"The supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up..."

"... sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations—the floors were covered with cow dung. There wasn't room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year's Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't."

From a letter from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., dated May 29, 1945, in Newsweek and in his new book "Armageddon in Retrospect."

German general needs 6,000 additional troops in Afghanistan

Up to 6,000 additional troops are urgently needed in Afghanistan and a failure to deploy them will only prolong the presence of Western forces in the country, a German NATO general said on Sunday.

Egon Ramms told public radio station Deutschlandfunk that alliance members would end up paying a price later if they did not boost troop numbers now.

"We are talking about a total of 5,000, 6,000 soldiers," Ramms said. "We need these soldiers now, very soon, because we need to hold specific areas, we need to win over Afghanistan's citizens and because at some point, in 2010, 2011 or 2012 we will want to hand over responsibility to Afghan forces."

Roughly 60,000 foreign troops are in Afghanistan, most of them part of the NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF), but security has deteriorated over the past two years.

Some 6,000 people were killed in 2007, the deadliest year since U.S. and NATO-led forces and gangs of the so-called "Northern Alliance" seized Kabul and established the puppet regime in the country.

Western experts admit that since the departure of the Taliban from large cities the war in Afghanistan did not end. The Taliban have been actively fighting against the US and NATO forces and it does not look like they are going to stop the war. Moreover, judging from the emotional statement by the German general, the fate of the victory in Afghanistan is far from being resolved.