I had a quick look at the chapters by Cowdrey and Overmans in the 1992 book...as far as I can see they don't argue that it has been securely established 50 000 German pows died in US captivity. They state the standard number of around 5000 dead, but admit it may have been higher...50-60 000 seems to be more of a hypothetically possible upper limit. The real number is presumably quite a bit lower, but no one knows for certain and there probably isn't much interest in doing an objective investigation (since "revisionists" want to "prove" impossibly high numbers, while mainstream establishment historians aren't interested in potentially having to revise numbers upwards).
For establishment historians that have to maintain the myth that the Allies including the USSR did nothing morally wrong from 1939-1946 that is a huge concession. Nobody was willing to question the official figure until1989. I seriously doubt the figure is lower than 50,000. The same type of people that claim it is lower also denied Stalin's crimes in academia for decades and still often do. By being court historians for Moscow, DC, and Tel Aviv for so long they have destroyed all their credibility.
"For establishment historians that have to maintain the myth that the Allies including the USSR did nothing morally wrong from 1939-1946"
I don't think it's true quite like that, Soviet crimes are often at least somewhat acknowledged, it's just usually with the proviso that NS Germany was still "worse" and a more radical break with humane/Christian/Enlightenment values (which I don't even necessarily disagree with, while it's true that most Nazi crimes had equivalents among the allies, especially the Soviets, there probably still were distinguishing features like the mass killings of the mentally ill and disabled and the total character and scope of the Final Solution).
Btw. I don't share your view that Timothy Snyder is following an essentially "Noltean" framework....Nolte was weak on details, since he considered himself more of a philosopher of history than a researcher going through the archives, but his basic idea of an interaction between Bolshevism and Nazism is imo important and something that should be pursued by historians. Nolte was also a German nationalist (not a bad thing in my view, I want to emphasize) who wanted to "historicize" NS to ensure a future for Germany (unfortunately he failed in that completely). By contrast Snyder has zero sympathy for Germans, past or present, and also doesn't offer much on the concrete details of Bolshevik-Nazi interactions (one curious aspect of his Bloodlands book is that he claims he wants to focus on victims, not perpetrators, which isn't very illuminating about how perpetrators justified their crimes and what they may or may not have learnt from others). I don't know what his specific agenda is, but given his pronouncements on contemporary affairs in recent years I'd guess it's demonizing Russians as much as Germans have been and providing a handy historical narrative for a geopolitical Intermarium project.
This is my conclusion from my 2022 book, The Years of Great Silence.
“The Years of Great Silence for the Germans in the USSR between 1941 and 1955 have received little attention in the US and other English speaking countries. Against the back drop of the Second World War, the fate of a million and a half people ethnically and culturally related to the primary nemesis of the US, UK, and USSR during the 1940s has been treated as an inconvenient detail. While the subject has received much more scholarly and popular attention in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and Germany since the breakup of the USSR, it has remained not only largely ignored, but semi-taboo in the US. It is not just that the sources are largely in Russian and to a lesser extent German. But, rather the US and UK are still immersed in their own Years of Great Silence regarding much of World War II. In particular, addressing any Allied including Soviet crimes during the war and immediately afterwards against ethnic Germans remains strongly discouraged and overshadowed by a mythic construction of the war in which all Germans are demonically evil and their political and military enemies morally infallible. Given this predominant popular myth even research into the fate of the much larger and in many ways easier to research groups of Germans expelled from eastern Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia has remained extremely limited in the English speaking world. The fate of the smaller groups of Germans that remained trapped behind the Iron Curtain thus has received very scant attention in the English language literature. It is my hope that this short book will partially ameliorate this general lack of attention.
The Germans in the Soviet Union were the largest of a number of national groups subjected to ethnic cleansing by the Stalin regime during World War II. They constituted nearly half of all the people deported as special settlers by the NKVD from western regions of the USSR to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia during the war. The 1941 erasure of 177 years of German settlement from the Volga region also preceded the ethnic cleansing of the Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks by over two years. It thus sticks out as the largest of a series of ethnically motivated crimes by the Soviet government during the war.
