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This isn't really true. Generally, the Nazis were running trains eastward with supplies for their troops in Russia. The trains filled with victims for the camps would have otherwise returned empty. The same logistical situation is why so many POWs captured by the Allies in Europe and North Africa were brought back to the United States for incarceration.
As far as the expense of the Holocaust was concerned, the death camp Treblinka is pretty instructive. Treblinka operated for a period of 18 months, during which approximately 900,000 people were killed by the exhaust from a single salvaged tank engine. The camp was staffed at any one time by about 25 German officers and soldiers and 100 local civilian workers. Treblinka was an utterly trivial fraction of Germany's overall war effort, and yet it killed a million people.
The difference though is that the Allies could spare more resources, while the Axis can't. German rail lines also keep getting sabotaged and the blockade and air bombing kept the resources to fix them being disrupted or destroyed. The Allies didn't have such issues on their end. The German trains coming from the Eastern front could have loaded up more wounded but even so, I imagine they would have more limited available train freight because of destruction.
The anti-partisan action by the Axis also took up so much manpower that could have otherwise gone to the frontline. Not to mention that the very same people the Germans killed, could have been soldiers themselves on the side of the Axis. Many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators and could have helped the Nazis against the Soviet Union, but of course, the Nazis had a different idea. Mussolini's fascism was mild compared to the Nazis, and he was right that the Hitler's obsession on race is a waste of time and resources.
Once America got involved it was over for Germany. There is no scenario where Germany could have won with the US involved. Just fighting France and England and Russia they absolutely would have won. Could have anyway. How many people did the Russians sacrifice to get rid of the Germans, 17 million? Guys behind the lines to shoot anybody that Retreats from their position for any reason.
That's not what the purpose of blocking brigades was. Casualty rates were roughly similar between Germany and the USSR, if you don't include civilians.
There's a lot of fictions made up by nazis about the eastern front that western historians took seriously until the Soviet archives from the time were made public, that we still see in Hollywood and pop culture, like machine-gunning their own troops, sending soldiers without weapons, and human-wave "tactics".
That is not a piece of history that has ever been up for debate that I have seen, nor one that the Soviets have tried to hide or Russians have tried to deny. It was trotsky's idea, and in the Ukraine war they may have dusted it off to some degree.
So I don't know where you are getting that from but they absolutely were known for shooting anybody that retreated from their position no matter what the circumstance. They lost 17 million people.
Why not the wikipedia article? It cites statistics and primary sources.
Their job was to gather troops from shattered divisions so they could be reformed, and arrest ones who were refusing to fight so they could be tried later.
Or the hundreds of history books it is written in, I don't know what your recent iteration of Wikipedia says, But that has been the history, you are the first person I have ever heard challenging it. If that is something that you got off of a recent Wikipedia edit, I would not be surprised there is some new form of revisionism going on.
The Soviet blocking detachments were not as brutal as they are made to be in popular media. Rank and file soldiers were not shot themselves, it is the commanding officer of the retreating units who was punished instead. Massacring entire retreating units only occur rarely, if ever. I believe one such incident that happened during the Battle of Stalingrad was noted but exaggerated for propaganda effect.
The term revisionism geta a bad rap for understandable reasons, but revising history is standard procedure in academia provided there is a strong evidence that changes previous beliefs. I think we should revise the term revisionism to remove the negative connotation, and instead refer to bad faith revisionism as distortionism.
I will take your revised history under consideration, I read about this in history books so that consideration means little to me given all of the other revisionist history I have seen like rehabilitating history's worst monsters rehabilitating feudalism.
Often for wealthy benefactors with an ax to grind or paying academics to prove over and over that the New Deal made things worse are you okay? Intellectual looking front that lawmakers can wave around when making changes after they are paid to do so.
Reality is under assault from every angle and reality is losing.
Communism is dead and the right is winning the current cultural zeitgeist. There is hardly any rich people incentive to downplay communism lol (supporting communism is antithesis for the rich).
If you say you have read what you say in history books, the information is probably outdated. Like the other person mentioned, a lot of the accounts about the Soviets during WWII was from German generals, who were looking for any reasons to blame on why they lost instead of taking responsibility, like saying the Soviet horde fought without regard to the lives of their soldiers. But if you read about the Red Army deep battle doctrine, the Soviets were clearly militarily superior than the Germans. The Soviets knew they have the numbers and resource advantage, but to use it wisely to achieve quick and decisive victory is what they were trying to do. If the Soviets simply threw numbers against the Germans to win, they would have only repeated the experience in Winter War of sluggish advance, or what is happening to Russia in Ukraine right now.
It was when the Soviet archives were opened after the fall of communism, that outside historians finally gained access to first hand information. Many accounts about the Soviets were true, but exaggerated by outsiders who didn't understand the perspective of the Soviets because they did not have access to information before. I suggest you read on Colonel David Glantz' books on WWII Soviet histography as he is the leading expert on the topic, because he has access to the Soviet archives.
Well, that and the fact that it completely takes them out of the theater of war. They're not going to be rescued and released from a camp in the middle of Montana.
And even if a few do escape, they're a few days walk from anywhere, and will stick out like a sore thumb if they did encounter a local.