Hi Ladies and Gentleman. The diary of Helmut Horner. Let me know your thoughts below! Here is the playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLyuEmb1VavZARAG13NojLWW1yBVb-E4j7.html
I've listened to your stories for quite some time now, and I really enjoy them. But, one criticism. At the end of sentences, one can tell that your computer program is lagging in obvious sarcastic statements that the author is trying to describe to us, the faithful listener. Is there anyway to "improve" your program, can it learn different syntaxes? Anyway, bravo on the channel. I wait anxiously for the next episode!!!
My dad told me of a German P.O.W. that worked as a janitor at a facility in Italy, where my father was stationed. One day, my father asked the P.O.W. why he mopped the floor with such care each day. The prisoner responded, that he would not disgrace the uniform by doing a poor job.
It is truly amazing how a person who has been genuinely indoctrinated into a cause the way the German (and Russian for that matter) army was. That man had lost everything of pride and distinction to him, but he still had control over his performance as a prisoner. In a comparatively very small way, he found a way to maintain his dignity.
My dad fought in North Africa and Italy (had to swim the last mile into Italy after the ship he was on sunk after colliding with another ship). He was very interested in people and closely observed the cultures he was experiencing. Not wanting to talk about the combat and carnage, he instead talked of the various people and countries he had encountered. It seemed that he took away many positive things from a terrible and desperate time.
@@bikesnippets Germany was Not Our Enemy, Our Real Enemy's Won the War that "they" declared a "Holy War" in 1933 against Germany and America and Western Civilization in 1913 with their "Federal Reserve Act" thanks to a Traitors Criminal U.S. President. . .
My mother worked in Camp Administration of a POW camp in Wisconsin- her job was to keep the books on the payroll for the POWs and arrange work outside of the Camp should they choose to. One guy would take every single job that would come along, he told my mom that he is going to have something to build a future with when the war with the money earned. Oh, and he and my mom exchange Christmas Greetings right up till the day my mom died in 1976. There were Germans and Italians in that Camp.
@@phil4483 You don't know jack squat about it. They *are* made to work, and they are *not* paid anything (I'm not counting things like 14 cents per hour, because that's nothing). Like slaves. Go ahead and do some research before opening your pie hole again. "From the moment they enter the prison gates, incarcerated people lose the right to refuse to work. This is because the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against slavery and involuntary servitude, explicitly excludes from its reach those held in confinement due to a criminal conviction. The roots of modern prison labor can be found in the ratification of this exception clause at the end of the Civil War, which disproportionately encouraged the criminalization and effective re-enslavement of Black people during the Jim Crow era, with impacts that persist to this day. Today, more than 76 percent of incarcerated workers surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments." I suppose hypocrisy and corruption are lost on ideologues. I find it appalling that Nazis were treated better and paid far more, and given an opportunity to start a new life - while American citizens are treated like slaves. Do you?
@@phil4483 Kamala Harris as Attorney General refused a court order to release prisoners who had done their time because she said they were needed to fight forest fires. Once they do get out, they cannot use their experience to join the California firefighting services because they are ex-cons. So much for integrating them into civil society.
It's at the top of the column of available files to your right just under the lower right hand corner of the video in full screen which I'm watching at the moment.
As a young man in the 1960s I worked at an electronics company in southern California where I shared a lab with two men. One of them had been in the Luftwaffe; the other was a Hungarian who as a teenager was forced to work in a German electronics plant. The German told me of his flight to the west away from the advancing Russians so he could surrender to the Americans. The Hungarian told me horrifying stories of the brutality of the Russian army- his hatred for Russians was intense. He and his family had escaped Hungary during the revolution of 1956. Both very interesting men.
i like how these Germans never took responsibility. Germany tried to ethnically cleanse all of Russia and replace them with Germanic people. Germans hated Russians just as much as the jews. So Russian barbarity was completely in line with what the Germans did in the Soviet Union. Taking children and whole families inside budilings and burning whole villages down. Germans deserved everything they got in retribution. Only reasons Americans treated them nicely was because they held same ideologies and never had the germans unlive their whole family.
The Canadian army was the funniest, when the germans under their guard were getting unruly the guards would leave all their weapons outside the wire and go into the camp and hockey brawl with the Germans....lol
my 18 year old father, blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, landed in one of the following waves at Normandy as a tech sergeant cook , actually made long a long term friend while "guarding" POWs in the sculleries and food prep areas a nd would visit together frequently, the POW immigrated to the US at his first chance, I would listen to them roll from French to German to English and back around again. "Old Army buddy" has a different meaning for me.
My father was an American assistant medic in ww-2 , several times they escorted wounded German p.o.w’s to the camps where they would be held , he said he was treated better by the Germans that the french or British , he brought home a pocket watch that one of the Germans had given him , but after his death in 1998 one of our relatives received the watch , she pawned it , we were never able to relocated it.
I've heard too many stories of someone in a family selling off an important sentimental piece like your relative did with that watch and it makes me mad every single time.
@@visassess8607my friend tried to sell me his grandads m1a1 carbine and I gave him a fucking dissertation on how happy I'd be to have it and why he should NEVER SELL it to me or anyone else
well let's be real, there is no indication that he had committed any atrocities people keep acting as if soldiers are not victims, in truth let's be real here, they suffered worse conditions than civilians did, they fought for years, suffered hunger and pain. He had every right to see himself as a victim as in my oppinion does every soldier that suffered those conditions, I hope all those that say differently get to push a button and switch lives with them.
My neighbor across the street in Dearborn, MI was a former German U-Boat commender (his son explained it to me). He kept to himself mostly but kept the absolutely neatest house on the street. The small lawn was beyond manicured and the tiny house was spotless. He cut the grass in a very organized manner that guaranteed perfect results; left-to-right, forward-and-back, then diagonally in both directions. Same thing with raking the leaves and clearing the snow. Methodical, organized, thorough, and on-schedule. Always.
Keep this diary of Helmut Horner going .. its a wonderful story..my uncle was in the great escape .. he was one of them that had to stay back.. He was a Canadian..
my in-laws remember when they were children seeing all the Afrika Corps PoWs picking cotton and other crops in Arkansas - local communities brought them home-cooked meals for their Sunday Bible study - they said they were nice men
My aunt married into our family because my uncle fell in love and married her. She was German, she told me about her father and brother. Her father was captured by the Russian army, her brother was captured by the U.S.army, when her brother came home he was healthy and had skills as a carpenter, when her father came home he was near dead. Shouldn't that tell you the story
I can’t speak about this Helmut, but I’d like people to remember that’s it’s been found that most of the Wehrmacht did indeed take part in the war crimes that we all know happened. I hate to have to remind you all of how Germans did treat prisoners of war. How they ended up taking millions of people for slave labor, and how near the end they took at least a couple of hundred thousand French for that purpose as well. I have very little sympathy for these prisoners who were taken care of vastly better than they took care of theirs. Let’s never forget that.
Oradour- Sur-Glane...June 10th 1944... women and children locked in a church and burnt alive. Men shot in the legs and doused with kerosene...an entire village burnt to the ground...all civilians and passers-by. This is the revenge for resistance and one precious fucking Waffen SS. The Americans could see at that time that nazis had a level of delusion, superiority and sick brutality all of their own. The allies had to bring some order and sustenance to the defeated Germany. The nazi mass murderers got off virtually scot free. And it was found that the whole country was made up of tens of millions of deluded, brainwashed individuals. They had a whole population to de-nazify. I agree with you, mate...Thankyou.
And glad you mentioned the slave labour...!! I think too of all the lootings by all the thieving nazis...and the brutal occupation for all those years. Taking over all that was so beautiful about France. Then I think about 1914 to '18. Incomprehensible. (I attribute the majority of the 50 million horrific deaths from influenza also to the aggressors who started the war. And the Russian Revolution, started when Germany And 1871, then what happened after that defeat in France. I don't think much of aggressive countries. But that genocide and two World Wars, they are way over the top!!
If you were a 20th century American POW, by far the safest country to be captured by was Germany (1.9%) WWII only. The Japanese (33%), North Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese all lost over 20% of their POWs. The Germans did kill a lot of POWs from other countries though. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war
The prisoners have a lot of nerve to think the French are just going to let bygones be bygones. The allies had to bomb the crap out of the French, to get at the Germans.
Exactly. Just infuriating or moronic. In another story on this channel, a German participating in early Barbarossa would describe the invading Germans (his side) looting all the food from Russian peasants, or burning villages, or civilians caught in the fighting, etc. then on the next page of the diary be wondering to himself why the Russian civilians seem pretty hostile to the invading Germans. And he did that SEVERAL TIMES in the diary (describing things that would make anyone dislike your side, then wondering why people dislike your side). It is just an unbelievable level of stupidity and tone deafness.
@@okaythankyoubyeee2501 Too bad you can't even get your lies straight. The Rhine Meadows Camps are a controversial topic, but the truth of what happened is easily established. Dr. Mark Felton is a well-known British historian, the author of 22 non-fiction books,... Commented: My Grandfather was a German soldier. He surrendered to U.S. troops at the end of the war. He spoke of hardships, disease, and shortages of food for all. Soldiers and civilians alike. Many did die, but not like that. He said even U.S. troops were hungry and shared some of their own rations with the prisoners sometimes, but he made no mention of being treated badly or tortured at the hands of the U.S. Just the opposite. He immigrated here (USA) in 1951 with his wife and kids. One being my 5 yr old father.
