War of the Century by Laurence Rees states on page 57. But how many in the West know the terrifying statistic that out of a total of 5.7 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner between June 1941 and February 1945 a staggering 3.3 million died-the majority as a result of disease and starvtion? This figure should cause utter outrage but seems to be forgotten or ignored, doesn't it? We are constantly reminded of the Holocaust and this seems just as bad. I can also understand why some Soviet PoWs would join the German Armed Forces just for the simple reason of staying alive a bit longer.
And the remainder, when "liberated", were packed off to gulags by Stalin. So one could say that the true figure was all Russian POWs.
The Soviet POWs did have a bad time of it. Called Traitor to the Motherland for surrendering even if they had no choice. I've read some liberated POWs were given a gun and sent to the Front straight away. No home leave for them. Chatting to a Lady at the Underground Hospital, Guernsey, she said as a young woman in WW2, it wasn't the Germans who scared her but the Soviet POW workers. I expect many of them had mental health problems, not surprising really.
Cheers Kyt. From that article. Daniel Goldhagen, in Hitler's Willing Executioners (p. 290), gives the astonishing figure of "2.8 million young, healthy Soviet POWs" killed by the Germans, "mainly by starvation ... in less than eight months" of 1941-42, before "the decimation of Soviet POWs ... was stopped" and the Germans "began to use them as laborers" (emphasis added). There is good reason to think that this rate of killing exceeds even the worst period of the Holocaust against the Jews,
Dreadful statistics indeed. Does anyone have knowledge of the losses of Allied POW's, British, French, etc. interned in the early years of the war?
Dreadful statistics indeed. Does anyone have knowledge of the losses of Allied POW's, British, French, etc. interned in the early years of the war? According to the attached article, for US and British POWs "it was probably in the range of four deaths per thousand per year". (0.4%) However, I've also seen stats that claim approx 3-4% (as opposed to between 25-35% of allied POWs who died under the Japanese).
This would also account for why the Russians defended so stubbornly following the huge encirclements at the start of the Eastern Campaign. Once they knew what the Germans were like, they werent quite so willing to surrender.
Cheers Kyt. From that article. The problem with this subject is that it a very emotiove topic, especialy since we are using stastics. The reason so many russains died in the early part of the war, was mainly down to the two factors, 1) the germans were winning! 2) The attitude towards the slavs. It was only when the Germans began to lose the war did the idea of using both Jews and Soviets as workers rather than just killing them come into action. Goldhagen quotes the figure of 2.7 million soviets working in the German economy later on.
Ask any former P.O.W. who was incarcerated at Stalag 1VB about Zeitang.This was a work camp for Russian P.O.W. about 12mls from Mulberg, and ask about the Lime Pit in which most of them finished after being either worked or starved to death.
