It's creepy. The survival rate of Soviet officers in captivity was abysmally low. Commissars were specifically ordered to be executed on sight, though the order was so unpopular it was finally rescinded a year after the invasion of the USSR. Nonetheless, GD was no more or less complicit in these war crimes; Omer Bartov is one of many historians who has gleaned the Grossdeutschland's own records in his research on the "barbarisation" of warfare on the Eastern Front. If the "Russian" officer in the photo lived long enough to make it to a prison camp, the odds are he didn't survive the war. And even if he did, those who surrendered were not welcomed back by Stalin, who thought that anyone who surrendered on the battlefield was a shirker. So even living through all that was no guarantee of safety.
Against that backdrop of what we know of relations between the Soviets and the Germans during what was a complete war of genocide, it's hard to look at a photo of a Soviet officer being interrogated by German officers and not find it anything but ominous. He's a dead man walking.
What you say is true; yet I thought I had seen this picture before and I recall it was taken from the time in 1939 when the Wehrmacht and Soviet armies met as they divided Poland per the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August that year. But I could be wrong, and if this officer as a political officer (Commissar), then his fate would have been very terrible indeed.
I thought I had seen this picture before and I recall it was taken from the time in 1939 when the Wehrmacht and Soviet armies met as they divided Poland per the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August that year.
This is apparently a photo of the German and Soviets meeting after the invasion of Poland. No political statement is intended; it simply was the right angle for an altered photo.