I am an American, so I have a bias about our side when it comes to "The Good War". So from that perspective, I can appreciate Helmut's POV and feeling pretty morally superior. The war is not over yet, we have not liberated the death camps yet. It does not seem as if Helmut fought in the East, with it's horrible degradation of the sub human Slavs. Still, the complaints of his horrible treatment seem so over the top. Had he not seen anything of what the Germans did to Jew and other undesirables?
I wonder about that too. Unless he thought the so called lives of the “undesirables” were just par for the course. I’m sure by October 1944, he knew about the Death Camps, but he does sound 100% arrogant and constantly complains about everything especially the food! Once he was upset because he was tired of receiving meat, because he preferred bread instead! And would often refer to the Geneva Convention, although several allied POWs were massacred by the Nazis and the Japanese!
In addition, and from what I've heard from not only other stories of German POWs, but the POW camps ran by the Americans were Disneyland compared to the treatment the Germans received from the French and especially, the Russians. This ungrateful Helmut guy didn't realize just how good he had it. I personally knew a German POW who was one of millions at War's end, in huge fields. The British, French, Russians and Americans basically drew lots on who would get whom. Nobody wanted to go to the Russians, the French were only one step above, but all of them wanted to go to the Americans. My POW friend unfortunately went to the French, where he worked in a mine, escaped, recaptured and went to work on a French farm, where he was chained like an animal amongst the animals. He finally escaped and made it back to Germany.....
Everyone acts like a genious in hindsight. This is a journal of his experiance at the time and place. The death camps were operated by SS, not the army, and few on either side knew the extent of what those camps were about.
@@TheDuckofDoom. The holocaust was known amongst Germans. It was not a secret.* Every single German* accepted it and put it out of their mind if they didn't participate or actively resist.
The Axis lost because they were outnumbered and the Allies had superior war production, logistics, and supply lines. The Germans had great "super-weapons" but they were too few and came out too late. Plus, they overengineered their tanks. Also, sometimes they were just outfought.
They lost for the same reason that Japan lost they underestimated our resolve. They knew they could not win a prolonged war .they tried to hit hard and sue for peace. Hoping to keep some of the territory gained. Japan knew they had about a year . Hitler never possessed the ability to invade England. Italy could not lockdown the Suez or Libyan oil fields.
@@guystephens2881 There a lot of reasons the Germans lost WWII. Let's examine some of them: POOR MILITARY PLANNING: Hitler tried to fight a war on two large fronts with only so many soldiers...he should've finished off the British at Dunkirk, but he had this strange romantic notion that the very Germanic British would join the German quest to liquidate Satanic Bolshevism...he never grasped the sensible notion of a ''backup plan'' by sending warm winter clothing to the Russian Front in the event the Russkies were just a leetle beet better fighters than those ill-prepared Poles...which of course brings us to another reason the Germans lost the war, their arrogant RACIST feeling they were ''better'' than the uncouth Slavs of Russia and Poland...not to forget the mongrel United States with all those race-mixers, whether black or brown or yellow...or JEW. Hitler was a truly stupid person, as his lack of education would indicate. And while it is easy to understand how panic set in Germany once The Great Depression reared its ugly head, Germany should have never lowered her standards by allowing not only a stupid person but a RACIST to control her destiny.
My dad entered the Army in 1944 and deployed to Germany in 1945 right as the German Surrender took place. He told me when he got off the truck in a German city the first time - he was amazed to see German soldiers [without rank emblems or military badges] running the place. Even the police officers were German soldiers. Here were young Americans arriving in a city run by the enemy and the Germans were all smiles and very nice to him. They all appeared relieved the War was over and Hitler killed himself. The Germans knew Americans did not hate them. The relief of not being in the hands of Russians was obvious.
Fascinating stuff! We rarely get to hear the stories of the "other side". I'm glad to note in this episode that Helmut seems to have given up the idea of escape. In previous episodes I wanted to shout at him (in my comfortable 2023 vantage point, knowing what the coming 8 months or so have in store) "Don't do it! As a POW you're one of the *lucky* ones!"
It's a good soldier's duty to make every attempt to escape. Our guys being held by the Germans certainly came up with some ingenious methods- tunnels and the like. In hindsight though, I agree completely! These Germans did not know how lucky they were to be out of the fight. I've heard other stories about our POW camps here in the US and in those stories, the POW's needed to worry about other POW's as well. There were some among them that were fanatical National Socialists. In one story, they murdered a fellow POW because they felt he was a traitor. There may be a documentary concerning it on UA-cam. It may have been such zealots that pushed for escape attempts.
The stories are interesting and I have heard similar stories from My uncle and my Cousin who served in Germany and was wounded and my uncle who served in Italy during the war, I spent 18 months in Germany in the 50's and new a few Ex German soldiers who fought in the war and were actually in POW camps in the USA but after I got out of the Army and was working in the states I worked with a German Infantry soldier who fought against the Russians. They pretty much hated each other; he told us while moving through Russia his group went past a Russian soldier tied to a post on a road and all of the Germans in his group cut the guy with their bayonets when they walked by him. he also was wounded and his main objective was to get as far away from the Russians and find the American lines to surrender. I can understand his feelings in this story but don't necessarily feel sorry for the Germans. The Germans were as brutal to the Civilians in most of the countries they took over.
to an extent yes, they actually were better than they were in ww1 regarding atrocities and offcourse enacted brutal marshal law with little in the way of mercy for those who took part in "partisanship" but asside from Poland and the USSR they were not more brutal than any invader would have been, but invaders none the less
You may not believe this but my father had a sauerkraut factory in upstate N.Y. that employed German POWs. One of them later became a U.S. citizen with my father’s help. I didn’t make the usual joke about “krauts.”
Yes, because then you would have had to include Julius Caesar, who loved his 'brassica' (cabbage), all of Korea for their Kimchi (spicy cabbage) and South Africa with their pickled cabbage.
So being an American POW made me realize why we lost? Well I am waiting since I didn't hear anything in his tale where he realized that. Or did he realize why they lost because the Americans had more cans of pork? Same for an earlier episode where title says terrified but didn't hear anything in his tale that approached terror in him.
I guess if you want to hear more of the story then listen to it but just ignore the titles completely. I do find that irritating and this will be the last video I bother with.
@@1969cmp No disagreement at all. However, the Soviets expressly rejected the Geneva Convention and effectively wrote off their own surrendered soldiers as traitors, which signalled from the outset that German POWs weren’t going to be properly treated. In practise the Geneva Convention worked on the basis that each side was deterred from mistreating POWs by fear of retaliation, so the result of its absence is not surprising.
As I’ve been listening to this series about Helmut I keep forgetting the war is very much still raging and he must be wandering how it will all pan out. I keep forgetting he’s a POW after the war.
We need to realize that experience are always very individual experiences. Feeling discomfort in a situation doesn't men the situation could be worse. But we are in that specific situation at that specific moment.
They had to have known they were getting much better treatment from the yanks than ivan would have been giving them. They also bitch about the provisions but they also had to have known about supply chain and the yanks just can't snap their fingers and have three full meals a day for prisoners when a war is going on. The level of entitlement Helmut has irks me a bit.
@@dandavis8300 But it was NOT worse in Siberia….FAR more Germans returned home to their families after being a German POW in Russian gulags, than did Russians who surrendered to the Germans early in Operation Barbarossa…with virtually none of them returning home after the war and 99% left in an open field with no food or water by the Germans until they died of exposure or were shot trying to escape. People can make up whatever version of history they like so they can believe what they want to be true, but if you go by evidence and reality, all credible evidence shows that you were far better off on average as a German POW in Russia than vice versa, with plenty of videos here on YT laying out the evidence.
@@JP-dw1fp Hah….Google “top 10 most prosperous US states, bottom 10 poorest US states” - the top 10 are overwhelmingly or all Dem (depending how you define “rich, poor”) and the poorest, highest crime states are overwhelmingly Red States, with the poorest, highest crime states all Red States (Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Georgia, and South Carolina). And it is the thriving Dem economies that pay for the US military budget (mostly paid by NY, CA and Mass)…Alabama isn’t paying for those air craft carriers, and most Red states only function now by taking from the federal budget to pay for food stamps, Medicaid, etc, for their own citizens….meaning the poor Red states are basically on welfare from the prosperous Blue State’s economies. Google it for yourself…the poorest, highest crime (and fattest) states are all or nearly all Red, and the richest, thinnest and safest states are overwhelmingly Dem. Those are called facts and reality, and I know Republicans dislike them.
My great uncle fought for the British in North Africa and I remember him saying how gentlemen like everyone there was. I know that’s random but the idea that the North African front was a chivalrous one really is true.
@@gar6446 the wehrmacht as a fighting force comitted just as many atrocities as the waffen ss did, (not the SS offcourse, the waffen ss was also mostly just foreign recruits that couldn't join the wehrmacht and were often seperatists in their own country) as for africa corps soldiers, this same channel pointed out that they were most likely to hang swastika flags over their beds and have pictures of hitler on their nightstands, but that being said they were not privvy to the realities their brethren were exposed to by the end of the war and Rommel himself only turned against Hitler when he realised that he was mad and in large part this was helped by the war clearly turning against them by that point.
