Winning wars through hospitality
6 years ago by tehtehneh · 1246 Likes · 5 comments · Popular
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guest_
· 6 years ago
· FIRST
While this is completely true, it is also somewhat incomplete. The allied treatment of German POWs in general (at prison camps on home soil) was very good. America for instance took on almost 500,000 german prisoners by request of the European allies. These prisoners were well fed, well entertained, paid for work, and often allowed to visit towns near prison camps without guards. After the war over 5,000 former POWs moved back to the United States and many more visited or held good will to America on return to Germany in thanks for the treatment they’d received. For most Germans in the war, surrender to any ally was preferable to surrender to the Soviets who were known to treat prisoners (especially Germans) extremely inhumanly. Canada did in fact House and treat very well many thousands of German POWs, I just wanted to mention the other allies did as well and no one allied country can really be singled out above the others for such noble actions.
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late_commenter
· 6 years ago
Damn, somebody did their research.
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guest_
· 6 years ago
I enjoy history, but have always had an interest in WW2. It was a huge event that shaped the world around us, many of us walk by battlefields, prisons, places of secrets or horrors- every day and may not even realize it. There’s something about the idea of a total war being fought at an effectively planetary scale and scope, and even the youngest adults on the planet are separated from it by only a lifetime. When I was young you still had a good chance to work with and talk to people who were in the prime of life during the war. And yet even then it was like a distant past even as its ripples changed the society around us and brought the modern world to us. A world war almost hidden from view within the same life time as those who fought it. There’s just so much there, wonderful, horrible, almost unimaginable things contrasted against a world that on the surface is seemingly a completely different reality. Things changed so fast from there forward. We wanted to move on with good reason
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dolphinmaster77
· 6 years ago
It’s stated that most western prisoners on both sides of the war were treated reasonably well but on the front lines they’d be executed because of perceived threat proximity. However In the east especially in The USSR they were basically slaves or worse.
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Edited 6 years ago
guest_
· 6 years ago
Yes. On the frontlines things weren’t nearly as humanitarian much of the time. Fear of spy’s and saboteurs amongst enemy prisoners, coupled with scarcity of supplies and man power made taking prisoners an often undesirable proposition for many units. The asymmetrical nature of many engagements made the attention needed to guard prisoners and the danger of prisoners giving away a units position a potential catastrophe. There was also the fact that many actions requiring rapid advance didn’t have time to really take, search, process, and deal with prisoners who if cooperative would slow down an advance, and if uncooperative could drastically slow movement. The allies are said to have specifically turned over thousands of prisoners to the soviets under the idea of “friendship” but in actuality because they didn’t want to deal with them. The Soviet treatment of prisoners at best was in violation of international humanitarian law and treaty, and at worst saw prisoner deaths above 24%.
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