Ep. 23- The Genocide of Soviet POWs with Dallas Michelbacher

The second largest Nazi victim group after the Jews was Soviet POWs.  The experience of these people has been documented in part by the latest volume of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.

In this week’s episode, I talked with Dallas Michelbacher, one of the researchers on this project and a scholar of the Nazi genocide of Soviet POWs.

Dallas Michelbacher is an applied researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.364)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waittman Bourne. And today we are talking about camps, but probably not the ones that you may be familiar with. And in fact, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC has for a long time been trying to catalog all of the various camps of various formats, types, organizations.

et cetera, et cetera. and they asked have estimated there between 30 and 40 ,000 different camps in the sort of context of the Holocaust. And today, we are talking, predominantly about camps run by the Wehrmacht, run by the German military, which include, Soviet prisoner of war camps, prisoner war camps in general, but also some other interesting places that you may not have thought to think about. And, with me.

today to talk about this is an applied researcher from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, Dallas Miklbacher, who has worked on the latest volume of an amazing resource that the museum has created, which is the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. And this is volume four, which focuses on precisely these camps. So Dallas, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:22.777)
Thanks for having me.

Waitman Beorn (01:24.236)
can you tell us a little bit about, yourself and how you got involved in this and your background before we sort of dive into things?

Dallas Michelbacher (01:32.313)
Yeah, so I grew up in Georgia. Both of my grandfathers served in the second world war, so I've kind of always been interested in World War II history. Really when I started studying history in college, my main focus was like World War I and Russia, the Russian Revolution and all that. But once I got into working on my PhD, I really shifted to focus towards Germany and Romania and the Holocaust. I ended up writing my dissertation on labor camps in Romania.

And then after I finished my PhD, I started working at the museum and working on, as you mentioned, volume four, the encyclopedia, which deals with camps and other sites operated by the Wehrmacht and principally working on research on Soviet prisoners of war. And that's when I kind of realized, you know, the sort of lack of historiography in English on the subject, which we'll probably talk about later. So that got me interested in doing research in that area. And I've been working on that area for a few years now.

Waitman Beorn (02:31.532)
Absolutely, and it's it's I should mention again for those of you that interested in the Holocaust Interested in learning more. I believe most of these encyclopedias are available to the public free of free of charge, right?

Dallas Michelbacher (02:45.625)
Yes, you can download copies of volumes 1 through 4, like PDF copies through Project Muse now and come January 2025, you'll be able to, they'll actually be published through Muse in their platform. So they'll be searchable and stuff like that. Cause right now they're just regular PDFs. They're not necessarily the easiest documents to work with because they're like 800 page PDFs or whatever, but they will be published in Muse's like standard format where they'll be searchable and all of that in 2025. And then,

The remaining three volumes in the series will also be published in that format. So all of it will be available free, open source through Muse.

Waitman Beorn (03:23.852)
And again, I cannot recommend enough. These things are amazing. I've used them in my scholarly work, but they are absolutely accessible to the public. You know, they're they're just a great resource if you want to know about places, important places of the Holocaust. So, you know, after you listen to this podcast, if you're interested, you can download the latest version that Dallas has worked on or you can download any of the other ones. It's a fantastic resource. And I should.

I should mention that one of the sort of founding scholars behind this is an amazing guy. It was an amazing guy named Jeff McGarkey, who was a great friend, personal friend to me, and a great scholar of the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in many ways as well. And he was the driving force behind all of this. And unfortunately, he passed away very unexpectedly. But what an amazing guy and what an amazing...

resource that he is sort of living on through, I think, in a lot of ways, because this is sort of his baby, you know, and it's amazing.

Dallas Michelbacher (04:29.401)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, he was my first supervisor at the museum and he was kind of a mentor to me the first few years of my career. So yeah, definitely. He's, I could never even begin to fill his shoes on this because he'd forgotten more than I could possibly know about this subject. But, you know, it's kind of a, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The nicest guy you'd ever meet. But I've, and he wanted to do a,

Waitman Beorn (04:45.612)
And just the absolute nicest guy too. Like he was, you know, just like an amazing human being. So I think he'd be glad to know that, you know, that we're talking together about the encyclopedia.

Dallas Michelbacher (04:58.425)
Yeah, he had actually said he wanted to work on a bigger project on Soviet POWs that he never got the chance to get to, obviously, after Volume 4. So it's kind of a, you know, picking up the torch from failing hands, so to speak.

Waitman Beorn (05:09.804)
Yeah. And this is something, this is something that we are going to talk about. because for, for lots of reasons, you know, the Soviet PWA piece is very, very important. it fits in to a lots of other pieces of the story. And for lots of different reasons, it hasn't received sort of the same level of, or the, or the level of treatment that we think it probably should have.

So before we start, we took it to that piece. Let's talk a little bit more in generally about this volume. What is, what is this volume covering? When we say camps and or sites operated by the Wehrmacht, what are we, what are we talking about?

Dallas Michelbacher (05:51.961)
Right, so we're principally talking about prisoner of war camps. As you mentioned, that's most of the volume, the different categories of prisoner of war camps that were run by the Wehrmacht. So, you know, the Stalags that people are probably familiar with, which are the permanent enlisted men's camps, the Oflags, which are officers camps, and then various categories of transit camps and internment camps that were operated by the Wehrmacht. But then also a variety of improvised sites like improvised

prisoner of war camps mainly for Italian soldiers interned in 1943 before they were sent to the permanent camps in Germany, improvised internment sites for civilians, most of which were in either southeastern Europe or the occupied Soviet Union. And then things like labor camps for Tunisian Jews that were run by the Wehrmacht during the brief German occupation of Tunisia and detention facilities for Wehrmacht personnel convicted of military offenses.

So a pretty broad variety of things.

Waitman Beorn (06:52.364)
And so does this not cover, this is totally a random aside, but does this cover SS penal camps for SS members? Or is that a different?

Dallas Michelbacher (07:03.865)
No, anything that was run by the SS would be elsewhere. Yeah, this would be.

Waitman Beorn (07:06.604)
be someplace else. So this, I think I would love to know a little more if you can tell us about the Tunisian camps, because this is one of those areas that, you know, I think there's a common misconception, I miss, or at least a common mythology that the war in North Africa was this kind of very chivalrous, you know, gentleman's combat between the British and the Germans.

where the Holocaust didn't intrude, but it sounds like it absolutely did. And the Wehrmacht was knee deep in. Is that right?

Dallas Michelbacher (07:41.465)
Yes, so first of all, I should give a shout out to Jens Hoppe, who wrote that section of the volume. I did not write that section. So a lot of credit for that section because it was a difficult section to research. These camps are not well documented. There's not a lot of research out there on them. So he did a lot of fantastic work there. But so basically what happened was in November of 42, after the Operation Torch landings in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, excuse me, the Germans occupied

Tunisia, which had previously been under Vichy French control. And when they did that, they took, they set up about two dozen camps for Tunisian Jews who were sent to these camps to work on road construction and building fortifications and stuff like that for the Wehrmacht because they anticipated that the American British forces were going to invade Tunisia from the West. And of course, that's what happened. So these camps were mostly fairly short -lived because the Germans only occupied Tunisia for a few months before they were swept out by the

by the allies by May of 43, they had been totally pushed out of Tunisia. So this was, these were fairly short lived. The conditions of the camps weren't great, although these weren't, you know, what we think of as like, you know, the kind of conventional perception of like extermination through labor in camps in Poland and stuff like that. So these camps, like they were, they were, the people who worked there were assigned by a committee.

in the Jewish community, the Tunisian Jewish community, essentially in that committee was able to kind of, you know, bribe the Germans to bring in food and stuff like that and get people released. So there was a lot of that kind of informal economy going on. And these were, like I said, short -lived and not always well -documented sites, but we did our best.

Waitman Beorn (09:25.036)
I mean, that's an amazing sort of piece of evidence and scholarship right there. This is one of those things that, again, sort of, I think, as scholars of the Holocaust, we sort of know intrinsically that Jewish policy intrudes upon all aspects of the war. But here's an example.

in a place that you may not have expected it or I may not have expected to hear it, but you know that it does that. What happened to the Jews after were they liberated or were they moved on as the Wehrmacht retreated?

Dallas Michelbacher (10:00.345)
They were they were either released and the camps were closed or they were liberated. They weren't taken. The Wehrmacht didn't take them or anything like that. It's but yeah, it's an interesting story. It shows kind of the varieties. We'll probably talk about more of this, but the kind of the varieties of ways that the Wehrmacht interacted with civilian populations under their control because that's a theme.

Waitman Beorn (10:04.46)
Okay.

Waitman Beorn (10:18.06)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, what are some of the other civilian internment camps and why, why would the Wehrmacht be running a civilian internment camp versus, you know, the police or the SS?

Dallas Michelbacher (10:30.041)
Yeah, so there are a lot of these were really just improvised sites. They were mostly in the occupied Soviet Union. These were places where the Wehrmacht would be taking the civilian population from a town or something near the front lines and moving them somewhere in the rear to some kind of just improvised holding facility or something like that to get people out of out of the way. This wasn't really like a humanitarian. Let's keep people from being killed by, you know.

collateral damage or whatever, Germans don't care, especially in the case of the Soviet Union, they don't care. But they're doing it as a matter of what they perceive to be security policy. Essentially, they see Soviet civilians as potential partisans, right? So they move these people away from the front. As they see it to protect themselves from these civilians, they move them into these terrible...