Before anyone gets too angry about how Helmut and his friends were trying to get food to survive, just remember how little they were getting. 1200calories/ day was the standard given to German men, even after the war. The French and British sectors gave out less! That meant that each man in Germany was slowly dying. Women had still births or almost any babies born would die. It was a slow death of starvation. One of the American generals changed his mind and increased the Calories just enough to help people survive in the American sector.
since you have all the statistics on calories ... how many calories were the Germans giving Jewish prisoners (the ones they didn't gas, the ones they were using for slave labor)? I'll wait.
one of my uncles was a harbormaster at normandy,said the french stole or would try to steal anything,including vehicles and weapons,mp's had to terminate a few of them
Interesting and informative. German ( pow's ) were very humanely treated/well fed/professional medical 🚑 care/livable sheltering. Eventually returned to Germany in much better health then when arriving at an American ( POW) camp.
Once again thanks for the vid. Listening and looking at the thumbnail i cant help but think that german on the left has the drop and a decent shot on Upham and they can retreat with the rest of them. Of course steam boat willy gets it and they get away anyway. Geez, I gotta stop drinking coffee this late in the afternoon
This soldiers Journal is a prize of humanity. The irony is when there is compassion showed it is called being humane. And yet no creature is as cruel. The only compassion, true compassion, is in the animal world. The lion will lay with the lamb if it is not hungry
Umm,…sort of agree, but nature is actually pretty brutal, with animals committing SA (seals on penguins), deer eating the legs off baby birds, birds often laying 4-5 eggs when the parents can only feed 3 and letting the chicks fight it put until the weaker ones starves, chimpanzee troops warning with each other or picking on weak members in the troop with absolutely brutal attacks,….the list goes on and on.
The sad part is it costs the U.S. guard nothing for the trade! Even though the Germans were treated far better than the allied troops were treated by the NAZI'S!!!
George S. Patton wanted to put the Jews back in camps. He was a shit commander. He attacked an American soldier who he called a coward, except the soldier actually had FUCKING MALARIA. We're all lucky he got himself killed in a car accident, the man was a proper bastard and deserved what he got. Eisenhower was the real hero of the war.
He was not entirely wrong offcourse but no. the soviets and nazis were objectively monstrous totalitarian bstrds for all the same reasons, whether they were nationalist socialist or internationalist socialist totalitarians the one thing that can be said for the germans is that they at least treated their own people better than the soviets did, but don't be fooled russians were still priviliged relative to ukranians, poles, chechs,estonians, latvians, lithuanians,.... that's not saying much but there is a reason why so many russians still celebrate the USSR and practically none of the other "union members" do
My mother was 5 years old in 1945 on the east cost of England. Many German soldiers were housed nearby and could often be seen marching to some sort of manual labor project. One day, my mother was on her bike when she saw Germans marching towards her as she furiously tried to pedal back home. They were coming closer and closer, towering above her with their big noisy boots. She panicked and fell from her bike, her life was over. A tall blonde boy picked her from the walk and gently put her on the bike as she hysterically fought for her life. She miraculously made it home, still alive, but absolutely terrified. We have all laughed over the years about that story. I always wondered what ever happened to the young man who helped Mother onto her bike.
The narrator implies there is a difference between the German Army and the Nazis. Is this actually true? I'm skeptical because it just seems like in later accounts many Germans just wanted to distance themselves from the Nazis. Kind of like how Speer tried to portrayed himself as a good nazi or local Germans saying they knew nothing about the death camps.
After WW1, the German government was functioning as a disjointed republic with many political parties vying for power. Hitler became a prominent figure in the National Socialist German Workers Party (also known as the Nazi party) and was appointed Chancellor by the President. Long story short, Hitler ended up taking full control of the government and turned Germany into a dictatorship. As to your question, it depends on your point of view. Once the Nazi party had taken full control of Germany, one could argue that any and every German soldier was now a Nazi, as they were fighting for an army that received their orders from the Nazi government. In reality, there were likely a large number of German soldiers who did not approve of the ideals and actions of their government, but still felt a responsibility to fight for their country. The difference implied by the narrator is one of ideology.
From what I understand, the army wasn't supposed to be political but did follow the governments orders. That's why they created the SS to be the actual army of the nazi party. The ss had different leadership and chain of command. The us army is the same way they're not supposed to be political but follow the presidents orders.
They were very brave when they didn't and thousands lost their lives and/or were tortured by the Gestapo. It's called the French Resistance. Google it sometime. German prisoners got off lucky.
While those French who did act in the resistance were brave it is a fact that France was the easiest occupation duty the Germans had because the French resistance was by far the proportionally smallest and least agressive of any other occupied nation.
The Germans had a horrific reputation in occupied countries. Millions were starved, Ppl were set upon by attack dogs or simply dragged out & shot or taken as hostages and later shot or sent to Hellish concentration camps. My uncle was badly wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and was tortured , starved, and beaten for the rest of the war by the Nazis.. Rhinehard Heydrich was known as The Hang Man of Prague and when he was assassinated an entire village (Ladice) was infamously wiped out in reprisal. Intellectuals were prime targets for executions as well. And Jews were routinely massacred by the SS & the Wehrmacht. Only about 1 in 10 Russian POWs survived their captivity in Nazi hands,
true, but conversely they were not as brutal in the west, in part because the geneva conventions applied there, and Germans came to absolutely hate the russians from what i read, doesn't justify it, doesn't take away the suffering your family and people suffered but it's something to note.
An interesting series of videos and I do enjoy them. Is there any way to connect these to a particular person and find what happened to them after the war? Perhaps some additional photos even if just generic ones would be good. The "computer voice" is pretty good with few errors but is there another one available so they don't all sound the same? Thanks again.
The final statement, "Death has reached into the camp today," I found to be particularly ironic. Notably death reached into a high prrcentage of German camps and at orders of magnitude higher every single day. This prisoner rails against unfairness? Really?
So true, and my uncle was a US POW in a German-run camp, after his plane was shot down over a Germany. The German run camps were places of abject squalor, casual violence and murders by sadistic guards (Google “Big Stoop”) and starvation rations, with my uncle weighing about 100 pounds when he was liberated, and saying they only survived due to Red Cross packages, which the guards let in only so they could steal 90% of the contents to sell themselves. And that was the BEST Germans treated POWs, with 100,000s of Russian POWs just trapped in open fields with no food, water or supplies until 99% died. And these Germans in the memoirs here were fed propaganda since birth, but even a moron eventually sees through propaganda, and these guys are acting like a bunch of entitled Karens mad that the orange juice isn’t fresh squeezed. If the tables were turned and the Germans were in charge, they would either approve or be indifferent to actual POW abuse.
@@istoppedcaring6209 He had no say. He was in France in 1944. I suspect he knew about the German camps. Talk travels in an Army. In any case he acknowledges elsewhere the German death camps.
Helmut has no idea of his luck. He could have died or worse become a prisoner of the Soviets. He perhaps doesn't know the horrible conditions his Kamerades faced at the "tender mercies" of the Soviets. I will mark it up as the lack of information.
I bet concentration camp inmates would have loved to change camps with the Germans. What a hard life these Germans had. At least they had a future ahead of them.
I have a 2nd or 3rd cousin in Italy. I was told, while visiting there, that he was captured by the Americans during WW2. I asked how he was treated and he responded, "good, we had ice cream on Sundays." When I returned to the U.S. I enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the honor guard for 3 years. I planned on joining but when I heard that, I was convinced that American Military, despite flaws, has honorable soldiers and leadership.
Funny Helmut seems surprised by the anger of the French. He refers to them the "vanquished" French, as if they lost a jousting match. Fails to mention that the French were invaded, bombed, shelled, raped and occupied for 4 years and their Jewish people rounded up and killed. Maybe the Helmut was unaware of the death camps but he couldn't have been unaware of Hitlers intentions.
I've been listening to this diary over the past couple weeks, and while it makes for an interesting story and perspective, it's best views as a fictional recounting of likely real events. While the book is a collection of Helmut Horner's diary, it is HIGHLY unlikely a German soldier such as himself would have time to write such thoughts down during combat and later as a POW. Here, is able to recall, in perfect detail, the minutiae of silly arguments with his fellow comrades and the smallest camp details. And there is no way he'd be journaling his escape plans whilst they were ongoing. It's simply impossible for him to have written these sorts of details as they occurred. Now, that doesn't mean these events didn't happen. They probably did it. But the exact recounting of them is likely fiction.
I'm confused by the interrogation. I didn't think he answered enough questions for a determination to be made, but apparently, the interrogator heard what he needed. Was the Right or Left corner for members of the party? Initially, he was asked to go to the Left but they all ended up on the Right.
They took confessions given under torture during the Nuremburg trials... It's all Fake and Ghey... Made up by the same minds who create Hollywood movies
From his perspective, he was. He was a soldier, a man serving his country, and now he is a prisoner of war, in an American holding camp, awaiting transport to a prison camp in the US. The allies were not fully prepared for housing and feeding the number of prisoners they took during the liberation of France , so conditions for German POWs were far from ideal.
Is this a book? I looked on audible and didn't see it. I swear I've been waiting for you to post this all day. Is this an AI voice reading the diary. ? Anyway I've loved watching these
The German pows in the last of these I have heard seem like…..whiny brats, complaining even about there being a pastor who said kind words and they were mad he didn’t bring snacks and why even have a pastor. My uncle was a ball turret gunner whose plane was shot down over Germany, and spent months in a US POW camp run by the Germans, and he went from a normal, strapping 20-something young man to a 112 pounds as the food rations became less and less, and spent months in hospital when the guards finally took the last food and fled as the Allies approached. He did meet a nice, pretty young nurse named Katy there, and they were married for 50-plus years.
