Teens Now Look Favorably On Torture Because Media Teaches Its Morally Acceptable

[Berkut]

Why are you defending Nazis, Berkut?

Do you have brown leanings you haven't told us about?

Is this your way of coming out of the closet?

I am pretty sure nothing I have said could be construed as defending Nazis.

[Slargos]

Why are you defending Nazis, Berkut?

Do you have brown leanings you haven't told us about?

Is this your way of coming out of the closet?

I am pretty sure nothing I have said could be construed as defending Nazis.

I'm just trying out a new pair of shoes. They are comfortable. Everyone's wearing them so there must be something to the style.

[DGuller]

There is no strawman - you guys ARE acting like the Soviets tried to save them when you conclude that the Soviets were not responsible for their deaths. That is the only way one can reasonable conclude that the Soviets were not responsible - if they tried to save them and failed.

He said they didn't try.

He said even if they tried they would have failed.

That's different than the view you're attributing to him.

What he said was that the Soviets killing 85000 German POWs doesn't really count, since they all would have died anyway.

That is wrong on multiple levels, not the least of which is the fact that they would NOT have died anyway had they bothered to feed them, shelter them, and not work them to death.

Like I already said, the only way you could reasonably conclude that the Soviets were not responsible for their deaths would be if they had actually tried to save them and failed. Excusing them because "well, they would have all died anyway" is bullshit. That is the excuse the Soviets used to avoid responsibility for killing 85000 people.

You might as well accept Soviet excuses for Katyn while you are at it, if you are going to believe something as obviously false as "they would have all died anyway" as justification for killing them.

I didn't say that Stalingrad deaths didn't count.  I just explained why Stalingrad was an aberration and no indicative of the fate of the German soldiers in general.  Even including Stalingrad statistics, the odds for Germans were still multiple times better than the odds for the Soviets.  Yet again you're attributing something I didn't argue to me.  If you had a good argument, you probably wouldn't have to resort to such slimy tactics.

[Berkut]

I didn't say that Stalingrad deaths didn't count.  I just explained why Stalingrad was an aberration and no indicative of the fate of the German soldiers in general. 

Right - because "Stalingrad is an aberration  and not indicative of the fate of German soldiers in general" is not at all saying that Stalingrad doesn't count.

Even including Stalingrad statistics, the odds for Germans were still multiple times better than the odds for the Soviets. 

Multiple times? 50% is bad, 67% is worse, but I don't think I would call that "multiple times" better. In any case, they are both stunningly bad enough that I wouldn't comfort myself any thinking "Gee, getting captured and worked until half of us is dead is bad, but at least it isn't as bad as being captured and worked until 2.3rds of us are dead!" and then actually state that you are preciously offended at anyone saying they were both pretty bad.

If you had a good argument, you probably wouldn't have to resort to such slimy tactics.

You mean like ad homs, and cheering on Raz's lying? Slimy tactics like that?

[DGuller]

Right - because "Stalingrad is an aberration  and not indicative of the fate of German soldiers in general" is not at all saying that Stalingrad doesn't count.

  That's right, it's not saying that at all.  Please re-read the post where I first talked about Stalingrad, and note the context.  The context was that Yi was inferring about the fate of Germans in Soviet hands from the Stalingrad example.  Clarifying that Stalingrad is not indicative of Germans' odds of survival in Soviet captivity was not saying that it doesn't count, it's just saying that it's well outside of the average.  Some number may be very far from the average, but still be counted in the average.

Multiple times? 50% is bad, 67% is worse, but I don't think I would call that "multiple times" better. In any case, they are both stunningly bad enough that I wouldn't comfort myself any thinking "Gee, getting captured and worked until half of us is dead is bad, but at least it isn't as bad as being captured and worked until 2.3rds of us are dead!" and then actually state that you are preciously offended at anyone saying they were both pretty bad.

You're acting as if your 50% is undisputed, or even sourced.  The only sourced numbers indicate 15% death rate, so yes, 15% is multiple times less than 67%.

[DGuller]

Anyway, I've stated my point enough times, and you haven't come close to challenging it without radically twisting what I said.  If you haven't managed to come up with a convincing counter-argument by now, odds are none would be forthcoming.

This tit-for-tat can go on for weeks, and I don't have time for this bullshit.  Feel free to make a triumphant last word post, I'm not worried about you having any credibility left in this thread for it to make a difference.

[The Brain]

Victory to the Nazis!

[Berkut]

you haven't come close to challenging it


  Feel free to make a triumphant last word post, I'm not worried about you having any credibility left in this thread for it to make a difference.

You don't even realize how hypocritical this post is, do you?

Par for the course, I guess. You are, if nothing else, predictable.

[Berkut]

You're acting as if your 50% is undisputed, or even sourced.  The only sourced numbers indicate 15% death rate, so yes, 15% is multiple times less than 67%.

That is simply a lie - I sourced the 50% claim. Military History Magazine, German POWs and the Art of Survival, July 17th, 2007. I even was kind enough to provide a link.

I assume you didn't actually read Raz's "source" since it made it rather clear that even the author of the source did not consider the Soviet claims particularly credible, and suspected they were off by as much as 1 million men.

But then, you made it pretty obvious you were arguing from your conclusions from the beginning.

[Norgy]

Victory to the Nazis!

Count on the Swede to cheer them on! 

[crazy canuck]

Berkut: what you don't get is that relatively speaking, the Stalin regime treated German POWs pretty darn well, when compared to say a typical 1930s Ukranian peasant, a prewar general officer in the Red Army, or a high-ranking Bolshevik c. 1928-1941.

