Polian's study detailed the Soviet statistics on the employment of German civilian labor during the Stalin era. B. Archivalien und ausgewählte Erlebnisberichte. Given that we treat Yugoslavia and Poland separately, German POWs included in this study are: 63, 815 (US, France, UK, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg) and 400,000 USSR. 2007. The West German Search Service working with the German Red Cross attempted to trace German civilians deported to the USSR and estimate the approximate number who died. Depicting the challenges of growing up in Nazi Bavaria to becoming a Soviet prisoner-of-war, this is a gripping and enlightening account from a necessary but rarely explored perspective. Often they were conditioned strictly by Soviet calculations. Following the rejection of his Continental System by Czar Alexander I, French Emperor Napoleon I invaded Russia with his Grande Armée on June 24, 1812. Hilger, Andreas. : Harvard University Press. Of the 231,000 British and American prisoners held by the Germans during the war only about 8,300 — 3.6 percent — died in German … [7], The Soviets sent about three-quarters of the laborers to the Donets Basin to work in the reconstruction of heavy industry and mines, and about 11% to the Urals' heavy industries. He did not speak German, and the Germans spoke no Hungarian. [35], Forced labor of German civilians - estimate by German Red Cross in 1964, Source of figures: Kurt W. Böhme - Gesucht wird - Die dramatische Geschichte des Suchdienstes Süddeutscher Verlag, München 1965 Page 275. During World War II, Nazi Germany sent its soldiers across much of Europe, the Soviet Union, North Africa, and the world’s oceans. Eugene Davidson "The death and life of Germany: an account of the American occupation". Determining exactly how many German POWs are still in Russia is problematic. As an example, the late Air Force Col. O’Wighton Delk Simpson (ret.) A. Deported from Former eastern territories of Germany and Poland for forced labor in the USSR - Over 400,000 civilians deported to USSR of whom they estimated about 200,000 died. These categories in the Red Cross figures for deportees are also listed above in the Russian archive statistics. Collects and analyzes seventy years of communist crimes that offer details on Kim Sung's Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho," and Cuba under Castro. Dr. Kurt Horstmann of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany wrote the foreword to the study, endorsing the work of Reichling. Steinbach, Peter. Of the estimated 10,000 members of the Totenkopf Division who went into Russian captivity fewer than 2,000 survived. All 14 German POWs had been court-martialed and found guilty of murder. As a young teen in 1939, Milan Lorman witnessed the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the creation of Slovakia as a satellite state of the Third Reich. In 1943 Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to the UK, was ordered by the Soviet government to form a task force on the issue of post-war reparations from Germany. No figures were given for Romania and Hungary. typhus. German prisoners of war in the United States had it good compared to those held by the Soviet Union. In France, their internment lasted a particularly long time. [8], Ethnic German civilians interned by USSR - Soviet data from the Russian archives, Source of figures Pavel Polian-Against Their Will[16]. They were deployed in various kinds of work with few provisions and more often than not exposed to the harsh weather of Siberia. While this case study reviews the conditions for POWs held by several different countries, it primarily focuses on those held by the USSR. Bischof, Günter, Stefan Karner, and Barbara Stelzl–Marx, eds., 2005. Since the fall of the USSR the Soviet archives have been accessible to researchers. The work of the German Search Service to trace the fates of civilians in eastern Europe was only partially successful. The classic history of Adolph Hitler's rise to power and his dramatic defeat The official Soviet numbers are that 350,000 to 400,000 German POWs perished in Soviet imprisonment, which historians have determined to be far too low. Ending [38], D. Civilians held as POWs — The Soviets classified these persons as POWs and they were held in POW camps, they were ethnic Germans from the Former eastern territories of Germany and Poland. This category of deportees is also listed above in the Russian archive statistics. Manfred von Ardenne worked on Soviet atomic bomb project and was awarded a Stalin Prize.[49]. He also had very little awareness of the passage of time, having spent most of his time in isolation. They were deported into the USSR,[40], G. "Convicted POWs" (Strafgefangene) POWs convicted of war crimes and held in Soviet prisons. Bericht des Bundesarchivs vom 28. They were returned to the USSR. [44], G. 100,000 deaths in Czechoslovak internment camps. In this, Soviet treatment of German POWs differed from the wartime policies of Nazi Germany, which intentionally sought to kill Soviet POWs. Germans taken prisoner by the Soviet Union numbered around 3,250,000, and about 36 percent of them – 1,200,000 – vanished there, the rest of them trickling back to Germany in the years after war. Allied PoWs in the Gulag. Based on documents in the Russian archives Grigori F. Krivosheev in his 1993 study listed 2,389,600 German nationals taken as POWs and the deaths of 450,600 these German POWs including 356,700 in NKVD camps and 93,900 in transit. TA152, May 17, 2008. 