Waitman Beorn (11:14.603)
Right.

Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (11:21.388)
Is this the so -called desert zone sort of idea, the Wust -O -Zone and whether...

Dallas Michelbacher (11:24.569)
Yeah, yeah, and they moved them into these terrible camps that are basically just fenced off fields and stuff like that and just leave people there. Thousands of people die in these camps and they're not... We document some of them in the volume, but we don't have any illusions that we found all of them. I'm sure there were plenty more that we didn't find because either nobody found the documentation or the documentation doesn't exist. It was all destroyed. So...

Some of these sites are probably lost to history, but we were glad to be able to document at least some of them just because this is a dimension of the Wehrmacht's policy that people probably aren't familiar with.

Waitman Beorn (12:04.396)
Yeah, absolutely. And what are some of the sources? And I guess you've already sort of alluded to the challenges of sort of a full accounting of Wehrmacht camps, particularly as we move toward the Soviet PW camps, you know, of which there are, I'm guessing, thousands. But what are the sources that you and the other people who worked on this volume were working on, working with?

Dallas Michelbacher (12:30.489)
Yeah, yeah, so obviously we, we drew from, you know, the main sources would be things from the Bundesarchiv, the Militärarchiv and Freiburg, the collections of the, the organization that was responsible for administering the POW camps within the Wehrmacht, which is called the Kriegsgefangenenwesen. That was part of the Auge -Meines Wehrmachtamt of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. So,

That's the main office that we use their records as well as records of other Wehrmacht offices and branches. We also drew on the records from the post war trials from Nuremberg as well as other post war trials, the Center for Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. We use those records a lot.

We drew on records from the Arlson archives, ITS. We also drew on the investigative, like the Soviet and other investigative commissions, like the Extraordinary State Commission, as well as the Polish Investigative Commission. And then investigations, you know, from the US, like the National Archives, from the, you know, the Judge Advocate General and stuff like that, or the OSS that did investigations of this stuff. So.

You know, a variety of stuff that was generated during the war by the perpetrators that was generated after the war by people investigating the war crimes and then whatever possible, obviously, we wanted to use firsthand testimonies as well. So we drew on what we have in our oral history collections, whatever our authors working in other countries could find in terms of firsthand accounts.

The few published firsthand accounts that are available and then things like the the show of foundation, the oral histories at the the USCC show of foundation, which we have access to at the museum. Those were really helpful because obviously they're primarily collecting Jewish victims, but they also have some Soviet prisoners of war in their collection. So we draw on those as well.

Waitman Beorn (14:27.308)
Yeah, I mean, this is an amazing, amazing project. And I guess as, as you know, someone who has written books, you know, how do you, how do you go about starting to write an encyclopedic kind of, of project? Because I'm sure that there, there, there are different ways of going about it because, you know, when writing a book, we were, we're all by definition, not being encyclopedic because we're focusing on a particular place or a particular subject, you know, what,

How did you do that? How'd you go about it for, you know, it must, from my perspective, it seems like a sort of daunting challenge to stand in front of, you know, the subject of all Wehrmacht camps and then try to put them into, into a book.

Dallas Michelbacher (15:12.153)
Yeah, so I should clarify that I came in about at the midway point of this. A lot of the content had already been written when I came in. There were still some that I ended up doing, or I ended up editing or translating or whatever. But basically, the process was that we generated our list of sites that we kind of would pare down as we went on or at as we found new places. And then identified people who had worked on those or who might have some expertise and said, hey, can you?

Waitman Beorn (15:19.948)
Sure.

Dallas Michelbacher (15:39.193)
Help us with this. Would you be willing to write some of these entries? And then other was we if we couldn't find somebody else, we obviously do them ourselves at house. But yeah, and then we would just kind of we gave every entry. We kind of start with like a list of. General questions, like, when was the camp established? Who established it? Who was the commander? How long did it operate? What were the conditions like? What other information do we have? When was the camp closed or evacuated or liberated or whatever?

So we started just kind of with that broad questionnaire and then obviously wanted to fill out as much detail and add as much character as we could to that, which was, as you might imagine, much easier for some places than others. You know, a lot of the main POW camps in Germany itself are pretty well documented. The records are well preserved. There were good investigations of the personnel after the war. There was, you know, especially the camps that had, you know, American and British prisoners. There's a good amount of published testimony on those, maybe even some.

some secondary sources and even secondary sources in English on those camps. And then, you know, obviously, like sites that we were talking about a moment ago, some of these improvised sites, there's next to no documentation. And it was just a matter of us being able to, you know, come across at least a few scraps of information and put something together so that we could say, hey, we know this site existed, even if we can't give a ton of details about it.

Waitman Beorn (17:01.004)
Yeah, and the the Dulags, for example, these Dushgangslager, these transit camps, most of which appear on the eastern front. They move to right from from place to place.

Dallas Michelbacher (17:14.873)
Yeah, any the so the the the there were two categories of camps like that. There were these sort of collection points that were located near the front and then the transit camps that were located in the army and army group rear areas. So the on the Eastern front, the collection points were referred to as or army prisoner collection points. This is the abbreviation and then the transit camps were or which just means transit camp.

So these moved, especially the AGSSTs, these moved right along with the frontline, because these were right with the frontline units. As soon as the prisoners were captured, they were taken to these collection points. And then the Dulags also moved every few weeks as the Germans advanced. But interestingly enough, once the German advance was stopped at the end of 41 and winter of 41 -42, these kind of took on a more permanent character until the German advance started again in the spring. And then after that slowed down as well, again, they start to take on more

a more permanent character, so they almost become like, you know, almost very, fairly similar to the Stalags that were located within the occupied Soviet Union. But yeah, the fact that they moved so frequently and tracking all of those movements was actually pretty difficult for us because, you know, we might have good records of the camps when it was in one, you know, when they were in one or two cities. But if, you know, we know that they stopped a few other places along the way, we maybe can't find a ton of information about.

those stops. So that ended up being kind of a difficult thing to research with these camps just because they move so frequently.

Waitman Beorn (18:52.524)
Yeah, I remember what I remember when I was doing the research for the first book and I was in Freiburg and I was looking at I was looking at military maps to try to trace just, you know, the small units that I was interested in. But I remember because we might cover this later because the units that I was interested in also were involved in the POW process. And you could see the Dulog little flag, like a little symbol on a map with like a little flag that has like the Dulog number and it would move periodically.

down the road or someplace else. And I was just thinking about that. We'll come back to the PWA piece, but I was just thinking about that as a researcher. I was like, God, how do you possibly, cause now you have to kind of track, you know, where it is. Whereas, you know, when I'm reading the, the encyclopedia of, of ghettos in Poland, for example, you know, that that's in the town of, you know, wouldge and you don't have to worry about where it is. Cause it's going to stay there forever. You know, whereas these places are just moving.

some of them moving quite a bit. And.

Dallas Michelbacher (19:52.281)
You know what was really fun was trying to make maps of that. That was really difficult.

Waitman Beorn (19:55.212)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is this. This is crying out for a digital map because a map where you can show movement over time, you know, because otherwise you.

Dallas Michelbacher (20:00.537)
Exactly. Yeah, something and that's yeah, that's something we've talked about is. Yeah, creating something that's it. Yeah, otherwise, because it's just trying to show that on a static map is really difficult. You end up with 5 different points that say do live to 40 or whatever. And it's confusing for the readers, but we couldn't really figure out a way to a better way to represent it on a printed map. It's just a difficult thing to represent. It's not like.

Waitman Beorn (20:14.508)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (20:25.324)
Yeah.

Dallas Michelbacher (20:25.625)
Yeah, it's not like a map of Kants in Poland where you can say, this is where Auschwitz is, this is where Majdanek is.

Waitman Beorn (20:31.276)
Yeah. And I imagine that the other option would is which is not an option really, which is, you know, you have a map for each camp showing like where it moves over time. But again, when you have thousands of them, you know, this is, this is something that digitally, you know, would be a possibility, but certainly not in the print world. I want to come to, I want to get to Soviets, but before we do that, we've talked about some of the, the other camps.

What are the what are the Wehrmacht disciplinary camps? Like what are what are they doing? What are what is the sort of what are the conditions there? Because, you know, the German military. And again, this isn't being sort of apologetic for them, but they were ruthless towards their own people as well, right?

Dallas Michelbacher (21:21.305)
Yeah, that's one thing that really stood out that we've talked about as kind of being one of the surprising themes in this volume is the harshness of the Wehrmacht towards their own personnel. And these, so these disciplinary facilities, there were a few different types. Obviously, you have standard prisons, which were referred to as Wehrmacht Gefängnisse or Kriegswehrmacht Gefängnisse, which just means, you know, Wehrmacht prison, which were

You know, prison buildings that were just taken over by the Wehrmacht. There were a few of these in different parts of Germany and then occupied Eastern Europe as well. And then there were the field units, field penal camps, which were called Feldstraflager or the field penal units, which were called Feldstrafgefangenen Abteilungen. And the Strafgefangenen Abteilungen, these were similar to the Soviet Strafbots. It's the same etymology.

