In absolute numbers the Russian losses in WWII were mind-numbing. Not just deaths, but everything imaginable, rape, robbery, enslavement - or should I say unimaginable? I've only got a little glimpse of it - it's hard to get at in the US. Took a class about the Nazis this summer, and became curious because I saw names of death camps on maps that I had never heard of. And the way the Russian soldiers were treated - I can't find the reference book I was looking for, so just by memory out of 3 million POWs inside Russia, less than a million survived.
During WWII, 14.5 million Ukranians died as a result of the conflict. 27 million Soviets total.
After the Iron Curtain came down, there was no cooperation between historians and archivists in the East and the West. Actually the Jews had a pretty hard time getting people to realize what they suffered. No one in the West spoke for the Poles and the Russians. No one in the East spoke for the Jews, they wanted to talk about the deaths of the Communists and the Socialists (Hitler's first victims). People developed little fiefdoms, as intellectuals are wont to do.
The Holocaust Museum in DC is pretty much about the Jews. I don't want to diminish in any way the suffering of the Jews in WWII - no one suffered as much as they did.
I don't want to whitewash Stalin, either. Just pointing out, as you are, that the suffering of the ordinary Russians in WWII was beyond belief, but we never learn about it. Six million Jews was most of the Jews in Europe, except for the ones who escaped. Almost no Jews left in Poland, out of 3 million. But how to compare that to 27 million Soviets? Why get into a measuring contest? Horrible is horrible.
Still, percentage wise, the Poles had it worse than the Soviets, I think. 6 million dead out of 20 million, half of them Christian, half Jewish. Maybe 50% of intellectuals were killed, doctors, lawyers, college professors, journalists, on the basis of their status as intellectuals. Many, many Catholic priests. My faulty recollection is that 75% of Polish officers died. Wish I knew what I did with that book. |