1. The gulag’s daily food ration was padded with 400 to 800 grams of bread, more than half of the prisoner’s daily 1200-1300 calories. C. The German Federal Archives study did not provide figures for Romania and Hungary. He slipped down the rope, out of the prison, and onto a train on April 17th, 1942, over Hitler’s birthday weekend. Still, for the Soviets, the German POWs had a use; they were to work to rebuild the country. Thus, they ensured that communists controlled the eastern zone under the guise of democratic unity. [vii] Historians agree that 100,000 POWs held by non–Soviet forces remain missing, but it is not clear from the scholarship how much overlap there is between the “missing” POWs and the “confirmed” dead because of unreliable data. // Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland. Many others died because of overwork, and because the Soviets did not allocate resources towards the POWs, but to their war effort. [47], The Soviet Union exploited the technical expertise of the German specialists who were resident in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany as well as POWs held in the USSR. They went to Austria, but many had returned. He passed away in 2004, having spent most of his life in captivity, a victim of war and apathy who lived in the horror show of Soviet psychiatric hospitals for decades. In fields and factories, they worked side-by-side with locals who still remember them. He wasn’t taken prisoner in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Russia’s most recent war at that time. When he returned to Hungary later that year, many people were outraged that no one in fifty-five years managed to care enough to find out what Toma’s story was, and that no one recognized the language he was speaking – that of a long-time Soviet ally. He wasn’t taken prisoner in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Russia’s most recent war at that time. The reburial took place today at the German cemetery in Sologubovka, around 40miles from St. Petersburg in Russia. Bevolkerungsbilanzen fuer die deutschen Vertreibungsgebiete 1939/50. This category of deportees in the Federal Archive Report is also listed above in the Russian archive statistics. The Soviets promoted the creation of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) out of the forced merger between German communists and the eastern Social Democrats. #2. According to data from the Soviet archives, by October 1945 687,300 Germans remained alive in the special settlements,[23] an additional 316,600 Soviet Germans served as labor conscripts during World War II in NKVD labor columns, later informally referred to as "labor army". [25] According to J. Otto Pohl 65,599 Germans perished in the special settlements, he believes that an additional 176,352 unaccounted for persons "probably died in the labor army". Here again historians generally agree that there were no deliberate attempts to annihilate German POWs en masse. The study was published by Central European University Press. [55], A research project by German military historian Rüdiger Overmans stated that 363,000 German POWs died in Soviet custody; Overmans cited the statistics of the West German Maschke commission that put the number of German POWs taken by the Soviets at 3,060,000, of whom 1,090,000 died in captivity. Here was Russia’s largest railway repair shop – but a ruin in 1945. Dieter–Müller, Klaus, 2005. According to Soviet records, 381,067 German Wehrmacht POW died in NKVD camps over that time period, out of which 356,700 were German nationals and 24,367 from other nations. This ensured the return of the last prisoners to East and West Germany.[xvii]. KM? It included the largest tank battle in military history. Officially, the last surviving German Prisoners of war returned home from the USSR in 1956, but it is now clear that it was not exactly true. As Russia’s government pulled out all the stops on May 9, 2018, to celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and to remember the estimated 25 million Soviets who died during the war, historian Konstantin Bogoslavsky was working to shed light on the fate of Soviet POWs “abandoned” by their own government. Three percent of the German pre-war population (about 20,000 people) had been evacuated by the Volksbund before that. “Zur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenschaft in der Sowjetunion im Zweiten Weltkrieg in der Frühgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zum Problem historischer Kontinuität,” Zeitgeschichte 17: 1–18. Reichling's figures for German forced labor were based on his own calculations, his figures are estimates and are not based on an actual enumeration of the dead. There were legitimately disturbed inmates there who could make a person’s life a living hell – especially for extra rations or privileges. Approximately 1.5 million German soldiers from the Second World War are still listed as missing in action. Found insideThis work traces the lives and careers of German authors Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter, 32. Of the nearly 91,000 German prisoners captured in Stalingrad, only about five to six thousand returned to Germany after Konrad Adenauer made a plea... Image: A wounded German POW taken at the Battle of Stalingrad. Found insideThe first systematic study of the phenomenon of frontline surrender to the Germans in the Soviet Union's 'Great Patriotic War' against the Nazis in 1941-1945, showing that while people were disgruntled with Stalin's rule, most attempts to ... The Soviet Union refused to discuss the question of POWs. 3,423. [iv], The Soviets were not alone in their treatment of German POWs. Yet, this number remains an estimate.