The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War #WW2 #History

The main sources I've used are on the screen, but for a full list of all my WW2 sources, please see the link in the description. National Socialism went East in 1941. They expected the war with the Soviet Union to be over in a matter of weeks, and expected many more Red Army prisoners of war than they Yet, they deliberately did not prepare to take care of these vast numbers, at least not in the way you'd expect from a civilized society. Upon capture, German soldiers would separate and shoot Red Army commissars, their political in order to rid the world of the adherents to Bolshevism. 80% of their marked units reported having executed commissars during Operation Barbarossa. Maltreatment and the indiscriminate shooting of Russian POWs was not solely the result of specific orders from above, neither was it necessarily conducted in a disciplined manner. Division and other records indicate that wild and often indiscriminate shootings of Soviet POWs began during the first days of the campaign. The encirclement battles had resulted in the capture of thousands of Soviet prisoners, many of whom were already malnourished, or the survivors of previous famines in the Soviet Union. Even though they had been encircled, German soldiers were encouraged by their higher-ups to execute Soviet soldiers found individually or in small groups behind the lines, as if they were partisans. And prisoners who were wounded or sick were also often shot on the Many Germans had closed their hearts to such sites. If I had known the rest of it, I think I would have run away. Long columns of half-starved Soviet prisoners snaked across the countryside on their way to the prisoner-of-war camps, which were sometimes hundreds of kilometers away and took days or weeks to get to. The Germans, having been bombarded by newsreels referring to the Soviet prisoners as Mongols, Asiatics, and sub-human Bolsheviks, beat their captives. The wounded often perished first, followed by those who fell sick, or were too tired to walk due to their malnourishment. So many were shot around the vicinity of Vyazma later in the campaign that the commander of the rear area was uneasy about its impact on enemy propaganda. Columns devoured everything by the side of the road, including the leaves off the trees. Goering even boasted, "...hunger among Russian prisoners has reached such an extreme that it was no longer necessary to send them under armed guard to the rear. It is enough to put at the head of a column of prisoners a camp kitchen. Thousands and thousands of prisoners trail along like a herd of famished animals." Rail transport was available, but the open freight cars were no luxury. There was no protection from the Russian winter, which froze 20% of them to death on average, but some journeys reportedly had a death rate of 70%. When the trains reached their destinations, hundreds or sometimes even thousands of frozen corpses would tumble from the open doors. But there was a fear from some units that the rail cars would be contaminated by the supposedly sub-human captives, and so 16th Army instructed its formations not to transport prisoners using the trains. Those unlucky enough to survive the journey found themselves at one of over 80 Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. There were three types of these camps. Dulags – transit camps, Stalags – base camps for enlisted men and NCOs, and the smaller Oflags – for officers. In practice, all three types of camps were often nothing more than an open field surrounded by barbed wire. Prisoners were not registered by name, a policy that only happened twice in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps, and later in the death camps of the Holocaust. Often there was no shelter, except maybe some mud-huts that the prisoners carved for themselves, with the result that many froze to death in the harsh winter. Once winter approached, the poorly equipped German soldiers often deprived their prisoners of coats and boots. Toilets were either non-existent, or few and far between. At one camp near Uman, thousands of Soviet wounded lay on the open ground, with no shelter and little medical care. Nearly every day we had men die of exhaustion. The others would take their dead back to camp to bury them there. They would take turns carrying corpses and never seemed in the least moved by them. The camp graveyard was very large. The number of men under the ground must have been greater than that of those still among the living. In mid-July 1941, the OKW and RSHA had agreed that certain prisoners would be removed and then murdered by special SS units. From October 1941, Einsatzgruppen were allowed into the prisoner-of-war camps, where they shot Jews, commissars, officers and other political opponents. Often they couldn't identify who was who, so many non-Jews, non-officers and non-commissars were shot instead or in addition. Roughly 100,000 Jewish prisoners were separated and given this special treatment. German camp guards were informed in September that they would be punished if they used their weapons too little. And the food. Well, there basically wasn't any. Some reportedly received 100 grams of bread per day, and the Ministry of Food allocated 1,561 calories a day for prisoners. But the official calorie quotas were not met, and when they were, they were starvation rations