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Drawings by Alexei Mikhailovich Pankin

Drawings by Alexei Mikhailovich Pankin
Archives of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense
View this Artwork

tags: fear & intimidation food & hunger visual art

type: Artwork

Alexei Mikhailovich Pankin was a Red Army soldier from Moscow who was born in 1907. Pankin was wounded in battle on August 15, 1942, as German forces began to advance toward the Soviet city of Stalingrad.1 Pankin had no choice but to lie wounded in a field for three days until he was taken prisoner.

German forces had first invaded Soviet territories on June 22, 1941. They advanced rapidly and conquered large swaths of territory in the western Soviet Union within months. They also took millions of Soviet soldiers prisoner. Pankin was sent roughly 1,000 miles westward by train with other wounded POWs—far behind the German front. Pankin later testified that they were transported in sealed cars for nearly three weeks without food or medical treatment. On an unknown date in September 1942, they arrived at a POW camp established by the German Army outside the Ukrainian city of Slavuta.

Nazi leaders viewed Red Army soldiers as a unique threat to the Nazi regime’s plans to conquer and exploit Soviet territories—and to colonize eastern Europe with members of the Nazis’ so-called “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft). According to Nazi ideology, the war against the Soviet Union was not just a traditional military conflict. It was also a war for survival against the political and racial enemies of Nazi Germany.2 Nazi policies toward Soviet POWs were brutal and deadly. Roughly 3.3 million Soviet POWs in German captivity were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or abuse.3

The featured drawings by Pankin give glimpses into the misery and hunger experienced by Soviet POWs in German captivity.4 One of Pankin’s drawings show prisoners being served “balanda”—a watery soup made from rotten vegetables, potato peels, and sawdust. Sometimes it included rotten horse meat. Prisoners at Slavuta sometimes received no food at all for days at a time. A drawing called “Pikirovshchiki” (“Dive Bombers”) shows starving prisoners risking their lives in an attempt to steal a few potatoes from a passing cart. One drawing shows a POW so weakened and emaciated that the guards seem to have mistaken him for a corpse.5

The population of the POW camp at Slavuta reached roughly 20,000 prisoners by April 1943, and conditions became horribly overcrowded. Contagious diseases spread rapidly among malnourished Soviet POWs forced to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. German forces created a “major hospital” (German: “Gross-Lazarett”) at Slavuta that was nothing more than several stone buildings surrounded by barbed wire. POWs received no medical care here. It was simply a place where German guards concentrated wounded or ill Soviet POWs, leaving many of them to die from disease and starvation. Between 6,000—7,000 prisoners died at Slavuta.6 Pankin and the surviving POWs at Slavuta were liberated by the Red Army in January 1944.

Pankin and another Soviet POW named Sergei Mikhailovich Valiaev each created drawings that documented their experiences in the camp near Slavuta.7 Pankin’s and Valiaev’s drawings both showed how German guards mistreated Soviet POWs. Pankin made his drawings on cards that had originally been created by German authorities to register captured Red Army soldiers in POW camps.8 He submitted his drawings and a brief statement to Soviet authorities as evidence of German war crimes. What do his drawings suggest about Pankin’s experiences at Slavuta? What might the drawings reveal about how he viewed the prisoners and their captors?

The battle of Stalingrad became a pivotal moment in the history of World War II. Fierce urban warfare lasted many months, and the Soviet victory and German defeat at Stalingrad turned the tide of the war against Nazi Germany.

Nazi ideology equated Communism with Jewish people—a conspiracy theory known as “Judeo-Bolshevism.” To learn more, see Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Roughly 5.7 million Soviet POWs were held in German captivity over the course of the war. An estimated 3.3 million of these prisoners did not survive. To learn more, see Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, Third Edition, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 204; and 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.

For more details on the extreme deprivation and inhumane conditions imposed by German forces on Soviet POWs, see the related film in Experiencing History. 

To learn more about Pankin’s drawings and the POW experiences at Slavuta, see Maris Rowe-McCulloch, "Deprived of Masculinity? Experiences of Soviet Prisoners of War in Slavuta POW Camp as a Case Study," Canadian-American Slavic Studies 58 (July 2024). 

To learn more about the camp at Slavuta, see "Mannschaftsstammlager (Stalag) 357," The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume IV: Camps and Other Detention Facilities under the German Armed Forces, edited by Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington, IN and Washington DC: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022), 359–61. 

For more examples of artworks created by a Soviet soldier, see the related Experiencing History item, Images from the Liberation of Majdanek and Auschwitz.

Given that Pankin’s drawings were made on German military forms, it is likely that the drawings were only created after the liberation of the POWs by the Red Army in 1944.

A thin soup served in concentration camps and POW camps, the mainstay of the prisoners' diet.

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1. 52

[text of drawing]

“Sir, I’m not dead yet!”
–“The Russky is kaput, kaput!”

[bottom left of drawing] Drawn v/p X by A. Pankin

[bottom right, upside down] Comments:

[left margin] 1035 Military District (Wehrkreis) XVII Printing Plant, Vienna, H.Ho. 38/5

[typed below] "There were numerous instances in the camp when living persons who were unconscious were carried off to the mortuary, where they regained consciousness and where they also died after a while."

2. 51

[upper left of drawing] Comments:

[text of drawing] “Dive-bombers”

[bottom right] Sketched v/n X by Pankin

[right margin, same as left-margin text in previous drawing]

[typed below] "Driven to despair by hunger, prisoners of war, risking their lives, pounce on a passing horse-drawn cart carrying potatoes."

3. 49

[upper left] Comments:

[text of drawing] "Distribution of 'balanda'"1

[bottom right, same as in previous drawing]

[right margin, see previous drawing]

Archival Information for This Item

Source (Credit)
Archives of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense
RG Number 22.002M
Date Created
January 1944 to 1945
Photographer / Creator
Alexi Mikhailovich Pankin
Language(s)
German
Russian
Location
Slavuta, Ukraine
Still Image Type Artwork
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