The losses and trauma suffered by the Germans in the USSR from 1941 to 1955 greatly altered their historical path of development. It geographically scattered them across Siberia and Kazakhstan and greatly accelerated their acculturation into a much larger Soviet Russian culture. Hopes of creating a distinct Soviet German speaking nation in the Volga German ASSR were permanently destroyed by the forced dispersal of its population from this area of compact settlement. The deportations also psychologically marked them as being part of a single outsider group defined by biological descent from German colonists and laid the foundations for the massive emigration out of the former Soviet states in the 1990s. The fourteen Years of Great Silence formed the nadir of the historical narrative of the Russian Germans as an ethno-national group.
The deportations, special settlement restrictions, and mobilization into the labor army, however, only form a part of the historical narrative of the Russian Germans and it would be wrong to view their entire history from 1763 to today solely through this lens. Instead the narrative arc as a whole should be viewed as having several stages. These are an initial heroic narrative of the original settlement and economic success, followed by the victim narrative of the years of Soviet repression, and ending with a redemption narrative on overcoming the Years of Great Silence. This book has focused on the middle victim part to the neglect of the first and third parts. There has been a considerable amount of research published on the first part of this narrative not only in Russian and German, but even in English. The third and perhaps most important part of the narrative still largely remains to be written in any language.”
"ending with a redemption narrative on overcoming the Years of Great Silence"
I'm not sure how that redemption narrative could look...Russian Germans don't have much of a future as a distinct community, except maybe for the remains still in Kazakhstan. And the Federal Republic today is a truly dystopian state whose main project nowadays seems to be about turning Germans into a dwindling minority in Germany itself as fast as possible, so its elites certainly don't have an interest in anything like that.
But anyway, I've checked out your book from the library and will read it, thank you for doing research on such a neglected topic.
A friend of mine, John Jobst, later Bishop of the Kimberley, Western Australia, was in that camp, as was his brother. He told me that he could never forgive the Americans for what they did. In his Memoirs, which I published, he identifies the vicious OIC as a jew.
So the worst killers, both in the Russian and American death camps, were of the world destroyers.
It will happen again, soon, (as with the covid deaths) unless they are banished from the earth.
I had a quick look at the chapters by Cowdrey and Overmans in the 1992 book...as far as I can see they don't argue that it has been securely established 50 000 German pows died in US captivity. They state the standard number of around 5000 dead, but admit it may have been higher...50-60 000 seems to be more of a hypothetically possible upper limit. The real number is presumably quite a bit lower, but no one knows for certain and there probably isn't much interest in doing an objective investigation (since "revisionists" want to "prove" impossibly high numbers, while mainstream establishment historians aren't interested in potentially having to revise numbers upwards).
For establishment historians that have to maintain the myth that the Allies including the USSR did nothing morally wrong from 1939-1946 that is a huge concession. Nobody was willing to question the official figure until1989. I seriously doubt the figure is lower than 50,000. The same type of people that claim it is lower also denied Stalin's crimes in academia for decades and still often do. By being court historians for Moscow, DC, and Tel Aviv for so long they have destroyed all their credibility.
"For establishment historians that have to maintain the myth that the Allies including the USSR did nothing morally wrong from 1939-1946"
I don't think it's true quite like that, Soviet crimes are often at least somewhat acknowledged, it's just usually with the proviso that NS Germany was still "worse" and a more radical break with humane/Christian/Enlightenment values (which I don't even necessarily disagree with, while it's true that most Nazi crimes had equivalents among the allies, especially the Soviets, there probably still were distinguishing features like the mass killings of the mentally ill and disabled and the total character and scope of the Final Solution).
Btw. I don't share your view that Timothy Snyder is following an essentially "Noltean" framework....Nolte was weak on details, since he considered himself more of a philosopher of history than a researcher going through the archives, but his basic idea of an interaction between Bolshevism and Nazism is imo important and something that should be pursued by historians. Nolte was also a German nationalist (not a bad thing in my view, I want to emphasize) who wanted to "historicize" NS to ensure a future for Germany (unfortunately he failed in that completely). By contrast Snyder has zero sympathy for Germans, past or present, and also doesn't offer much on the concrete details of Bolshevik-Nazi interactions (one curious aspect of his Bloodlands book is that he claims he wants to focus on victims, not perpetrators, which isn't very illuminating about how perpetrators justified their crimes and what they may or may not have learnt from others). I don't know what his specific agenda is, but given his pronouncements on contemporary affairs in recent years I'd guess it's demonizing Russians as much as Germans have been and providing a handy historical narrative for a geopolitical Intermarium project.
