German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of war

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of war stand as one of the most lethal episodes of the Second World War. Of nearly six million Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands, around three million died during their imprisonment. The death rate from October 1941 through January 1942, running at between 300,000 and 500,000 per month, equaled the peak killing rate of Jews during the height of the Holocaust. These men and women died from starvation, exposure, disease, forced marches, and deliberate execution. And yet, as historian Christian Hartmann observed, their fate has been called "one of the greatest crimes in military history" while remaining among the least studied atrocities of the war. How did this happen? Who decided it? And what became of those who survived?

• 2. A War Designed to Kill

  ›

  On the 22nd of June 1941, Germany and its allies crossed into the Soviet Union with the declared purpose of waging a war of extermination. Adolf Hitler had said privately on the 30th of March 1941 that Germany must "distance ourselves from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship" and treat the coming conflict as a war against an enemy who was "no comrade" of Germans. No one present raised any objection. The German military's Supreme Command stated that the Geneva Convention did not apply to Soviet prisoners, even though Germany had signed it in 1929 and generally honored it with prisoners from other countries. The Soviet Union had offered to observe the Hague Convention's provisions if Germany would do the same; Hitler rejected that offer several weeks after the invasion began. Abwehr officer Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was one of the very few German voices who argued that Soviet prisoners should be treated according to the law. Before the fighting started, the OKW had already issued an order for the execution of captured Soviet political commissars. More than 80 percent of front-line German divisions on the Eastern Front carried out that order, shooting an estimated 4,000 to 10,000 commissars. The order was only rescinded in May 1942, after it became clear it was stiffening Soviet resistance rather than breaking it.

• 3. Mass Capture and Mass Death

  ›

  By mid-December 1941, more than two million Soviet soldiers had been taken prisoner during thirteen major battles involving large-scale encirclements. Three or four Soviet soldiers were captured for every one killed, a ratio that reflected the chaos of the German Army's rapid advance. The German military had not planned to house or feed prisoners on anything like this scale. When the encirclements at Kiev, Vyazma, and Bryansk in September and October 1941 produced close to a million and a half additional captives in a matter of weeks, the makeshift logistical arrangements simply broke down. On the 21st of October 1941, OKH general quartermaster Eduard Wagner issued an order cutting daily rations for non-working prisoners to 1,487 calories, an amount that constituted starvation and was rarely even delivered. Wagner acknowledged at a November 1941 meeting that non-working prisoners would die. At the time, all but one million of the 2.3 million prisoners held were classified as non-working. Death rates reached their highest point after Hitler ordered, on the 31st of October, that surviving prisoners be prioritized for labor deployment in Germany. The need for labor could not overcome other priorities for food distribution. By early 1942, two-thirds of all Soviet prisoners captured to that point had already died. One of the largest individual camps was Dulag 131 in Bobruisk, where an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Red Army soldiers died.

• 4. Conditions Inside the Camps

  ›

  By the end of 1941-81 camps had been established on occupied Soviet territory. Prisoners were often herded into open, fenced-off areas with no buildings and no latrines, and some camps had no running water. Some prisoners had to survive the entire winter exposed to the elements, or in unheated rooms, or in burrows they dug in the earth that sometimes collapsed on them. The Germans began preparing winter barracks in September 1941 and rolled out construction systematically in November, but the preparations were inadequate. Open cattle wagons were introduced for transport after October 1941, resulting in the death of roughly 20 percent of passengers from cold. Russian estimates put deaths in transit at between 200,000 and 250,000. Starving men attempted to eat leaves, grass, bark, and worms. Some wrote requests to their guards asking to be shot. Cannibalism was reported in several camps despite carrying the death penalty. Soviet civilians who tried to pass food through the wire were often shot. At the end of 1944, all prisoner-of-war camps were placed under the authority of SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Historian David Harrisville notes that orders from military authorities to refrain from excessive violence had little practical effect; their main function was to give German soldiers a positive self-image. Organized resistance groups formed at some camps regardless, and tens of thousands of prisoners attempted to escape. About half were recaptured, and around 10,000 reached Switzerland.

