#4

Post by Roberto » 04 Feb 2003, 18:58

panzermahn wrote: I think this is nonsense and purely Bolshevik propaganda...The German was desperately defending the Seelowe Heights with full courage, valor and tenacity because Berlin would be dangerously open for the Russians if the Seelowe Heights fall which it was...



How can the Germans have even spare time to strangle or cut the genitals of russian POWs least they had to find piano wires..u think there were piano selling shop in seelowe heights..

panzermahn wrote: Besides, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Rudolf Falkenhayn, one of the participants of the Battle of Seelowe Heights, never mentioned this incident in his biography, Road to Valhalla....which written by an american author whom i forget his name..He survived the battle of Seelowe Heights to participate in battle of Berlin...was captured by russians....and survived the labor camps to be repatriated.....Falkenhayn only mentioned that neither sides (Germans and Russians) taking prisoners and he personally saw Russian Bolsheviks shooting wounded German POWs as he retreated



Besides General von Manteuffel who was the commander of the 3rd Panzer Army defending Seelowe Heights, does not even mentioned this incident..purely propaganda to tarnished the heroism of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS during the last months of the war where they were fighting so bravely...

Dear Editor of World War II magazine,



I am a regular internet reader of your magazine and greatly appreciate the mostly excellent articles featured therein.



One big exception is the article "Red Army Assault at Seelow Heights" in your May 1999 feature by Mr. Colin D. Heaton, "the author of Cold Wind to Valhalla, a biography of Rudolf Falkenhahn".



The article is well written and exciting to read, but so full of inaccuracies that its value as a source of historical information must be seriously questioned.



One of these inaccuracies: "The Soviets drove a wedge into Prussia, but their losses were heavy. Six Soviet infantry and two tank divisions were wiped out after a series of assaults on Vitebsk, Orsha, Allenstein and Königsberg", takes only a look at a contemporary map to discover. The cities of Vitebsk and Orsha, which the author transplants to East Prussia, actually lie in Belarus and Central Russia, respectively.



This is the least of errors, however. There are other, more serious ones:



 Dates: Heaton sets the attack on the Seelow Heights between the 8th and the 15th of April, 1945. According to the sources I have consulted, there was no major action on the Oder Front on these days; the Soviet attack on this front started on April 16th, and the battle for the Seelow Heights took place between April 16th and April 18th, 1945.



 Commanders: The commander of the Soviet attack on the Seelow Heights was not Marshal Konev, but Marshal Zhukov. Due to the fierce German resistance at the Seelow Heights, Zhukov was initially somewhat behind Konev in the "race for Berlin" between the two commanders promoted by Stalin. The overall commander of the German forces defending the Oder line and Berlin, which included the Third Panzer and Ninth Armies, was General Heinrici, a commander of high competence and experience in defensive fighting dubbed the "Giftzwerg" ("poison dwarf") by those who didn't like him. Heinrici is not even mentioned in Mr. Heaton's account.



 Casualties: I have not been able to find a source backing Mr. Heaton's claim that 600.000 Soviet soldiers were killed in the battle for Berlin. The most recent Russian sources available (Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century, Greenhill Books London, 1997, pages 158 and 94) list as "irrecoverable losses" 78.291 troops for the "Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation, 16 April - 8 May 1945" and 243.296 troops for all Soviet forces in Europe during the whole of the 2nd quarter of 1945. These figures are in line with previous estimates of ca. 100.000 Soviet dead in the Berlin operation, which Cornelius Ryan in "The Last Battle" even considered as possibly inflated by the Soviets themselves in order to dramatize their victory. As for German casualties, the only information I found was Ryan's statement in "The Last Battle" that only 40.000 out of 200.000 soldiers of General Busse's Ninth Army survived to surrender to the Americans.



The sources I have consulted at the following:

"The Unknown War" by Harrison E. Salisbury;

"Russia's War: A History of the Soviet War Effort" by Richard Overy;

"The Last Battle" by Cornelius Ryan;

"Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century", edited by G.F.Krivosheev, foreworded by John Erickson, Greenhill Books London/Stackpole Books Pennsylvania, 1997.



I would very much like to have your feedback on this review. Given the errors detected, I would also suggest that your magazine submit articles and other contributions to more critical scrutiny before publishing them.

They may have found a shattered piano in a shattered building, or then they carried piano wire around their wrists to garrot enemy sentries on night patrols, like other elite units (Soviet Spetsnats, for instance) did.Lack of time is also hardly an argument against the plausibility of the occurrence, which I wouldn't dismiss as impossible considering how the Germans treated their Soviet prisoners throughout the war in general and the bitterness and resentment they are likely to have been full of in that final battle in particular.I wonder if panzemahn would open up in the same manner if the account had been about Soviet troops doing the same to German prisoners of war.As for myself, the issue is simply whether or not there is conclusive evidence to such occurrence, like eyewitness testimonials or written contemporary reports. If there's no such evidence, there's no need to talk about it, period.Just the kind of people who would have done everything to sweep such an atrocity under the carpet.It's interesting to learn from remarks like the above what kind of literature panzermahn draws his wisdom from, by the way. The American author whose name he doesn't remember, the one who helped Falkenhayn write his biography, is a certain Colin D. Heaton, who a couple of years ago wrote an article about the battle of Berlin in World War II magazine on TheHistoryNet. It was the worst compendium of nonsense I ever read about that battle, a comedy of errors. Here's the text of the message I sent in September 2000 to the editor of World War II magazine:It seems the editor didn't like my message. He never replied.