who permit russian to take all the prisones of war in russia

[konig]

dear all,

last night when i was reading a book, a question mark lightened in my head.

who permit russian to take all the german soldiers to POW camps in russia? was it a legal? why americans did not prevent them? and most of the german pow was dead in russia and the returners could return after 1950.

br

[Tom Houlihan]

who permit russian to take all the german soldiers to POW camps in russia? was it a legal?

Who was going to tell Stalin he couldn't? Legal? Not technically, but it's not the only questionable post-war activity that was ignored.

[phylo_roadking]

br, the technical answer was - the treatment of POWs taken by nations fighting each other was regulated both by the Hague Conventions and The Geneva Conventions during WWII (NOT to be confused with the replacement all-in-one Geneva Convention of 1949) The Conventions werem't automatically binding on nations in those days - they had to "buy in" by signing up to the Hague Rules as "High Contracting Powers" to enjoy their protection under international law, or sign up to the Geneva Conventions or parts of them with the Red Cross in Geneva.

However, in 1917, the new USSR opted OUT of all international treaties the Tsar had made - including therefore those bits of the Hague and Geneva Conventions protecting POWs, in effect becoming a "rogue state". Stalin at times attempted to "opt back in" by accepting certain parts of the Geneva Convention - but very specifically NOT the bits on POWs as this would have meant that representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the monitoring body for the Geneva Conventions, would have been free to inspect camps in the USSR...including Gulags...!!!

In July 1941 Stalin offered to Hitler that both nations would abide by the Hague Convention and Hague Rules on Land Warfare - but Hitler refused. He was going to win, after all....so why offer good treatment to Russians? This meant that there was nothing, not even a "gentleman's agreement" (!!!) that prevented the Russians from treating POWs as they did...which was NOT to house them in POW camps in the USSR, actually, but to simply put them into the Gulag system of labour camps that the Soviets had prior to 1939 been using for their own citizens.

This is in turn why the Germans trteated RUSSIAN prisoners so badly, using them as forced labout etc. - because they didn't HAVE to do better than they did. All other combatants whos POWs they took, however, were given the minimum good treatment set down by the various Conventions.

[sniper1shot]

-All German forces that fought or were fighting the Soviets were to be turned over to the USSR....though not all were.
-All Soviet forces that turned and fought for the Germans were turned over to be "tried" for treason.

This was set down in Yalta if I am not mistaken. The Americans & British agreed.

Legal you ask?? What is legal in a war?

[nigelfe]

My understanding is that the nation that takes the prisoners is responsible for them and therefore makes there own arrangements for them.

As Prof Chris Bellamy has pointed out in his recent book 'Absolute War' about the E Front front neither Hitler nor Stalin had any motives to be concerned about their soldiers (etc) taken prisoner by the other side and how they were treated. It's merely a toss up as to who was least concerned and behaved worst. Why on earth should the US be concerned about German prisoners held by the Russians? You also have to take account of the genuine popular Soviet outrage at the unprovoked surprise attack by Germany, a country with which they had a pact.

[Schultz]

sniper i think had the answer, that was the agreement, any german forces that fought against the soviets were to be handed over but american and british forces on seeing what happend at times (not all) would let ppl slide.

The reason we can debate forever, that peoples lives were done this way, but there was still a war to be fought with japan so america and britain wasn't thinkin we should treat ppl nice or legal, they needed the troops to fight japan so at yalta they agreed to anything stalin said.

People was just tired of war, Patton may have wanted to go to war with russia but the rest of the world didn't.

Schultz

[phylo_roadking]

IIRC it was Eisenhower who stopped the transfer of POWs postwar to Russia as forced labour...

Konig - you DO mean postwar? or during the war? Postwar ALSObeings in the whole question of the "status change" ordered by Eisenhower - as "Disarmed Enemy personnel" NOT POWs they had no legal protection under EITHER HRLW or Geneva!

[Soldat7128]

dear all,

last night when i was reading a book, a question mark lightened in my head.

who permit russian to take all the german soldiers to POW camps in russia? was it a legal? why americans did not prevent them? and most of the german pow was dead in russia and the returners could return after 1950.

br

According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_and_German_POWs the U.S. themselves handed over hundreds of thousands of German P.O.W.s to the Soviets, their forced labor being part of the reparations Stalin negotiated at Yalta. The Brits were allegedly less likely to hand their German prisoners over.

Having said that, the death rates for German P.O.W.s in the SU was much lower than that for Soviet prisoners in Nazi Germany (35% vs. 57%, again according to Wikipedia).

[nigelfe]

I think there's some confusion here.

Western allies did not hand German PWs over to the USSR, whether or not they had fought on the Eastern Front - how would the W allies know where any GE PW had fought without interrogating them all? Plainly a daft notion, not to mention totally untrue.

However, substantial numbers of USSR soldiers, particularly from the Ukraine, chose to serve in the German Army after being taken PW by the Germans. The USSR, not unreasonably, regarded these men as traitors and demanded that any captured by the W Allies were repatriated to the USSR, which they were.

[Soldat7128]

I think there's some confusion here.