So that they were deployed in areas near the front. A lot of the time they would do difficult work like building anti -tank ditches or cleaning minefields and stuff like that. Because the idea was a lot of the time, a lot of these people had been sentenced for things like desertion.

or cowardice in the face of the enemy. So the idea is, well, if you're a coward, you have to go and do the most dangerous, the most brutal work. And if you survive that, then you can redeem yourself. And there were actually units that were called probationary units where people who they thought could maybe be rehabilitated, so to speak, and made it to useful soldiers again were sent to these units. And if you proved yourself by serving honorably in the probationary unit, then you could be restored to service in the other.

in regular units, but unsurprisingly, the casualty rates of these units are very high just because of how dangerous the work they're doing is. The conditions even in the prisons themselves, the permanent prisons were often quite bad. They were cold, they were damp, the prisoners' health was generally good, they weren't fed very well. And then these prisons also serve as execution sites for people who were convicted of offenses that were capital offenses under the military code. That's where people were executed usually by beheading.

Dallas Michelbacher (23:35.897)
And I should again give a shout out to our authors, Peter Lutz -Kaumbach and the late Hans -Petter Klausch, who wrote most of the entries in that section. Yeah, it's another subject that's not documented at all in English, basically. There's a little, a few books in German, there's nothing in English on this subject.

Waitman Beorn (23:45.452)
I mean, it's.

Waitman Beorn (23:54.764)
I'm just trying to imagine, I mean, the, the world in which you have to work your way up from these really dangerous, horrendous conditions and tasks to prove yourself. And the prize at the end is probably that you get to fight on the Eastern front with like a regular unit, which is like, you know, it's like, you're not really winning much. Yeah. You're not really winning much when you, when you've won that, but I guess it's, it's something. Do you have a sense of how many, how many Wehrmacht members?

Dallas Michelbacher (24:09.785)
Yeah, exactly. You get the go. In like 30, 43 or 44. Right, exactly.

Waitman Beorn (24:23.052)
were in these cams and or were killed by the Wehrmacht themselves.

Dallas Michelbacher (24:27.481)
I don't have that right off to be honest with you. But yeah. They were, the numbers were pretty substantial. I mean, we're talking thousands of people.

Waitman Beorn (24:29.612)
Okay, no, it's fine. I mean, I'm not, but I, yeah, my, my guess is it's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Quite, quite a bit. And again, it's, and it's some of this, some of the stuff, you know, is, is probably incredibly draconian in terms of the, what qualifies you to be arrested and put in Wehrmacht jail, you know, compared to.

Dallas Michelbacher (24:53.657)
Yeah, there was a very broad category of offenses that fell under it. The German term is Vakhoffsatzung, which is very hard to translate. It's something like subversion of fighting strength or something like that is what we settled on as a translation, but it's a broad thing, you know, includes all kinds of stuff. So yeah, there were a lot of people. Yeah, something like that. And it's much broader than what people would be accused of under the American or British military penal codes.

Waitman Beorn (25:05.868)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (25:10.572)
like detracting from the war effort kind of, you know.

Waitman Beorn (25:21.1)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it can be it can be anything from like just sort of saying defeatist things, you know, which, you know, soldiers grumble and complain all the time. If the American Army was doing that, they wouldn't have anybody, anybody left. So let's let's let's turn then to. To the Soviet PWA piece, because this is something that.

Dallas Michelbacher (25:21.689)
So yeah, it's a large number of people.

Waitman Beorn (25:49.228)
needs a lot of discussion, I think. It's a piece of the Holocaust that is not, well, maybe it's not a part of the Holocaust. That's a whole different question. But it's a piece of what I call the Nazi genocidal project that I think is really, really important. So can you give us maybe an overview of the general situation with Soviet POWs, maybe starting from how the Germans view them and then how that relates to how they're treated?

Dallas Michelbacher (26:19.865)
Right, so yeah, the Germans totally in contrast to how they treated Western allied POWs, right? The Western allied POWs are generally treated according to the Geneva Convention of 1929, which is the body of international law that was enforced at the time. There were some exceptions to this, things like the Stalag Luft III murders or the Malmedy massacre. But the death rates for Western allied POWs in German camps was relatively low, two to three percent.

It increased some towards the end of the war as conditions got worse, supply lines started to fail, bombings became more frequent, but generally they were treated according to the Geneva Convention. And obviously for the Soviet POWs, it was completely the opposite, right? The Germans treated the Soviet POWs in a way that completely disregarded international law altogether. And so in case people aren't familiar with the statistics, the Germans took about 5 .7 million Soviet POWs of whom about 3 .5 million

3 million died in captivity. So that's about 58%, which makes Soviet POWs the second largest group of victims of Nazi mass killing. And the death rate for this was especially high in the first year or so of the war. So the Germans took about 3 .35 or so million prisoners of war during the campaign in 1941. And by February 1942, 2 million of those people were already dead.

Most of them starved to death in the last months of 1941 and early 1942. And the death rates in the months between October of 41 and January of 42 rival the death rates at the peak of the killing during the Holocaust during Operation Reinhardt. So at that point, January of 42, the Germans had actually killed more Soviet POWs than they killed Jews because this is before.

The final solution really begins. So at that point, Soviet POWs are actually the largest group of Nazi victims. Yeah. So this was the result of deliberate policy choices. We should really emphasize that. This was not something that happened as an accident or a result of circumstances. This was a result of deliberate policy choices. The German strategy for the war in the East was built around this idea that they're going to quickly

Dallas Michelbacher (28:36.345)
It's the classic blitzkrieg operational strategy, right? You're going to penetrate the front quickly, encircle the opponent quickly, and they're going to trap the Red Army near the front, and they're going to encircle and destroy those units. And then because their intelligence was so faulty, they thought if we destroy these units near the front, they don't have much left to resist on the way to, and we can just march straight to Moscow. The war will be over in two to three months. So they also don't make the kinds of logistical plans that would be necessary to.

fight a longer war beyond that two to three month range. And of course, once Barbarossa fails, that becomes a big problem, not only for German troops, but for feeding prisoners of war. This doesn't necessarily indicate any intent to kill the prisoners, but the idea that their operational plan says we're going to encircle large groups of troops, but we're not going to make plans for getting supplies to the camps, it's not hard to figure out what happens in that circumstance.

But their policies in terms of food and security in the rear areas are different. The Germans had this very, both Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership had this very strong belief in the stab in the back myth, right? The idea that the German army wasn't defeated in the field in World War I, that they were betrayed at home by Jews and communists and that unrest at home had been the cause of defeat.

And they remembered that the British blockade in 1918 had contributed to food shortages and domestic unrest. So they were desperate to avoid that. Again, they did not want to cut domestic food rations if at all possible. So they said, we're going to feed the Fairmont from Russia. It has to be fed from Russia. And there was an infamous meeting in among the

State Secretaries on the 2nd of May of 41 where the State Secretary in the Ministry of Food Herbert Baca laid out the so -called hunger plan in which you know, he stated that quote umpteen million people in the Soviet Union were going to inevitably starve because they had to keep the food rations maintained in Germany and use food from the Soviet Union to do that and then whatever was left over they could feed the they could feed the prisoners of war whatever with

Dallas Michelbacher (30:48.857)
They didn't get to fully implement the plan because of the failure of Barbarossa. So the Soviet POWs actually bore the brunt of this because they're in the camps. They're trapped there. They're in what Christiane Gaelach referred to as total sultans, right? They can't move to get more food. So they are stuck with what the Germans gave them and what the Germans gave them was insufficient to sustain life. And the Germans knew that. They openly admitted that, you know, we're not feeding them enough for them to live. They saw these people as useless eaters or quote -unquote.

quote, right? They see them as racial inferiors, they see them as useless eaters, they're not going to go to any special effort to feed them, especially the prisoners who couldn't work. And then in terms of security policy, this is the other area where you see the directing tend to kill people, right? This is hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war were directly executed. The Germans, Hitler had kind of famously laid out his general view on this by

In March of 41, the 31st of March, there was a meeting with about 250 high ranking officers at the right chancellery, where Franz Halter noted in his diary that Hitler said, the communist is no comrade before and no comrade after, which of course was the Christian Streit's seminal book on this kind of come of God and takes its title from that. And then, so over the next few months, this is kind of the basis for developing policy for the treatment of

prisoners of war, as well as the conduct of the Wehrmacht in the occupied Soviet Union. So there's an agreement with the, with Hydrith, with the SS that they're going to cooperate, the Wehrmacht is going to cooperate with the Einsatzgruppen, provide them operational support and provide them with logistical support and ultimately in some cases directly participate in the killings. And then there's also, you know, the series of criminal orders, which we can probably get into.

you know, in more detail if you would like.

Waitman Beorn (32:50.284)
Well, I mean, certainly one of them, right, that bears direct relevance to what you're talking about is the Commissar order, right?

Dallas Michelbacher (32:55.993)
Right. Yeah, the Commissar Order. So the Commissar Order issued on June 6th of 41. The Germans, this is issued by Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht High Command. And in this order, they explicitly instruct the German troops to immediately separate out and execute Soviet political commissars. This is supposed to be done immediately on the battlefield. And this is obviously an explicit instruction to violate.