Right? Geez, what wouldn't you give to see this guy in Russian captivity, or being held in a German POW camp as a Russian POW? Whiny bastard. "Hey, these French guys didn't treat us very nice after we invaded their country." Wow. It's hard to believe anyone could seriously be that thick.
They reason the rations ran out were because of non stop American bombs. We burnt cities full of innocent civilians to the ground. War is ugly on all sides
@@leighz1962 Define “paraded” and yes, he was attacked by civilians in Germany, although more comically. Just as he got free of his parachute, a very elderly German woman came screaming out of a nearby farmhouse, striking him feebly with a broom as he just stood there and smoked his last cigarettes and saw that the general alarm had been sounded. And a bigger question is: why were the French so hostile? I suspect they had a few friends tortured, burned alive in churches by retreating Germans, etc. And don’t think the “darn it…the supply lines got bombed” applied to the 100,000 or so starved Red army prisoners the Germans let die, with more captured Germans returning from Siberia than Russians surviving being captured early in the Russian invasion, who had a staggering mortality rate under the Germans.
Germany attacked and occupied France twice in the 20th Century. In 1914 they marched through neutral Belgium, committing numerous atrocities against Belgian civilians on their way to France. Millions of French, British and Americans died over 4 years to kick the Germans out. In 1940 they again invaded France, and the next year they did the same in Russia. They treated the Russians as subhumans. Millions and millions from all over the world died defeating Germany again. One wonders how a clearly articulate person as the author of this diary can spend so much time stressing about the hatred and anger of the French when German POW’s were mistreated.
France opened hostilities against Germany in 1914 and in 1939, not the other way around. So France was effectively the “aggressor” in both cases. But I guess these facts don’t matter to you.
You may want to rethink that a bit. Even if one takes your assertions at face value, in no way was Germany morally justified to then attack neutrals and line up and execute innocent civilians in the streets.
@@ditto1958 I’m not justifying atrocities, so there’s nothing for me to rethink. I’m simply supplying context to your basic statement that “Germany attacked and occupied France twice in the 20th Century” because taken at face value this statement is completely misleading. And with regards to atrocities and your apparent sympathy for the Soviets, nobody committed more atrocities than the Soviets did.
I really enjoy the stories and your narration but there is one thing that I would like to see if you could have a kind of slide show of relative pictures and clips I know that it is a bit more work for you but I believe that you will get more listeners and subs. I had mentioned this on another channel and his subs went up substantially. Just saying
You’re glamorizing warfare and sounding rather silly. Trust me, going to war is an enormous pain in the ass and last thing on your mind is, “wow! What a masculine experience this is”
@@chrisdraughn5941 It is always a mistake, that is why most men should hide as harem girls ;-) Don't underestimate familial opposition, it can be just as fatal ;-))
I understand what you're saying...."warrior code" and all that. But there is nothing nobly-masculine about taking up arms in service of monstrous evil.
Yeah, he really feels victimized, doesn't he? I roll my eyes every time he goes on about how well the Germans treated people compared to how he's being treated. It's an interesting series, but I can't like old Helmut.
@@doomhippie6673 You are challenging a Polish person there. You are the one who need a bit of respect. How many of your family and community were murdered by Nazi army ravaging your country? If you are a doomhippie American probably no one. All German soldiers were NOT drafted they were trained from childhood to the brainwashing of the Hitler Youth. They gladly marched off to do the will of the Fuhrer. Not till the very end did they begin to suspect they were not the ubermensch that Helmut , even as a POW, seems to feel himself.
These are people fed propaganda for ten years,conquered countries in days or weeks and had very advanced weapons. They were wholly ignorant of the atrocities their country were committing and were unaware of the near starvation of the German people. America was in short supply of Agricultural labor and was feeding its allies plus all of its forces including those in the Pacific. Returning transport was the only way to ship prisoners to the U.S. and Canada. No doubt they were better fed when put to work growing food and there was no comparison with the treatment Americans got in Bataan.
Hatred of the untermench combined with complete power over the occupied people. All of the German military was complicit in genocide. No sympathy for these vile nazis
Hi Ladies and Gentleman. The diary of Helmut Horner. Let me know your thoughts below!
Here is the playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLyuEmb1VavZARAG13NojLWW1yBVb-E4j7.html
i get so angry when its over....thanks so much for the read
Something og a click bait title, nothing in the episode relating to the title, plus it goes backward in time.
I've listened to your stories for quite some time now, and I really enjoy them.
But, one criticism. At the end of sentences, one can tell that your computer program is lagging in obvious sarcastic statements that the author is trying to describe to us, the faithful listener.
Is there anyway to "improve" your program, can it learn different syntaxes?
Anyway, bravo on the channel. I wait anxiously for the next episode!!!
8888788888788888888888888888878888888⁸88888888
Am enjoying the German perspective
My dad told me of a German P.O.W. that worked as a janitor at a facility in Italy, where my father was stationed. One day, my father asked the P.O.W. why he mopped the floor with such care each day. The prisoner responded, that he would not disgrace the uniform by doing a poor job.
It is truly amazing how a person who has been genuinely indoctrinated into a cause the way the German (and Russian for that matter) army was. That man had lost everything of pride and distinction to him, but he still had control over his performance as a prisoner. In a comparatively very small way, he found a way to maintain his dignity.
Amen
My dad fought in North Africa and Italy (had to swim the last mile into Italy after the ship he was on sunk after colliding with another ship). He was very interested in people and closely observed the cultures he was experiencing. Not wanting to talk about the combat and carnage, he instead talked of the various people and countries he had encountered. It seemed that he took away many positive things from a terrible and desperate time.
😂😂😂 that should make up for the mass murder he facilitated.
@@bikesnippets Germany was Not Our Enemy, Our Real Enemy's Won the War that "they" declared a "Holy War" in 1933 against Germany and America and Western Civilization in 1913 with their "Federal Reserve Act" thanks to a Traitors Criminal U.S. President. . .
My mother worked in Camp Administration of a POW camp in Wisconsin- her job was to keep the books on the payroll for the POWs and arrange work outside of the Camp should they choose to. One guy would take every single job that would come along, he told my mom that he is going to have something to build a future with when the war with the money earned. Oh, and he and my mom exchange Christmas Greetings right up till the day my mom died in 1976. There were Germans and Italians in that Camp.
These days prisoners don't get paid anything. Like slaves.
@@rationalbasis2172 Uh, yes, they do, not much, but something. If they are made to work, that is. Most are not.
@@phil4483 You don't know jack squat about it. They *are* made to work, and they are *not* paid anything (I'm not counting things like 14 cents per hour, because that's nothing). Like slaves. Go ahead and do some research before opening your pie hole again.
"From the moment they enter the prison gates, incarcerated people lose the right to refuse to work. This is because the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against slavery and involuntary servitude, explicitly excludes from its reach those held in confinement due to a criminal conviction. The roots of modern prison labor can be found in the ratification of this exception clause at the end of the Civil War, which disproportionately encouraged the criminalization and effective re-enslavement of Black people during the Jim Crow era, with impacts that persist to this day.
Today, more than 76 percent of incarcerated workers surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments."
I suppose hypocrisy and corruption are lost on ideologues. I find it appalling that Nazis were treated better and paid far more, and given an opportunity to start a new life - while American citizens are treated like slaves. Do you?
@@phil4483 Kamala Harris as Attorney General refused a court order to release prisoners who had done their time because she said they were needed to fight forest fires. Once they do get out, they cannot use their experience to join the California firefighting services because they are ex-cons. So much for integrating them into civil society.
@@rationalbasis2172 in US you get paid for outside work but it goes to your commissary account .
I wonder if Helmut ever realized that his copper rings made in a POW camp might possibly have value as "battlefield/camp art?"
Yes, I wonder what sort of price as objet d'art they would fetch now
No, they had no idea.
Dude,...smoke two not four next time,ok?
It'd be nice if these episodes were numbered so we could easily listen to them in order
This is what I’ve been thinking all along. 👍🏽
They are in a play list, and the link is posted at the top of each comment stream.
Yes. Poorly organized.
It's at the top of the column of available files to your right just under the lower right hand corner of the video in full screen which I'm watching at the moment.
@@deltavee2 Dan? Is that you?
Imagine the value of one of those copper rings today. The soldier probobly trew it away as his GI buddies hurled him with jokes
actually true, though given that they can't be verified anyway they may not really be tradeable
As a young man in the 1960s I worked at an electronics company in southern California where I shared a lab with two men. One of them had been in the Luftwaffe; the other was a Hungarian who as a teenager was forced to work in a German electronics plant. The German told me of his flight to the west away from the advancing Russians so he could surrender to the Americans. The Hungarian told me horrifying stories of the brutality of the Russian army- his hatred for Russians was intense. He and his family had escaped Hungary during the revolution of 1956. Both very interesting men.
i like how these Germans never took responsibility. Germany tried to ethnically cleanse all of Russia and replace them with Germanic people. Germans hated Russians just as much as the jews. So Russian barbarity was completely in line with what the Germans did in the Soviet Union. Taking children and whole families inside budilings and burning whole villages down. Germans deserved everything they got in retribution. Only reasons Americans treated them nicely was because they held same ideologies and never had the germans unlive their whole family.
The Canadian army was the funniest, when the germans under their guard were getting unruly the guards would leave all their weapons outside the wire and go into the camp and hockey brawl with the Germans....lol
my 18 year old father, blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, landed in one of the following waves at Normandy as a tech sergeant cook , actually made long a long term friend while "guarding" POWs in the sculleries and food prep areas a nd would visit together frequently, the POW immigrated to the US at his first chance, I would listen to them roll from French to German to English and back around again. "Old Army buddy" has a different meaning for me.
