re: Judgment at Nuremberg is on TCM @ 9:45 pm (Eastern)

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Stalin's Russia could give Hitler's Germany a run for it's money when it came to executing enemies of the state. And as hard as is to imagine, Stalin probably cared even less about the Russian population in general than Hitler did about non-Ayran Germans. Stalin was a ruthless bastard.

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If you were a German soldier, you prayed that you would be captured or would be able to surrender to the Western Allies. Many German POWs who were held by the Russians died in POW camps. The Russians were ruthless, and the Nuremberg trials probably saved a lot of Nazis' lives. The Soviets were just itching to start the executions or to throw them in camps in Siberia for the rest of their lives.

I read somewhere that out of the ~90,000 Germans captured in the defeat at Stalingrad, only about 6,000 actually made it back to Germany after the war.