Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T09:19:57.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hitler's Rassenkampf in the East: The Forgotten Genocide of Soviet POWs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Thomas Earl Porter
Thomas Earl Porter*
Affiliation:
Department of History, North Carolina A & T University, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA. Email: portert@ncat.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The sheer enormity of Soviet losses at the hands of German forces during the Second World War staggers the mind. During the immediate post-war period, Stalin did not want the West to know just how badly the Soviet Union had been mauled or the fact that far more Soviet soldiers had died than German ones (up to three times as many); consequently, the Soviets clamed that the total number of dead was 7 million, while Western estimates were between 10 and 15 million Soviet dead. It was only during the Khrushchev era that the true scale of the disaster was revealed and the more accurate figure of 20 million dead was generally accepted. Of these, only half were soldiers. The rest were at least 10 million civilians, including 2 million who died as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. The death toll has more recently been put at 25, 27 and even 30 million, though I suspect the latter figures also take into consideration the decline in birth rates. In April 2009 Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev appointed yet another commission to give a final accounting of Soviet losses.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 37 , Issue 6 , November 2009 , pp. 839 - 859
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bakanichev, A. E. Zapiski katorzhanina. Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2004.Google Scholar
Bartov, O. The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985.Google Scholar
Bohn, Robert. Reichskommissariat Norwegen. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000.Google Scholar
Calvocoressi, Peter, and Wint, Guy. Total War. New York: Penguin, 1979.Google Scholar
Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997.Google Scholar
Clark, Alan. Barbarossa: The Russian–German Conflict, 1941–1945. New York: Quill, 1965.Google Scholar
Crowe, David. The Holocaust: Roots, History and Aftermath. Boulder: Westview, 2008.Google Scholar
Czech, Danuta. Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945. New York: Henry Holt, 1990.Google Scholar
Dallin, Alexander. German Rule in Russia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981.Google Scholar
Ellman, M., and Maksudov, S. “Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note.” Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 4 (1994): 647–74.Google Scholar
Evans, Richard. The Third Reich in Power. London: Penguin, 2005.Google Scholar
Forster, Jurgen. “The German Army and the Ideological War against the Soviet Union.” In The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War, edited by Hirschfeld, Gerhard. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.Google Scholar
Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Glavatskii, M. E. Rossiia, kotoruiu my ne znali 1939–1993: khrestomatiia. Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-uralskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1995.Google Scholar
Goebbels, Joseph. Die Tagebucher von Joseph Goebbels, edited by Frohlich, Elke. Munich: KG Saur, 1997.Google Scholar
Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.Google Scholar
Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The German Army and Genocide: Crimes against War Prisoners, Jews, and other Civilians, 1939–1944. New York: New Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Hitler, Adolph. Mein Kampf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.Google Scholar
Hoess, Rudolph. Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Klaus, Edgar. Durch die Holle des Krieges. Berlin: Frieling, 1991.Google Scholar
Megargee, Geoffrey. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.Google Scholar
Merridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. New York: Picador, 2006.Google Scholar
Mueller, Rolf-Dieter. Die deutsche Wirtschaftspolitik in den besetzen sowjetischen Gebieten 1941–1943. Boppard am Rhine: Harald Boldt, 1991.Google Scholar
Mueller, Rolf-Dieter. Hitlers Ostkrieg und die deutsche Siedlungspolitik. Die Zusammenarbeit von Wehrmacht, Wirtschaft und SS. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1991.Google Scholar
Mulligan, Timothy P. “Reckoning the Cost of the People's War: The German Experience in the Central USSR.” Russian History, 9 (1982): 27–47.Google Scholar
Noakes, Jeremy, and Pridham, Geoffrey. Nazism 1919–1945. Vol. 3, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination. A Documentary Reader. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001.Google Scholar
North, Jonathan. “Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II.” World War II, January–February 2006, 37–41.Google Scholar
Solzhenitsyn, A. The Gulag Archipelago. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.Google Scholar
Stern, J. P. Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Streit, Christian. “The German Army and the Policies of Genocide.” In The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War, edited by Hirschfeld, Gerhard. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.Google Scholar
Troitskii, N. A. Tiazhelye sny. Krasnoiarsk: Kn. Izdatel'stvo, 1998.Google Scholar
Ueberschar, Gerd R. “The Military Campaign.” In Hitler's War in the East: A Critical Assessment, edited by Muller, Rolf-Dieter and Ueberschar, Gerd R. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002.Google Scholar
Ulrich, Herbert. Hitler's Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich. Translated by William Templer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Velikaia Otechestvennaia Voina, 1941–1945 gg: voenno-istoricheskie ocherki. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1998.Google Scholar
Veselovskii, B. V. Skrytaia biografiia. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1996.Google Scholar
Vsenarodnoe partizanskoe dvizhenie v Belorussii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny, 1941–1944. Dokumenty i materialy v trekh tomakh. Minsk: Belarus Gosizdat, 1982.Google Scholar
Werth, A. Russia at War. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1964.Google Scholar
Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar