Barbarossa - The Air Battle - Chapter 17 on atrocities

[Sylvester Stadler]

Having just finished Bergström's interesting book, my initial impression is that it is a good overview of the first six months of the eastern campaign's battles in the air. However, I question his judgment that it was the Soviet AF that stopped or slowed down the armored advances toward Leningrad or Moscow. He probably does not have access to the divisional histories of the 1st PD, the 2nd SS ID (mot), 3rd SS ID (mot), 7th PD, 29th ID (mot), etc. In the first instance, he would have known that the Ist PD had broken through the defensive rings around Leningrad and was set to take the city in an assault, when the order from Hitler arrived halting all advances on the city which was to be besieged. The failure to take Moscow was as a result of Hitler's orders to finish the cauldron around Kiev when Moscow could have been taken in August or September 1941. The slow advance and temporary halts were also due mainly to the lack of hard roads in Russia when the rains turned everything to a mud pie.

The chapter on atrocities was out of place in such a work. I especially question his use of such discredited historians such as Goldhagen, which have even been questioned by reputable Jewish historians, and Ward Churchill, whose main claim to fame is that he stated that the victims of 9/11 deserved their fate. Christer quotes Churchill who claims that "perhaps as many as a million troops...were simply executed by Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS units rather than being taken prisoner in the first place." No evidence is cited that such activity ever occured. Bergström also cites that 381,000 Wehrmacht soldiers died in Soviet captivity. This is the understatement of the century. It is known that Stalin gave the orders within days of the start of the campaign to kill or destroy anything German. Until Stalingrad, Germans who surrendered were routinely killed and during the entire war, those Germans who were wounded and fell into Soviet hands were killed on the spot since they would require medical care and could not be forced into labor. Of the 90,000 soldiers who surrendered at Stalingrad, 5,000 ever returned to Germany.

No mention is ever made of the two million German women and girls who were raped by the liberating Red Army who committed the same crimes in Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary. The Red Army also murdered millions of civilians in these countries, the same of which had been committed in the areas taken prior to 22 June 1941.

I have seen estimates that the Red Army sent some five million military and civilian personnel to the USSR for forced labor of which some one million never returned, forever missing.

I think Christer needs to look at the case of Katyn to determine the nature of the Communist beast.