Quote:
Originally Posted by Olefin
You can see how this would happen here as well - especially if the units sent to the Chinese front were composed of troops who might have been suspected of having pro-Western tendencies - i.e. western Czechoslovakian troops or troops whose relatives might have been involved in either the 1968 Czech or 1956 Hungarian uprsisings.
Units like that would be seen as the ones that could be thrown into the meatgrinder the easiest - similar to how the Soviets used penal battalions in WWII.
|
On the other hand, if the East German higher-ups thought about shifting sides, they might use the call for replacements to Siberia as an opportunity to get rid of the hard-core Communists among them. If those guys get killed over there, they won't be in the way once the door to the West is opened.
I was thinking of the Spanish "Blue" division that Franco sent to the Russian Front in 1941-43. He sent away the die-hard Fascist ideologues, who would have made trouble in Spain if he eroded the ideology in the face of the western Allies.