anyway. The German High Command urged its soldiers not to feel sorry for the starving prisoners, and to remember that every ounce of food that is given to the prisoners is food that isn't available and thus taken from the German people at home or German soldiers. For National Socialists, food was seen as a zero-sum economic game. Prisoners ate grass, leaves, bark, pine needles, nettles, occasionally a stray dog, sometimes horse meat if the guards were feeling generous. Prisoners were that desperate for food that they dug into the ground to find roots and worms. Prisoners fought to lick utensils, while their German guards laughed at their behaviour. When the cannibalism began, the Germans presented it as the result of the low level of Soviet civilization. In Minsk, where over 140,000 prisoners were kept in an extremely small area, men killed each other for a piece of bread or a drop of water. In late October 1941, just as the weather was turning, Army Quartermaster General Wagner ordered a reduction of rations for prisoners unable to work. Death rates in the camps increased to 1% to 2.5% per day. At Kurok 582 in November 1941, when a rear security unit took over from the 9th Army, watchdogs received 50 times the ration of a single Soviet prisoner. Prisoners were also crammed into the camp's single-storey accommodation blocks, and there were only two latrines for 11,000 prisoners. It's no wonder that cases of both typhus and cannibalism broke out that autumn. At Dulag 185, Dulag 127, and Stalag 341 in the East Belarusian city Mahele, witnesses saw mountains of unburied corpses outside the barbed wire. Some 30 to 40,000 prisoners died in these camps. At Dulag 342 at Molodechno, conditions were so awful that prisoners submitted written petitions asking to be shot. At Stalag 306 at Kirovarad, German guards reported that prisoners ate the bodies of comrades who had been shot, sometimes before the victims were dead. Near Minsk was Stalag 352. This had been designed to accommodate 30,000 people. Instead, it had 100,000 prisoners of war, and another 40,000 civilians as well. All the prisoners were packed like sardines between the barbed wire, and had to urinate and defecate where they stood. Brute force had to be used by the guards to keep discipline. Some 109,500 people died there. It wasn't just German reports that recorded these atrocities either. In occupied Poland, the Polish resistance recorded the death rates of Soviet prisoners of war in 1941-42. They reported that 45,690 people died in the camps in the General Government in just 10 days between the 21st and 30th of October 1941. And local peasants in both Poland and the Soviet Union were prepared to help feed the starving Soviet prisoners. Sometimes the Germans allowed it. Other times, they denied it. In retaliation, the Germans shot the Polish women carrying the milk jugs and destroyed whole Polish villages. About half a million Soviet prisoners of war starved to death in the General Government. Many skilled workers had been sent to the Eastern Front in 1941, seriously depriving the German armaments factories of labour. They tried to compensate by employing women and old men, but this wasn't enough. They had to use Soviet prisoners of war. But it wasn't until the 13th of October 1941 that Hitler changed the policy to allow this to happen. For many, it was too late. The Germans discovered that most of their prisoners were either now dead or unable to work due to malnutrition or disease, with only 200,000 available to work immediately. The situation did not begin to improve until the spring of 1942, when Hitler ordered that Russian prisoners be given enough to eat. Over the course of the war, the death rate for Soviet prisoners of war in German camps was somewhere near 58%. But it was probably much higher in the first months of the war. The death rate for German prisoners of war in Soviet hands was 13.5%, which includes the 6th Army at Stalingrad, who were starved in their pocket and died shortly after capture as a result of that malnourishment. For comparison, the death rate for British and American POWs in Germany was less than 5%, which just shows that this wasn't accidental, as some claim, but a deliberate policy. Somewhere in the region of 3.3 million Soviet prisoners fell into German hands in the first six months of the conflict, only about a million of which were still alive by the end of 1941. And half of those who did survive weren't fit enough to be carted off to the Reich as slave labourers. Overall, throughout the war, 5.7 million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner by the German Army in World War Two. Of these, nearly 3 million Soviet prisoners were forced to work for the Germans in their homeland, where 400,000 would die. Even then, the racist attitude of the German soldiers caused additional suffering en route to Germany. Several commanders attempted to march their prisoners on foot across the newly conquered territories to avoid infecting German railroad cars with such subhumans. Small wonder then that German industry received little help from slave labour until 1942, and that forced labour productivity never approached that of the German workers. Somewhere near 3.1 to 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German hands in World War Two. Regardless of which organization had custody at the time of death, those prisoners were the moral responsibility