[xi]. Given the Cold War, the Western Allies could not influence the Kremlin either. Mr. Murphy had, indeed, been conservative, partly because he underestimated the number of prisoners due to return to Germany from Russia. By the summer of 1946, 10,000 survivors returned to Italy from Russian POW camps. This tragic story is complex and unsettling, but most of all it is a human story. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping but until now hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the Last Million, as they crossed from a broken past into an unknowable ... As many as 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers, "liberated" by the Soviets from German POW camps ended their days in the Gulag. The Soviet government proposed the use of German labor as reparations in 1943, and raised the issue at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Hungary — 30,000 to 35,000 German civilians were deported to the USSR and that death toll was 6,000. Rarely, if ever, talked about however has been the fate of those tens of thousands of Allied servicemen who were to disappear into the system. As late as 1953, however, at least 20,000 German POWs remained in Russia. Horton, Aaron. As long as a POW was fit and useful he was kept working, when they became too sick and weak they were repatriated. Prisoners returning in 1955. Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. Düsseldorf: Droste. Munich: Lau–Verlag, 2014. State Defense Committee Order 7161 of December 16, 1944 instructed to intern all able-bodied Germans of ages 17–45 (men) and 18-30 (women) residing within the territories of Romania (67,332 persons), Hungary (31,920 persons), Yugoslavia (12,579 persons), which were under the control of the Red Army. For example, the records of Pauline Gölner reveal that she was born in 1926 in Wolkendorf in Transylvania, was arrested on January 15, 1945 and sent to forced labor in the coal mines of Chanchenkowo (Ukraine). Photo by Liepaja1941 CC-BY-SA 3.0. ed. They were expected to rebuild Russia. No, he had been held in captivity in a Soviet/Russian psychiatric hospital since World War II. In October 1946 the Soviet NKVD forcibly deported from East Germany "a few hundred" selected German experts to work in the USSR. 4 The Napoleonic Wars posed many challenges to Russia and the treatment of prisoners of war proved one of them since none of Russia’s previous conflicts produced as many POWs as the wars against Napoleon. The figures are rough estimates and not based on an actual enumeration of persons deported and those that died. [xvii] Biess 2006, 126–27, 203–204; Hilger 2005, 212–216. 4. [33] The figures for those deported and deaths were rough estimates and not always based on confirmed reports. The number of deported was derived by estimating the number of persons sent to the USSR, and was not based on an actual enumeration. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.. Lehmann, Albrecht. The return of German prisoners of war from Soviet captivity. Nothing they say can be trusted. This book focuses on one of the most visible and important consequences of total defeat in postwar Germany: the return to East and West Germany of the two million German soldiers and POWs who spent an extended period in Soviet captivity. Even then, a further 26,000 POWs and civilian internees classified as ‘war criminals’ were only released in two main waves; in 1953–54 and 1955–56 (p. 45). The Russians simply let many of them starve to death. Still, German POWs (prisoners of war) in the Soviet Union lived much better than Soviet prisoners in the Third Reich. Approximately 5 million were released almost immediately, and the last POWs in the Soviet Union would not return until 1956. The report mentioned that ethnic German citizens from pre-war Poland were considered "traitors of the nation" and sentenced to forced labor. Oldenbourg 2000. had used forced labour of people in the occupied territories since the beginning of World War II, a massive project of enslaving the populations of Eastern European countries to use as forced labour in German factories and agricultural facilities, Chief Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internee Affairs, Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen, German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, Forced labor of Germans after World War II, The Soviet Union and the western allies employed German POW labor up until 1949, Forced labour under German rule during World War II, Forced labor of Hungarians in the Soviet Union, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, Flight and expulsion of Germans from Romania during