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?