After the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in 1941, Hitler's greatest wish was to hold a military parade after the German army conquered Moscow, just as it did when Paris was occupied. But the tenacious Soviets did not give Hitler a chance and won the defense of Moscow, and no German army was able to enter the iron walls of Moscow. Three years later, the opportunity came suddenly: nearly 60,000 German soldiers lined up into Moscow to complete a belated "military parade." The Germans suffered the worst defeat of World War II: the mighty Army Group Center was almost completely annihilated, with more than 500,000 casualties, even more than the number of deaths lost in Verdun in 1916. The Soviets captured 160,000 German prisoners of war, and by July, only 57,000 had survived, and their lives were not easy: they were to be openly paraded through the streets of Moscow.
On July 17, 1944, the official "military parade" called "TheGreatWaltz" officially began. Tens of thousands of German prisoners of war formed 90 squares, escorted into the streets of Moscow by Soviet soldiers, and at the forefront of the German army were 19 Wehrmacht generals, uniforms and medals were worn, followed by ragged German soldiers, all with expressionless faces. For these people, the Soviets watching along the way not only scolded and laughed, but even spit and smashed various objects at them. This scene frightened the German soldiers, but their greatest fear was that they would be shot after the parade.
At the front of the line were 19 captured German generals, who wore military uniforms and medals, which became the focus of the day's day-trip street display as a major victory in the Soviet army's battle. The captives paraded through the streets, dressed in dirty military uniforms covered with lice, walked the streets of Moscow in rags. The temperature was as high as 40 degrees, and thousands of captives collapsed. Due to problems with the food given to the prisoners the day before, many prisoners had severe diarrhea, some of them were pulled on the asphalt road before they could go to the toilet, the ground was full of feces and urine, and the smell was smelled far away, but the escorts criticized the German prisoners for being uncultured.
At the end of the parade, sprinkler trucks were used to clean up the roads traveled by the German prisoners, as if the filthy things brought by the invaders were cleaned up at once. Six hours later, the prisoners were disbanded on the spot and transported to a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia, where many died, and after germany's surrender, the living returned home safely, recalling that they were happy even if they were humiliated, because they had not been shot, and it was good to be alive.
The author believes that the Soviet Union did not immediately kill german prisoners of war at that time, probably because the soldiers believed that honor was more important than life, just like the soldiers could not be humiliated, and the Soviet Union was actually more ruthless than killing German prisoners of war, talking about killing people, and the reason why they did this was because they wanted german prisoners of war to completely collapse mentally, and then not to kill German prisoners of war, it was more like playing with them after the cat caught the mouse, and then slowly cleaned up. However, those German prisoners of war who lamented that they could survive probably thought that they would be able to return to their hometown alive, so they did not care about the humiliation of the Soviets.