My father was an American assistant medic in ww-2 , several times they escorted wounded German p.o.w’s to the camps where they would be held , he said he was treated better by the Germans that the french or British , he brought home a pocket watch that one of the Germans had given him , but after his death in 1998 one of our relatives received the watch , she pawned it , we were never able to relocated it.
I've heard too many stories of someone in a family selling off an important sentimental piece like your relative did with that watch and it makes me mad every single time.
@@visassess8607my friend tried to sell me his grandads m1a1 carbine and I gave him a fucking dissertation on how happy I'd be to have it and why he should NEVER SELL it to me or anyone else
@@miketrujillo3677 So he sold it to somebody else.
@@AdamGeorge-pb3fm I don't think so but who knows
Now I'm invested in this story. Ty so much!
You have to chuckle at the irony of the author of the memoir going on and on about the Geneva convention.
well let's be real, there is no indication that he had committed any atrocities
people keep acting as if soldiers are not victims, in truth let's be real here, they suffered worse conditions than civilians did, they fought for years, suffered hunger and pain.
He had every right to see himself as a victim as in my oppinion does every soldier that suffered those conditions, I hope all those that say differently get to push a button and switch lives with them.
Nazi's where socialist, expect everything, give nothing.
My neighbor across the street in Dearborn, MI was a former German U-Boat commender (his son explained it to me). He kept to himself mostly but kept the absolutely neatest house on the street. The small lawn was beyond manicured and the tiny house was spotless. He cut the grass in a very organized manner that guaranteed perfect results; left-to-right, forward-and-back, then diagonally in both directions. Same thing with raking the leaves and clearing the snow. Methodical, organized, thorough, and on-schedule. Always.
the concentration camps were organized and methodical, too
It's how the Germans are, very methodical.
Keep this diary of Helmut Horner going .. its a wonderful story..my uncle was in the great escape .. he was one of them that had to stay back..
He was a Canadian..
Listening to this podcast is the only thing that prevents my daily commute home from giving me a brain aneurysm.
my in-laws remember when they were children seeing all the Afrika Corps PoWs picking cotton and other crops in Arkansas - local communities brought them home-cooked meals for their Sunday Bible study - they said they were nice men
Many immigrated to America post war and quite a few married women they'd worked for as POWs.
Afrika Corp POWs were also kept at at camp near Ruston, LA, as well as the submarine crew from U-505.
My aunt married into our family because my uncle fell in love and married her. She was German, she told me about her father and brother. Her father was captured by the Russian army, her brother was captured by the U.S.army, when her brother came home he was healthy and had skills as a carpenter, when her father came home he was near dead. Shouldn't that tell you the story
It tells me that Russians treated the Nazi like a Nazi while Americans embraced them.
Germans never went on a rampage through America, laying much of it in ashes. Leaving that part of the story out seems odd.
I can’t speak about this Helmut, but I’d like people to remember that’s it’s been found that most of the Wehrmacht did indeed take part in the war crimes that we all know happened. I hate to have to remind you all of how Germans did treat prisoners of war. How they ended up taking millions of people for slave labor, and how near the end they took at least a couple of hundred thousand French for that purpose as well. I have very little sympathy for these prisoners who were taken care of vastly better than they took care of theirs. Let’s never forget that.
😵💫
Oradour- Sur-Glane...June 10th 1944... women and children locked in a church and burnt alive.
Men shot in the legs and doused with kerosene...an entire village burnt to the ground...all civilians and passers-by.
This is the revenge for resistance and one precious fucking Waffen SS.
The Americans could see at that time that nazis had a level of delusion, superiority and sick brutality all of their own.
The allies had to bring some order and sustenance to the defeated Germany.
The nazi mass murderers got off virtually scot free. And it was found that the whole country was made up of tens of millions of deluded, brainwashed individuals. They had a whole population to de-nazify.
I agree with you, mate...Thankyou.
And glad you mentioned the slave labour...!!
I think too of all the lootings by all the thieving nazis...and the brutal occupation for all those years. Taking over all that was so beautiful about France.
Then I think about 1914 to '18. Incomprehensible.
(I attribute the majority of the 50 million horrific deaths from influenza also to the aggressors who started the war. And the Russian Revolution, started when Germany
And 1871, then what happened after that defeat in France.
I don't think much of aggressive countries.
But that genocide and two World Wars, they are way over the top!!
If you were a 20th century American POW, by far the safest country to be captured by was Germany (1.9%) WWII only. The Japanese (33%), North Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese all lost over 20% of their POWs. The Germans did kill a lot of POWs from other countries though.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war
American, British, and Commonwealth POWs were treated reasonably well for the most part. Others like Poles and Czechs, not so much.
The prisoners have a lot of nerve to think the French are just going to let bygones be bygones. The allies had to bomb the crap out of the French, to get at the Germans.
Exactly. Just infuriating or moronic. In another story on this channel, a German participating in early Barbarossa would describe the invading Germans (his side) looting all the food from Russian peasants, or burning villages, or civilians caught in the fighting, etc. then on the next page of the diary be wondering to himself why the Russian civilians seem pretty hostile to the invading Germans. And he did that SEVERAL TIMES in the diary (describing things that would make anyone dislike your side, then wondering why people dislike your side).
It is just an unbelievable level of stupidity and tone deafness.
My uncle was a Wehrmacht panzer captive at Camp Luckystrike. This story sounds like what he told me about captivity among the Americans.
Too bad he didn't tell you about the 2,000,000 German Soldiers who died in Eisenhauer's death camps
@@okaythankyoubyeee2501Say what??
@@billkramer2994 Book by the name of Eisenhauer's death camps... The last secret of WWII. You should check it out
@@okaythankyoubyeee2501that number is hugely exaggerated…
@@okaythankyoubyeee2501 Too bad you can't even get your lies straight. The Rhine Meadows Camps are a controversial topic, but the truth of what happened is easily established. Dr. Mark Felton is a well-known British historian, the author of 22 non-fiction books,...
Commented: My Grandfather was a German soldier. He surrendered to U.S. troops at the end of the war. He spoke of hardships, disease, and shortages of food for all. Soldiers and civilians alike. Many did die, but not like that. He said even U.S. troops were hungry and shared some of their own rations with the prisoners sometimes, but he made no mention of being treated badly or tortured at the hands of the U.S. Just the opposite.
He immigrated here (USA) in 1951 with his wife and kids. One being my 5 yr old father.
I am an American, so I have a bias about our side when it comes to "The Good War". So from that perspective, I can appreciate Helmut's POV and feeling pretty morally superior. The war is not over yet, we have not liberated the death camps yet. It does not seem as if Helmut fought in the East, with it's horrible degradation of the sub human Slavs.
Still, the complaints of his horrible treatment seem so over the top. Had he not seen anything of what the Germans did to Jew and other undesirables?
I wonder about that too. Unless he thought the so called lives of the “undesirables” were just par for the course. I’m sure by October 1944, he knew about the Death Camps, but he does sound 100% arrogant and constantly complains about everything especially the food! Once he was upset because he was tired of receiving meat, because he preferred bread instead! And would often refer to the Geneva Convention, although several allied POWs were massacred by the Nazis and the Japanese!
In addition, and from what I've heard from not only other stories of German POWs, but the POW camps ran by the Americans were Disneyland compared to the treatment the Germans received from the French and especially, the Russians. This ungrateful Helmut guy didn't realize just how good he had it.
I personally knew a German POW who was one of millions at War's end, in huge fields. The British, French, Russians and Americans basically drew lots on who would get whom. Nobody wanted to go to the Russians, the French were only one step above, but all of them wanted to go to the Americans.
My POW friend unfortunately went to the French, where he worked in a mine, escaped, recaptured and went to work on a French farm, where he was chained like an animal amongst the animals.
He finally escaped and made it back to Germany.....
Very well said!
Everyone acts like a genious in hindsight. This is a journal of his experiance at the time and place.
The death camps were operated by SS, not the army, and few on either side knew the extent of what those camps were about.
@@TheDuckofDoom. The holocaust was known amongst Germans. It was not a secret.* Every single German* accepted it and put it out of their mind if they didn't participate or actively resist.
The Axis lost because they were outnumbered and the Allies had superior war production, logistics, and supply lines. The Germans had great "super-weapons" but they were too few and came out too late. Plus, they overengineered their tanks. Also, sometimes they were just outfought.
...and out-thought.
They lost for the same reason that Japan lost they underestimated our resolve. They knew they could not win a prolonged war .they tried to hit hard and sue for peace. Hoping to keep some of the territory gained. Japan knew they had about a year . Hitler never possessed the ability to invade England. Italy could not lockdown the Suez or Libyan oil fields.
Gas. The winners had oil - the losers did not. It's why the war was started in the first place.
@@guystephens2881 There a lot of reasons the Germans lost WWII. Let's examine some of them: POOR MILITARY PLANNING: Hitler tried to fight a war on two large fronts with only so many soldiers...he should've finished off the British at Dunkirk, but he had this strange romantic notion that the very Germanic British would join the German quest to liquidate Satanic Bolshevism...he never grasped the sensible notion of a ''backup plan'' by sending warm winter clothing to the Russian Front in the event the Russkies were just a leetle beet better fighters than those ill-prepared Poles...which of course brings us to another reason the Germans lost the war, their arrogant RACIST feeling they were ''better'' than the uncouth Slavs of Russia and Poland...not to forget the mongrel United States with all those race-mixers, whether black or brown or yellow...or JEW. Hitler was a truly stupid person, as his lack of education would indicate. And while it is easy to understand how panic set in Germany once The Great Depression reared its ugly head, Germany should have never lowered her standards by allowing not only a stupid person but a RACIST to control her destiny.