They're directly telling them to execute prisoners of war in violation of international law. They know this. They know this is a violation of international law. And they've rationalized this away by saying the Soviets didn't sign the Geneva Convention. So we're not going to offer them the protection. We don't expect them to do it for our POWs. We're not going to do it for them. This, of course, ignores the fact that the Geneva Convention says in Article 82 that...

All signatories have to treat all POWs according to the terms of the convention. So Germany did have an obligation to the Soviet POWs, but they rejected this. Obviously, the real reason was because of political and racial ideology, right? There's this perception that this is a war of extermination. This is a war, an existential war, right? This is a war between two opposing ideologies, and only one of them can win, and it has to be us. It's a...

existential showdown between national socialism and quote, Jewish Bolshevism. So the orders that the German troops go into the Soviet Union would reflect that, right? Before they issue the Commissar Order, there's the military jurisdiction decree, which authorizes collective reprisals and summary executions of civilians and people accused of being partisans, preemptively pardons German troops for crimes that they might commit in the Soviet Union. And then the Commissar Order itself, right? And

It should be noted as well that these orders are expressed in explicitly racialized terms. The Commissar order says that the Commissars are, quote, the originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare. So this is expressed in explicitly racial terms. And it should be noted that these were subsequent orders expanded this. A couple of orders from Heidrich in July and then new instructions from the OKW on.

Dallas Michelbacher (35:13.209)
September 8th of 41 expanded this to the execution of all Jewish POWs, communist functionaries and intellectuals, as well as people identified as quote fanatical Bolsheviks. So this rapidly expands from just executions of the commissars, which there are a few thousand of them to large categories of people which are carried out in the in the in the Soviet Union, the occupied Soviet Union, the occupied territories. This is done by

Zika Heights Dienst. They come into the camps, the Wehrmacht's already done a preliminary selection, but they come in and select all these people. And then they take them out just outside the camp, some isolated area and shoot them. In the Reich, this is actually done by the Gestapo. Teams of four to six Gestapo men go to the camps, do these selections, carry, and then the people who are selected are taken to the nearest concentration camp, and then they're executed in the concentration camps. So we'll get into that more later. The linkages between.

killing of Soviet POWs and the Holocaust, but that's an immediate point of overlap where the mass shooting of people who have been designated as quote unquote unbearables by the OKW immediately, you know, they this interacts with the concentration camp system. So from the very beginning, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (36:30.156)
Well, and ultimately you also have. Yeah, you also have the Jewish prisoners of war being segregated out, just regular, regular prisoners who happen to be Jewish segregated out by the Wehrmacht and then being shot by the by the Einsatzgruppen sort of representatives or the SD representatives, right?

Dallas Michelbacher (36:42.585)
Right. Yep.

Dallas Michelbacher (36:50.617)
Yeah, and then in the Reich, they would then be taken, the Jewish prisoners were taken to the concentration camps and shot. And an unfortunate side effect of this is actually that, because obviously one of the ways that they figured, obviously they depended on prisoner records and denunciations to identify Jewish prisoners, but they would also inspect the prisoner to see who was circumcised, right? Because most Russian men were not, but so they would assume anybody who was circumcised was Jewish, but there were actually, you know, as you'd expect large numbers of.

Central Asian and Tatar Muslim soldiers within the Red Army. And these men were, they were Muslim, so they were also circumcised and they would be, you know, since the Germans did that inspection just on a cursory basis, those prisoners would be taken away and executed as well. And it wasn't until I believe October or November of 41 that the SD sent around some kind of circular that said, hey, beware, don't execute the.

Turkic Muslim prisoners of war along with the Jews on that basis. But yeah, so the Soviet, the Jewish Soviet prisoners of war were singled out from early in the war for execution and either killed by the SD or taken to the concentration camps and killed. The estimates on this vary, but some sources suggest that as few as 5 % of Jewish Soviet POW survived. And the estimate is that about 85 ,000 of them were killed during the war.

Waitman Beorn (38:15.116)
Yeah, I mean, this is something that I was hinting at because I'm doing this, the second edition of the Holocaust Eastern Europe book. And in it, I had a chance to really highlight the PWS along with some other victim groups. And one of the things that I came across in the research was precisely that, which interestingly, Soviet Jews also served in numbers exceeding their percentage of the population, just like German Jews did during the first world war. Right. And so you have a group that's, that's overrepresented in the military.

but then also overrepresented in the casualty figures because of the fact that they are intentionally sort of segregated out and murdered by the German military. And of course, one of the other parallels that we might talk about later is that a lot of these POWs, these Jewish POWs were turned in by their own, by their comrades, by the fellow Red Army prisoners. Sometimes, I mean, it's not excusable, but sometimes as a result of the sort of

intense starvation. I'll give you some bread if you show me who the Jews are, but also sometimes out of anti -Semitism as well, right?

Dallas Michelbacher (39:22.265)
Yeah, and the Germans actually kind of relied on this not just for the Jewish prisoners, but for the commissars intellectual stuff like that communist functionaries Because you know the the SD and the Gestapo teams like the Gestapo teams that went to the camps in the right They were generally four to six guys and they're going to camps that have 40 50 ,000 prisoners in them and they have to figure out You know who are the Jews who are the you know in the Fairmont's done some kind of preliminary selections?

in the camps, they say, hey, we think these might be kavasars or whatever, right? And the Germans go and interview them. But four to six guys can't go through that many people, process that many people in any sort of timely fashion. So they're really dependent on what they would refer to as Vertrauensmänner or, you know, or V -Männer, like the trusted confidants among the prisoners. And they're actually told, the Wehrmacht's actually told,

Waitman Beorn (40:09.036)
informants. Yeah.

Dallas Michelbacher (40:16.473)
while you're identifying the people that we consider undesirable that should be selected for execution, you should also try to figure out who can we utilize to help us, right? Ethnic Germans, Ukrainians, people of Baltic nationality, Luddings, people were ultimately released later on, but they were seen as people who might be amenable to collaborating and helping and ultimately denouncing some of their fellow prisoners to help the Germans because they couldn't rely solely on their own personnel to do all of the work.

Waitman Beorn (40:46.54)
Well, and this is where the, this is where the Travniki sort of men come from. And it's one source, right? Which is, which is a by -product of the horrendous conditions created by the Wehrmacht that, you know, people are willing, people of, of acceptable ethnic characteristics. So like not ethnic Russians, but ethnic, all the men, all the ones you just mentioned, you know, are given an opportunity to step forward and say, will you, will you come help us in sort of a security service kind of way?

And, you know, if you're literally starving to death in a field someplace, it helps, it helps to sort of encourage you to do that sort of thing.

Dallas Michelbacher (41:21.561)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's a problematic question to examine and this is something that I'm working through in my own work on this because on the one hand, yeah, these people become, you know, boots on the ground, direct perpetrators of the Holocaust. But on the other hand, in a lot of cases, and I think John Demian, among others, mentioned this at their trials, it was like, I was starving to death. My choices were go become a concentration camp guard or starved to death. So it is kind of this.

complicated situation where, you know, how do you, it's hard to look back on it 80 years later as, you know, healthy, well -fed historian and make judgments on people who were, you know, probably a few days away from starving to death.

Waitman Beorn (42:11.66)
Yeah, I mean, it is one of those sort of challenging questions, you know, but of course then, for example, you know, in my work, there's some tribe Niki men that end up at Yanovskaya and like some of them, like a number of them desert and it's not that hard to sort of get away either, right? So I mean, this is not really the focus of our conversation, but those guys had a series of options that lots of other people.

in similar situations didn't have in terms of being complicit. They could escape and they could sort of get away with that usually. But again, what creates some of the motivations is exactly what you've already talked about, which are these conditions of just you're gonna die and you're gonna die in a horrible way. And if someone gives you an opportunity to not die, again, racially based, which is interesting, then people take it.

Speaking of the camps, one of the questions that I was interested in is who are the Germans that are administrating these camps? Like, where do they come from?

Dallas Michelbacher (43:15.289)
So the officers in the camps are generally older men, reservists, people like that. A lot of them are World War I veterans. These are dudes in their 40s and 50s who are probably too old for service at the front. They're selected by the defense districts within Germany, right? The Verkaiser, the commanders of the prisoners of war in those districts select those prisoners or those.

officers and they're sent to Stalag IID and Staggad in what's now Poland to be trained as guards. And usually there's like, there's the commandant, a handful of officers, maybe a dozen or more, two dozen NCOs and then 60, 70 enlisted men and a few civilian functionaries. And then the guards are generally

again, reservists, older men from the, the Landeschützen, the, kind of civil defense, I guess is the best way to put it, right? These reservists who are again, too old or not fit for combat at the front. So these are the guys who are generally selected to guard the camps. and the, the camp units actually stay together when the camps relocate. So even as the physical location of the camp changes, which

The camps for Soviet, the Stalags for Soviet prisoners of war did relocate quite a bit when they were in the Soviet Union. The Stalags in Germany mostly stayed put for most of the war. But as those camps moved, even if the physical side of the camp changed, the camp, the camp command unit stayed the same throughout those moves. Sometimes they would be reassigned or re -designated or something like that, but they stayed together.

