The New Eastern Front

[tyrodtom]

It's been posted in this thread that the concentration camp workers who worked on the V2 were treated a little more gently than the usual inmate, when just a brief look at the number of deaths says different.
Nobody said much of anything counter to that.


Now I get raked over the coals for introducing politics into the equation?
I can see the humor in that.

 

[drgondog]

It's been posted in this thread that the concentration camp workers who worked on the V2 were treated a little more gently than the usual inmate, when just a brief look at the number of deaths says different.
Nobody said much of anything counter to that.


Now I get raked over the coals for introducing politics into the equation?
I can see the humor in that.

I haven't raked you over the coals, nor have I gotten upset or happy about any discussions regarding slave laborers treatment in this thread. If you accept Dave's or my comments as raking you over the coals you have led a sensitive and gentle life - and I apologise for hurting your feelings.

 

[tyrodtom]

No hurt feelings here.
But my sense of humor doesn't extend to revisionist propagada on slave labor and concentration camps.

 

[GrauGeist]

There wasn't any "raking of the coals" intended (nor implied) in my comment, nor have I seen any "revisionist propeganda" so far.

But for the sake of continuity of the thread, let's say that a condition imposed on the Germans for aid would be to immediately close all concentration camps, release all forced labor and remove (and arrest) all leaders responsible for such.

In essence, deal with a German government much along the lines of what existed under Admiral Doenitz.

 

[michaelmaltby]

"... I would say that a thread like this needs a sense of humor...?"

I TRY .... I REALLY TRY:

".... Some people here want to paint me as the idiot who thinks against the majority and it's wrong, but I'm certainly not this type. "

".... Anyone who thinks the allies would would turn a blind eye to the known crimes of the Nazi regime, and then fight beside them, is a idiot, or Himmler, or both."



MM

 

[Hoju2k]

Links in Post 42 give a ration better than 2:1 (106025:46846) or 2.26:1

According to Zaloga.

AFV (T&SPG) Strength
Germany (total) / Germany(EF) / USSR)total)

6/41: 5639 / 3671 / 28800
3/4: 5087 / 1503 / 6690
5/42: 5847 / 3981 / 8190
11/42: 7798 / 3133 /6940
3/43: 5625 / 2374 / 9200
8/43: 7703 / 2555 / 8200
6/44: 9148 / 4740 / 13600
9/44: 10563 / 4186 / 13400
10/44: 11005 / 4917 / 13900
11/44: 12236 / 5202 / 16000
12/44: 13175 / 4785 / 17000
1/45: 13362 / 4881 / 16200

OK, I was going from memory. Still, slightly above 2:1 is a long way from 50000:6000 (or worse, as was suggested).
Interesting thing about those strength numbers, the moment when the Soviets had the better ratio (almost 8:1, and that moment also coincides with their better strength ratio for the Air Forces), things were not going much well for them. AFV, Aircraft strength ratios don't tell the whole story.

 

[Milosh]

Production 1941-45

T-34 - 36,119
T-34/85 - 29,430

Total production - 65,549

Panzer V Panther - 6,557

50000:6000 (or worse, as was suggested)

This is production numbers NOT what was on the battlefield.

 

[Hoju2k]

This is production numbers NOT what was on the battlefield.

Yes, I am aware of that. You have to pay more attention.

 

[Jenisch]

"... I would say that a thread like this needs a sense of humor...?"

I TRY .... I REALLY TRY:

".... Some people here want to paint me as the idiot who thinks against the majority and it's wrong, but I'm certainly not this type. "

".... Anyone who thinks the allies would would turn a blind eye to the known crimes of the Nazi regime, and then fight beside them, is a idiot, or Himmler, or both."



MM

Get out of my lap Michael, it's heavy already.

 

[Gixxerman]

Production 1941-45

T-34 - 36,119
T-34/85 - 29,430

Total production - 65,549

Panzer V Panther - 6,557



This is production numbers NOT what was on the battlefield.

Yes indeed.

But the point I was making by referring to these production totals (for just those 2 types alone) is that they illustrate the point very well.
In terms of the weapons used on the EF (and as far as I can see this applies in every single catagory) Russian arms vastly outnumber German.
Not forgetting the vast manpower differential.
Or the fact that by 1944 Russia is on a growing tide with huge momentum in these things for Germany the reverse in every practical sense applies.
It is the Russians that in 1944 are developing a growing pool of experienced combat units whilst German units are continually being worn out (sometimes in the most literal sense) decimated and reborn
(with all that entailed at this stage of the war = units often with less men than than normal standard reducing levels of training experience).

Germany has lost on the EF by 1944.
It really is as simple as that.

One can cheat in this 'what if......' with the ludicrous notion of fresh, well trained well equipped American British Commonwealth troops coming along to plug the widening developing holes in the German forces but that is such an absurd position to take.
Even the Germans couldn't pull it off at the time (as those tragic brave July 1944 bomb-plotters found out as they tried to get any sort of encouragement from the allies with not one whiff of any interest).