That is a good point - given that the DGs Soviet engaged in mass genocide on a regular basis, I can see why he would be "offended" that anyone would compare them to the Nazis.

I mean really, what a ridiculous comparison!

[LaCroix]

soviet repression of statistics: some comments, michael ellman
europe-asia studies

The policy of releasing 'unfit for work ballast' was a cost-cutting measure which was intended to save on food consumption and on guards and other personnel, and hence reduce the deficit and improve productivity in the Gulag. It increased 'efficiency' (i.e. the ratio of output to inputs) while simultaneously improving the financial results and the mortality statistics. (Similarly, after the war, German POWs who were invalids or very ill were released before the able-bodied. From an economic point of view this was entirely rational and optimised the results of utilising the POWs.) Wheatcroft correctly drew attention to the fact that senior officials were concerned about high mortality and that 'incidents of high mortality were often investigated'.13 This, however, did not necessarily lead to an improvement in conditions, since camp bosses could improve their mortality statistics by releasing those about to die. In fact, the bosses of the Gulag as a whole were keen to improve the mortality statistics this way. An instruction of 2 April 1943 by the head of the Gulag forbade including deaths of released former prisoners in Gulag mortality statistics.'4 (This is not the only example of the use of mortality data as success indicators leading to misleading mortality statistics. The postwar filtration statistics, which purport to show that as of 1 March 1946, out of the 4.2 million people checked, 58% had been sent home, include those who died in the filtration camps among those 'sent home'.15)

review: prisoners of war and internees in the second world war, ilse pautsch
contemporary european history

Stefan Karner introduces us to the world of the Soviet POW camps in 'Lagergruppe Stalingrad/Volgograd' (the Stalingrad/Volgagrad group of camps), which uses Russian sources. The largest single group interned in these camps consisted of some 93,000 German soldiers who had survived the Battle of Stalingrad. The conditions were so terrible that two-thirds of the prisoners succumbed; in the Beketovka section 40,000 of the 50-60,000 inmates died. Most of the deaths were put down to dystrophy or dropsy - both symptoms of extreme malnutrition. Able-bodied prisoners were put to work in industry and road-building, but their capacity to work was so low that in 1945 the camp commandants tried to stabilise the prisoners' condition by increasing their rations, meeting with only limited success.

The situation changed when sick prisoners, and those unable to work, began to be repatriated, and there was a steep rise in criminal convictions. Most of these convictions, which generally carried a sentence of 25 years' forced labour, were for membership of a particular Wehrmacht unit or of the Waffen-SS. Strangely enough, the mere hopelessness engendered by such a sentence goaded the prisoners into protests and demands for better living and working conditions since they had nothing more to lose. Not until 1955 were the Stalingrad/Volgagrad camps closed and the last German prisoners released. The political and diplomatic efforts which procured the return home of the last German POWs in Soviet hands are the subject of Michael Borchard's chapter, 'Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in der Sowjetunion' (German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union). Borchard approaches this difficult theme with commendable objectivity, based on extensive research in archives in both the Federal Republic and the former East Germany, together with US, British and French collections. Regrettably, there is no evaluation of the Russian sources which have been available since 1991.

Borchard demonstrates how a fundamentally humanitarian problem turned into a political one that could be solved only by political means. He also highlights the very different ways in which it was tackled in the two Germanies. A turning point was the announcement by the Soviet news agency Tass, on 4 May 1950, that only about 13,000 'war criminals' still remained in Soviet camps. While the true number of German POWs in the Soviet Union had never been definitely established, this could only mean that the fate of up to one and a half million German soldiers was unexplained and would doubtless always remain so. Between Tass's declaration and the death of Stalin in 1953, the subject of POWs was never mentioned in public in East Germany or raised in its exchanges with the Soviet Union.

maybe more paragraphs and highlighting will get raz and dg's attention, but then maybe not. i can see why the russian would want to believe in soviet sources, but why raz--who so often recalls the time when cc cited fiction as his source 

[Berkut]

maybe more paragraphs and highlighting will get raz and dg's attention, but then maybe not.

Once you devolve the discussion into shit flinging, it becomes very hard to backtrack and admit you might have been wrong. It is a good reason (beyond simple integrity and courtesy) to not let a discussion turn that unpleasant to begin with - it doesn't really leave you an out.

But then, I suppose it depends on your purpose to begin with - I kind of like actually learning things, but I know that for many Languish isn't really about that.

[Berkut]

It is interesting to look at those numbers - 1.5 million men unaccounted for, and the Soviets admit they have 13,000 of them.

Compare that to the amount of stress the US went through over 2000 unaccounted from Vietnam MIAs...

What a stunning disappointment that must have been to find out that practically none of those 1.5 million missing men were still alive, or going to ever come home.

On the other hand, the Germans killed about 10-20 times as many Soviets as that number as a result of their war. Pretty hard to have much sympathy for them, no matter how horrific the Soviets were...

However, I don't give the Soviets any slack for "The Germans had it coming". While the Germans probably DID have it coming (to the extent that any generality like that can make any sense at all), things like Katyn make it pretty clear the Soviets were not killing as any kind of retribution, but simply because it was expedient to do so.

[LaCroix]

they kept up with that stalingrad argument for so long that i thought they must have some source for all their claims of "well! the purebred aryan simply fought for so long that by the time the merciful rus was upon him.. he could only perish." maybe they confused stalingrad with auschwitz