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Soviet POWs in Germany
Soviet POWs in Germany
From the very beginning, German policy on the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) was determined by Nazi ideology. German political and military leaders regarded Soviet POWs not only as racially less valuable but as potential enemies, obstacles in the German conquest of “living space." The Nazi regime claimed that it was under no obligation for the humane care of prisoners of war from the Red Army because the Soviet Union had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, nor had it specifically declared its commitment to the 1907 Hague Convention on the Rules of War.
Soviet prisoners of war were the first victims of the Nazi policy of mass starvation in the east. In August 1941, the German army set a ration of just 2,200 calories per day for working Soviet prisoners of war. Even this was not enough to sustain life for long, but in practice the POWs received much less than the official ration. Many Soviet prisoners of war received at most a ration of only 700 calories a day. Within a few weeks the result of this “subsistence" ration, as the German army termed it, was death by starvation. The POWs were often provided, for example, only special “Russian" bread made from sugar beet husks and straw flour. Suffering from malnutrition and nearing starvation, numerous reports from the late summer and fall of 1941 show that in many camps the desperate POWs tried to ease their hunger by eating grass and leaves.
Sack of wood flour (finely powdered wood or sawdust) used to make substitute bread. Deblin, Poland, 1942 or 1943.
The Germans made little provision to shelter most of the prisoners they took from the Soviet military. Eventually the Germans established makeshift camps but the lack of proper food, clothing, and shelter took a terrible toll. Often the prisoners had to dig holes in the ground as improvised shelter from the elements. By the end of 1941, epidemics (especially typhoid and dysentery) emerged as the main cause of death. In October 1941 alone, almost 5,000 Soviet POWs died each day. The onset of winter accelerated the mass death of Soviet POWs, because so many had little or no protection from the cold.
View of a camp for Soviet prisoners of war, showing the holes dug into the ground that served as shelter. The camp was located in northern Germany. Wietzendorf, Germany, 1941–42.
The large number of dead was due not just to irresponsible neglect by German officers but also to mass shootings. The Germans shot severely wounded Soviet soldiers to free the German army of their care. Time and again German forces were called upon to take “energetic and ruthless action" and “use their arms" unhesitatingly “to wipe out any trace of resistance" from Soviet POWs. Those attempting to escape were shot without warning. Moreover, a decree issued on September 8, 1941, stated that the use of arms against Soviet POWs was, “as a rule, to be regarded as legal"—a clear invitation for German soldiers to kill Soviet POWs with impunity.
Heinrich Himmler looks at a young Soviet prisoner during an official visit to a prisoner-of-war camp in the vicinity of Minsk.
"At the beginning, those deceased and killed during work were brought to the camp on horse-drawn carts, then on heavy vehicles or even on dumper trucks. Physical condition of the POWs was so poor that they were incapable of carrying the bodies of their colleagues to the camp. The problem of storing the bodies existed from the very beginning. There was no proper room. Permanent overload of the crematorium I in the main camp with bodies of the prisoners killed with gas caused that no bodies from the POW camp were admitted. We were told to store bodies of the POWs in washing rooms and basements...we run out of space in Block No 1...so the bodies were stored under the blue sky..."
(Kazimierz Hałgas, Soviet POW who worked in the camp hospital at Auschwitz)
The executions did not take place in the prisoner-of-war camps or their immediate area. Instead, prisoners were transferred to a secure area and shot. The concentration camps proved an ideal location for executions. In Gross-Rosen concentration camp, for example, the SS killed more than 65,000 Soviet POWS by feeding them only a thin soup of grass, water, and salt for six months. In Flossenbürg, SS men burned Soviet POWs alive. In Majdanek, they shot them in trenches. In Mauthausen, Austria, so many POWs were shot that the local population complained that their water supply had been contaminated. The rivers and streams near the camp ran red with blood. Estimates of the numbers of victims of this operation range from at least 140,000 up to 500,000.
In January 1942, Hitler authorized better treatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) because the war had bogged down and German authorities decided Soviet POWs were a useful source of wartime labor. The labor shortage in the German war economy was reaching critical proportions. They provided Soviet POWs with slightly better rations—though they were still far short of the rations allotted to other POWs and to the German civilian population. As a result, the enormous death rate among the Soviet POWs was contained, but until the end of the war it was still much higher than that among the other POWs.
Soviet prisoners of war at forced labor build a road. Probably in the Soviet Union, about 1943.
German POWs in the Allied Camps
German POWs in the Allied Camps
At the war’s end, millions of German soldiers, fearing revenge, trekked westward hoping to surrender to the Americans or British, rather than the Red Army. The POWs were employed to help rebuild the war-destroyed country. Many were sent to logging camps in Siberia or mining in the Ural Mountains. Imprisonment was generally harsh. A young POW recalled being subjected to “brutal assaults on a daily basis, hunger, disease, and the cold.” Only by 1948 did their situation improve.
The German occupation had wreaked havoc on Soviet soil, so the Soviet propaganda machine had little difficulty instilling hatred for Germans. Many POWs who died in captivity were almost certainly casualties of punitive revenge, but their exact numbers cannot be readily ascertained. There is a consensus, however, that most deaths were not the result of official policy. Most German POWs seem to have died before 1945 due to their poor health when falling captive after month-long fighting such as in Stalingrad. Many others died because of overwork, and because the Soviets did not allocate resources towards the POWs, but to their war effort.
After the war, Soviet resources were in turn allocated towards their own population, and poor postwar harvests only made the POW’s situation worse. Until 1947 the single highest cause of death was dystrophy, a disease caused by undernourishment. Moreover, POWs often engaged in self-destructive behavior, such as refusing food, and/or inhaling, imbibing, or consuming dangerous substances in the hopes to be weakened to an extent to be let off work or be returned sooner to Germany. The deaths that resulted from this cannot be ascertained either. Still, for the Soviets, the German POWs had a use; they were to work to rebuild the country. In this, Soviet treatment of German POWs differed from the wartime policies of Nazi Germany, which intentionally sought to kill Soviet POWs.
The Soviets were not alone in their treatment of German POWs. An estimated 40,000 died in American stockades because of neglect and hunger between May and July of 1945. Another 20,000 died while working to rebuild war-ravaged France, often tasked with dangerous tasks such as removing explosives from mine fields. Here again historians generally agree that there were no deliberate attempts to annihilate German POWs en masse. While certainly the policies put in place came out of hatred and punitive sentiments, it was the difficult condition of the immediate postwar, especially low calorie diets, neglect, and overwork that ensured the death of POWs.
Germany POWs head to the French coast to look for the Wehrmacht's land mines
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