Tag #147735 - Interview #78105 (Jacob Mikhailov)

After Khrushchev's [32] speech at the Twentieth Party Congress [33] covering Stalin's trespassing I brooded on how great Stalin's role was in defeating Germany. Alas, my thoughts were very wistful. Even now we don't know for sure how many casualties we had in that war. It is known that the Germans had nine million casualties. [Editor's note: regarding different resources, battle casualties of the USSR were between 8,6 and 13,6 million soldiers, of Germany between 3,45 and 4,75 million soldiers. Total military casualties of World War II in Europe number between 27 and 55 million people.] Germans are very punctilious, they consider everything. We still don't know the exact figure; all we know is that it considerably exceeded the casualties of the Germans. It should have been vice versa. They were assaulters, who were supposed to lose more than the defenders. People say that 30 million soldiers perished. But this figure is unrealistic. There were so many unburied soldiers. At present people are still finding human bones when they dig in the kitchen garden. Our state doesn't look into the issue of their burial or collecting data about them, some other people are doing that.