My dad entered the Army in 1944 and deployed to Germany in 1945 right as the German Surrender took place. He told me when he got off the truck in a German city the first time - he was amazed to see German soldiers [without rank emblems or military badges] running the place. Even the police officers were German soldiers. Here were young Americans arriving in a city run by the enemy and the Germans were all smiles and very nice to him. They all appeared relieved the War was over and Hitler killed himself. The Germans knew Americans did not hate them. The relief of not being in the hands of Russians was obvious.
Fascinating stuff! We rarely get to hear the stories of the "other side". I'm glad to note in this episode that Helmut seems to have given up the idea of escape. In previous episodes I wanted to shout at him (in my comfortable 2023 vantage point, knowing what the coming 8 months or so have in store) "Don't do it! As a POW you're one of the *lucky* ones!"
It's a good soldier's duty to make every attempt to escape. Our guys being held by the Germans certainly came up with some ingenious methods- tunnels and the like. In hindsight though, I agree completely! These Germans did not know how lucky they were to be out of the fight. I've heard other stories about our POW camps here in the US and in those stories, the POW's needed to worry about other POW's as well. There were some among them that were fanatical National Socialists. In one story, they murdered a fellow POW because they felt he was a traitor. There may be a documentary concerning it on UA-cam. It may have been such zealots that pushed for escape attempts.
Oh, I'd love to hear the 'other side' from My Lai than the bullhorn news.
The stories are interesting and I have heard similar stories from My uncle and my Cousin who served in Germany and was wounded and my uncle who served in Italy during the war, I spent 18 months in Germany in the 50's and new a few Ex German soldiers who fought in the war and were actually in POW camps in the USA but after I got out of the Army and was working in the states I worked with a German Infantry soldier who fought against the Russians. They pretty much hated each other; he told us while moving through Russia his group went past a Russian soldier tied to a post on a road and all of the Germans in his group cut the guy with their bayonets when they walked by him. he also was wounded and his main objective was to get as far away from the Russians and find the American lines to surrender. I can understand his feelings in this story but don't necessarily feel sorry for the Germans. The Germans were as brutal to the Civilians in most of the countries they took over.
to an extent yes, they actually were better than they were in ww1 regarding atrocities and offcourse enacted brutal marshal law with little in the way of mercy for those who took part in "partisanship"
but asside from Poland and the USSR they were not more brutal than any invader would have been, but invaders none the less
Very good, i wait every day for the new issue. an old nam vet here.
You may not believe this but my father had a sauerkraut factory in upstate N.Y. that employed German POWs. One of them later became a U.S. citizen with my father’s help. I didn’t make the usual joke about “krauts.”
Yes, because then you would have had to include Julius Caesar, who loved his 'brassica' (cabbage), all of Korea for their Kimchi (spicy cabbage) and South Africa with their pickled cabbage.
Phelps NY by any chance? Or near Port Byron?
@@MrLogo73 I'm South African. Pickled cabbage?
So being an American POW made me realize why we lost? Well I am waiting since I didn't hear anything in his tale where he realized that. Or did he realize why they lost because the Americans had more cans of pork? Same for an earlier episode where title says terrified but didn't hear anything in his tale that approached terror in him.
It's called click bait. Every one of these are click bait.
@@JP-dw1fp Totally. Is the young narrator a secret neo-Nazi sympathizer. Aw gee, they weren't so bad.
@JP-dw1fp i mean at what point is that bad? They do not seem monitized or have lots of ads. So if ppl find them ezer so be it
I guess if you want to hear more of the story then listen to it but just ignore the titles completely. I do find that irritating and this will be the last video I bother with.
I just discovered your channel. It’s fascinating. Thanks!
It's clickbait nonsense. Nothing in the video titles ever happens in this story
@@mackhomie6 Are you saying that there NEVER was a German Soldier called Helmut?..... didn't they ALL wear Helmuts?
@@AnthonyOMulligan-yv9cg heh...
Excellent. Thank you. I have listened to all three excerpts, please keep them coming.
This is like watching a filmstrip in school but the picture never changes.
Would be interesting to hear the diary of a Russian prisoner of war and how they were treated by the Germans.!
A million “Russians” (more specifically, subjects of the Soviet Union) had to be forcibly “repatriated” after the war. What does that tell you?
good luck finding a balanced account
Good find a Russian prisoner that survived being held captive by the Germans.
Treatment of Soviet POWs was horrific, just as the German POW held by the Soviets.
@@1969cmp No disagreement at all. However, the Soviets expressly rejected the Geneva Convention and effectively wrote off their own surrendered soldiers as traitors, which signalled from the outset that German POWs weren’t going to be properly treated. In practise the Geneva Convention worked on the basis that each side was deterred from mistreating POWs by fear of retaliation, so the result of its absence is not surprising.
Great story. It should be a movie.
They don't make good movies anymore, They are now only computer generated drag queens running around in dresses. But, yes, it would make a good movie.
As I’ve been listening to this series about Helmut I keep forgetting the war is very much still raging and he must be wandering how it will all pan out. I keep forgetting he’s a POW after the war.
I'm reading "Man's Search for Meaning" by Frankl. The Americans, British and French treated their captives better than the Germans treated the Jews.
Thr germans were monsters
not comparable;;;;
Ask palestinians how nice jews are
@@just_one_opinionAsk Jewish schoolchildren how nice Palestinians are.
And by and large the Lutwaffe and Whermarcht treated American, British and French POWs well.
My Grandfather in Maine had a potato farm and my Mom would bring the German prisoners Apples !
I love your content. Thank you!!!
Assume Helmut was trading for cans of Spam, lol.😂
Well, it is pork......I think? LOL
These Germans feel so sorry for themselves when they had so mistreated everyone else.
No empathy there, or contrition, just smug superiority.
This Kraut wouldn't be whining like this if he'd been a Soviet pow because he'd have been DEAD.
We need to realize that experience are always very individual experiences. Feeling discomfort in a situation doesn't men the situation could be worse. But we are in that specific situation at that specific moment.
I like your spicy and feelingful comment. Sympathetic comments are either ignorant of the TRUTH of WW2 or neo-Nazi sympathizers.
I would hope for a more ironic tone in the lamentations of hunger and dirtiness given what these troops had inflicted on Europe for years.
Thanks for making playlists!
Thank you for sharing this report
I like how the guards and prisoners exchanged items through the fence
They had to have known they were getting much better treatment from the yanks than ivan would have been giving them. They also bitch about the provisions but they also had to have known about supply chain and the yanks just can't snap their fingers and have three full meals a day for prisoners when a war is going on. The level of entitlement Helmut has irks me a bit.
While his own army starved millions of POWs to death.
Look up "Other Losses". If you're being starved and frozen to death, it might not occur to you that it's even worse in Siberia.
Later, he moved to the U.S. and was on welfare and food stamps for life. AKA, as a good democrat.
@@dandavis8300 But it was NOT worse in Siberia….FAR more Germans returned home to their families after being a German POW in Russian gulags, than did Russians who surrendered to the Germans early in Operation Barbarossa…with virtually none of them returning home after the war and 99% left in an open field with no food or water by the Germans until they died of exposure or were shot trying to escape.
People can make up whatever version of history they like so they can believe what they want to be true, but if you go by evidence and reality, all credible evidence shows that you were far better off on average as a German POW in Russia than vice versa, with plenty of videos here on YT laying out the evidence.
@@JP-dw1fp Hah….Google “top 10 most prosperous US states, bottom 10 poorest US states” - the top 10 are overwhelmingly or all Dem (depending how you define “rich, poor”) and the poorest, highest crime states are overwhelmingly Red States, with the poorest, highest crime states all Red States (Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Georgia, and South Carolina).
And it is the thriving Dem economies that pay for the US military budget (mostly paid by NY, CA and Mass)…Alabama isn’t paying for those air craft carriers, and most Red states only function now by taking from the federal budget to pay for food stamps, Medicaid, etc, for their own citizens….meaning the poor Red states are basically on welfare from the prosperous Blue State’s economies.
Google it for yourself…the poorest, highest crime (and fattest) states are all or nearly all Red, and the richest, thinnest and safest states are overwhelmingly Dem. Those are called facts and reality, and I know Republicans dislike them.
The golden rule is, " it is a soldiers right to gripe"
Can't believe the continuing arrogance and 'surprise' at the French reaction to the Jackboot!
I would imagine that the cans of pork he frequently refers to, is SPAM. Just a guess.
My uncle knew about the copper scam but gave in just to help
Amazing story!
Poor little innocent soldier just a victim .((talk about seeing the the world through Nazi coloured glasses .
My great uncle fought for the British in North Africa and I remember him saying how gentlemen like everyone there was. I know that’s random but the idea that the North African front was a chivalrous one really is true.
I believe that front was fought with less viciousness because it was neutral ground. Both Brit and Germans were strangers there.
@@Albemarle7 I think it also helped that he was a medic, maybe even tended to Germans. I wish he was still around to tell us more.
There were no SS units in the Afrika Corps.
