Your friend must have been a fascinating source of information – if he were willing to talk about the experience. Quite the lucky man to get home.

When I was in high school, the husband of the woman I had for American and world history was from Russia. His father had served in the Soviet Army during the war, in a tank division. Whether he was a tanker or attached infantry I forget. He lived through the war unscathed, and went home to his wife and young family, just outside Moscow. You probably see where this is going. One night, a couple months after he was home, there was a knock at the door. Three very polite but intensely serious men came in, told the father to pack a small bag, and away they went. Never seen, or heard from, again. Shortly after that the mother managed to get herself and her two young ones away from town, through the countryside, and away from that particular iteration of a madman’s hell. They finally made their way to the States.

When I hear my students, some co-faculty, or family members (my side and my wife’s side) commenting how President Obama has led us to Communism or a Nazi state, I think about these snippets of history and marvel at what stupendous assholes the complainers are.

A friend of mine from way back was in the Luftwaffe as an aircraft mechanic. He ended up in the Ukraine during that famous winter when all the oil froze. As a mechanic, he remembers that especailly well.

He also remembers his units arrival as being seen as a sort of liberation for the local Ukranians. Then, that Einsatzgruppen you mention came along. They were very diligent in searching for saboteurs, so good in fact that everybody became a saboteur. They would burn the houses down to see if there were munitions hidden in them. If the house burned without any explosions the homeowners were innocent but homeless in the middle of the winter. If something blew up they were shot. I believe the very famous photograph, titled “The last Jew in Vinnitsa,” of the grim looking man sitting next to a pit already lined with bodies with the soldiers looking on while a Einsatzgruppe soder holds a pistol to his head is from the Ukranian site of Vinnitsa.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union was the only attack during the war employing the concept of Einsatzgruppen (tasks forces) which followed just behind the attacking forces with specific orders from Hitler to kill, “… all potential leaders of society (meaning to wipe out the intelligentsia), all communists, Jews, Gypsies, guerrillas, saboteurs and those capable of resistance.”This written policy of annihilation was also given to three million German soldiers just before the attack on June 22, 1941.

Note: the Russian soldiers, and resistance, did nasty things to the Germans too. It was not a good thing to be taken prisoner by either side.
The Russians had good reasons to be pissed at the Germans, and the Germans had good reason to be scared of them.
Final comment: my father-in-law was with the Allies who met the Russians at the Elbe. He said he came away feeling very glad he had been fighting Nazis instead of the Soviet army. “They scared me” was his comment.

Stalin maintained loyalty by being just slightly less bloody to the Russian people than the Germans. That, and a constant series of purges, political indoctrinations, enforced bravery, and the threat of being put into a punishment battalion and use to, among other nasty and suicidal jobs, clear minefields by marching across them . Stalin, of course, justified this cruelty as being necessary to fight an existential threat. I suggest that Germany was blamed for inhumanity on both sides.

Hitler set up the situation that allowed Stalin to prosper and took the blame for his methods. The war for Russian soldiers was extraordinarily grim. Suggested reading: “Ivan’s War” by Catherine Merridale. 2006.

And with the Red Army, it was personal more because, on the road from Moscow, they found what the Germans had done on the road to Moscow, than because of anything the top brass ordered. At least the number of Jewish civilians who perished is capable of being calculated. Not so with the Slavs.

….

he and Eva Hitler go off on their own, and later they are dead, shot in the head and there are poison capsules expended on the floor. But I’m pretty sure you hear only one shot. But of course, in a movie, they have to come up with only one plot and stick with it. Even if ambiguity is left in it would be difficult to reference all the different hypotheses that must emerge for something like this.