Defeat At Stalingrad - Hitler's Message To Stalin

[Coppit]

In 1943 I can clearly remember hearing the BBC news when it was reported that Hitler had sent a message to Stalin saying / asking that at the end of the war prisoners would be allowed to return to their homes.
It must have struck me at the time as odd. The fact the broadcast happened is true - but was the message?

[hellywelly4]

See the post below from Segilla in 2012

[Peter Pedant]

by 1943....
the germans had taken around two million russian prisoners

and it was well known ( unlike the gas chambers) that they had been terribly badly treated. Stalin hadnt signed the correct convention and a least a million had starved by then. The liberated nations in the East had been terribly badly treated as well

[my father as an English POW in spangenburg bearded one of the german guards about this and he replied ( in German ) 'yes yes I admit mistakes were made in the East']

stalingrad I think only 10% survived - the allies found that the whole of the muster of the adolfstandard regiment who had murdered the English POWs at Wormhout had perished at Stalingrad and that therefore there was no one left to hang.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhoudt_massacre

By 1945 the return of the POWs was a really really big deal
Everyone thought that those 'liberated' by the Russians would be sucked into the gulags. The Germans were. They were ( all the POWs) were sentenced to 1oy hard labour for war crimes. Hence the riots when they were released in 1955 and found nothing had changed.

Count Bernadotte - just disappeared ....

There was a secret agreement that the British POWs liberated by the Russians would be trained to Odessa and shipped back to . Taken further east - oo-er Mrs ! ( detailed either by Cruikshank or Newman in his memoirs) Only one made it.

The British threatened to shoot the commandants if they sent POWs to concentration camps ( rather than POW camps ) altho the Stalag 111 ( the great escape ) survivors ended up in one
and when sachsenhausen was liberated there wer about 200 english POWs there

the whole of allied foreign policy late 1945 was tuned to return of the allied POWs and that was really the reason why the Cossacks and other were returned to Stalin and to their deaths
( otherwise S would not give the Brits their POWs )
see Minister and the Massacres and all that sort of thing ....

so yeah
but well done for remembering the broadcast in real time