and after World War II, Forced labor in Germany during World War II, La recherche des Allemands prisonniers ou portés disparus au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondial, The Expulsion of 'German' Communities from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, European University Institute, Florence. When he was told he was going to be shown a movie of events of WWII, he moved his chair to the back of the room, so that he could see the whole movie screen – only to be disappointed when he was shown the movies on a TV, which he had never seen. Nor did any of the Soviet guards or authorities speak Hungarian. Hilger, Andreas. [39], F. Klaipėda (Memel) residents- Ethnic Germans who remained in Klaipedia after the war. Upon his return to Hungary, Mr. Andras’ memories came flooding back. Many were allowed to live, and were sent to “educational” camps. The Eastern Front is best known for the multi-year Siege … Both the Western Allies and the Soviets committed crimes against the POWs. His name was Andras Toma, and he was the last POW of WWII. In The Devils' Alliance, acclaimed historian Roger Moorhouse explores the causes and implications of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, an unholy covenant whose creation and dissolution were crucial turning points in World War II. Forged by the German ... Vienna and Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag. It was the biggest Prisoner of War escape attempt in Britain - as 70 German World War Two PoWs tried to tunnel to freedom. Yet, this number remains an estimate. This article details the published statistical data from the West German Schieder commission of 1951–1961, the German Red Cross, the report of the German Federal Archives and a study by Gerhard Reichling (an employee of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany). [48] They were not directly involved in the missile program but were only consulted by Soviet engineers. After the war, Soviet resources were in turn allocated towards their own population, and poor postwar harvests only made the POW’s situation worse. On 23 July 1946, the Army announced that the last 1388 German officers and EM had left the day before on the USS General Yates. Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen 1945-1948. German prisoners captured by the Red Army suffered greatly; approximately 91,000 were captured at end of Battle of Stalingrad but few returned home, being sent instead for work in labour camps. As you can imagine, having starving men crammed into these prison camps was a recipe for disaster. Moreover, they wanted to give the East German government a trump card after the June 1953 uprising in East Germany by crediting East Berlin with the repatriations. 270,000 men of the German 6th Armee were invested in Stalingrad in late summer, 1942. For a time it looked like the Germans had continued their win... This forced confrontation brought Germans face-to-face with the worst works of the Third Reich. Before that, however, it was known in the West through accounts released in West Germany and recollections of the internees. These guys were captured … After the war, the vast majority of ordinary Germans in east and west believed that they had suffered the most during World War II, and POWs were the very symbol of defeat and German victimization. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the regime put dissidents into these places for a number of reasons. Walter Warda, a soldier in the German army during World War II, was captured by the Red Army in 1944 and held in Soviet POW camps until 1950. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. The Protecting Power described this act as plunder to the German commandant who finally promised to return the … 6. The misfortunes of many Soviet POWs did not end when the guns fell silent. Mr. Toma barely lived a life. Read another story from us: In 25 images: The Corpus Christi naval air station where WW2 pilots earned their wings. The 16 survivors were picked up by an American destroyer and, like hundreds of thousands of other German soldiers, sailors and fliers, were placed in a stateside POW camp for the duration of the Second World War. The Protecting Power described this act as plunder to the German commandant who finally promised to return the … By 1950 almost all had been released.Officially, the last surviving German Prisoners ofwar returned home from the USSR in 1956, but itis now clearthat it was not exactly true. Statistics for the Soviet use of German civilian labor are divergent and contradictory. many died. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. No, he had been held in captivity in a Soviet/Russian psychiatric hospital since World War II. They were released by 1955.