of the German Army that captured them. And yet, some people believe that the Wehrmacht wasn't responsible for any of the crimes committed in World War Two, especially not the murder of commissars, prisoners of war, or the Jews. I mean, German generals like Guderian, von Manstein, and the beloved Franz Halder said they were innocent. And we must believe those honourable gentlemen. Plus, if you read military history books written by German veterans like Kurowski and Haupt, which have great reviews on many internet book sites by the way, you'll hear all about the Soviet atrocities, and nothing about German ones. So, of course, why would we accuse the amazingly amazing Wehrmacht of committing such crimes? Not until the 1970s did historians begin to analyze the significant connection between the outbreak and course of war and the mass murder of undesirable elements and inferior races. This may also explain why many a veteran still doggedly perpetuates the myth that the Wehrmacht was not involved in the annihilation policy in the East. It is true that some German leaders stressed the advantages of a more humane treatment of prisoners, but these were the exception to the rule, and usually did so for reasons that benefited the Germans, not because they wanted to help the prisoners. Some, like General Lehmannsson, commander of 47th Panzer Corps, complained that his men were shooting prisoners of war, deserters and civilians. This is murder! The German Wehrmacht is waging this war against Bolshevism, but not against the united Russian peoples. We want to bring back peace, calm and order to this land which had suffered terribly for many years from the oppression of a Jewish and criminal group. A Russian soldier who had been taken prisoner while wearing a uniform and after he put up a brave fight, has the right to decent treatment. This instruction does not change anything regarding the Führer's order on the ruthless action to be taken against partisans and Bolshevik commissars. So even here, in a best-case scenario where a German general was calling for the humane treatment of Soviet soldiers, it was still alright to kill commissars, who were soldiers in uniform, and partisans. Although the commissars within the Red Army wore uniform, they were regarded not as combatants, but as political functionaries. The Army High Command's fear that such hardliners might continue disseminating propaganda in the Reich if taken prisoner of war was a major factor dictating the shooting of political commissars of all kinds, a policy illegal by all international rules. And, as we have mentioned earlier, 80% of all Wehrmacht units on the Eastern Front reported having executed commissars during Operation Barbarossa. For example, by the end of October 1941, Guderian's 2nd Panzer Group had shot 183 commissars. Not very innocent, was he? Nor was General-Oberst Franz Halder the Chief of the General Staff. Since October 1940, Müller, General Officer of Special Duties attached to Halder, had been subject to Halder's directives regarding military jurisdiction within the army and against the population of occupied territories. Since Halder was willing to let the troops participate in the intended ideological war, the Army High Command formulated its own draft that confined military jurisdiction during Operation Barbarossa to the maintenance of discipline and expected the troops to deal themselves with civilians impeding or inciting others to impede the Wehrmacht. In cases where such criminal elements could not be shot while fighting or escaping, an officer was to decide whether they were to be shot. The Army High Command also took the initiative against the commissars in the Red Army. As bearers of the Jewish-Bolshevik worldview, they were to be executed after being taken prisoner on the orders of an officer who had to identify the commissar in consultation with two other officers or NCOs. The High Command formulated the first draft of the commissar order, and the Wehrmacht and Army High Commands were also responsible for Soviet prisoners of war. The army was to separate civilians and prisoners of war according to nationality and politics, and at the beginning of the conflict, the Wehrmacht was responsible for eliminating selections of prisoners in the POW camps, not the Einsatzkommandos or the SS. Only later, on the 7th of October 1941, did this policy change, and the Army High Command allowed Einsatzkommandos direct access into the camps. Before this, the Wehrmacht was responsible for the camps. The Wehrmacht also drafted Soviet prisoners of war into their army, who may have constituted 40% of some support units by the end of 1941. The military leaders did not merely comply with Hitler's dogmatic views. They were not mere victims of their own professional tradition. They too believed that the dangers of Russia and Bolshevism should be eliminated forever. Hitler was the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. If he's guilty, so is the Wehrmacht, who carried out his orders and created their own. Not only that, but he provided the moral and ideological basis for what the army did. Before the conflict even began, Hitler was telling the generals that the upcoming war was a war of extermination. So it's not like they didn't know. In fact, they embraced it. