Approximately 5.7 million Soviet soldiers were captured by German forces during the Second World War. Of those, approximately 3.3 million died in German captivity. After the murder of European Jewry, this is the largest single category of Holocaust-era death. The Soviet prisoners of war died of starvation, exposure, disease, deliberate shooting, and gassing. The German treatment of Soviet prisoners was governed by ideological categorisation, not by international law: the Reich did not consider the Slavic Untermensch to be entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.
The conditions of captivity
Soviet prisoners taken in the early months of the eastern campaign were often held in open-air enclosures with no shelter, no rations, and no sanitation. Tens of thousands died of exposure during the winter of 1941-42. Those who survived were used as forced labour in conditions designed to kill them through overwork and starvation. The mortality rates in Soviet POW camps in the autumn and winter of 1941 reached approximately one per cent per day, levels not seen in any other category of German captivity.
The first gassing victims at Auschwitz
Soviet prisoners were the first victims of mass gassing at Auschwitz. In September 1941, approximately 600 Soviet prisoners and 250 Polish prisoners were killed in the first experimental use of Zyklon B in the basement of Block 11. The success of the experiment from the SS perspective led directly to the construction of dedicated gas chambers and the extension of the gassing method to other groups, including Jews from across occupied Europe.
The Commissar Order
The Wehrmacht’s 1941 Commissar Order required that any Soviet political officer captured was to be shot immediately rather than treated as a prisoner of war. The order was followed widely. Tens of thousands of Soviet political officers were killed under it. The order was one of the documents introduced at the Nuremberg trials as evidence that the German military, not just the SS, had participated knowingly in the criminal conduct of the war.
The post-war silence
The fate of Soviet prisoners has been comparatively under-discussed in Western Holocaust historiography, partly because the Cold War made Soviet sources hard to access and partly because the surviving prisoners themselves were often badly treated by the Stalinist regime on their return. Many were sent to Gulag camps for the offence of having been captured. The full documentation of what happened in German captivity has only become available since the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s.
See also
- The Soviet Union
- Franz Stangl
- Ordinary People Who Became Killers, Reserve Police Battalion 101
- The Einsatzgruppen
- The Treblinka Revolt 1943
- Political Prisoners
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards