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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
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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.

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

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