Though members of the SS continued to stand in defendant's docks in the Federal Republic of Germany and elsewhere after the end of World War II—even up to the present day—the vast majority of SS and police were never called to account for their crimes.
After World War II, German prisoners were taken back to Europe as part of a reparations agreement. They were forced into harsh labor camps. Many prisoners did make it home in 18 to 24 months, Lazarus said. But Russian camps were among the most brutal, and some of their German POWs didn't return home until 1953.
Six thousand survived, returning to Germany after the war. Of them, 35 are still alive today. We visited ten of these veterans, to trace the memories of the battle in their faces and voices. In Russia we located a dozen surviving Red Army soldiers who had fought the Germans at Stalingrad.
After the war, millions of German settlers were forcibly, even violently, expelled and sent back to Germany. Other ethnic Germans, whose families had lived in border regions like the Sudetenland for generations, also fled or were expelled. Allied opinion was divided about these expulsions.
The most common sentences for lower-ranking members of the Auschwitz garrison were three years in prison (203 times, for 31.9% of all the sentences) and 4 years (111 times, 17.5%). Death and life sentences were relatively rare (41 times, 6.1%).
During the Dachau liberation reprisals, German SS troops were killed by U.S. soldiers and concentration camp internees at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, during World War II. It is unclear how many SS men were killed in the incident, but most estimates place the number killed at around 35–50.
As the generation that elected Adolf Hitler and fought his genocidal war dies away, most Germans today see World War II through the prism of guilt, responsibility and atonement. And almost all agree that the defeat of the Nazis was a good thing.
The German population fled or was expelled from all regions which are currently within the territorial boundaries of Poland, including the former eastern territories of Germany annexed by Poland after the war and parts of pre-war Poland.
Almost all the ethnic Germans living in the territories acquired by Poland were expelled by the postwar communist regimes, to be replaced by Poles who had themselves been displaced from former Polish lands now annexed by the Soviet Union.
John Tosh, the Director of the Texas Air Museum in San Antonio, Texas, is 87 and still going strong. He is a member of the Veterans of Underage Military Service, being only 15 or so when he enlisted in the U.S.Army. He didn't make it overseas before the war ended.
The Draft and WWII
On September 16, 1940, the United States instituted the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which required all men between the ages of 21 and 45 to register for the draft.
Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction.
Russians also point to the fact that Soviet forces killed more German soldiers than their Western counterparts, accounting for 76 percent of Germany's military dead.
It is believed that about 1 percent of Germans did stay, and an unknown percentage later came back to the United States, largely because of poor employment prospects in the immediate postwar Germany.
The total value of the paid reparations from Eastern Germany to Poland amounts to 10.2 billion US Dollars (1938) - or 180.54 billion in inflation adjusted (2018) US Dollars. Poland and Western Germany concluded several treaties and agreements to compensate Polish victims of German aggression.
Immediately after World War II, nearly 40,000 square miles of eastern Germany were handed over to Poland. Polish authorities quickly ousted 10 million ethnic Germans, pushing them across the newly redrawn German-Polish border. New Polish settlers took their place.
The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which ended the war, restored the independence of Poland, known as the Second Polish Republic, and Germany was compelled to cede territories to it, most of which were taken by Prussia in the three Partitions of Poland and had been part of the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German ...
But is ignorance the solution? The Ministry of Education's guidelines for junior high schools state that all children must be taught about Japan's "historical relations with its Asian neighbours and the catastrophic damage caused by the World War II to humanity at large".
Ami – German slang for an American soldier.
Good Germans is an ironic term — usually placed between single quotes such as 'Good Germans' — referring to German citizens during and after World War II who claimed not to have supported the Nazi regime, but remained silent and did not resist in a meaningful way.
The Soviet Union suffered the highest number of fatalities of any single nation, with estimates mostly falling between 22 and 27 million deaths.
Military deaths from all causes totaled 21–25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war. More than half of the total number of casualties are accounted for by the dead of the Republic of China and of the Soviet Union.