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

[Volgadon]

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).

ALL is quite an exaggeration. MANY were mistreated, imprisoned, denied rights, but others were swiftly rehabilitated, or spent a year or two in interment. Circumstances were taken into account, most of the time.

[Soldat7128]

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).

ALL is quite an exaggeration. MANY were mistreated, imprisoned, denied rights, but others were swiftly rehabilitated, or spent a year or two in interment. Circumstances were taken into account, most of the time.

Ok fair enough. I'd only heard that returning POWs were sent to Siberia, but the real story probably isn't as dramatic or extreme as that, as you stated.

[Volgadon]

I most certainly am not defending the SU, but it's easy to take Ivan Denisovich and generalise.

[Soldat7128]

I most certainly am not defending the SU, but it's easy to take Ivan Denisovich and generalise.

Yes especially when the sources are latently or not-so-latently predisposed a certain way.

It's amazing the amount of misleading negative stories one hears about others peoples and countries, I think. (This goes for everywhere.)

It's one of the blessings of English becoming widespread that people can share a common language, even if you don't like the Anglo-American aspect of "globalization", that such misconceptions have a greater chance of being challenged.

[sniper1shot]

VOLGADON- are you denying that the Soviet Union murdered/executed returning Soviet POW's after the war?? I'm not saying all of them.....but a lot of them.

[Volgadon]

Nowhere near as many as popular opinion would have.

[phylo_roadking]

Any figures from Anne Applebaum on new Gulag intakes in 1945-46? I leant out my copy. There SHOULD be a jump in those years...

[sniper1shot]

The numbers I remember is 10's of thousands. Not sure what public opinion is though, so I can't dispute that one.

[Stephan H.]

This is an older post but it caught my attention as the topic has come up in several recent books.

From Giles Macdonough After the Reich (2007):

pg 392 "Around 8 million German soldiers were captured at the end of the war - making a total, if you add those taken before May 1945, of around eleven million. . . . The Western Allies captured some 7.6 million a, while the rest fell into the hands of the Red Army. About five of the eleven million were released within a year." It appears he does not give a total number of assumed German POWs in Soviet Captivity, but alludes to the fact that they were over 1 million.

pg 393 "The idea of using the POWs as slaves was aired at Moscow in 1943. The originators of the proposal were the British. At Yalta it was decided that the men could be made to repair the damage Germany had caused to the Allies."

pg 393 "With the exception of the Americans, the Allies all envisaged a prolonged use of German slave labor."

Madonough has an entire section of the book with more stats than is probably necessary to put here, although I wil mention two more. On pg 395 "In 1979 there were believed to be 72,000 prisoners still alive in - chiefly Russian custody."

On pg 420-421 "The imprisonment of German and other Axis POWs in Russia was marked by an element of callous chaos. Huge numbers of Germans went east-not just soldiers, but non-military men aged between sixteen and sixty, including scientists and technicians. Records attesting to their identity were inadequate, and whether they lived or died was clearly a matter of supreme indifference to Soviet authorities. As it happened, 1,094,250 soldiers perished, half of them before April 1945."

Yes, Soviet "citizens" that served in the ranks of the Wehrmacht were handed over to the Soviets as per prior agreement. If anyone has been stationed at Ft. Dix, NJ and visited their small museum that will find information of some Cossacks that were kept their as POWs and after the war, when they found out that the USA would not give them asylum status and they would be sent back to Mother Russia, they barricaded themselves in their barracks. US Army MPs had to extract them by force.

All this is interesting, but I recommend anyone really interested in stats to reference Prof. R.J.Rummel's Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (1996). The German POW contingent was smaller than the domestic forced labor used by the Soviet Union to rebuild their country. Rummel calculates the overall POW camp dead by 1945 at being 2.2 million (pg175)--compare that to his number of overall labor camp dead that includes Soviet citizens (Ukrainians, etc.,.) at being around 10 million (pg. 177). Though I will admit that Rummel's stats are hard to delineate from one another at times.