But in the terms of the original posting it is supposed to be 'what if the western allies stopped allied with Germany, and all now against Russia, in 1944?'.
So all the damage loss up until 31st Dec 1943 in the west at sea etc etc has already happened......as well as all the lend lease supplying the Russians.

I just don't see how anyone could reasonably state, even in those circumstances that the Americans British would ever fight alongside the German forces - far too many war-crimes against their men nevermind the rest have been committed.
Or that any other outcome except the German total defeat would occur.
Russia was by then just far too strong no amount of interesting prototypes (even with better raw materials in their production) can squeeze the 3, 4 or 5yrs brand new types often need to come on stream properly (including the whole support infrastructures training the development of proper tactics for their use).

 

[Siegfried]

How was this ~25% increase in speed obtained?

V1 ones grew in speed to about 485mph in late january to 493 Feb/March with some examples reaching 515mph. See The V2 and the German, Russian and American Rocket Program By C. Reuter, sometimes available on google books. The increase was achieved via a series of increases in fuel injection pressure and timming precision. The Germans basically didn't have time to get these units into mass production or to launch them at near enough targets.

The two of the three required Ewald II midcourse guidance stations had also just about been completed: the V1 was on the verge of becomming a 515mph guided cruise missile

 

[Jenisch]

Yes indeed.
Germany has lost on the EF by 1944.
It really is as simple as that.

I don't think so. As I already presented in a few posts before, the author of Normandy Crucible puts a good thesis that the D-Day (and German preparations for it) was the determinant engagement in the Allied victory in Europe.

In my opinion, despite you having specified Eastern Front, you are doing the mistake of try see the Eastern Front as an isolated conflict of World War II, when in fact, not only the war being fought by the Germans against the Western Allies, but also the wars in Africa, Mediterranean and in the Pacific affected what was going on in Eastern Europe. You need the Chaos Theory to analyze alternative scenarios like this one. And in fact, there are intangibles to be considerated (i.e intelligence services), and so a definitive answer never will be possible.

Personally, letting intables and politics apart, if Himmler's proposal was aproved before D-Day, I think this premature "NATO" would have a favourable chance of keep the Soviets inside their borders, or at least out of Germany. The massive material support for Germany, together with ground and specially Anglo-American air power would make the human and economic costs very high for the Soviets, costs they could not have been willing to pay.

 

[Jenisch]

Ah, and the Manhattan Project should definately not be desconsiderated in such a scenario.

 

[Siegfried]

Concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora, 60,000 inmates passed thru it, 20,000 died, 9,000 died due to exhaustion and collapse. 350 hanged, 200 for sabotage.
Is that enough "Hollywood hype" for you Siegfrei ??


I later realized i'd left out something important, Mittelbrau-Dora was only one of the camps suppling the V-2 program with laborers, and only in operation about a year.

It's obviously not enough hype for you. Your rhetoric doesn't detract from my point. If everyone had of lived or died at Mittlebau-Dora it wouldn't make much difference to the impressed or indentured labour system simply because it was not representative of the overall impressed labour situation. I use the word impressed rather than slave labour as this was not chattel slavery and there was an intention to release indentured or impressed labour when it became possible to do so for what was surely most instances. There was planty of hope for these workers. Many had liberties such as movement in the town during certain hours of the day. In a big factory conditions could be poor in a small one of 20 people its could be quite good. These were the people working in production. Dora was an late war SS run underground superfactory designed to produce a range of weapons and aircraft, not just V2.

So the overall system was far more banal, survivable and productive than you are prepared to admit. It had little to do with death camps. If you want to know how you ended up in a forced worker in a factory or as a forced farm hand; ask youself what might happened to a Serb who handed out anti German pamphlets at a railway station. I know a person who ended up in the system that way.

Deaths at Dora were a late war event and seem to have been concentrated around the excavations of the bomb proof structure rather than production workers, this excavation work was at best indifferent and it seem likely deliberatly muderous. Also included at least 1500 deaths from Allied bombing in from only one series of raids. Had these have been impressed German workers (who also had no choice but to partake in war production) they would be counted as victims of allied bombardment rather than Nazism. Also included must be many who perished in forced evacuation marches as the allies advanced. As it was many were skilled French POW's, something clearly against the Geneva convention which allows forced labour only in non munitions related industry.

But I get back to my main point, which you wish to sequay into a holicaust story. The impressed and indentrued labour forces productivity and quality was not at all bad considering the limited materials, training and skill they had. Nor were they subject to starvation or daily beatings etc etc which would never have allowed them to assemble the devices required of them though I have no doubt any sabotage would likely be dealt with by summary execution.

AFAIKT the labour (Ukranian women) was at least 90% as effective as "free" German wokers.

I should also add many factories used little or no forced labour at all. Junkers itself for instance.

