The letters i got seem to be all confiscated from German POWs, seems like actually zero were exchanged during the POW experience. The dates are ’43 to ‘44

and the envelopes all have ‘Feldpost’ addresses and stamps. I am sure during the war years there was no, none, zero postal exchange between USSR and Reich.

I don’t recall when POWs were allowed finally to send letters; maybe early 1950s, maybe never ?

Wasn’t there a Korean movie from about 4 years ago on the experience of a Korean who was inducted into the Japanese army, captured by Russia, then captured

by the Germans, and put to work supposedly defending the Normandy coast on D-Day? I don’t want to look it up right now.  I didn’t see the movie but saw trailers

from. Others have written about some unexpected nationalities among the German D-Day defenders. You can imagine how motivated they were.

A particularly heartbreaking subject is the Americans who ended up in the Gulag and those who disappeared into it. Including from Korean War, or from later “spy

planes” shot down. A subject that can be propagandized no doubt but there is a basis of hard truth. I recently read a couple books by an American who spent two decades

in the Gulag after being arrested in Dresden, Germany, and i recall reading years ago in a U.K. paper about a French civilian swept up after the war and only returned

from the Gulag in 1960.

This is an odd thing, but i still remember reading when i was 10 years old about the Soviet shoot-down of a ‘spy plane’ over Armenia; i remember some of the exact

text quoting the radio intercepts of the Russian pilots. Odd what things one remembers when so much else is disremembered. I doubt many young folk now are reading

about international tensions, but maybe so. I’m not claiming one time pursuit is better than another.

-Hue Miller