All pretty heady stuff to contemplate and a WWII/post-WWII topic that needs more research.

Stephan

[Helmut]

nigelfe,
You are incorrectin saying that the allies did not hadn over any german POWs to the Soviets. In Austria, large numbers of Germans who had surrendered to the Americans, notably the SS-Totenkopf and the Fuehrer Grenadier Divisions among others, were handed over to the Soviets. Additionally, many Germans who surrendered to the western allies were helf for up to 3 years after the war ended. albeit under much more humane conditions than those held by the Soviets.

Regards,

Helmut

[sniper1shot]

We all know that the Western Allies handed over Germans and German Units to the Soviets at wars end....but my question is, Did the Soviets hand over any Germans to the Western Allies?? Was it only a 1 way street? Possibly not German Units but maybe certain individuals??

I have also read that the 14thSS (I could be wrong on the Div but it was SS) managed to avoid repatriation to Russia and stayed as Western POW's though do not remember the reason why.....

We also all know that the Soviet forces had executions of Soviet soldiers that had served w/the German forces as soon as they were handed over (repatriated).....was there mass executions of German soldiers right away also?

Is there any truth to there being German Soldiers still being kept as POW's into the 70's?? IF so, why?

This is just to feed my curiosity and not for any research projects.

[lwd]

We all know that the Western Allies handed over Germans and German Units to the Soviets at wars end....but my question is, Did the Soviets hand over any Germans to the Western Allies?? Was it only a 1 way street? Possibly not German Units but maybe certain individuals??
...

I thought the handovers were due to:
1) Certain groups that were to be handed over per the Yalta (or other) agreements. Primarily these were Soviets who served with the Germans.
2) Germans captured in the areas the Soviets were to occupy.

If this is the case then the only ones the Soviets would have been requried to turn over applying a symetrical agreement would have been Western Allied citizens serving the Germans. I have a vague recollection of their being a few individuals in this catagory but that's all....

[sniper1shot]

I can't really recall ever reading about the Soviets turning anyone over.

[Mikeo066]

My father-in-law, a Sudetan of mixed Czech and German parentage, served in the Wehrmacht. At the end of the war, he and some friends (this was on the Hungarian - Czech border) threw away their weapons and put on civilian clothes. Their aim was to go west and give themselves up to the Americans. However, after a couple of days on the run they were caught. He says that he should have gone alone because he spoke fluent Czech and could have probably made it. But a group of men obviously attracted attention.

He was sent to the Urals and had to work in a coal mine until 1952 ... harsh conditions and weather. Then he was suddenly and unexpectedly released. When he got back to Germany he worked for a while in a German coal mine ... but said the conditions in the mine ... safety and so on ... had been better in Russia!

He was called up as a teenager ... went through the eastern campaign ... then spent 7 years in a Russian coal mine. He doesn't like to talk about it. Curiously, his brother was a regular in the Czech army; he somehow made his way to France and so they fought on opposite sides. There was a certain amount of bitterness between the two.

On another tack, my f-i-l's drinking, eating, and skittling buddy served in the west as a tank driver. He lost a leg and was invalided out. After the war, a new GP arrived in the village and took him on as a patient. Amazingly, it was the doctor who had amputated his leg in the field hospital in France. He looked at the leg and admired his own neat stitching.

The tanker also does not like to talk about his experiences. From time to time, I try to draw him out with little questions ... but never get far. I once commented that the Tiger was a very good tank. All he would say was, "Ja, aber die Amis haben uns trotzdem kaputt gemacht." I get the feeling that those awful moments in a blazing Tiger are ... even today ... so painful that he tries to blot the memory out.

M

[sniper1shot]

"Ja, aber die Amis haben uns trotzdem kaputt gemacht."

Rough translation through an internet site:
"Yes, but the Amis made us nevertheless broken"