Waitman Beorn (45:09.196)
That's really interesting too, because you sort of have, for lack of a better word, a mobile concentration camp, but with people who, with the same group of people who then can generate sort of a history of both criminality, but also the way that they interact with prisoners, which I suppose can change over time as well.

Dallas Michelbacher (45:31.605)
Yeah. Yeah. And it varies from, you know, some, you have some commanders who are, you know, committed Nazis and you have others who don't like the Nazis and try to, you know, ameliorate the conditions of the camps. But one of the things that I've looked at in my book, like Christian Streit emphasizes this when he's talking about the mass death of prisoners in winter of 40, fall in winter of 41, when 2 million people starved to death is that,

No matter how positive your attitude is as a camp commander, if they are only giving you food rations, enough food rations to feed everybody 700 calories a day, it doesn't matter what you do. You could be a committed anti -Nazi. It doesn't matter. You can't prevent people from starving to death in those conditions. So especially in the tougher situations at the front during that period, the

ability of the camp commander's attitude to influence the outcomes for the prisoners is a lot more constrained. That said, there are cases where the camp commanders took issue with things like the summary executions of prisoners and stuff like that. There were a couple of cases where people are actually sacked from their jobs because they complained about it. Notably, one of the entries that I wrote in the volume was on Stalag 7A in Mosburg.

in Bavaria. It's a pretty well -known camp because there were a lot of Americans there. So there's a good bit about written about this in English, a good bit of good number of memoirs and stuff like that. The commander there was actually sacked from his job because he complained about the Soviet POWs being taken to be shot at Dachau. And he eventually like complained enough that he made his superiors mad and they fired him and reassigned him or something like that and put a more compliant commander in place. So it's you do get these interesting dynamics, but

there were only certain, there are only some circumstances where it really matters. In other cases, the mass death of prisoners is being dictated by circumstances that are well, that are being, you know, dictated by policies that have been set well above the camp commander's level and there's not much they can do about it.

Waitman Beorn (47:42.316)
Yeah. And I mean, and it, it also goes without saying or should go without saying that the Wehrmacht, the sort of maneuver units often are involved in some way, shape or form with some of these places, you know, and, and I'm going to give an example because I looked it up in the dictionary, in the, in the encyclopedia, but it also is directly relevant to the book that I wrote, the first book on the German army and the Holocaust. And it's Dulag 127. I don't know if you're familiar with that one.

Dallas Michelbacher (47:54.233)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (48:10.764)
But Dulag 127 was located at a place called Drozhdy just outside of Minsk. And just to give the listeners a sense of what we're talking about, because I don't think unless you've really worked in this area, you really have a conception of just how bad these places are. So the Drozhdy camp, and the reason I came across it is that one of the units that I wrote about in my book about the German army and the Holocaust, 354th Infantry Regiment,

for a time was tasked with guarding this camp because the camp held a hundred thousand prisoners, some of whom were civilians. Large numbers of civilians were sort of there as well, but also a hundred thousand Soviet POWs essentially in a giant field surrounded by barbed wire, which was helpfully placed just inside the boundary of a creek. So the creek is just out.

was just out of reach of the prisoners. No, no accommodations whatsoever in terms of shelter. And this is in the, you know, July, August, et cetera, like where, which in, in that portion of the world, Belarus is quite hot and dusty and awful. So, I mean, this is what we're talking about. And this, and this is what, when Dallas was mentioning earlier, this idea of

Wehrmacht planning to not have a plan, which is basically what happened. This is what it looks like. Right. Whereas, and I was reading earlier, you know, an example from the Western front, you know, the, the Germans fed, housed and cared for over a million French and British POWs after 1940. Yeah, cause too many. Thank you. So.

Dallas Michelbacher (49:59.193)
close to 2 million.

Waitman Beorn (50:02.476)
It is possible for the German military to do this, and it is possible for them to foresee the fact that they're going to encounter large numbers of prisoners and then have the apparatus in place to do that. So we go back to Drosdí and you have this place, which is just a hellacious... It's like an Andersonville for our American listeners. It's just like a place where the prisoners have to literally dig holes in the ground, right?

Dallas Michelbacher (50:27.001)
Yeah, ironically enough, I grew up about 40 miles from Andersonville. I didn't know I was going to grow up and work on POWs, but I did grow up right down the road from there and visited there a couple of times as a kid. But yeah, that's not a bad comparison because Drozdi actually, that's one of the people who was stationed there was a man named, I don't remember his rank, Colonel, I think maybe Konrad Jarosz, who was a, not a memoirist, but he wrote letters to his wife back home that were later published by his

Waitman Beorn (50:35.436)
There you go.

Waitman Beorn (50:49.516)
He's a lieutenant, yeah.

Dallas Michelbacher (50:55.385)
son who's also named Carl Radjaros, who was a historian at UNC, who's I believe retired. yeah, that's well, of course, and that's why you know that. Yeah, but he wrote about how, you know, these people are rolling on the ground screaming because of how hungry they are. They've eaten the field is totally bare because they've pulled up and eaten all the grass. They've eaten all the mushrooms, even the poisonous mushrooms. Anytime they find a rat or something like that, they kill and eat that.

Waitman Beorn (50:59.564)
He was on my dissertation committee. He's an amazing guy. Yeah.

Dallas Michelbacher (51:20.537)
People will anytime they have food prepared people will try to rush the the kitchen area and the Germans will shoot them because they're Just swarming this area because they have you know, so many people in so little food it's really hard to Explain to people like people I don't think people have a sense as you said of just how bad these camps are the camp

These camps are in many cases worse than the concentration camps because the prisoners, and at least most of the time in the concentration camps, there are barracks. There's at least some food supply. There's at least some kind of medical care. Most of the time, especially in the camps in the occupied Soviet Union, but at least early on, even in the camps in the Reich, these are just fenced in fields or army parade grounds or something like that. There are no buildings. The prisoners have to dig holes in the ground to have shelter.

Otherwise they're going to freeze to death and large numbers do freeze to death. There's next to no food. Anytime food's distributed, it prompts a riot. There's a lot of cannibalism. And even before they get to the camps, they're brutalized because as the front advances, the distance from the front collection points to the Dulogs grows. So by a few weeks into the war, we're talking about marching dozens of kilometers, marching for

three, four weeks with almost no food in the heat, in the dust. And, you know, people just, if they try to sneak out to find food, they're shot. If they collapse from hunger or exhaustion, they're shot. And these people aren't registered yet. So there's untold numbers of people who died under these circumstances before they even got to the camp. And if they survived this, you know, horrible places like Dulog 127,

Then they're transported in open rail cars in the summer heat or in the middle of winter, open like hopper cars. Half of them, you know, between, you know, a lot of the time on average about 25 % died before they got to the main camp, the Stalag. In some cases it was 70%. People froze to death, starved to death or whatever. And they just kind of tossed their bodies out by the side of the railroad tracks. And then the few people who survived that, who are by now, you know,

Dallas Michelbacher (53:38.777)
Amasean and basically walking skeletons. They go to another camp that's maybe has barracks, maybe doesn't where they again have very little food. Very little in the way of potable water. There's no medical care and people who are wounded are basically left for dead because there's no medicine. There are no doctors. It's just, it's really hard to.

Waitman Beorn (54:00.012)
And they have these, they have the, I came across this cause I, was an external examiner for a really, really good dissertation, PhD dissertation on this, but there also are essentially these hospital camps, which are not really hospital camps, but they're for wounded or, or, you know, disabled POWs, but they're really just a place to put that specific group, but they all die there as well.

Dallas Michelbacher (54:16.761)
No.

Dallas Michelbacher (54:23.129)
Right. Yeah, exactly. They call these reserve lazareten. There are some in the occupied Soviet Union, fairly, you know, kind of the infamous ones like Dulag 240 and Rostov has one. There's one at Stalag 304, Sighthain in Germany. Joerg Osterloh wrote a good book about that camp. So yeah, they're referred to as hospitals, but basically, yeah, they're just places where they send people to die.

out of sight.

Waitman Beorn (54:53.964)
And I mean, it's worth, it's worth pointing out and you've done this really already so we can sort of very briefly, but you know, just the, the process, right? If you're, so you're a red army soldier, you're taking prisoner at the front. Let's say you're fortunate and you're not a member of one of these super at risk categories, like a Jewish soldier or a commissar. You may not ever make it much farther than the front lines because you might just get shot after taking prisoner anyway, which happened.

And then there's examples of, you know, a unit that was tasked with marching back, say 4 ,000 prisoners to the next, the next place. And they get there with like a thousand, right? And so clearly they've done like, you know, massive numbers of killing. So let's say you survive that. Now you have to march to the nearest do log. And again, all the things you mentioned are, are, are, are crewing, right? And I remember again, many years, many, many years ago, but I was reading a memorandum where,

One army unit basically was forbidding even empty train cars returning to the rear from being used because they made them dirty and they didn't want the PWs to dirty them up. So literally you had empty freight, even open cars moving backwards. It could have been carrying people, but they were just like, we don't want to clean them. So we're going to make them walk. And so you're walking like...

Dallas Michelbacher (56:00.025)
Yeah.

