Talk:Treuenbrietzen
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[edit] 1000? Town without Men? really?
According to the Treuenbrietzen town website (scroll down to "Einwohnerentwicklung") Treuenbrietzen had a population of less than 6,000 in 1989. This means that we are talking about more than one third of the male population having been killed in the April 1945 massacre. There is a little problem with that one: this was April 1945, and any available male tall enough for a Hitlerjugend uniform and not so old that his Parkinson disease stopped him from using a hand grenade properly had been mobilized. Unless the Soviet soldiers also killed young boys (nobody is claiming that, and the population distribution of Treuenbrietzen on the same web page quoted seems normal for any German town) there were simply not enough males in Treuenbrietzen in April 1945 to kill 1000 of them.
Of course, the people executed could have been outsiders- refugees from East Prussia. But that does not square with the contention that Treuenbrietzen is/was a town without men as a result of this massacre.
Having a look at the German page on the massacreS, I see that both the article and its sources quote other, much lower figures. 125 people buried in the graveyard there. That sounds much more believable. I am not saying that the massacre is a legend, or that Treuenbrietzen was not a town without men (of course, it is possible that almost no men returned from the various spectacles of war), but the way this is described here is impossible.
Note that the passage on the Italians killed does not clearly mention - or tries to hide? - that they were killed during the brief re-occupation by the German Wehrmacht. This is important because thereis therefore a clear possibility that the killings of German civilians were (also?) a reprisal for the Germans killing the Italians. --Pan Gerwazy 14:24, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
