Soviet POWs in German Captivity

Nazi Ideology and Soviet Prisoners of War

German authorities treated Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) differently than other captured Allied soldiers. The Nazis believed that Soviet troops were a special threat to Nazi plans to conquer and colonize eastern Europe as German “living space” (“Lebensraum”). Nazi ideology falsely claimed that the Slavic, Jewish, and Central Asian soldiers of the Soviet Union were “sub-humans” controlled by Jewish Communists intent on destroying Germany. To the Nazis, Soviet soldiers represented more than a normal military adversary—they also supposedly posed a political and racial threat to the Nazis’ so-called "national community" ("Volksgemeinschaft"). Soviet POWs in German captivity faced starvation, disease, exposure, and mass murder. Roughly 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) were killed as a result of Nazi policies during World War II.

The German War against the Soviet Union

As they prepared to attack the Soviet Union in June of 1941, Nazi leaders imagined the conflict as a war to destroy the racial and political enemies of National Socialism. The goal of conquering "living space" for the Nazis’ imagined “national community” meant that this was not an ordinary war—it was also a Nazi crusade against Jewish people and Communism. As they were planning for the invasion, German military leaders issued orders instructing German forces to commit war crimes against suspected saboteurs and the Soviet civilian population. The Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars—known as the Commissar Order—instructed German forces to separate Soviet political officers from other POWs and execute them.¹ German soldiers’ conduct on the eastern front during World War II was especially vicious and brutal.

German Treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War

German forces led a surprise attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. They advanced rapidly and captured millions of Soviet soldiers. A photograph of female Soviet POWs marching to an unknown camp in 1941 shows some of these soldiers after their capture.² German forces provided the POWs with little or no food, shelter, or medical care. When they did receive food, it was often raw potatoes, a thin soup made of rotten vegetables, or bread baked from flour mixed with sawdust. A 1941 film of Soviet POWs shows some of the terrible conditions experienced by the prisoners. A photograph of Soviet POWs forced to exercise gives a glimpse into the physical abuse that the POWs experienced in German captivity. Drawings by Alexei Mikhailovich Pankin document some of the scenes of starvation and disease he witnessed in German captivity. German forces often confined Soviet POWs in open fields exposed to the elements, forcing the prisoners to dig holes for shelter. The memoir of Fedor Fedorovich Khudiakov records how POWs struggled to survive as German forces left them exposed with no protection from the elements.

Mass Murder of Soviet Prisoners of War

German forces did not only kill Soviet POWs through deliberate neglect—they also directly murdered Soviet POWs by mass shooting and gassing.³ Soviet POWs were among the first victims of Nazi poison gassing experiments, and German forces killed unknown numbers of POWs by mass shooting. One POW in German captivity wrote a song called “Hecatomb 1941” in order to document the mass murders he witnessed. Soviet civilians sometimes witnessed German forces massacre Soviet POWs as well. The testimony of Mariia Trufanova describes how she saw German forces murder Soviet POWs and Jewish people in successive waves of mass killing.⁴

Soviet Prisoners of War and Forced Labor

German policies toward Soviet POWs began to shift in late 1941 as German military setbacks started causing severe labor shortages in Nazi Germany. Nazi leaders had counted on a quick victory over the Soviet Union, but Soviet resistance increased after the rapid German advances in the first months of the invasion. The German military suffered many casualties, and German authorities began drafting workers from German war industries to take their place. These industries needed replacement workers if they were to continue producing military supplies for the German war effort. German authorities decided to try solving this labor shortage in part by exploiting Soviet POWs as forced laborers.⁵

Exploiting Soviet POWs as forced laborers meant that German authorities were forced to make minimal improvements to the living conditions of the POWs. Abuse, neglect, and mistreatment in German captivity had damaged the prisoners’ health so much that the vast majority of them were no longer physically capable of working. A German military order on the labor deployment of Soviet POWs from December 1941 describes how German captivity had left virtually all of the POWs “in a state of severe malnutrition.” German authorities ordered minimal improvements so that Soviet POWs could be strong enough for forced labor. But years of Nazi propaganda about the Soviet Union led many German officers to resist these orders because they still held strong prejudices against Soviet soldiers. A 1942 circular on preventing prisoner escapes describes some of the anxieties German authorities felt over the presence of Soviet forced laborers in Nazi Germany. Soviet forced laborers faced difficult conditions, but German authorities’ decision to exploit Soviet POWs for forced labor greatly increased the POWs’ odds of survival.

Collaboration with Nazi Germany

German military losses and personnel shortages led to other changes to Nazi policies targeting Soviet POWs. German authorities began recruiting collaborators from within POW camps. Some of the Soviet POWs in German captivity chose to collaborate in order to increase their chances of survival. Others chose to collaborate with Nazi Germany out of support for the Nazi movement or opposition to the Soviet government. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs chose to collaborate in some fashion—often as informants, translators, or camp guards.⁶ Several thousand Soviet POWs were trained to become camp guards for the Nazi SS at the Trawniki camp in German-occupied Poland. The so-called Trawniki men served as auxiliary guards at the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers.⁷

Postwar Persecution of Soviet Prisoners of War

Soviet POWs who had survived German captivity often faced continued persecution after their liberation. Soviet authorities treated all Soviet soldiers who had been captured as suspected cowards and traitors.⁸ Many Soviet POWs who survived German captivity were imprisoned in Soviet prison camps for years after the end of World War II. An interview with Lev Manevich describes how he was sentenced to hard labor in a Soviet mine because he had been captured by German forces during the war. Because they were characterized as disloyal cowards, Soviet POWs were largely excluded from the official postwar Soviet narrative of World War II—known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War. Their experiences did not receive much attention, and they were not encouraged to write memoirs or give interviews. The postwar social stigma against POWs in the Soviet Union partly explains why there are so few available primary sources on the experiences of Soviet POWs in German captivity during World War II.

German forces killed roughly 3.3 million Soviet POWs during World War II. Nazi ideology led Nazi leaders and German military authorities to wage a brutal war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. German forces targeted Soviet POWs with policies of deliberate neglect and mass murder—more than half of the Soviet POWs in German captivity did not survive. The sources gathered here give a glimpse into some of the experiences of Soviet POWs during World War II.

To learn more, see Geoffrey Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2007).

To learn more about women combatants in the Soviet military, see Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 2017); and Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

To learn more, see Thomas Earl Porter, “Forgotten Genocide: The Case of Soviet Prisoners of War,” Prisoners of War and Forced Labour: Histories of War and Occupation, edited by Marianne Neerland Soleim (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 19-34.

To learn more about the connections between the mass murder of Soviet POWs and the mass murder of European Jews, see Karel Berkhoff, "The Mass Murder of Soviet Prisoners of War and the Holocaust: How Were They Related?," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (2005): 789-796; Pavel Polian, "First Victims of the Holocaust: Soviet-Jewish Prisoners of War in German Captivity," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (2005), 763-787; and Aron Shneyer, Pariahs Among Pariahs: Soviet-Jewish POWs in German Captivity, 1941-1945, translated by Yisrael Cohen (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016).

To learn more, see Ulrich Herbert, Hitler's Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

To learn more, see Mark Edele, Stalin's Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers Became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–1945 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017).

To learn more, see Peter R. Black, "Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 25, no. 1 (2011): 1–99.

To learn more, see Seth Bernstein, Return to the Motherland: Displaced Soviets in World War II and the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).