I saw The Pianist the other night and it left me with a couple questions.
In Warsaw and other cities where Jews were forced into ghettos, who took their homes?
At the end of the movie it mentions the death of a german soldier in a Russian POW camp… but in 1952? It was my understanding that after the war German POW’s were sent home. Was Russia the only country not to do this and why?
In answer to number 2, the Soviets were pretty ticked off at the Germans, since the Nazis killed millions of Soviet citizens. (Indeed, one of the greatest fears of the Germans near the end of the war was being captured by the Soviets because of how the Soviets had suffered at German hands. Any German that had the choice, surrendered to the British or the Americans because they figured that the odds of them surviving were better than if they surrendered to the Soviets. IIRC, there’s even some question as to what happened to US GI’s who were in camps liberated by the Soviets.
Who took the homes of the people put in Japanese internment camps in America?
You underestimate Russia, my friend. Or overestimate. To put it mildly, a good number of Germans and Russians (And Poles, and Czechs, and pretty much anyone caught anywhere) never saw home again even though they didn’t die in combat. Consider it similar to American POWs allegedly still in Vietnam.
I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to your first question.
Re the second, it is certainly true that many German POWs were never returned. The most famous instance of this was at Stalingrad: of the 91,000 survivors of the German Sixth Army who surrendered, only about 5,000 ever returned to Germany.
As to why the Russians were reluctant to return prisoners, I can only speculate, but I would certainly suppose that in many cases the prisoners were considered politically undesirable to have walking around Poland and East Germany. The Soviets had a notorously short way with politically undesirable prisoners, as they demonstrated by shooting 10,000 Polish officers in the back of the neck at Katyn Forest.
nods at Danimal They pretty much went in with the intent to take control of the region they were liberating from the Germans… well, you can’t very well release POWs and support undergorund militias in a territory you plan on establishing a puppet government in, now can you?
The Uk also held on to German POWs till well after 1945 . The last ones were sent home in 1948 although many thousands stayed on in Britain . This was because they had met and married local girls or they did not want to return to Germany occupied by the USSR. This link takes you to a recent BBC programme that dealt with this subject.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/germans/german01.shtmlAmerica also held onto some German POWs for longer than the Geneva convention dictates. The POWs in Allied countries were used as laborers to rebuild the war damage. (How the US …)
German POW life expectency in France was quite low. Hundreds of thousands were kept in Andersonville-like conditions. But since they won no “war crimes” were committed.
The last surviving German POWs were returned by the Soviet Union in the first months of 1956, after the West German government agreed, in September of 1955, to have diplomatic relations with the Soviedt Union. It seems diplomatic relations took so long because West German policy up to then was not to have diplomatic relations with countries that recognized East Germany.
Spain sent a division to fight on the German side against the Russians. Many, if not most, of those taken prisoner died in the concentration camps. Those who survived were returned in 1954.
Getting back at the end of the war from Russian hands was non-trivial even for non-Germans: see Primo Levi’s The Truce for the roundabout story of an Auschwitz survivor’s fate in such circumstances.