02-23-2009, 01:21 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-23-2009, 02:01 AM by Dennis Ruhl.)
ham Wrote:They ignore (purposefully?) the fact that eminent Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti [there is a city named after him in Russia] refused to plead in favor of Italian POWs in USSR, leading to the death of so many of them. Togliatti argued that personal losses (=a family member not coming back) were "the best antidote" against Fascism, whose existence deserved punishment.
The outcome for Italian prisoners of war held by Russia was unbelievably poor. The idiocy of blaming concripts who would have rather been anywhere else is hard to believe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_war..._1942-1954
Post-war Russia tried to create an industrial revolution based on the slave labour of millions, if not tens of millions. Huge dams and other projects were built by hand. They kept WWII POWs for 10 years or much longer plus imprisoned millions of their own citizens.
One D8 Cat burning oil worth less than $1 per barrel would have been much cheaper than caring for the hundreds of starving prisoners and may have led to a real industrial revolution. There is another book I read some time ago called, I think, "The Iron Cage"(Nigel Cawthorne.) It is about Western POWs freed by the Russians from POW camps in Poland and Germany who were never seen again. They did it to us too. Cawthorne says that over 30,000 Commonwealth prisoners of war registered with the Red Cross disappeared in Russian hands and nobody showed any interest.
http://www.authorsonline.co.uk/book/The+Iron+Cage/
The most interesting thing about WWII is that anyone who writes about anything other than the party line concerning WWII isn't just wrong, they are a heretic. I am amazed that German historians have shown no interest in straightening out some of the iffy conclusions but I guess Germans have been dutifully trained to squat to pee.
Just an interesting item about the tens of thousands of German prisoners sent to Alberta. A local history item said that a German at a forest camp cutting timber got sick and had to be transported down river to see a doctor. The German got into the boat, the Veteran Guard of Canada soldier passed him his rifle and then climbed into the boat. Away from the front Canadians were pretty agreeable.