Dallas Michelbacher (56:10.969)
Right. Yeah, the German transport, like the transport corps, like explicitly said, yeah, these people have, you know, parasites and stuff like that. They're a risk to spread disease. We don't want them in our train cars. And of course, with the trains, you run into the other problem, which is that the train lines only go to the border because the Russian trains run on a different rail gauge. So you can't even like, the furthest you could transport them is to the border. So like, so the prisoners who were transported to the Reich on trains, they had to...

Waitman Beorn (56:29.995)
Yep.

Dallas Michelbacher (56:39.673)
get the rest of the get to get all the way to the border on foot. That's hundreds of kilometers. So it's a miracle that as many people as they did even survived that. And like you were saying, at every stage along this process, there's just more and more attrition, right? You have the people who are executed immediately after capture, and then the people who die on the way to the Dulog, the people who die in the Dulog, the people who die on the train from the Dulog to the Shtalog, the people who die.

in the shtalag, the people who are sent to forced labor, who die while working as forced laborers. And by the time you get to the end of the war, the last official statistics, there's fewer than a million, something like 930 ,000 people who are left as of January of 45.

Waitman Beorn (57:24.972)
Well, and this is one of those elements that's really interesting too, because if I'm, if I remember correctly, there is a change in policy or an attempt to change in policy, which essentially equates to the German military and the sort of labor forces realizing, holy crap, we had all these people that we could have been exploiting for labor. but we've killed a ton of them and maybe we should stop, stop killing them, but yet it doesn't really end up.

Dallas Michelbacher (57:33.593)
Yes. Yes.

Dallas Michelbacher (57:49.433)
Yeah, and that's...

Dallas Michelbacher (57:54.585)
Yeah, at the beginning of the war, Hitler says, no, we're not going to bring these people back to the Reich. A, we expect to win the war very quickly. What's the point? B, these people are, they're dangerous, right? Politically, they could infect the German population with communism. I put this in my notes. Reinhard Otto, who wrote a couple of very good books on this subject, referred to the Germans being afraid of the quote, Bolshevik bacillus. Like they really see it as a

Waitman Beorn (57:54.7)
stopping much of it.

Dallas Michelbacher (58:21.209)
disease that could infect the German population if they bring these people back to the Reich. Some industrial leaders, the head of the Reichsvereinigung Kola, the coal mining association, basically, they want prisoners of war for forced labor immediately. Goering and Speer, they're both working on Hitler saying, hey, we could use these people in the war economy. But Hitler refuses until really the policy

The official policy changes on October 31st of 41, by which time, obviously, the German offensive is starting to slow down. That's when they're starting to encounter stronger resistance at Moscow or on the approach to Moscow. But by that point, hundreds of thousands of people have either starved to death or on the verge of starvation. And when they start sending them to forest labor, they realize the people who they send them to say these people are useless. They're walking skeletons. We can...

maybe a fifth of them are useful for forced labor. We've, you've starred them to the point where they're not useful anymore. So the Germans, yeah, like you said, basically realized, we wasted this huge reservoir of labor. And originally they viewed this as like an infinite supply of labor. But as soon as the advance stopped and they stopped encircling large numbers of troops, then they realized, it's not infinite. And we shouldn't have starred all the people to death before they were, you know,

to the point where they can't work anymore. So really they don't start heavily exploiting Soviet POW labor until the spring of 42, when they're able to either get at least the survivors at the winter of 42 are able to recover some. And these people really only start recovering because so many people have starved to death that the limited food supply that they have to go around becomes enough to keep them alive, right? So many people have died that the inadequate food rations now when they dig them up.

They're not dividing them among as many people so that it's enough to keep them alive. But then in spring of 42, I was just saying in spring of 42, they finally start advancing again, capturing more prisoners and they're able to plug them in and conditions improved to an extent. But another 1 .3 million people, another 27 % of the whole die from 42 to 45. So this is still, they're still in horrible conditions, much worse than even the Ostobite.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:14.668)
Well, and it bears mentioning, sorry. Yeah, go ahead. Keep going.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:00:40.185)
Soviet civilian laborers, they only died at a rate of about 10%. So this is still an astronomical death rate.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:47.628)
And it bears mentioning at this point, which is a good transition, that Auschwitz to Birkenau was originally planned to house Soviet prisoners of war and a number of prisoners of war were sent there, of whom only a tiny minority ended up surviving. But this comes to the issue of how is the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis?

Dallas Michelbacher (01:00:56.217)
Yes.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:01:05.913)
Right. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:16.908)
intertwined with what we might call the Holocaust in general.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:01:20.889)
Yeah, so yeah, as you noted, a very direct example is Auschwitz. So what happens is in September of 42, Himmler writes to the OKW and says, hey, send me, I think initially he wanted 100 ,000 and then 150 ,000 Soviet POWs, which he didn't get anywhere near that many. I think he got about 50 ,000, but he wanted them to use his forced labor in the SS concentration camps. So these people were released from Wehrmacht captivity.

technically and given over to the SS. They sent about 15 ,000 to Auschwitz and about 15 ,000 to Majdanek, smaller numbers to other camps. And as you mentioned, the vast majority of these people die very quickly. They're already in bad shape when they get there. The prisoners at Auschwitz come from Gross -Rosen mainly, and most of them are on the verge of death when they arrive. Of the 15 ,000, only about nine, a little over 900 are still alive. They arrive at the beginning of October.

by the beginning of 42, less than a thousand are alive. By the end of the war, fewer than a hundred are alive. So almost all of them die and almost all of them die very quickly. But a couple of other interesting notes about the overlaps with the Holocaust at Auschwitz specifically, as you mentioned, Birkenau was originally intended as a POW labor camp for a hundred thousand POWs. And then once that fell through, it was converted into the mass killing center. And then the...

A couple of other interesting overlaps is that the first experiments using Ceylon Bay, the gas that was used to kill prisoners at Auschwitz and Majdanek, the first experiments with that were actually done on a group of about 600 Soviet POWs, as well as 250 or so Polish political prisoners who were no longer able to work in the basement of Block 11 at Auschwitz in early September. The sources conflict on the date. It's either the third or the fifth of September, but they

used the Tsiklom Bay to gas these prisoners to death. And that's the first experiment with what would eventually become the gassing protocol that was used to gas close to a million people at Auschwitz. And the first experiment was on Soviet POWs. Another interesting thing is the practice of tattooing prisoners' numbers on their arms. That also developed with Soviet POWs because that first group of Soviet POWs that were sent to Auschwitz, they died so quickly that the Germans had trouble accounting for who was who.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:03:45.561)
So when they, by tattooing their numbers on them, they could just look at the number on the corpse, say, this is who this is, this person is dead, dispose of the corpse much more efficiently. So those are both, you know, interesting overlaps between the, you know, things that were originally done on Soviet POWs that later translated to the final solution. But in terms of just broader themes,

Obviously, there is, you know, obviously controversial interpretations of the uniqueness of the Holocaust versus other aspects of Nazi genocide, but I think it's important to emphasize the unity of the war and the Holocaust, right? People often think of these as two separate phenomena or even phenomena that are in conflict with each other. People are always like, well, what if they hadn't done the Holocaust? Why would they have won the war if they hadn't wasted all this resource killing people? But it's a misunderstanding because...

You can't have one without the other. They both flow from the exact same ideological perspective. The war is, as Jürgen Forster put it, basically the ultimate expression of Nazi racial ideology. And Doris Bergen, among others, have noted that this was always a question of when, not if, there would be this apocalyptic showdown between national socialism and Bolshevism. This is the...

Waitman Beorn (01:05:10.7)
And it bears mentioning really quickly, you know, something that I always highlight, which is a lot of people view the war in the East as this sort of aberration of like extreme violence and extreme barbarity, et cetera, et cetera. And I always make the argument that actually it's the war in the West that is the aberration, is the exception to the rule because the Germans have a, the Nazis have a...

You know, a different racial outlook on Western Europeans, where it's kind of like they're they're racially of more or less the same quality. We're not trying to colonize occupied to sort of settle, resettle this area, but that actually the war in the East, this sort of unfettered. As you as you've already nicely pointed out, this existential crisis that is not constrained by any rules of civilized warfare.

is actually precisely the kind of war that the Nazis envision. As you say, their ideal kind of war. That's what Nazi war is.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:06:16.089)
This is the ultimate endpoint of Nazi ideology. And from Mein Kampf forward, this is the ultimate goal. Attain, Lebensraum, colonize these and eliminate the racially inferior Slavic populations in the East so that we can repopulate these areas with Germans. We have vital living space for the growth and maintenance of the German race. This is...

all tied in with Nazi racial ideology, the same racial ideology that ultimately motivated the Holocaust. And it's important to understand that, again, that the Nazis understood the political differences between national socialism and Bolshevism in racial terms, right? Bolshevism is seen as a Jewish conspiracy, right? The Jews...

are imposing this on the ignorant Slavs living in Russia. By combating Bolshevism, you are combating the Jews. By combating the Jews, you are combating Bolshevism. So if you're fighting a war, an existential war, a war of extermination against Bolshevism, which is how this is framed, Hitler referred to it as a Weltanschauungskrieg, a war of ideologies. So when you've equated

Judaism and communism, if you're fighting an existential war against communism, you're also fighting an existential war, a war of annihilation against the Jews. And this, you see this in the agreements with the Einsatzgruppen, because the Einsatzgruppen have this task of going in the rear areas behind the army and killing Jews, initially just Jewish men, because they're perceived as dangerous potential partisans, right? There's this phrase, the Jew is where the partisan is.

