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7he47r0n said:
Then I would recommend you check out just how many people Zhukov had executed via a firing line. And that's just one commander, mind you.
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Soviet blocking detachments killed ~150,000 soldiers. Commanders would be executed but most of the executions happened early on in the war. Again, most of the time you’d reassign stragglers, or send them to penal detachments.


EDIT: Some numbers for context. 15,649 soldiers were corralled by blocking forces, all of who fled the front line on the Stalingrad Front from August 1, 1942 to October 15, 1942. Of these, 244 soldiers were imprisoned, 278 were shot, 218 were sent to penal companies, 42 to penal battalions and 14,833 were ordered to return to their units.
 
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Techpriest said:
Soviet blocking detachments killed ~150,000 soldiers. Commanders would be executed but most of the executions happened early on in the war. Again, most of the time you’d reassign stragglers, or send them to penal detachments.
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That's almost as much as the entirety of French losses during the war (230,000). Let it sink in - the Red Army outright killed almost as many of their own soldiers, and that's not taking into account those that were "disappeared" in gulags and lagers due to being overworked, executed whilst there, or expired due to the inhumane conditions.
 
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7he47r0n said:
That's almost as much as the entirety of French losses during the war (230,000). Let it sink in - the Red Army outright killed almost as many of their own soldiers, and that's not taking into account those that were "disappeared" in gulags and lagers.
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The French fought for six months. Soviet casualties were 8.7 million men in a military capacity. This was over the course of 4 years. They lost 150,000 over the course of three years to the blocking detachments. That’s not a high casualty rate by any means. Of the 450,000 penal legionaries through the course of the war, most died in combat, some ended up in the gulags after the war, and others were considered to have served their time and released.

The Soviets were monstrous, but there’s no reason to exaggerate what they did, or to fall into the “death camps” fallacy when we have the records from the gulags of arrivals, deaths, terms, etc. A lot of gulag deaths occurred during the Second World War, when the USSR was on starvation rations across the board. Were they shitty? Yes. Did most people get out of them eventually? Also yes.
 
Techpriest said:
The French fought for six months. Soviet casualties were 8.7 million men in a military capacity. This was over the course of 4 years. They lost 150,000 over the course of three years to the blocking detachments. That’s not a high casualty rate by any means. Of the 450,000 penal legionaries through the course of the war, most died in combat, some ended up in the gulags after the war, and others were considered to have served their time and released.

The Soviets were monstrous, but there’s no reason to exaggerate what they did, or to fall into the “death camps” fallacy when we have the records from the gulags of arrivals, deaths, terms, etc. A lot of gulag deaths occurred during the Second World War, when the USSR was on starvation rations across the board. Were they shitty? Yes. Did most people get out of them eventually? Also yes.
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The French fought for five years. On both sides, to boot.
 
Marshal Mannerheim said:
”most gulag deaths were due to WWII” cannot be true if a famine + genocide took place in those same gulags.
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...Uh, the famine was in the Ukraine. The gulags in the rest of Russia have nothing to do with that.

Of about 2.5 million people who died in the gulags or after release from causes inside the gulags, about half of those deaths occurred during three years - 1941, 1942, and 1943. During those years, the death rate hit 20% across the camps on average, as food quickly became a problem after the fall of the Ukraine. Rations were cut for everyone in the Soviet Union to near starvation and even less for the gulags.
 
7he47r0n said:
That's almost as much as the entirety of French losses during the war (230,000). Let it sink in - the Red Army outright killed almost as many of their own soldiers, and that's not taking into account those that were "disappeared" in gulags and lagers due to being overworked, executed whilst there, or expired due to the inhumane conditions.
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Meanwhile, we had Eddie Slovik. And that was it.
 
AnOminous said:
Meanwhile, we had Eddie Slovik. And that was it.
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Quite frankly Eddie pretty much did everything possible to be executed by firing squad.

The real crazy story execution wise to look into through is the guy who was the hangman at Nuremberg. What a fucking shitshow that affair was.
 
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Techpriest said:
Quite frankly Eddie pretty much did everything possible to be executed by firing squad.
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There's a reason he was the only one. The U.S. is pretty reluctant to execute someone for just being a coward. Almost everyone in Eddie's situation, including Eddie, was generally given multiple chances to avoid the ultimate penalty. For one thing, if someone is so much of a coward they'd be useless in combat anyway, why waste a gun on them? Almost everyone was given a chance to rejoin their unit, turn into an REMF, do something other than combat or, in only the most severe cases, do some time.

Ironically, for being a willful coward, he voluntarily put himself in front of a firing squad.
 
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