4 ms·

Compare this with Germans under the Soviet sphere of influence. Puppets, maybe, but alive as long as they cooperated with the ruling ideology. There was no plan

by cygx 6y ago

Compare this with Germans under the Soviet sphere of influence. Puppets, maybe, but alive as long as they cooperated with the ruling ideology. There was no plan to ethnically cleanse them to make room for Soviet citizens in German land. The USSR declared Germans in the annexed territories illegal residents. Going by Wikipedia, in 1947/48, officially, 102,125 Germans got shipped from East Prussia to the Soviet Zone, though only 99,481 arrived there (one reason for this was that food wasn't always provided on a journey that took 4-7 days by train). The GDR attributed this discrepancy to a 'calculation error'. There's also the issue of German orphans that were left behind (which are known as 'Wolskinder'). The lucky ones got adopted (eg by Lithuanian farmers), changed their names, and pretended not to be German. The unlucky ones were exploited as cheap labour, starved or got killed. His criticism of the treatment of German civilians was one of the things that got Solzhenitsyn arrested.

the_af 6y ago
I understand all of this. However, again look at the numbers and planned genocide: the Nazis aimed at killing -- murdering, not expelling, mind you -- most of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe. About 30 million people would have been killed, both through starvation and shooting/gassing if they didn't die fast enough, because they were deemed vermin and "surplus" population. And this wasn't even retaliation for anything, it was planned in cold blood. Did the Soviets exterminate all Germans in their sphere of influence once they won the war? What were the Nazi plans had they won (and which they partially implemented during the war)? This doesn't excuse even a single German civilian killed by the Soviets. But the scale and planning are tremendously different, which is why the comparison makes little sense. I think the latter day equivocation that both sides were more or less the same is a regrettable artifact of Cold War thinking.

by cygx 6y ago

the_af 6y ago

I understand all of this. However, again look at the numbers and planned genocide: the Nazis aimed at killing -- murdering, not expelling, mind you -- most of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe. About 30 million people would have been killed, both through starvation and shooting/gassing if they didn't die fast enough, because they were deemed vermin and "surplus" population. And this wasn't even retaliation for anything, it was planned in cold blood. Did the Soviets exterminate all Germans in their sphere of influence once they won the war? What were the Nazi plans had they won (and which they partially implemented during the war)? This doesn't excuse even a single German civilian killed by the Soviets. But the scale and planning are tremendously different, which is why the comparison makes little sense. I think the latter day equivocation that both sides were more or less the same is a regrettable artifact of Cold War thinking.