quote:
The Russian death total in WW2 was staggering.

Didn't know the U.S. lost the least. WWII started in '39 and we didn't really get involved until after Pearl Harbor, Dec '41.

The Germans launched into the USSR with 3 million soldiers, including large numbers of minor allies - Bulgaria, Hungary, even some poor souls from Spain. They didn't have enough of a logistical tail to supply all that force. When they captured literally millions of Russian POW's, they had no capability to feed them, and no plans to feed them given the Nazi racial policies.

The Germans would just herd huge numbers of Soviet POWs together on the steppe, lay barbed wire all around them and set up up machine guns to fire along the barbed wire. No food or water was provided.

Stalin made all that worse by refusing the advice of his generals to withdraw from threatened areas.

"German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war. During World War II, Nazi Germany engaged in a policy of deliberate maltreatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), in contrast to their treatment of British and American POWs. This resulted in some 3.3 to 3.5 million deaths, or 57% of all Soviet POWs." -wiki

The Russians paid out in the same coin. Of the 300,000 Germans captured at Stalingrad, only 5,000 ever returned home.

As an aside, many of the soldiers surrounded at Stalingrad had helped overrun northern France in 1940 and helped force France out of the war.

German POW's are marched away from Stalingrad, early 1943.

There is a book called "Ninety Days That Doomed the Axis."

The Germans lost the cream of their peace time trained army at Stalingrad. They lost another 250,000 Axis POW's (some Italians) in North Africa. In the Pacific, the Japanese evacuated the starving remnants of their Army from Guadalcanal. They left 25 priceless warships sunk in the waters around that island.

This post was edited on 12/24/16 at 12:12 pm