 

[michaelmaltby]

CHAOS THEORY ....is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, engineering, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.[1] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[2] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.[3][4] This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.
Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as weather.[5][6] Explanation of such behavior may be sought through analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps......

.... Chaotic behavior has been observed in the laboratory in a variety of systems, including electrical circuits,[14] lasers, oscillating chemical reactions, fluid dynamics, and mechanical and magneto-mechanical devices, as well as computer models of chaotic processes. Observations of chaotic behavior in nature include changes in weather, the dynamics of satellites in the solar system, the time evolution of the magnetic field of celestial bodies, population growth in ecology, the dynamics of the action potentials in neurons, and molecular vibrations. There is some controversy over the existence of chaotic dynamics in plate tectonics and in economics.[15][16][17]
Chaos theory is currently being applied to medical studies of epilepsy, specifically to the prediction of seemingly random seizures by observing initial conditions.[Wikipedia - FWIW - ]

Professional soldiers already understand Chaos Theory, Jenisch, it rules the way they operate in during wartime and maneuvers.

MM

 

[michaelmaltby]

"... If you want to know how you ended up in a forced worker in a factory or as a forced farm hand; ask youself what might happened to a Serb who handed out anti German pamphlets at a railway station ..."

Or the sad misfortune to be a Russian POW. Oh well, the Soviets did it right back at them in Siberia ...

MM

 

[Jenisch]

CHAOS THEORY ....Professional soldiers already understand Chaos Theory, Jenisch, it rules the way they operate in during wartime and maneuvers. MM

Logic. The problem is some people here don't seems to understand it for the proposed scenario.

 

[tyrodtom]

Ah, and the Manhattan Project should definately not be desconsiderated in such a scenario.

Again you're forgetting the Manhatten Project was infiltrated by Soviet spies.

 

[michaelmaltby]

"..... Logic. The problem is some people here don't seems to understand it for the proposed scenario."

You mean your scenario ...



MM

 

[tyrodtom]

It's obviously not enough hype for you. Your rhetoric doesn't detract from my point. If everyone had of lived or died at Mittlebau-Dora it wouldn't make much difference to the impressed or indentured labour system simply because it was not representative of the overall impressed labour situation. I use the word impressed rather than slave labour as this was not chattel slavery and there was an intention to release indentured or impressed labour when it became possible to do so for what was surely most instances. There was planty of hope for these workers. Many had liberties such as movement in the town during certain hours of the day. In a big factory conditions could be poor in a small one of 20 people its could be quite good. These were the people working in production. Dora was an late war SS run underground superfactory designed to produce a range of weapons and aircraft, not just V2.

So the overall system was far more banal, survivable and productive than you are prepared to admit. It had little to do with death camps. If you want to know how you ended up in a forced worker in a factory or as a forced farm hand; ask youself what might happened to a Serb who handed out anti German pamphlets at a railway station. I know a person who ended up in the system that way.

Deaths at Dora were a late war event and seem to have been concentrated around the excavations of the bomb proof structure rather than production workers, this excavation work was at best indifferent and it seem likely deliberatly muderous. Also included at least 1500 deaths from Allied bombing in from only one series of raids. Had these have been impressed German workers (who also had no choice but to partake in war production) they would be counted as victims of allied bombardment rather than Nazism. Also included must be many who perished in forced evacuation marches as the allies advanced. As it was many were skilled French POW's, something clearly against the Geneva convention which allows forced labour only in non munitions related industry.

But I get back to my main point, which you wish to sequay into a holicaust story. The impressed and indentrued labour forces productivity and quality was not at all bad considering the limited materials, training and skill they had. Nor were they subject to starvation or daily beatings etc etc which would never have allowed them to assemble the devices required of them though I have no doubt any sabotage would likely be dealt with by summary execution.

AFAIKT the labour (Ukranian women) was at least 90% as effective as "free" German wokers.

I should also add many factories used little or no forced labour at all. Junkers itself for instance.

You seem to have a fixation on Ukranian women.

I don't know where to begin.

20% of the Germans work force was slave labor, forced labor, 25 % in 1944. Different classes of workers had different privileges.

A for instance Polish workers made up at peak 2.8 million of the work force, they of course had to wear a P on the outer clothing at all times, they had a curfew, could not use public transportation, or facilities, could not attend German churches, could own no personel property ( bicycle, money, cigerette lighters, tools, etc.) earned a fraction of what a German worker earned, had a 7 day week, could not marry without permission, and if they entered the German gene pool, they were dead.

The eastern workers ( Russian, Ukranian, etc) had to wear a E? at all times and were in a different catagory. They comprised up to 5.5 million of the workforce at it's peak. They were kept in camps, only out under guard. So they didn't get to participate in the utopia that the Poles did.

I'm tired of typing.

I've seen a similiar spin put on the slave/forced labor situation before, I used to work with a guy who was a member of the KKK and a Nazi apologist in his spare time.