German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union

• 1. Introduction

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  German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union represent one of the most contested and tragic chapters of the Second World War. By April 1945, some two million German soldiers were already held in Soviet captivity. The number would climb further still before the guns fell silent.

  Who were these men, and what became of them? Soviet records and German records tell vastly different stories about how many died. A West German government commission spent years trying to find out the truth. And a small number of prisoners were not released until 1956, more than a decade after the war ended. What kept them? The answers touch on forced labor, political theater, war crimes trials, and one diplomatic journey by a West German chancellor to Moscow.

• 2. Capture and the Early Camps

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  In the first six months of Operation Barbarossa, few Germans fell into Soviet hands. The early tide of the war ran the other way. It was only after the Battle of Moscow and the German retreat that prisoners began arriving in meaningful numbers, reaching 120,000 by early 1942.

  The Battle of Stalingrad changed the scale entirely. When the German 6th Army surrendered, 91,000 survivors became prisoners of war. That single event pushed the camp population to 170,000 in early 1943. The toll on those Stalingrad prisoners was catastrophic. Some 85,000 of them died in the months immediately following their capture. Only approximately 6,000 of that original group survived long enough to be repatriated after the war.

  The economic desperation of the Soviet Union in those early war years played directly into the death rate. As that situation eased in 1943, the mortality rate inside the camps began to fall. Prisoners were becoming too valuable alive. The Soviet economy had been stripped of manpower, and the captive Germans represented a labor force the state badly needed.

• 3. Forced Labor and Political Leverage

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  The Soviet state organized its prisoners into a labor system administered by the NKVD. POWs were put to work in wartime industry and, after the German surrender, in the physical reconstruction of a country devastated by years of fighting.

  For prisoners willing to cooperate politically, conditions improved. With the formation of the National Committee for a Free Germany and the League of German Officers, those who aligned themselves with the Soviet cause received better rations and more privileges. The organizations were used as propaganda tools, giving the Soviets a way to demonstrate that German soldiers themselves had turned against the Nazi regime.

  As the Eastern Front collapsed in 1944, captive numbers surged. Operation Bagration and the collapse on the southern part of the front nearly doubled the German POW population in the second half of that year. By April 1945, the count had reached two million men.

• 4. After the War: The Long Wait

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  A large number of German POWs were released by the end of 1946. At that point the Soviet Union actually held fewer prisoners than the United Kingdom and France combined. Repatriation continued through the late 1940s.

  With the creation of the German Democratic Republic in October 1949, the population in Soviet camps had fallen to 85,000. Most of those still held had been convicted as war criminals and given sentences of 25 years in forced labor camps. The Soviet Union treated these men as a separate category from ordinary POWs, labeling them Kriegsverurteilte, meaning war convicts.

  The last of them were not freed until 1956, following a direct intervention in Moscow by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Their return closed the final chapter of captivity, but it did not resolve the question of how many had died along the way. The Soviet Union released Austrian prisoners at a faster rate than Germans throughout this period, though even the last Austrians were not released until 1955.

• 5. Disputed Numbers

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  Soviet NKVD records, as compiled by Russian historian Grigori F. Krivosheev, list 2,733,739 German Wehrmacht POWs taken, with 381,067 dying in captivity. That figure breaks down to 356,700 German nationals and 24,367 from other nations. According to those records, the overall death rate was 13.9 percent.

  Western historians have consistently challenged those numbers. The West German commission headed by Erich Maschke published its findings in 1974. It concluded that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 of them died in captivity. The commission broke those deaths into three periods: 549,360 from 1941 to April 1945; 542,911 from May 1945 to June 1950; and 1,979 from July 1950 through 1955.

  German historian Rudiger Overmans placed the maximum number of German POW deaths in Soviet hands at 1.0 million. He confirmed 363,000 deaths through the records of the Deutsche Dienststelle, also known as WASt. Beyond that documented figure, Overmans stated that it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that 700,000 German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody. Academic Waitman Wade Beorn has cited a figure of 35.8 percent of German POWs dying in Soviet custody, a rate supported by other scholarly works.

• 6. Transfers from the West

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  Not all Germans who ended up in Soviet captivity were captured on the Eastern Front. According to Edward Peterson, the United States chose to hand over several hundred thousand German prisoners to the Soviet Union in May 1945 as a gesture of friendship.

  Historian Niall Ferguson has written that it is clear many German units actively sought to surrender to Allied forces other than the Red Army, a preference that sometimes proved futile. Heinz Nawratil maintains that American forces refused to accept the surrender of German troops in Saxony and Bohemia and instead transferred them to Soviet control.

  Reports in the New York Times documented thousands of prisoners transferred to Soviet authorities from camps in the West. Six thousand German officers were sent from the West to NKVD special camp Nr. 7, located at the site of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and from there to Soviet POW camps. A further data point came with the release of Soviet Ministry for the Interior documents in 1990, which listed 6,680 inmates in the NKVD special camps in Germany between 1945 and 1949 who were subsequently transferred to Soviet POW camps.

• 7. Nationalities in the NKVD Count

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  The Soviet accounting of Wehrmacht prisoners was complicated by how the NKVD categorized nationality. The Soviet Union treated ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe as nationals of their prewar country of residence. Sudeten Germans, for example, were recorded as Czechs.

  The NKVD figures also excluded conscripted civilians counted separately under forced labor categories, and did not include prisoners from Italy, Hungary, Romania, Finland, or Japan. An Austrian historian has argued that Soviet-era documents point to 2.6 million prisoners in total, including 400,000 civilians.

  Within the nationalities counted, death rates varied sharply. German nationals died at a rate of 15 percent according to Soviet records; Austrians at 7 percent; Poles at 5 percent. The category listed as others carried a recorded death rate of 73 percent, though the small total of 3,989 in that group limits what conclusions can be drawn. The Maschke Commission's work, culminating in its 1974 report, remains the most comprehensive Western effort to reconcile these figures with the human reality behind them.