[39]. Spieler, Silke. In Captured, Mansell tells the story of the captives from Guam, whose story until now has largely been forgotten. [ii] Lucks and Harald Stutte 2010, 253–254. A 91-year-old German man, who was a prisoner of war at JBLM during World War II made a nostalgic trip to thank the United States Oct. 3 - 72 years after his capture. In addition he listed 182,000 Austrians taken prisoner[51][52] In his revised 2001 edition Krivosheev put the number of German military POWs (Wehrmacht of all nationalities) at 2,733,739 and dead at 381,067 [53] These figures are disputed by sources in the west that give a higher number of POWs captured and estimate losses may be higher than those reported by the USSR. Common belief has it that airman Franz Von Werra was the only German to make it back to the Fatherland after escaping from a British PoW camp. Munich: C.H. [34], The figures from the German Red Cross are cited in some English language accounts of the German civilians deported to the USSR. After speaking with Mr. Toma, who unsurprisingly was a quiet, somewhat withdrawn man who showed signs of PTSD, Hungarian authorities did much research and narrowed down his identity. The West German government-sponsored Schieder commission during the 1950s documented the population transfer of Germans from East-Central Europe after World War II. Since 3 million German POWs were under Soviet control in 1945, over 400,000 must have died in Soviet camps after 1945. Depicting the challenges of growing up in Nazi Bavaria to becoming a Soviet prisoner-of-war, this is a gripping and enlightening account from a necessary but rarely explored perspective. The POWs who returned to both Germanys in the late 1940s were “ragged and emaciated.”[xvi], It would take until 1953 and 1956 respectively for the last surviving POWs to return. [x] Borchard 2000, 11; Steinbach 1989, 1; Lehmann 1986, 10. You can hardly blame the Russians for this after the Nazi behavior in their push into Russia. [21][22] During the war, shortages of food plagued the whole Soviet Union, especially within the special settlements. Wien; Muenchen: Oldenbourg, 1995. According to the book Nazi Prisoners of War in America, Krammer, 1979, Scarborough House, the last German PoWs left the US in 1946. [iii] Moreover, POWs often engaged in self-destructive behavior, such as refusing food, and/or inhaling, imbibing, or consuming dangerous substances in the hopes to be weakened to an extent to be let off work or be returned sooner to Germany. All in all, 2 million POWs returned from the Soviet Union. Origin- Former eastern territories of Germany and Poland -233,000; Romania 80,000: Hungary 35,000 and Yugoslavia 27,000. They were returned to the USSR. The last prisoners were not returned to Germany until 1955. In 1969, the Federal West German government ordered a study of expulsion losses to be conducted by the German Federal Archives which was finished in 1974. Now 90, he lives in west Allentown. Operation “The Great Waltz”, the parade of 57,000 POWs was held on July 17, 1944. Overall, 60,000 ethnic Germans had fled. [ii], The German occupation had wreaked havoc on Soviet soil, so the Soviet propaganda machine had little difficulty instilling hatred for Germans. Wiesbaden, 1958. The reasons are patchy record keeping; the chaotic conditions the immediate postwar period, and the discrepancy between official figures and the number of actual disappeared POWs. "[8] In fact, when the Germans released the Russian prisoners of war, 50,000 of them found their way to France. In 1952, Schieder was chosen by the West German government to head the Commission that would document the fate of the Germans from Eastern Europe. “Skoro Domoj?” in Bischof, Günter, Stefan Karner, and Barbara Stelzl–Marx, eds., 2005. revealed to this reporter in the 1970s that American POWs by the hundreds were transferred from Chinese to Soviet control during the Korean War. The Soviets also devised a scheme by which POWs who fulfilled a work quota could come home sooner. Gerhard Ohst was sent to Velikiye Luki. 1991. The same restrictions that are placed on psychiatric professionals in the West simply were not in place. Dear KM, Officially, none of the more than 425,000 Axis POWs kept in the United States should have stayed there after the war—POWs are supposed to be repatriated after the war is over. [iv] Lehmann 1986, 10, 81–83; Biess 2006, 119–140. [19], There is currently an ongoing research program in collaboration between Russia and Germany:[20], The ethnic German minority in the USSR was considered a security risk by the Soviet government and they were deported during the war in order to prevent their possible collaboration with the Nazi invaders. Ich War Hitlers Letztes Aufgebot: Meine Erlebnisse Als SS–Kindersoldat. These categories of deportees in Reichling's report are not listed above in the Russian archive statistics. The photo of a German prisoner of war returning to his home town of Frankfurt to discover his house bombed and his family no longer there, shows the kind the depressing moments of dejected subjects we associate with images of war. POWs in the Soviet Union, and in Soviet occupied countries such as Poland, had the worst luck. The head of the commission was Dr. Theodor Schieder a rehabilitated former member of the Nazi party. A total of 1,386 remains of German soldiers were found in Leningrad. On this date in 1944, Wehrmacht Oberst Rudolf Körpert, his deputy Hauptmann Carl Frister, and officers Fritz Müsenthin, Otto Mäder, Richard Seidlitz and Kurt Wohlfarth, were shot in the Soviet Union for their treatment of Russian prisoners of war at Stalingrad.. Was released at 74: Hitler 's war in Russia is problematic ( prisoners war! Often tasked with dangerous tasks such as in Stalingrad image shows the faces German. 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