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, told his commanders to view the German-Soviet war as… "...a struggle between two different races, requiring their troops to act with all necessary harshness." General von Küchler, commander of 18th Army, agreed with Hitler, saying that National Socialist Germany and the Marxist-Socialist Soviet Union were ideologically and racially distinct, and agreed with the Commissar Order. "...the war against Russia is an important chapter in the struggle for existence of the German nation. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slav peoples, of the defence of European culture against Moscovite-Asiatic inundation, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the destruction of present-day Russia, and it must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron will to exterminate the enemy mercilessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system are to be spared." The criminal orders were the Barbarossa Directive of the 13th of May, and the Commissar Order of the 6th of June 1941. There was also the Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia, which was published on the 19th of May 1941 by the Wehrmacht. All these orders spelled out that this was an ideological conflict against Judeo-Bolshevism, that Commissars, Partisans and Jews were to be eliminated. And this was before the Wehrmacht agreed with the SS that the Einsatzkommandos should liquidate those elements from the prisoner-of-war camps. Now, what's interesting is that some claim that it was ok to inflict such suffering on the Soviet prisoners of war because, they state, that the Soviet Union didn't sign or agree to the Geneva Convention. Well, even if that was some sort of moral argument for the inhumane treatment of human beings, who themselves had no option in signing the treaty, the fact is that on the 17th of July 1941, the Soviets declared that, if the Germans did the same, they would abide by the Geneva Convention. The German response, by Hitler himself, was simply to reject Soviet intentions. So, in response to the German response, the Soviets didn't adhere to it. And even better, the OKW, the Armed Forces High Command of the military, did say on the 16th of June 1941 that, although the Soviet Union hadn't recognized the Geneva Convention, the Germans would stick to it, with some exceptions. Well, that was a blatant lie. And the point is this. Even if the Soviet Union hadn't signed the Geneva Convention, Germany had. And even if they hadn't, that's no excuse for treating individual human beings like this. Why should individual human beings suffer just because governments always fail to do their jobs correctly? No, the reality is that the National Socialists wanted to inflict this suffering on their ideological enemies in this war of annihilation. There was a food crisis going on for the Germans. The Wehrmacht had to be fed without reducing rations for German civilians. Since these catastrophic conditions also existed in camps in the Reich, the mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of war was not due to ignorance or incompetence. To the Nazi leadership, it was axiomatic that Germans and Russians could not both be fed. The former would thus be supplied at the expense of the latter, regardless of the consequences. On the 16th of September 1941, with logistics all over the place, Goering decided to improvise. He ordered the German soldiers in the east to simply live off the land. Food from the Soviet Union was to be allocated first to German soldiers, then to Germans in Germany, then to Soviet citizens, and then to Soviet prisoners of war. German commanders would have to continue the war, which meant feeding soldiers, which meant starving others. This was the political logic and the moral trap. For the soldiers and the low-level officers, there was no escape but insubordination or surrender to the enemy. Prospects as unthinkable for German troops in 1941 as they had been for Ukrainian Communists in 1932. Yes, Hitler was clearly responsible for the ideological aspect of the War of Annihilation, plus implementations of things like the Commissar Order. However, he wasn't alone in this. The Wehrmacht High Command agreed, supported, and helped draft these orders, and took charge of the Soviet prisoners from the beginning. It cannot claim that it didn't know how many prisoners there would be, because they expected the war to be over in a few weeks, thus they expected a large influx. They can't claim that it was an accident because they wrote the plans before the start of the invasion, and Hitler alone did not commit all of the crimes. Responsibility lies with the Wehrmacht, its generals, and many of its soldiers, as much as it does with Hitler. And I will leave you with a final thought. The concentration camps of the Third Reich also took in Soviet prisoners of war, and these camps began to change their character as a result. Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Auschwitz became, as the SS used them to execute Soviet prisoners of war, killing facilities. Some 8,000 Soviet prisoners were executed at Auschwitz, 10,000 at Mauthausen, 18,000 at Sachsenhausen. At Auschwitz on the 3rd of September 1941, a pesticide known as Zyklon B was tested on Soviet prisoners. This has led some to conclude that the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in the autumn of 1941 was an important watershed for the Third Reich in the process of mass murder and the Holocaust. Thanks for watching, bye for now.