What Stalin Did to Nazi Prisoners Shocked Even His Enemies

What Stalin Did to Nazi Prisoners Shocked Even His Enemies

In the winter of 1943, 91,000 soldiers of Hitler’s 6th Army stumbled out of the ruins of Stalingrad and into Soviet captivity.

Most of them believed the worst was behind them.

They were wrong.

What Stalin’s system did with those men and with the hundreds of thousands who followed is one of the least examined chapters of the entire war.

And some of what happened was not what anyone on either side expected.

To understand what happened to German prisoners in Soviet hands, you have to start at the moment the scale of the problem became undeniable.

By November 1942, the German 6th Army under Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus had been fighting in and around the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River for months.

The battle had consumed divisions on both sides at a rate that defied comprehension.

Streets changed hands block by block, building by building, sometimes floor by floor.

The Soviet defense, commanded at the front by General Vasily Chuikov’s 62nd Army, had held by the narrowest of margins through the summer and autumn.

On November 19th, 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a massive counteroffensive that struck the German flanks north and south of Stalingrad simultaneously.

Within 4 days, the entire 6th Army was encircled.

Approximately 300,000 German and Axis soldiers were cut off inside a pocket, dependent on an airlift that could not come close to delivering the supplies they needed.

Hitler refused to permit a breakout.

A relief column under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein advanced to within 48 km of the encircled forces in December 1942, but was stopped.

>> [music] >> In January 1943, the last two airfields inside the pocket fell to Soviet forces, cutting off even the inadequate air supply.

On January 24th, Paulus sent a message to Hitler stating that his men had run out of ammunition and food, that 18,000 of his wounded had no bandages or medicines, and that collapse was imminent.

He requested permission to surrender.

Hitler refused.

On January 30th, 1943, the 10th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal.

The significance of this gesture was not subtle.

No German or Prussian field marshal had ever surrendered in the country’s military history.

Hitler was, in effect, telling Paulus what was expected of him.

Paulus surrendered the following morning.

On February 2nd, 1943, the remaining forces in the northern pocket capitulated as well.

91,000 men, including more than 20 generals and 2,500 officers, laid down their weapons and entered Soviet captivity.

More than 125,000 Germans had already died inside the pocket during the months of encirclement.

The survivors were in an appalling physical state.

Many were suffering from frostbite, severe malnutrition, dysentery, and wounds that had gone untreated for weeks.

The temperature at Stalingrad in early February was around minus 25° C.

The men who emerged from the ruins were, in the words of one eyewitness journalist, the walking residue of an army, skeletal, wrapped in rags, faces darkened by weeks in the rubble.

Soviet cameras were there to record the surrender.

The footage and photographs were distributed globally, and their political impact was enormous.

Here, for the first time in the war, was visible proof that the German military machine could be broken.

The image of Paulus, tall, gray, gaunt, emerging from a basement headquarters to surrender, was broadcast in newsreels around the world.

What the cameras did not follow those men into, however, was what came next.

Of the 91,000 men who surrendered at Stalingrad, approximately 85,000 died in the weeks and months immediately following their capture.

The causes were a combination of the men’s already catastrophic physical condition at the time of surrender and the conditions of the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps, which, in the harsh winter of early 1943, could not adequately shelter, feed, or medically treat the wave of prisoners suddenly in their custody.

Disease, typhus in particular, swept through the holding camps.

Many men who had survived months of combat and encirclement died within weeks of the surrender that was supposed to end their ordeal.

Only approximately 6,000 of the 91,000 men who surrendered at Stalingrad would survive Soviet captivity and eventually return to Germany.

The last of them came home in 1956, 13 years after the battle.

But the story of what the Soviet system did with its German prisoners was not only a story of death.

It was also, in ways that genuinely surprised both sides, a story of something altogether more calculated.

The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point at which German prisoners began arriving in the Soviet Union in numbers large enough to require a systematic response.

Before Stalingrad, German captives were relatively few.

In the first 6 months of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union that began on June 22nd, 1941, the Wehrmacht had advanced so rapidly and captured so much territory that the flow of prisoners ran overwhelmingly in one direction, Soviet soldiers into German hands.

By the end of 1941, over 3 million Red Army personnel had been taken prisoner by German forces.

What happened to most of them is a separate and far darker chapter.

Approximately 2 million of those 3 million men were dead by February 1942, killed by starvation, exposure, disease, and deliberate execution.

The number of Germans in Soviet captivity at the start of 1942 was only around 120,000.

After Stalingrad, it rose to 170,000.

As the war continued to turn against Germany through the summer of 1943, through the collapse of the German position in the south in 1944, through the catastrophic defeats of Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944, which destroyed an entire German army group, the numbers grew with each passing month.

By April 1945, approximately 2 million Wehrmacht personnel were in Soviet custody.

By the end of the war, the total had reached roughly 2.

8 million, according to Soviet records.

Western estimates, accounting for men who were captured and died before being formally registered, suggest the actual number may have been higher, closer to 3 million.

The organization responsible for managing this population was the NKVD, the Soviet security and intelligence agency, which under Stalin served as the instrument for both foreign intelligence operations and the internal repression of the Soviet population.

The NKVD’s role in managing prisoners of war was not incidental.