This it was claimed was the reason for the relative lack of atrocities in the Afrika campaign
Except rommel shutting down jewish shops and using jews to clear mines. They keep that one quiet..,.
@@gar6446 the wehrmacht as a fighting force comitted just as many atrocities as the waffen ss did, (not the SS offcourse, the waffen ss was also mostly just foreign recruits that couldn't join the wehrmacht and were often seperatists in their own country)
as for africa corps soldiers, this same channel pointed out that they were most likely to hang swastika flags over their beds and have pictures of hitler on their nightstands, but that being said they were not privvy to the realities their brethren were exposed to by the end of the war and Rommel himself only turned against Hitler when he realised that he was mad and in large part this was helped by the war clearly turning against them by that point.
Before anyone gets too angry about how Helmut and his friends were trying to get food to survive, just remember how little they were getting. 1200calories/ day was the standard given to German men, even after the war. The French and British sectors gave out less! That meant that each man in Germany was slowly dying. Women had still births or almost any babies born would die. It was a slow death of starvation. One of the American generals changed his mind and increased the Calories just enough to help people survive in the American sector.
since you have all the statistics on calories ... how many calories were the Germans giving Jewish prisoners (the ones they didn't gas, the ones they were using for slave labor)?
I'll wait.
one of my uncles was a harbormaster at normandy,said the french stole or would try to steal anything,including vehicles and weapons,mp's had to terminate a few of them
A lot of the allied troops had seen some of the death camps and they had a huge amount of contempt for their prisoners
Dresden was a real death camp
Thank you this is very entertaining while I drive.
Interesting and informative. German ( pow's ) were very humanely treated/well fed/professional medical 🚑 care/livable sheltering. Eventually returned to Germany in much better health then when arriving at an American ( POW) camp.
Once again thanks for the vid. Listening and looking at the thumbnail i cant help but think that german on the left has the drop and a decent shot on Upham and they can retreat with the rest of them. Of course steam boat willy gets it and they get away anyway.
Geez, I gotta stop drinking coffee this late in the afternoon
Ok ok BB to BB😊
@4':56The m unit (meat) of the C ration was 340 grams (12 oz) not 60 grams (2.1 oz)
How arrogant for Germans to complaint about Parissians taking revenge!
This soldiers Journal is a prize of humanity. The irony is when there is compassion showed it is called being humane. And yet no creature is as cruel. The only compassion, true compassion, is in the animal world. The lion will lay with the lamb if it is not hungry
Umm,…sort of agree, but nature is actually pretty brutal, with animals committing SA (seals on penguins), deer eating the legs off baby birds, birds often laying 4-5 eggs when the parents can only feed 3 and letting the chicks fight it put until the weaker ones starves, chimpanzee troops warning with each other or picking on weak members in the troop with absolutely brutal attacks,….the list goes on and on.
@@Itried20takennames
Well at least they haven't invented Napalm yet
Yea! I love these accounts by Mr Helmut. How many of these will there be. I’ll be sad when they run out.
More than a few hopefully.
Just appreciate the moment. All things come to an end. You too.
@@paulstewart6293thanks bro. I wasn’t aware of that at all.
Don't Worry, Helmut Went On To Lose Many Many MORE War's (but none as big as his first one)
The sad part is it costs the U.S. guard nothing for the trade! Even though the Germans were treated far better than the allied troops were treated by the NAZI'S!!!
George S. Patton, upon taking control of Berlin in 1945, said "We defeated the wrong enemy."
George S. Patton wanted to put the Jews back in camps. He was a shit commander. He attacked an American soldier who he called a coward, except the soldier actually had FUCKING MALARIA. We're all lucky he got himself killed in a car accident, the man was a proper bastard and deserved what he got. Eisenhower was the real hero of the war.
He was not entirely wrong offcourse but no.
the soviets and nazis were objectively monstrous totalitarian bstrds for all the same reasons, whether they were nationalist socialist or internationalist socialist totalitarians
the one thing that can be said for the germans is that they at least treated their own people better than the soviets did, but don't be fooled russians were still priviliged relative to ukranians, poles, chechs,estonians, latvians, lithuanians,.... that's not saying much but there is a reason why so many russians still celebrate the USSR and practically none of the other "union members" do
My mother was 5 years old in 1945 on the east cost of England. Many German soldiers were housed nearby and could often be seen marching to some sort of manual labor project. One day, my mother was on her bike when she saw Germans marching towards her as she furiously tried to pedal back home. They were coming closer and closer, towering above her with their big noisy boots. She panicked and fell from her bike, her life was over. A tall blonde boy picked her from the walk and gently put her on the bike as she hysterically fought for her life. She miraculously made it home, still alive, but absolutely terrified. We have all laughed over the years about that story. I always wondered what ever happened to the young man who helped Mother onto her bike.
The narrator implies there is a difference between the German Army and the Nazis. Is this actually true? I'm skeptical because it just seems like in later accounts many Germans just wanted to distance themselves from the Nazis. Kind of like how Speer tried to portrayed himself as a good nazi or local Germans saying they knew nothing about the death camps.
After WW1, the German government was functioning as a disjointed republic with many political parties vying for power. Hitler became a prominent figure in the National Socialist German Workers Party (also known as the Nazi party) and was appointed Chancellor by the President. Long story short, Hitler ended up taking full control of the government and turned Germany into a dictatorship.
As to your question, it depends on your point of view. Once the Nazi party had taken full control of Germany, one could argue that any and every German soldier was now a Nazi, as they were fighting for an army that received their orders from the Nazi government. In reality, there were likely a large number of German soldiers who did not approve of the ideals and actions of their government, but still felt a responsibility to fight for their country. The difference implied by the narrator is one of ideology.
the nazis was a political party. the army is the army.
From what I understand, the army wasn't supposed to be political but did follow the governments orders. That's why they created the SS to be the actual army of the nazi party. The ss had different leadership and chain of command. The us army is the same way they're not supposed to be political but follow the presidents orders.
The french got really brave when the Germans laid down their weapons.
There were many brave Frenchman in the 30s and 40s... Most of them fought in the Charlemagne Division...
They were very brave when they didn't and thousands lost their lives and/or were tortured by the Gestapo. It's called the French Resistance. Google it sometime. German prisoners got off lucky.
While those French who did act in the resistance were brave it is a fact that France was the easiest occupation duty the Germans had because the French resistance was by far the proportionally smallest and least agressive of any other occupied nation.
Your point is ?
@@steveelsholz5297 Googled it. Only about 5% of the French population were actively in the resistance.
The Germans had a horrific reputation in occupied countries. Millions were starved, Ppl were set upon by attack dogs or simply dragged out & shot or taken as hostages and later shot or sent to Hellish concentration camps. My uncle was badly wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and was tortured , starved, and beaten for the rest of the war by the Nazis.. Rhinehard Heydrich was known as The Hang Man of Prague and when he was assassinated an entire village (Ladice) was infamously wiped out in reprisal. Intellectuals were prime targets for executions as well. And Jews were routinely massacred by the SS & the Wehrmacht. Only about 1 in 10 Russian POWs survived their captivity in Nazi hands,
Thankyou for testifying to the reality of the German War
Ever notice every WW2 conversation -Jews have to be brought into it?
true, but conversely they were not as brutal in the west, in part because the geneva conventions applied there, and Germans came to absolutely hate the russians from what i read, doesn't justify it, doesn't take away the suffering your family and people suffered but it's something to note.
@@jwhiskey242well 6 million were killed. Pretty big deal, don’t you think?
@@jwhiskey242 Ever notice every WW2 conversation, inveterate anti-semites have to have their ignorant two cents.....
An interesting series of videos and I do enjoy them. Is there any way to connect these to a particular person and find what happened to them after the war? Perhaps some additional photos even if just generic ones would be good. The "computer voice" is pretty good with few errors but is there another one available so they don't all sound the same? Thanks again.
What was the original purpose of burying copper around the latrine?
The wire was to hang a curtain to keep the French from looking at them or give them privacy in the latrine.
Thanks for our daily installment
The final statement, "Death has reached into the camp today," I found to be particularly ironic. Notably death reached into a high prrcentage of German camps and at orders of magnitude higher every single day. This prisoner rails against unfairness? Really?
So true, and my uncle was a US POW in a German-run camp, after his plane was shot down over a Germany. The German run camps were places of abject squalor, casual violence and murders by sadistic guards (Google “Big Stoop”) and starvation rations, with my uncle weighing about 100 pounds when he was liberated, and saying they only survived due to Red Cross packages, which the guards let in only so they could steal 90% of the contents to sell themselves. And that was the BEST Germans treated POWs, with 100,000s of Russian POWs just trapped in open fields with no food, water or supplies until 99% died.
And these Germans in the memoirs here were fed propaganda since birth, but even a moron eventually sees through propaganda, and these guys are acting like a bunch of entitled Karens mad that the orange juice isn’t fresh squeezed. If the tables were turned and the Germans were in charge, they would either approve or be indifferent to actual POW abuse.
what say did he have over German camps, and what knowledge was he supposed to have of them?
@@istoppedcaring6209 He had no say. He was in France in 1944. I suspect he knew about the German camps. Talk travels in an Army. In any case he acknowledges elsewhere the German death camps.
Helmut has no idea of his luck. He could have died or worse become a prisoner of the Soviets.
He perhaps doesn't know the horrible conditions his Kamerades faced at the "tender mercies" of the Soviets.
I will mark it up as the lack of information.
I bet concentration camp inmates would have loved to change camps with the Germans.