So they equate Jews not only with communism, but with partisan resistance. And very quickly, this accelerates into the killing of not just Jewish men, but Jewish women, Jewish children, elderly Jews. So this becomes, it's seen as an integral part of pacifying the rear area, which then makes the war at the front possible. So killing Jews is seen not as something that's being done on the side or being done as a detriment to the war effort, but something that's being done as a.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:08:32.505)
part of the war effort as an essential, as a strategic objective in its own right. And really this, it's important, I think, to see June 22nd, 1941 as a turning point, not only in the war, but in the larger phenomenon of Nazi mass killing, because this is where the real radicalization happens. And Christopher Browning points this out in the origins of the final solution. He talks about this as being kind of the point where you go from.

isolated incidents of killing and ghettoization to the idea of mass murder. You start with the killing of Jewish men by the Einzats group and you progress to the mass murder of larger groups of Jewish men, women and children. And then within a few months, you have the formulation of the final solution and the killing of all Jews in Nazi occupied Europe. So these things happen in synergy with one another. You can't have one without the other. The same

racial and political ideology that motivates the killing of Soviet political commissars and Jewish POWs, it's the same ideology that motivates the final solution to the Jewish question. So you have to view, in my view, you have to understand them as two parts of the same phenomenon that can't be separate from one another.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:43.308)
Yeah, I mean, and it's something that there's another element to which I encountered in the first book, which is the effect that it has on. Very mocked units that come into contact with POW policy, which is one of it sends a an incredibly clear message. Precisely to the to the what you've already mentioned about what kind of a war this is and what kinds of violence.

are expected and understood and accepted, right? And so like, for example, the unit, the 354th 3rd battalion that I talk about in marching in the darkness, they guard prisoners at this camp. And while they're part of the guard force that shoots prisoners when they're trying to storm the kitchens and all this kind of stuff, but they're also watching the SD come in, pull out prisoners and execute them. They are going to some of these mass.

killing sites of prisoners and watching the executions. And then who was surprised, you know, a month or two later when they are themselves murdering Jews in conjunction with the Antartsh group and, you know, later on, right? I mean, so it's, it's, it's a, it's a case of in some ways, I think, desensitizing, you know, large portions of the Wehrmacht itself to, to value of human life in Eastern Europe, which as, as you've already pointed out, has a synergy.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:10:52.857)
Yeah.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:11:04.185)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:11.34)
with Nazi anti -Jewish policy, Nazi anti -Romani policy, you know, all of these sorts of things. You cannot, you can't, you can't pull those strings apart.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:11:21.337)
No, it's what Omar Bartov called the barbarization of warfare, right? And it's because, and a lot of it is you get the, well, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:25.836)
Yes and no. I mean, like he makes the argument that, you know, he makes the argument that the Barbaration, that the Vermark becomes sort of barbaric as a result of the barbaric conditions and encounters on the front. But what you would. Yeah.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:11:38.649)
Right, that too, yeah. What I'm getting at is more like they've been bombarded with this propaganda, right? This understanding of the enemy as the unta mention and then cases like what you were talking about at that camp where you see this just faceless, nameless mass of 100 ,000 bedraggled, starving men who would do anything for a small bite of food who will cannibalize their dead comrades. All that does is reinforce what they've been fed. They've been told this and then in combination with the other factors,

Waitman Beorn (01:11:47.82)
Yes.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:12:06.937)
the exposure to the mass killings and things like that and just the general conditions of the war. It's an effective cumulative radicalization, essentially. It just builds.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:14.988)
Well, and also, I mean, I should point out, I'm going to draw on the work of a great, great scholar, Daria Czarkowska, who I mentioned earlier, I was on her external, I was on her committee for her PhD, which she was very successful. And she has worked on a camp called Slavuta, and I'm hoping that she'll have a book about this coming out. But Slavuta is one of these reserve lazarette places.

and that's a horrendous place. but one of the really amazing things that she did in her research and she shows an dissertation is, is what I called when I was, when I, when we're doing her Viva, the intersectionality of, of sort of the POW camp process, because in this one place in Slavuta in Ukraine, you have, Soviet POWs, you have the sorting out of Jewish.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:12:47.257)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:14.348)
Soviet POWs. You have Soviet POWs digging, providing the labor to dig the pits at killing sites for the local Jewish population, unrelated to the POW process, except that here's another overlap, right? And then you have Soviet prisoners of war being shot and killed in the same local killing site where local Jews are being murdered. And on top of all of that, you also have

essentially the extension of the T four program where, where you have Soviet POWs who are deemed incapable of work because they're disabled being also selected out and murdered, right? All in this one place, right? So it's a, I, again, I really hope that this, her work comes out in a book or something soon because it's just so good as, as, as a microcosm for the ways in which all of this stuff sort of comes together.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:14:01.401)
Yeah. Right.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:14:14.041)
Right. And you see that in a lot of different cases, right? Like, especially like the mass killings by the Anzats group. And you have the Soviet POWs who are often forced to dig the graves, bury the bodies. Sometimes the Soviet POWs are also shot at some of these killing sites like Ponary near Vilnius and then Babi Yar in Kiev. Thousands of Soviet POWs are shot in both locations. So you have this, you know, not only do you have them being forced to dig the graves, you have them becoming the victims of the same, you know, the same places where...

Thousands and thousands of Jews are killed, so there are all kinds of overlaps. And I should say we have an entry on Slavuta in the volume. It's Shtalak 301, I believe.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:51.788)
Yeah, everyone check it out because it's amazing. And like I said, I hope Darius work comes out in a larger format soon because it's just really good. So maybe as we move towards the end, is there any justice for this? Are there trials? How do they turn out? Because I know from my own work that Wehrmacht trials don't have a great success rate of either starting or finishing. But what happens to anybody in this sense?

Dallas Michelbacher (01:14:57.529)
Yeah, I'd be interested to see that.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:15:19.097)
Yes. So this stuff is introduced at the Nuremberg trials. It comes up in the IMT, the main trials, although it's not the main focus. The main place where it comes up is the high command trial, where people like, including the head of the Augermann -Vanmachtamt, Hermann Reinecke, who was essentially responsible for POW policy.

He was responsible for issuing the order on the 8th of September that expanded the killing from commissars to, you know, Jews, communist functionaries and intellectuals and so forth. And that's introduced as evidence against him at trial. That was the main thing that he was on trial for. But so it does come up a lot of, as you might imagine, a lot of the lower level people never see much prosecution from this because there wasn't a lot of effort at prosecuting a lot of these.

These smaller, you know, the smaller fish, they weren't really the priority in the immediate post -war period. And then once you get to the fifties, the German, West German government and the allied government start losing interest in these trials. A lot of them are investigated by the central office for the investigation of Nazi crimes in like the sixties and seventies. But those files were very useful to us because they, you know, they would create lists of here were all the officers at the camp. Here's all the places where the camps were. Here's when they moved and all that. That was all very helpful for us. But.

Most of them ended with no trial because it was either the guy was, you know, the people in charge of the camp are dead because, you know, it was 20, 25 years after the war, or, you know, they didn't have enough evidence. They couldn't gather enough evidence to prosecute them. So a lot of the people who were responsible for this stuff at the lower levels never saw any meaningful punishment for it. And the fact that it wasn't featured prominently in the post -war trials, I think is kind of the start of...

Burying the memory of it right because you have immediately after the trials you start to get the develop. This is the 50s and 60s is when the clean very much that starts to develop and that requires sweeping all of this under the rug and even in Germany. This doesn't really become common knowledge until. The 80s and then the 90s right after the historic astride and you have the VAMOX offstellung that shows a lot of this stuff to the German public for the first time and it becomes known in Germany in the 80s and 90s so you don't.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:39.756)
But even then, I mean, and you've done a really good job already of sort of showing sort of the memory piece and like why we don't talk about this so much, you know, and, and one of them is that, you know, it's that clean Wehrmacht, right? And so the easy excuse for the Wehrmacht is what you, what you debunked as almost the first words out of your mouth in the beginning of this discussion, which was the Wehrmacht says, we just took so many prisoners. We had no idea what to do with them. There were so many of them. We were overwhelmed, you know, by the number of prisoners.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:17:47.065)
gross.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:09.356)
Right. Which is, which is, you know, at first glance, a very believable thing that one might might take. And so that's there. And that's swallowed by, I think, most people. Right. well, clearly you didn't. How could you possibly handle, you know, you're taking exceptional numbers of prisoners. How could you handle that? And then easily they push, you know, they push off onto the Wehrmacht or onto the SS, you know, responsibility for shooting and those kind of things. And in some ways, the city POWs are a really unfortunate victim group because.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:18:18.937)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:38.156)
they're also Soviets. And so no matter what Germans think about Jews, they can't express that the way they still can about the Soviets because of what the Red Army does when it comes into Germany. You know, it's, it's, it's definitely the bad guy and it remains the bad guy for, you know, well, forever, you know, all the way to the end of the cold war, right. And, and also,

Dallas Michelbacher (01:18:51.993)
Yeah.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:18:58.553)
to the end of the Cold War.

