@Lazarus:
From:
Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941-1944
(Calculated murders The German economic and political destruction in Belarus 1941-1944)
http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/christian-gerlach/kalkulierte-morde.html
According to the reports and eyewitness testimonials the murders on marches and transports increased in a well nigh incredible manner in the autumn and winter of 1941. This was especially obvious in the city of Minsk. After a transport in January 1942 alone 1,000 to 2,000 corpses of prisoners are said to have lain in the Minsk main street Sovietskaja. That 80 out of 8,000 men were shot between Masjukovshtchina and the Minsk freight train station was nothing unusual. For instance, German soldiers of Home Infantry Battalion 332 indicted by the Soviets stated that once on 3 October 1941 31 men and once in November 200 men, at other times between 100 and 500 men, had been murdered especially on the way to the secondary camp at the Pushkin barracks in the northeast of Minsk. And this happened on a relatively short trip – on overland marches in Belorussia things were no different, only harder to document. During a march of 3,000 Soviet prisoners of war from Bobruisk in the direction of Sluzk on 7 November 1941, according to a witness who went after the column in a horse cart and counted the bodies, 729 men were shot – then the march was cancelled, and the column had to turn back. Whether in Minsk alone a total of 5,000 or 20,000 prisoners were shot in such actions, as becomes apparent from various eyewitness testimonials, can no longer be clarified.
From the Wikipedia article about Christian Gerlach:
According to Gerlach, the resistance offered by officers such as Claus von Stauffenberg and Henning von Tresckow, who were responsible for the famous assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944, was insincere, and in fact- Tresckow and many other resistance fighters were heavily implicated in national socialist war crimes [7] However, Gerlach’s thesis was severely criticized by a number of scholars . . . Recently, Danny Orbach, a Harvard based historian and PhD candidate, had argued that Gerlach’s reading of the sources is highly skewed, and at times- diametrically opposed to what they really say. In one case, according to Orbach, Gerlach had falsely paraphrased the memoir of the resistance fighter Colonel Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, and in another case, quoted misleadingly from an SS document. Hence, Orbach concludes that Gerlach’s thesis on the German resistance is highly unreliable. [9].
Based on the above, my first impression is that Gerlach has swallowed Allied propaganda hook, line, and sinker. And has distorted evidence to make Germany look as bad as possible. (By attempting to discredit the German resistance.) And has devoted his whole career to wallowing in a sense of collective German guilt.
The German occupation of the Soviet Union was harsh. But that harshness should be discussed objectively. You very clearly have an ax to grind, and the same also appears to be true of Gerlach.