Western allies did not hand German PWs over to the USSR, whether or not they had fought on the Eastern Front - how would the W allies know where any GE PW had fought without interrogating them all? Plainly a daft notion, not to mention totally untrue.

However, substantial numbers of USSR soldiers, particularly from the Ukraine, chose to serve in the German Army after being taken PW by the Germans. The USSR, not unreasonably, regarded these men as traitors and demanded that any captured by the W Allies were repatriated to the USSR, which they were.

According to the article I cited above the Western Allies did hand over hundreds of thousands of German POWs, although it doesn't make any mention of basing that fact on whether they had fought on the Eastern Front or not (which would have been an absurd exercise in pedantry trying to figure out). It also mentions I think that they (the Western Allies) did not accept the surrender of certain German units (in Saxony and somewhere else), so that would be another aspect of it.

Most Soviets who fought on the Axis side were from what I remember Cossacks, so Ukrainians in a sense but I wouldn't consider those two categories synonymous. Also I *believe* Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army was mostly (Great) Russians? (In any case I don't fully buy your argument about Stalin legitimately seeing these men as traitors, although they certainly were, for the reason that the Soviets mistreated *all* the POWs they got back after the war--they were thought to have been "contaminated" by exposure to Western-bourgeois-fascist realities and were often sent to Siberia, denied status as veterans in the post-war era, and so on.)

If you have well-documented evidence to the contrary I would encourage you to go to the Wikipedia site and start tearing things up!

[nigelfe]

After cutting thru the distortions it would seem that PW continued to be used for civil labour tasks. Using PW for such work was entirely legal, Germany used western PW in this way and western allied countries used GE, Italian, etc PW in this way. There was no legal requirement for PW to be released from such work when Germany surrendered. The fact that USSR also needed such labour is entirely understandable given the scale of destruction they'd suffered and their manpower losses. Germany's use of slave labour from throughout the occuppied territories was, of course, of somewhat more doubtful legality.

[Soldat7128]

After cutting thru the distortions it would seem that PW continued to be used for civil labour tasks. Using PW for such work was entirely legal, Germany used western PW in this way and western allied countries used GE, Italian, etc PW in this way. There was no legal requirement for PW to be released from such work when Germany surrendered. The fact that USSR also needed such labour is entirely understandable given the scale of destruction they'd suffered and their manpower losses. Germany's use of slave labour from throughout the occuppied territories was, of course, of somewhat more doubtful legality.

Just to clarify my own post when I said the Soviets treated all POWs poorly I meant *returning Soviets who had been captured by German/Axis/etc. forces* (even if they hadn't taken up arms against the SU).

[Annelie]

After cutting thru the distortions it would seem that PW continued to be used for civil labour tasks. Using PW for such work was entirely legal, Germany used western PW in this way and western allied countries used GE, Italian, etc PW in this way. There was no legal requirement for PW to be released from such work when Germany surrendered. The fact that USSR also needed such labour is entirely understandable given the scale of destruction they'd suffered and their manpower losses. Germany's use of slave labour from throughout the occuppied territories was, of course, of somewhat more doubtful legality

Its not just POW's that were sent to Russia for labour. In Berlin in the summer of 45 the workers
from other countries were told they would be sent home. Instead they were put on trains for Russia,
never to be heard of again. I know one such women who realized the direction of which the train was
going and had the sense to jump off in Poland. First you work for the dritte reich then Russia
takes you? Not legal and not talked about.

[Soldat7128]

After cutting thru the distortions it would seem that PW continued to be used for civil labour tasks. Using PW for such work was entirely legal, Germany used western PW in this way and western allied countries used GE, Italian, etc PW in this way. There was no legal requirement for PW to be released from such work when Germany surrendered. The fact that USSR also needed such labour is entirely understandable given the scale of destruction they'd suffered and their manpower losses. Germany's use of slave labour from throughout the occuppied territories was, of course, of somewhat more doubtful legality

Its not just POW's that were sent to Russia for labour. In Berlin in the summer of 45 the workers
from other countries were told they would be sent home. Instead they were put on trains for Russia,
never to be heard of again. I know one such women who realized the direction of which the train was
going and had the sense to jump off in Poland. First you work for the dritte reich then Russia
takes you? Not legal and not talked about.

Now that's a screw job. First you get used as slave labor in Nazi Germany and then the war ends and you get sent to Siberia as a non-Soviet civilian?

[sniper1shot]

Cossacks, Ukrainians, and anyone who served in the German forces that were originally in the Soviet forces were asked to be sent back to the Soviet Union after the war. The US AND British forces did comply with this and there is eye witness accounts of executions being done with in ear shot.......whole units and groups sent to the Soviet zone were marched out of eye sight, and the British forces that did this then reported hearing large amounts of shooting.
Merchant Marines also reported seeing large amounts of repatriated soldiers being sent to the other side of warehouses and then hearing machine guns barking.
There are even British reports of people who had immigrated to Germany, Austria etc being lumped into this and being sent back to the Soviet Union. The British do not come out of this particular scene looking very good.

This is all well documented and any search of Yalta will bring this up. You can also check WWII reparations.