Since some of the officers, such as General Franz Halder, who had previously argued with Hitler about military matters remained silent after hearing this speech, John Wheeler-Bennett presumes that they had no objections to the sort of war that Hitler intended to wage.[48] In 1989, British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that right from the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht waged a genocidal war of "extreme brutality and barbarism".[49] Evans wrote that Wehrmacht officers regarded the Russians as "subhuman"; were from the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939 telling their troops the war was caused by "Jewish vermin"; and explained to their troops that war with the Soviet Union was to wipe out the "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "red beast", language clearly intended to produce war crimes by reducing the enemy to something less than human.[50] Such views helped to explain why 3,300,000 of the 5,700,000 Soviet POWs taken by the Germans died in captivity.[51]