German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union

• 1. The Stalingrad Discrepancy

  ›

  In early 1943, the German 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad. Ninety-one thousand survivors became prisoners of war. Eighty-five thousand died in the months following their capture. Only approximately six thousand survived to be repatriated after the war. The BBC put the number of POW captured at Stalingrad at 91,000 of whom 6,000 survived. Soviet records list 2,733,739 German Wehrmacht POWs taken with 381,067 having died in captivity. A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity. Rüdiger Overmans believes that the deaths of 363,000 POWs in Soviet captivity can be confirmed by the files of Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt). He maintains that it seems entirely plausible while not provable that 700,000 German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody.

• 2. Labor For The Economy

  ›

  The desperate economic situation in the Soviet Union eased in 1943. At the same time POWs became an important source of forced labor for the Soviet economy deprived of manpower. With the formation of the National Committee for a Free Germany and the League of German Officers, POWs who cooperated with the Soviets received more privileges and better rations. By April 1945 the number of POWs had risen to 2,000,000. A total of 2.8 million Wehrmacht personnel were held as POWs by the Soviet Union at the end of the war according to Soviet records. A large number of German POWs had been released by the end of 1946 when the Soviet Union held fewer POWs than the United Kingdom and France between them. Most of those still held had been convicted as war criminals and sentenced to long terms in forced labor camps usually 25 years. It was not until 1956 that the last of these Kriegsverurteilte were repatriated following the intervention of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Moscow.

• 3. Special Camps And Officers

  ›

  Soviet Ministry for the Interior documents released in 1990 listed 6,680 inmates in the NKVD special camps in Germany from 1945 to 1949 who were transferred to Soviet POW camps. It is known that 6,000 German officers were sent from the West to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp one of the NKVD special camps at the time and from there to POW camps. According to a report in the New York Times thousands of prisoners were transferred to Soviet authorities from POW camps in the West. The Soviets considered ethnic Germans of Eastern Europe conscripted by Germany as nationals of their country of residence before the war for example the Sudeten Germans were labelled as Czechs. These figures do not include prisoners from Italy Hungary Romania Finland and Japan. The Soviet statistics for POW do not include conscripted civilians for the Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union.

• 4. The May Surrender Order

  ›

  Edward Peterson states that the U.S. chose to hand over several hundred thousand German prisoners to the Soviet Union in May 1945 as a gesture of friendship. Niall Ferguson maintains that it is clear that many German units sought to surrender to the Americans in preference to other Allied forces particularly the Red Army. Heinz Nawratil maintains that U.S. forces refused to accept the surrender of German troops in Saxony and Bohemia instead handing them over to the Soviet Union. Some hundreds of thousands who had fled to the Americans to avoid being taken prisoner by the Russians were turned over in May to the Red Army in a gesture of friendship. This decision created a significant number of additional deaths among those transferred to Soviet custody.

• 5. Adenauer And The Final Release

  ›

  Chancellor Konrad Adenauer succeeded in concluding negotiations for the release to Germany by the end of the year of 15,000 German civilians and prisoners of war. A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity. The last Austrian prisoners were not released until 1955. It was not until 1956 that the last of these Kriegsverurteilte were repatriated following the intervention of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Moscow. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956. Rüdiger Overmans: Soldaten hinter Stacheldraht. Deutsche Kriegsgefangene des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Ullstein München 2002 page 258 confirms this timeline.