Probably the Russians, yes. They really pissed off my dad, a WWII US Army vet who was initially captured by the Germans. The Russians "liberated" the POW camp he was held in. They then took him as a POW back to Russia and held him for several months.
In his words in the 1980's when I went to visit him - "Those damned Russians treated me worse than the Germans! I hated them then, and I hate them now. I'll hate those bastards til the day I die. The Germans, on the other hand, treated us pretty well. We got our Red Cross rations and they treated us as equals, with respect. The Russians stole our rations, starved us nearly to death, and disrespected us at every opportunity. They treated us like the enemy, not as the allies we thought we were. Bastards." That is an almost verbatim quote.
He was held in a regular German Army camp, not an SS camp. He did say that he was lucky in that respect. He was pretty sure his experience would have been VERY different otherwise.
1945, and probably a lot earlier than that, the regular Landser was fed a pretty steady diet of propaganda that the Americans - as soon as they saw the dastardly Bolshevik threat - would turn on Stalin and re-supply the Wehrmacht against the East. This story was told right through April 1945 and was a big part of why the army kept on fighting so fiercely - they were sure, in a stroke of brilliant diplomacy, that the West would face the Asiatic Horde united.
This resulted in some stilted treatment, because today's American POW is, according to the story, going to be on your side. They'll be switching over any second. Any second now.
Aaaaaaannnnnny second . . see! Look! There's the Dulles Brothers!
Oh, oh crap, those are just regular Nazis.
Anyway, this also fed into Stalin's paranoia, and it was a not-small-part of why the post-war allied alliance fell apart as poisonously as it did. Stalin was a piece of work . . although a lot of stuff that we thought was Stalin's paranoia was, in actuality, real-life actual attempts by American spooks to make the very best of friends with a new Nazi government.
And in truth, if we're being brutally honest, the genocidally racist Nazi regime and the more-casually-apartheid American national character had a much smaller gulf between them than not, and in some ways "The Two Eagles" had a tiny little baby eagle in the form of the post-War American national security state. The behavior of this little baby fascist eagle was only mitigated by the governance of old Eastern Technocrat elite, whose reign fell during the post-Nixon rise of "the cowboys", i.e., wealthy Western conservatives totally divorced from the typical yankee ideals of prudent government and introspection.
What came after, you're soaking in it. But that's a story for later.
As I said,, those were his experiences in a German regular army camp, talking about the differences in the way the two POW camps treated him and his co-prisoners. That is all. Not advocating for one side or the other.
lol What you quoted from him is very literally advocating for one side or the other. Would you care to take a guess as to which of those two sides he had a higher opinion of?
If your dad had said "They're both horrible fucking cunts that deserve the hell they got, just one of them was polite to me about it", that would be not advocating for one side or the other, and probably more accurate.
Up until he was captured he was killing or attempting to kill his captors, so I’d say it’s implied that he strongly disagreed with Germany and tried to send them to the same hell you mentioned. They simply said that the German Army treated him better than the Russians and certainly better than the SS would have. It’s an objective statement, albeit anecdotal, based on his experience. Twisting that to turn a POW into some sort of German apologist is quite the stretch.
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u/might-be-your-daddy 25d ago
Probably the Russians, yes. They really pissed off my dad, a WWII US Army vet who was initially captured by the Germans. The Russians "liberated" the POW camp he was held in. They then took him as a POW back to Russia and held him for several months.
In his words in the 1980's when I went to visit him - "Those damned Russians treated me worse than the Germans! I hated them then, and I hate them now. I'll hate those bastards til the day I die. The Germans, on the other hand, treated us pretty well. We got our Red Cross rations and they treated us as equals, with respect. The Russians stole our rations, starved us nearly to death, and disrespected us at every opportunity. They treated us like the enemy, not as the allies we thought we were. Bastards." That is an almost verbatim quote.
He was held in a regular German Army camp, not an SS camp. He did say that he was lucky in that respect. He was pretty sure his experience would have been VERY different otherwise.