And the Soviet Union also, the Soviets contributed to this as well because like you have order 270 from Stalin, right? On the 16th of August, 41 that says, you know, anybody who surrenders is a traitor. So all of these people have been branded as traitors. The, you know, the hundreds of thousands of POWs who were liberated and brought back to the Soviet Union. These people are branded as traitors. They're politically unreliable. They go through these NKVD filtration camps. A lot of them are sent either to the Straffbots or they're sent to the Gulag.

some 15 % or so sent to the Gulag. And even after Stalin dies, these people are not really fully rehabilitated. They're still viewed as traitors and this social and economic stigma. They have a hard time finding jobs and stuff like that. They don't get veterans benefits. It's not until 1995 that Russia changes the law to give former POWs veterans benefits. And by that time, most of these guys are very old or dead. So the Soviet government's attitude towards POWs

also contributes to the burial of the memory. So everybody involved is really content to bury this history. And it's not, it's just been very, very recently that's, you know, in the last 40 or so years that it's really started to be unearthed and explored in detail.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:15.02)
And am I, am I correct? This is a little tidbit of knowledge, but am I correct in remembering that the few remaining Soviet POWs liberated at Auschwitz by the Red Army end up going into the Gulag system for precisely the reasons that you've mentioned.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:20:29.305)
It's, I don't know about all of them. Some of them did. The numbers that go to the Gulag, I think there's this impression that a lot of them, that all of them did. It was only 15 to 20 % estimates, variance from different authors, but a lot of them were not, some of them were reintegrated back into the military. Some of them were discharged. A lot of them were sent to like forced labor or penal battalions as well. So yeah, a lot of people were.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:53.484)
And there's an interesting connection here too, in terms of, and this is during the war even, but also to some larger memory issues, which are somewhat tangential to this conversation, but also I think relevant in the sense that, you know, the Soviets are faced with this dilemma, both as they're liberating territories at the end of the war, but also after the war of, of how to explain the behavior of local populations under.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:21:19.253)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:20.044)
under occupation, right? And so they have this problem with the partisan movements and with partisans, and they have this problem with POWs because, and I suspect this plays directly into what you're talking about, because if they recognize we had, that the Germans killed, you know, 3 million POWs, they have to admit that 3 million Red Army soldiers surrendered to the Nazis, right? Which is not a great advertisement.

for this mythical Soviet sort of unity in defending the motherland against the Russians or against the Germans in the same way that they have issues with the partisans because the partisans are sort of innately suspect because why didn't you flee to the Russian lines? So you were behind Russian German lines, which automatically makes you suspect even if you were a partisan. And so some of the partisans receive some of this treatment that you mentioned as well in terms of being, you know,

retried or filtrated by the NKVD to find out if they're like, even some of them who joined the Red Army as the Red Army liberates them after the war are still viewed as politically suspect, right? So you have this group that is just in a really awful situation because the Western allies don't care about them. The Soviets have lots of reasons to cover up the fact that they exist. And they've also suffered legitimately awful suffering during the war itself.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:22:43.609)
Yeah, and so you get this weird situation where the Soviets are both trying people, putting people on trial and executing people for mistreating prisoners of war, but also subjecting the prisoners, the liberated prisoners to political repression themselves. So they kind of talk out of both sides of their mouth on this issue. It's one of the weird, the many weird contradictions that the Stalinist system produced. And unfortunately, it lasted well after Stalin's death.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:00.94)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:12.204)
Yeah. Yeah. And of course, you know, and the last thing that bears mentioning, of course, is that even, even as Holocaust scholars had some limited access to, you know, Soviet archives and relating to sort of the Holocaust, the show up, they don't have the same access, I'm guessing, to, you know, the military records that might talk about POWs, even if they had that interest, which they, which they.

don't so much during the Cold War period.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:23:44.921)
Yeah, there's no way to there was no way to write about it prior to well, not even Glasgow, really not until the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was very, very little writing on this in Russian. The Russian historiography is nowhere near as developed as the German historiography because the records were kept secret for so long. So it's unsurprising that the historiography really started to develop in West Germany where the records were available basically.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:07.372)
And I'm guessing that, you know, again, one of the, again, it's obviously not in any way the most important, but another casualty of the war in Ukraine is that these archives in, in Russia, but also in Ukraine are now sort of inaccessible again. And, you know, have been closed off. Yeah. Yeah. Present company included, I'm guessing. Yeah, it's not, cause if I remember correctly,

Dallas Michelbacher (01:24:25.465)
Yeah, not great if you're trying to write a book on this subject.

Yeah, exactly, right? Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:36.843)
I had a, one of my people on my committee was Don Raleigh, who is a Soviet historian, you know, and, and so I had some Soviet or some Soviet historian friends. And one of the things that they mentioned is sort of that there was this moment at the beginning of the end of the cold war, so like 1991, where sort of it was, it was the wild west and you could go into any archive in Russia, former Soviet Union and have access.

And then they realized that they could sort of, they needed to actually try to control what was coming out of their own archives and also monetize it. And now, and now you're, now I'm certainly we're at the case where, you know, you don't want to go to Russia, even if you would be allowed in the archives, because it's just not safe. and also again, they're, they're going to want to close off that kind of stuff, you know? So I can't imagine what it's like trying to finish a, a Soviet related.

book on the topic. But as you say, at least fortunately, there is a large number of large amount of material that either has already made it out or is in other other sources, I suppose.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:25:31.897)
Yeah, no kidding.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:25:43.001)
Yeah, and the other problem is there's not much overlap between like historians of the Soviet Union and historians of the Holocaust. There's very little overlap in that Venn diagram, right? Most Soviet historians think of themselves working on the Soviet Union, not really the Holocaust. So it's an understudied topic in general, but especially the fate of the prisoners of war, because it doesn't attract a lot of attention in the West either.

Waitman Beorn (01:25:52.94)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:26:07.5)
Well, hopefully this volume and maybe humbly this podcast episode will help to solve that. We've taken up a bunch here time already, but before we close, I'll ask our sort of standard question, which is, what is one book on the Holocaust that you'd recommend our readers check out?

Dallas Michelbacher (01:26:27.033)
I'd be remiss if I didn't say Christian Streitz seminal work on the subject, which was originally published in 1978. There was a new edition published in 1997, which is the most recent, not an easy book to get your hands on. I spent. Multiple years trawling the depths of Amazon until one finally popped up and I. Paid a pretty large amount of money to get it. Get my hands on it, but if you can get your hands on a copy.

Highly recommended, very in -depth treatment of the subject, limited somewhat by what records were available when he wrote it, but it's a seminal work on the subject and one of the real keys, one of the first real works that started breaking down the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. Obviously that gets litigated in the subsequent historiography in Germany. So super important book. Can't stress enough how vital it is. It's a shame it's never been translated into English, but

Waitman Beorn (01:27:15.532)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:27:24.249)
It's if you read German.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:24.332)
Yeah, speaking of, do you have an English recommendation as well? I mean, yeah, yeah. So keep an eye out for, for Dallas Mikkelbacher's book on this, which will be the first English language discussion of this.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:27:27.865)
There aren't really, this is kind of why I'm writing one, because there are no monographs. There are no monographs in English.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:27:39.897)
Yeah, in like 10 years or something like that. Yeah, there's not a whole lot. Alex K has written a good bit about it in his works. Obviously, you've touched on it. You've touched on it in your books as well. Your work on the subject is also very good. Carl Burkoff is...

Waitman Beorn (01:27:51.756)
I mean the K is a good shout, that's a good shout as well. Empire Destruction is a good...

Dallas Michelbacher (01:27:55.417)
Yeah, Carl. Yeah, and Carl Burkoff writes about it. Some he wrote a couple of articles and talks about it in his books. Bob Moore wrote a book on prisoners of war that has a chapter on it. the the Carlshorst Museum in Berlin. They put out a book called Dimensions of a Crime. It's like a one of those books is published in both languages at once, so it's German and English. You can find that that has several articles in it that are quite good as well. So this is.

Waitman Beorn (01:28:18.284)
Right.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:28:23.129)
If you're doing an English historiography, it's a matter of piecing together book chapters and articles and stuff like that. I just wrote a chapter for a forthcoming volume on the treatment of POWs by the Romanians. So that's coming out fairly soon. But yeah, there's a lot. You're just piecing together articles and book chapters because there's no monograph, which is why I decided to write one.

Waitman Beorn (01:28:42.892)
And that's, that's a great reason to do it. And that's one of the reasons I wrote the UNOSCA book is there's no monograph on that one as well. Well, thank you so much Dallas, for everyone else. once again, thank you for listening. I'm going to ask if you're listening now, hopefully this is a podcast that you've been listening to for awhile. Now you're engaged. Can you please take a minute, and just go give us a review and a rating on Amazon, you know, the stars and then.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:28:45.305)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:11.468)
If you want a comment, that's really helpful in further elevating the podcast, getting more people to listen to it. I'm hearing great content like Dallas as I'm sounding like one of those NPR fun drive people. But please, please do the if you have a chance to do that for us, it'd be amazing. Dallas, thank you so much for coming on here and talking about this topic. I really, really appreciate it.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:29:33.945)
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I hope y 'all got a lot out of it because it's an important, understudied subject.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:40.236)
Absolutely, thanks so much.

Dallas Michelbacher (01:29:42.264)
Next.