• 5. Selective Killings

  ›

  Soviet Jews, political commissars, Red Army officers, and communists were not merely left to die. They were targeted for deliberate execution. German counterintelligence identified Jewish prisoners through medical examinations, denunciation by fellow prisoners, or physical appearance. Beginning in August 1941, additional screening by the Security Police and the SS Security Service led to the killing of another 38,000 prisoners. Einsatzgruppen units visited prisoner-of-war camps to carry out mass executions with the army's cooperation. About 50,000 Jewish Red Army soldiers were killed, though 5 to 25 percent escaped detection. Soviet Muslims who were mistaken for Jews were sometimes killed. About 80 percent of Turkic prisoners had been killed by early 1942. At least 33,000 prisoners were transferred to Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Gusen, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, and Hinzert. Experimental execution techniques were tested on Soviet prisoners: gas vans at Sachsenhausen, and Zyklon B in gas chambers at Auschwitz. So many prisoners died at Auschwitz that its crematoria were overloaded. The SS began tattooing prisoner numbers in November 1941 to track which prisoners had died. After March 1944, all Soviet officers and non-commissioned officers implicated in escape attempts were executed. Those executions resulted in 5,000 deaths, including 500 officers who had taken part in an attempted mass escape from Mauthausen.

• 6. Collaboration and Survival

  ›

  A large proportion of Soviet prisoners who survived 1941 did so by collaborating with the Germans. Hitler had opposed recruiting Soviet collaborators, blaming non-German recruits for Germany's defeat in the First World War. His military commanders in the east ignored him from the start of the campaign. By 1943, fifty-three battalions had been raised from prisoners of war and other Soviet citizens: fourteen in the Turkestan Legion, nine in the Armenian Legion, eight each in the Azerbaijani and Georgian Legions, and seven each in the North Caucasian and Idel-Ural Legions. A separate group, the Trawniki men, were recruited directly from prisoner-of-war camps. They were largely ethnic Ukrainians and Germans but also included Poles, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Tatars, Latvians, and Lithuanians. The Trawniki men helped suppress the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and worked in extermination camps that killed millions of Jews in German-occupied Poland. After the German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, defections back to the Soviet side increased. In response, Hitler ordered all Soviet military collaborators transferred to the Western Front late that year. By D-Day in mid-1944, they made up 10 percent of the German forces occupying France. By the war's end, 1.4 million prisoners of war out of a total of 2.4 million were serving in some kind of auxiliary military unit.

• 7. Return and Reckoning

  ›

  About 500,000 prisoners had been freed by the Red Army by February 1945. Many were killed during forced death marches in the war's final months or died from illness after liberation. Those who made it back returned to a country whose infrastructure had been destroyed and whose population was experiencing food shortages. Soviet policy had treated surrender as treason from the beginning. A decree issued in August 1941 classified surrendering commanders and political officers as deserters, ordered their summary execution, and directed that their families be arrested. As the war ended, freed prisoners were sent to filtration camps for screening. According to official statistics, 57.8 percent eventually returned home, 19.1 percent were remobilized, 14.5 percent were drafted into labor battalions, and 6.5 percent were transferred to the NKVD. Trawniki men typically received sentences of 10 to 25 years in a labor camp. A Supreme Soviet decree on the 7th of July 1945 pardoned former prisoners who had not collaborated; a second amnesty in 1955 released remaining collaborators except those convicted of torture or murder. Former prisoners of war were not recognized as veterans and did not receive the associated benefits. In 1995, Russia equalized their status with other veterans. The German government's Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future excluded Soviet prisoners from its reparation claims. A symbolic payment of 2,500 euros finally reached the few thousand still alive in 2015.

• 8. The Silence Afterward

  ›

  Christian Streit published the first major scholarly study of the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in 1978. The Soviet archives did not become available to researchers until 1990. In 2016, there were no books in English dedicated to this subject. Historians have disagreed about the death toll. Working from the German figure of 5.7 million captured, Christian Streit estimated 3.3 million dead; Christian Hartmann put the figure at 3 million; Dieter Pohl estimated 2.8 to 3 million. Historian Viktor Zemskov, using a higher capture figure of 6.2 million, estimated around 3.9 million dead. By any of these counts, the deaths equaled or exceeded the killing rate of European Jews at the peak of the Holocaust, and more Soviet prisoners had died by early 1942 than members of any other group targeted by the Nazis. Soviet commemorative culture focused on antifascism and combat deaths, not captivity. A public debate erupted in the Soviet Union during perestroika in 1987 and 1988 over whether the former prisoners had been traitors; those arguing they had not prevailed after the Soviet Union dissolved. In Germany, the Wehrmacht exhibition, which toured around 2000, was the first major public challenge to the widespread belief that the German military bore no responsibility for Nazi-era crimes. For the 80th anniversary of the Second World War, several German historical and memorial organizations organized a traveling exhibition to carry that reckoning further.