What a hard life these Germans had. At least they had a future ahead of them.
great stories...subbed
I have a 2nd or 3rd cousin in Italy. I was told, while visiting there, that he was captured by the Americans during WW2. I asked how he was treated and he responded, "good, we had ice cream on Sundays." When I returned to the U.S. I enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the honor guard for 3 years. I planned on joining but when I heard that, I was convinced that American Military, despite flaws, has honorable soldiers and leadership.
Is this an audio book? If so, what is author and book name?
Funny Helmut seems surprised by the anger of the French. He refers to them the "vanquished" French, as if they lost a jousting match. Fails to mention that the French were invaded, bombed, shelled, raped and occupied for 4 years and their Jewish people rounded up and killed. Maybe the Helmut was unaware of the death camps but he couldn't have been unaware of Hitlers intentions.
Apparently you are not aware that France declared war on Germany in 1939, not the other way around.
Thus did the ambitions of the Wermacht change from domination of Europe to duping prison camp guards for a few more food calories.
Is there a condensed version of this story? ;-) I did not realize Germans were such 'wordy' people. And, I'm pretty darn wordy myself.
So HOW does this long "story" reflect the Title? NEVER did I hear a quote by a German that reflected how he realize WHY Germany lost!
I've been listening to this diary over the past couple weeks, and while it makes for an interesting story and perspective, it's best views as a fictional recounting of likely real events. While the book is a collection of Helmut Horner's diary, it is HIGHLY unlikely a German soldier such as himself would have time to write such thoughts down during combat and later as a POW. Here, is able to recall, in perfect detail, the minutiae of silly arguments with his fellow comrades and the smallest camp details. And there is no way he'd be journaling his escape plans whilst they were ongoing. It's simply impossible for him to have written these sorts of details as they occurred.
Now, that doesn't mean these events didn't happen. They probably did it. But the exact recounting of them is likely fiction.
There were more DIARIES found during this war, than empty bullet casings! Very, ermmm, lucky!! 😉
This one is funny to me because unlike most of them, he doesn't attempt to make himself look any less insufferable, smug, and pampered
I'm confused by the interrogation. I didn't think he answered enough questions for a determination to be made, but apparently, the interrogator heard what he needed. Was the Right or Left corner for members of the party? Initially, he was asked to go to the Left but they all ended up on the Right.
They took confessions given under torture during the Nuremburg trials... It's all Fake and Ghey... Made up by the same minds who create Hollywood movies
It amazing how Helmut always feels he is the victim.
He must be a Liberal-Democrat
@@okaythankyoubyeee2501Sounds a lot more like Trump
From his perspective, he was. He was a soldier, a man serving his country, and now he is a prisoner of war, in an American holding camp, awaiting transport to a prison camp in the US. The allies were not fully prepared for housing and feeding the number of prisoners they took during the liberation of France , so conditions for German POWs were far from ideal.
@@georgesimon1760 And there it is..... chronic TDS enters the chat.....
@@Neillybob63 lol, whatever
Is this a book? I looked on audible and didn't see it. I swear I've been waiting for you to post this all day. Is this an AI voice reading the diary. ? Anyway I've loved watching these
Well listening. Not watching
its all made up bullshit
A commenter on the last video said it was from a book.
Its a book
It's a book. "A German Odyssey: The Journal of a German Prisoner of War"
He claims to be a officer , but as a pow he was a NCO
He called himself (and the other two guys) a staff sergeant very early in this series of videos also. Why he would say officer I don’t know.
@@DoggoWillink it was funny before he was captured he was call LT , then promoted out of his anti tank platoon to command a company - very strange
Probably a mistranslation of ‘Unteroffizier’.
Warrant Officer would be the correct rank.
On the cover of his journal he's wearing an NCO's collar insignia, unless I'm wildly misunderstanding the picture.
The British were reluntant to supply weapons to the French Resistance, they were afraid that they would use them to fight other French Groups
It’s easy to forget that they were young people who were called to duty. They all had lives & families they had to leave behind.
The German pows in the last of these I have heard seem like…..whiny brats, complaining even about there being a pastor who said kind words and they were mad he didn’t bring snacks and why even have a pastor.
My uncle was a ball turret gunner whose plane was shot down over Germany, and spent months in a US POW camp run by the Germans, and he went from a normal, strapping 20-something young man to a 112 pounds as the food rations became less and less, and spent months in hospital when the guards finally took the last food and fled as the Allies approached. He did meet a nice, pretty young nurse named Katy there, and they were married for 50-plus years.
Boo hoo
Right? Geez, what wouldn't you give to see this guy in Russian captivity, or being held in a German POW camp as a Russian POW? Whiny bastard. "Hey, these French guys didn't treat us very nice after we invaded their country." Wow. It's hard to believe anyone could seriously be that thick.
They reason the rations ran out were because of non stop American bombs. We burnt cities full of innocent civilians to the ground. War is ugly on all sides
Unfortunately, supply lines were bombed before camps were liberated. He wasn't paraded through towns to be attacked was he?
@@leighz1962 Define “paraded” and yes, he was attacked by civilians in Germany, although more comically. Just as he got free of his parachute, a very elderly German woman came screaming out of a nearby farmhouse, striking him feebly with a broom as he just stood there and smoked his last cigarettes and saw that the general alarm had been sounded. And a bigger question is: why were the French so hostile? I suspect they had a few friends tortured, burned alive in churches by retreating Germans, etc.
And don’t think the “darn it…the supply lines got bombed” applied to the 100,000 or so starved Red army prisoners the Germans let die, with more captured Germans returning from Siberia than Russians surviving being captured early in the Russian invasion, who had a staggering mortality rate under the Germans.
Germany attacked and occupied France twice in the 20th Century. In 1914 they marched through neutral Belgium, committing numerous atrocities against Belgian civilians on their way to France. Millions of French, British and Americans died over 4 years to kick the Germans out. In 1940 they again invaded France, and the next year they did the same in Russia. They treated the Russians as subhumans. Millions and millions from all over the world died defeating Germany again. One wonders how a clearly articulate person as the author of this diary can spend so much time stressing about the hatred and anger of the French when German POW’s were mistreated.
France opened hostilities against Germany in 1914 and in 1939, not the other way around. So France was effectively the “aggressor” in both cases. But I guess these facts don’t matter to you.
You may want to rethink that a bit. Even if one takes your assertions at face value, in no way was Germany morally justified to then attack neutrals and line up and execute innocent civilians in the streets.
@@ditto1958 I’m not justifying atrocities, so there’s nothing for me to rethink. I’m simply supplying context to your basic statement that “Germany attacked and occupied France twice in the 20th Century” because taken at face value this statement is completely misleading. And with regards to atrocities and your apparent sympathy for the Soviets, nobody committed more atrocities than the Soviets did.
How did the Germans treat their prisoners in their camps? Actually I know, and anyone with a small knowledge of history knows.
Honestly, how tf did they expect the French to treat them?
I really enjoy the stories and your narration but there is one thing that I would like to see if you could have a kind of slide show of relative pictures and clips I know that it is a bit more work for you but I believe that you will get more listeners and subs. I had mentioned this on another channel and his subs went up substantially. Just saying
Copper is worth more than a can of Spam!
I was wondering what he was gonna do with that copper tubing.😊
He seems to confuse copper wire with copper tubing. Tubing is hollow but wire is solid.
I salute all the fighters of every Army etc ... a near universal masculine experience ... though most of us fight our wives or children ;-)
You’re glamorizing warfare and sounding rather silly. Trust me, going to war is an enormous pain in the ass and last thing on your mind is, “wow! What a masculine experience this is”
@@chrisdraughn5941 It is always a mistake, that is why most men should hide as harem girls ;-) Don't underestimate familial opposition, it can be just as fatal ;-))
I understand what you're saying...."warrior code" and all that. But there is nothing nobly-masculine about taking up arms in service of monstrous evil.
@@leojanuszewski1019 Reality is evil, all the way down ... get over it ;-)
No accountability at all.
Yeah, he really feels victimized, doesn't he? I roll my eyes every time he goes on about how well the Germans treated people compared to how he's being treated. It's an interesting series, but I can't like old Helmut.
For what? He was probably drafted and had join the army or be shot
@@chesterwortham5525Better to be shot than to take up arms in the service of monstrous evil.
@@leojanuszewski1019 says a person who has ever been in that situation.... You'll be surprised what people are willing to do to live.
@@doomhippie6673 You are challenging a Polish person there. You are the one who need a bit of respect. How many of your family and community were murdered by Nazi army ravaging your country? If you are a doomhippie American probably no one. All German soldiers were NOT drafted they were trained from childhood to the brainwashing of the Hitler Youth. They gladly marched off to do the will of the Fuhrer. Not till the very end did they begin to suspect they were not the ubermensch that Helmut , even as a POW, seems to feel himself.
Perhaps just a technicality, but a POW is one of your own people held by an enemy.
The enemy prisoners you hold are PWs.
These are people fed propaganda for ten years,conquered countries in days or weeks and had very advanced weapons. They were wholly ignorant of the atrocities their country were committing and were unaware of the near starvation of the German people.
America was in short supply of Agricultural labor and was feeding its allies plus all of its forces including those in the Pacific. Returning transport was the only way to ship prisoners to the U.S. and Canada. No doubt they were better fed when put to work growing food and there was no comparison with the treatment Americans got in Bataan.
Hatred of the untermench combined with complete power over the occupied people. All of the German military was complicit in genocide. No sympathy for these vile nazis