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During World War II, Nazi Germany engaged in deliberately genocidal policies towards Soviet Union prisoners of war (POWs). This resulted in some 3.3 to 3.5 million deaths, about 60% of all Soviet POWs.[1][2][3][4][5] During Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent German–Soviet War, millions of Red Army prisoners of war were taken. Some of them were arbitrarily executed in the field by the German forces, died under inhumane conditions in German prisoner-of-war camps and during ruthless death marches from the front lines, or were shipped to Nazi concentration camps for extermination.
It is estimated that at least 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody, out of 5.7 million. This figure represents a total of 57% of all Soviet POWs and may be contrasted with only 8,300 out of 231,000 British and U.S. prisoners, or 3.6%. Some estimates range as high as 5 million dead, including those killed immediately after surrendering (an indeterminate, although certainly very large number).[6][7] About 5% of the Soviet prisoners who died were of Jewish ethnicity;[8] in some cases, circumcised Muslim prisoners were mistaken for religious Jews and killed.
The most deaths took place between June 1941 and January 1942, when the Germans killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs primarily through deliberate starvation,[9] exposure, and summary execution, in what has been called, along with the Rwandan Genocide, an instance of "the most concentrated mass killing in human history (...) eclipsing the most exterminatory months of the Jewish Holocaust".[10] By September 1941, the mortality rate among Soviet POWs was in the order of 1% per day.[7] According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), by the winter of 1941, "starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions".[11] This deliberate starvation, leading many desperate prisoners to resort to acts of cannibalism,[10] was Nazi policy in spite of food being available,[12] in accordance to the Hunger Plan developed by the Reich Minister of Food Herbert Backe.[13] For the Germans, Soviet POWs were expendable: they consumed calories needed by others and, unlike Western POWs, were considered to be subhuman.[14]
The Commissar Order (German: Kommissarbefehl) was a written order given by Adolf Hitler on 6 June 1941, prior to the beginning of Operation Barbarossa (German invasion of the Soviet Union). It demanded that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be shot immediately. Those prisoners who could be identified as "thoroughly bolshevized or as active representatives of the Bolshevist ideology" were also to be executed.
In the summer and fall/autumn of 1941, vast numbers of Soviet prisoners were captured in about a dozen large encirclements ("cauldrons"). Due to their rapid advance into the Soviet Union and an expected quick victory, the Germans did not want to ship these prisoners back to Germany. Under the administration of the Wehrmacht, the prisoners were processed, guarded, force marched, or transported in open rail cars to locations in the occupied Soviet Union and Poland.[15] Much like comparative occasions such as the Pacific War's Bataan Death March, the treatment of prisoners was brutal, without much in the way of supporting logistics. In the most extreme case, a forced march of prisoners from Gzhatsk to Smolensk in December 1941 may have resulted in the deaths of up to 400,000 men.[16]
Soviet prisoners of war were stripped of their supplies and clothing by ill-equipped German troops when the cold weather set in. This resulted in fatal consequences for the prisoners.[7] In the case of the Soviet POWs, most of the camps were simply open areas fenced off with barbed wire and [17]
Some of Soviet POWs were also experimented on. In one such case, Dr. Heinrich Berning from Hamburg University starved prisoners to death while performing "famine experiments".[18][19] In another incident, a group of prisoners at Zhitomir were shot using dum-dum bullets.[20][21][22]
The camps established specially for Soviet prisoner-of-war were called Russenlager ("Russian camp").[23] In other camps, the Soviets were kept separated from the prisoners of other countries. The Allied regulars kept by Germany were usually treated in accordance with the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. However, although the Soviet Union was not a signatory, Germany was, and Article 82 of the Convention required signatories to treat all captured enemy soldiers "as between the belligerents who are parties thereto." Russenlager conditions were often even actually worse than those commonly experienced by prisoners in regular concentration camps.