This is my conclusion from my 2022 book, The Years of Great Silence.
“The Years of Great Silence for the Germans in the USSR between 1941 and 1955 have received little attention in the US and other English speaking countries. Against the back drop of the Second World War, the fate of a million and a half people ethnically and culturally related to the primary nemesis of the US, UK, and USSR during the 1940s has been treated as an inconvenient detail. While the subject has received much more scholarly and popular attention in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and Germany since the breakup of the USSR, it has remained not only largely ignored, but semi-taboo in the US. It is not just that the sources are largely in Russian and to a lesser extent German. But, rather the US and UK are still immersed in their own Years of Great Silence regarding much of World War II. In particular, addressing any Allied including Soviet crimes during the war and immediately afterwards against ethnic Germans remains strongly discouraged and overshadowed by a mythic construction of the war in which all Germans are demonically evil and their political and military enemies morally infallible. Given this predominant popular myth even research into the fate of the much larger and in many ways easier to research groups of Germans expelled from eastern Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia has remained extremely limited in the English speaking world. The fate of the smaller groups of Germans that remained trapped behind the Iron Curtain thus has received very scant attention in the English language literature. It is my hope that this short book will partially ameliorate this general lack of attention.
The Germans in the Soviet Union were the largest of a number of national groups subjected to ethnic cleansing by the Stalin regime during World War II. They constituted nearly half of all the people deported as special settlers by the NKVD from western regions of the USSR to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia during the war. The 1941 erasure of 177 years of German settlement from the Volga region also preceded the ethnic cleansing of the Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks by over two years. It thus sticks out as the largest of a series of ethnically motivated crimes by the Soviet government during the war.
The losses and trauma suffered by the Germans in the USSR from 1941 to 1955 greatly altered their historical path of development. It geographically scattered them across Siberia and Kazakhstan and greatly accelerated their acculturation into a much larger Soviet Russian culture. Hopes of creating a distinct Soviet German speaking nation in the Volga German ASSR were permanently destroyed by the forced dispersal of its population from this area of compact settlement. The deportations also psychologically marked them as being part of a single outsider group defined by biological descent from German colonists and laid the foundations for the massive emigration out of the former Soviet states in the 1990s. The fourteen Years of Great Silence formed the nadir of the historical narrative of the Russian Germans as an ethno-national group.
The deportations, special settlement restrictions, and mobilization into the labor army, however, only form a part of the historical narrative of the Russian Germans and it would be wrong to view their entire history from 1763 to today solely through this lens. Instead the narrative arc as a whole should be viewed as having several stages. These are an initial heroic narrative of the original settlement and economic success, followed by the victim narrative of the years of Soviet repression, and ending with a redemption narrative on overcoming the Years of Great Silence. This book has focused on the middle victim part to the neglect of the first and third parts. There has been a considerable amount of research published on the first part of this narrative not only in Russian and German, but even in English. The third and perhaps most important part of the narrative still largely remains to be written in any language.”
"ending with a redemption narrative on overcoming the Years of Great Silence"
I'm not sure how that redemption narrative could look...Russian Germans don't have much of a future as a distinct community, except maybe for the remains still in Kazakhstan. And the Federal Republic today is a truly dystopian state whose main project nowadays seems to be about turning Germans into a dwindling minority in Germany itself as fast as possible, so its elites certainly don't have an interest in anything like that.
But anyway, I've checked out your book from the library and will read it, thank you for doing research on such a neglected topic.
A friend of mine, John Jobst, later Bishop of the Kimberley, Western Australia, was in that camp, as was his brother. He told me that he could never forgive the Americans for what they did. In his Memoirs, which I published, he identifies the vicious OIC as a jew.
So the worst killers, both in the Russian and American death camps, were of the world destroyers.
It will happen again, soon, (as with the covid deaths) unless they are banished from the earth.
Thank you for your work on this difficult, troubling topic!
This is good info- thanks.
WTF does anyone care what midwit jewish supremacist yarvin has to say. There are many other good sources for WWII history.