German forces invaded the Soviet Union 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. After capture, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) were taken to transit camps (Durchgangslager, or Dulags) behind the front line. There the POWs awaited transfer to permanent POW camps (Stammlager, or Stalags) located in Germany and occupied Poland. In many cases, the prisoners were forced to march dozens of miles to the Dulags. These camps were often only open fields fenced in with barbed wire. German Army authorities provided the POWs with virtually no shelter, food, or medical care. The combination of overcrowding and malnutrition promoted the spread of disease among the prisoners.1
The desperate conditions in the Dulags were the result of deliberate choices by the Germans not to properly feed and house the prisoners.2 Nazi ideology promoted the idea that the people of the Soviet Union were "subhuman."3 Before the invasion of the Soviet Union, German war planners aimed to prevent Soviet people from consuming resources that could instead be used to feed Germans. The agricultural resources of the Soviet territories would be stolen to secure rations for German civilians and troops. The Germans anticipated that “umpteen million people” would starve to death due to this policy of extracting resources from the occupied Soviet Union.4
This film clip illustrates the terrible conditions in the Dulags in the occupied Soviet Union. This clip was part of a newsreel that was probably shown to German civilians. The film was taken in the summer of 1941 in the area of what is today Belarus and western Russia. Soviet prisoners crowd in a large ravine, surrounded by a barbed wire fence. German soldiers stand on higher ground, outside the fence, and throw food down to the starving prisoners, who fight desperately for it. The depiction of both the Soviet prisoners and their German captors appears designed to reinforce Nazi ideas about Germans’ supposed superiority over other “races.”
Soviet POWs were more vulnerable to starvation than Soviet civilians because their inability to leave the camps to obtain food meant that they had no options aside from the rations provided to them by the Germans.5 Local civilians, like those pictured in the film, were sometimes allowed to bring food to the POW camps. More often the Germans forbade Soviet civilians from feeding POWs and even beat or shot them for doing so.6
German Army policies in the occupied Soviet Union led to the mass death of Soviet POWs on an almost incomprehensible scale. Of the 3.35 million Soviet POWs captured by the Germans in 1941, 2 million (60 percent) had already died by February 1942—the majority of them due to starvation.