In the "weeding-out programs" (Aussonderungsaktionen) in 1941–42, the Gestapo political police further identified Communist Party and state officials, commissars, academic scholars, Jews and other "undesirable" or "dangerous" individuals who survived the Commissar Order selections, and transferred them to concentration camps, where they were immediately summarily executed.[28] At Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, Major Karl Meinel objected to these executions, but the SS (including Karl von Eberstein) intervened with military leadership, Meinel was demoted to reserve, and the killing continued.[29][30][31]
In all, between June 1941 and May 1944 about 10% of all Soviet POWs were turned over to the Einsatzgruppen death squads and murdered.[7] Einsatzgruppen killings included the Babi Yar massacres where Soviet POWs among 70,000–120,000 people executed between 1941 and 1943 and Ponary massacre that included the execution of some 7,500 Soviet POWs in 1941 (among about 100,000 murdered there between 1941 and 1944).
Between 140,000 and 500,000 Soviet prisoners of war died or were executed in Nazi concentration camps.[11] Most of those executed were killed by shooting but some were gassed.
In January 1942, Hitler authorized better treatment of Soviet POWs because the war had bogged down, and German leaders decided to use prisoners for forced labour (see [17] where they provided labour while being slowly worked to death. The largest "employers" of 1944 were mining (160,000), agriculture (138,000) and the metal industry (131,000). No less than 200,000 prisoners died during forced labour.
The
Six kilometres from Pogostie Station (Leningrad region) the Germans, when retreating under pressure from Red Army units, shot over 150 Soviet war prisoners with dum-dum bullets, after terrible floggings and bestial tortures.
According to Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär, "Soviet historians engaged for the most part in a disinformation campaign about the extent of the prisoner-of-war problem."[51] They claim that almost all returning POWs were convicted of collaboration and treason hence sentenced to the various forms of forced labour.[39][51][52][53][54][55][56] However, other scholars concede de-classified Soviet archive data to be a reliable source.[57][58][59] Thousands of Soviet POWs indeed survived through collaboration, many of them joining German forces including the SS.
Russian historian G.F. Krivosheev gives slightly different numbers based on documents provided by the KGB: 233,400 were found guilty of collaborating with the enemy and sent to Gulag camps out of 1,836,562 Soviet soldiers who returned from captivity.[49] Latter data do not include millions of civilians who have been repatriated (often involuntarily) to the Soviet Union, and a significant number of whom were also sent to the Gulag or executed (e.g. Betrayal of the Cossacks). The Black Book of Communism provides different numbers: 19.1% of ex-POWs were sent to penal battalions of the Red Army, 14.5% were sent to forced labour "reconstruction battalions" (usually for two years), and 360,000 people (about 8%) were sentenced to ten to twenty years in the Gulag.[50] The survivors were released during the general amnesty for all POWs and accused collaborators in 1955 on the wave of De-Stalinization following Stalin's death in 1953.
Some Soviet POWs who survived German captivity were accused by the Soviet authorities of collaboration with the Nazis[39] or branded as traitors under Order No. 270, which prohibited any soldier from surrendering.[44][45][46] During and after World War II freed POWs went to special "filtration" camps. Of these, by 1944, more than 90 per cent were cleared, and about 8 per cent were arrested or condemned to serve in penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD. Further, in 1945, about 100 filtration camps were set for repatriated Ostarbeiter, POWs, and other displaced persons, which processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, 80 per cent civilians and 20 per cent of POWs were freed, 5 per cent of civilians, and 43 per cent of POWs were re-drafted, 10 per cent of civilians and 22 per cent of POWs were sent to labor battalions, and 2 per cent of civilians and 15 per cent of the POWs (226,127 out of 1,539,475 total) were transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the Gulag.[47][48]
As many as 374,000[1] German prisoners of war (out of estimated 2.4 to 3.3 million) died in Soviet camps. According to Anne Applebaum, the official Soviet number was 570,000 deaths (the mortality rate is between 14% and 30%, depending on low and high estimates of deaths and total POW numbers): "In the few months of 1943, death rates among captured [German] POWs rose to 60 percent ... Similar death rates prevailed among Soviet soldiers in German captivity: the Nazi–Soviet war was truly a fight to the death."[42] One estimate[43] says that almost a million German prisoners died in the Soviet camps. Out of the nearly 110,000 German prisoners taken at Stalingrad, only about 6,000 survived the captivity.
The period from 1942 until the end of the war had approximately 1.4 million labourers in the service of the Organisation Todt. Overall, 1% were Germans rejected from military service and 1.5% were concentration camp prisoners; the rest were prisoners of war and compulsory labourers from occupied countries. All non-Germans were effectively treated as slaves and many did not survive the work or the war. [3]
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