Hello,

I wanted to find a book about postwar period and I found out that Tony Jutd book "Postwar" is among the most highly rated history books there is. The book reviews says that it contains mostly dry facts but allows the reader to make their opinion themselves. So I got the book and began reading it. The intro is very good but when I began reading it further I found a paragraph that I believe is completely incorrect.

"The Soviet losses in particular include prisoners of war. The Germans captured some 5.5 million Soviet soldiers in the course of the war, three quarters of them in the first seven months following the attack on the USSR in June 1941. Of these, 3.3 million died from starvation, exposure and mistreatment in German camps—more Russians died in German prisoner-of-war camps in the years 941-45 than in all of World War One. Of the 750,000 Soviet soldiers captured when the Germans took Kiev in September 1941, just 22,000 lived to see Germany defeated. The Soviets in their turn took 3.5 million prisoners of war (German, Austrian, Romanian and Hungarian for the most part); most of them returned home after the war."

I have read a lot of books about world war 2 and I understand that Germans treated soviet prisoners of war horribly and the number of dead is immense. I am not debating that at all. However, what I have heard and read is that German prisoners of war were treated extremely horribly too and the amount of prisoners of war that died is also huge. In Beevors book about Stalingrad, there are detailed descriptions about how badly German prisoners of war were treated, and that from 100'000 prisoners of war only 6000 returned to Germany after the war. This is why I find the last sentence of the paragraph incorrect. What is your opinion on this matter?