It was central.

A system of camps, transit points, and labor installations spread across the Soviet Union from the European west to the Siberian east.

The infrastructure was, in many respects, a parallel extension of the Gulag, the vast network of forced labor camps that had been operating inside the Soviet Union since the late 1920s, primarily to confine Soviet citizens whom the regime considered politically dangerous or economically exploitable.

German prisoners entered a system that had been designed and operated for more than a decade to extract maximum labor from human beings while providing minimum resources for their survival.

The Soviet Union had not signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.

This fact was significant, not primarily because it freed the Soviets of legal obligations.

The general principles of international law still applied, but because it shaped how the Soviet government publicly framed its treatment of prisoners.

Soviet declarations throughout the war asserted a commitment to humane treatment.

The gap between those declarations and the conditions inside the camps was, particularly in 1942 and 1943, enormous.

And understanding the conditions inside those camps requires understanding something about Union as a whole in those years.

When the German prisoners arrived in the Soviet camp system, they entered an environment that was catastrophic, but catastrophic in a way that was intertwined with the catastrophe of the Soviet Union itself.

By 1942 and 1943, the Soviet Union was a country undergoing one of the most severe existential strains in modern history.

German forces had occupied enormous swaths of Soviet territory, including some of the most agriculturally productive regions of Ukraine and the south.

Soviet industrial production had been massively disrupted by the early German advances, and much of it had only been preserved by the extraordinary effort of dismantling and evacuating entire factories to the Ural Mountains and beyond.

The civilian population of
the unoccupied Soviet Union was enduring food shortages of severe proportions.

Workers in Soviet cities were allocated rations that barely sustained basic physical function.

The prison population, ordinary criminals as well as the political prisoners of the Gulag, received the lowest priority in food allocation of any group in Soviet society.

German prisoners of war were not at the top of that priority list.

The camps varied considerably in their conditions, depending on location, year, and the specific NKVD administration in charge, but the common features of the worst periods, primarily 1941 through 1947 were severe overcrowding, inadequate shelter, minimal food rations, very limited medical care, and high mortality from disease.

The food ration for a German POW in the Soviet system in 1942 was typically a daily allocation of black bread, thin soup made from whatever vegetables or grains were available, and occasionally small amounts of salt fish.

Caloric content varied enormously, but in many camps the daily ration fell well below what was required to maintain body weight in the conditions these men were living and working in.

In the worst periods, the ration for prisoners classified as unable to work due to illness or injury was reduced further on the reasoning that those who were not producing labor did not require the same calories as those who were.

The labor itself was relentless.

German prisoners were put to work across the Soviet economy in coal mines, on railway construction, in timber camps, in heavy construction projects, in agriculture.

Workdays of 10 to 14 hours were common.

The specific projects they worked on were sometimes visible in the post-war landscape of the Soviet Union.

Factories, railways, buildings, and infrastructure that bore no acknowledgement of the prisoner labor that had built them.

The West German government’s Maschke Commission, which spent years in the 1950s and 1960s investigating the fate of German prisoners in the war, concluded that of approximately 3,060,000 German military personnel taken prisoner by the Soviet Union, approximately
1,094,250 died in captivity.

Soviet records acknowledged 381,000 deaths.

The discrepancy between these figures, reflecting partly the different methodologies used and partly the documented incompleteness of Soviet records, has never been fully resolved.

As of 2017, many of the relevant files in Russian archives remain classified.

What is not disputed is that the mortality rate for German prisoners in Soviet custody, however it is calculated, was among the highest of any prisoner group held by any major power during the war.

Only the Italian prisoners, whose mortality in Soviet captivity has been estimated at between 56 and 79%, the highest of any national group, exceeded it.

The Italians were captured primarily in the winter of 1942-43, already weakened, lacking cold weather equipment, and arriving in the camps at the precise moment when the Soviet food supply was at its most strained.

The experience of a German prisoner dying in a camp in Siberia in 1943 was, in its physical details, not dramatically different from the experience of a Soviet prisoner dying in a German camp in Ukraine in 1942.

Starvation, exposure, disease, exhaustion.

The machinery was different.

The ideology behind it was different, but the body on the frozen ground looked much the same.

The specific camp stretched from the Urals to the Soviet Far East.

Camps in the Komi Republic, the Siberian taiga, and Central Asia housed prisoners in conditions where winter temperatures plunged to minus 30 and below.

The camp infrastructure was adapted from and often physically shared with the existing Gulag network.

Some prisoners worked in coal mines in the Donbas.

Others were deployed on railway construction projects in the Urals.

A significant number were used in the reconstruction of Soviet cities that German forces had themselves destroyed.

A grim circularity that Soviet authorities did not find ironic but practical.

In the camps, officers and enlisted men were separated in formal compliance with the Geneva Convention, standards the Soviet Union had not technically ratified.

Officers were exempt from labor, but the exemption was often the only material distinction.

The food they received was marginally better, but they shared the same exposure to the same diseases, particularly typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis, that moved through the camp populations regardless of rank.

The death rate peaked in the first half of 1943 and then declined as the Soviet economy recovered, as fewer men arrived in the catastrophic condition that the Stalingrad prisoners had been in, and as the NKVD camp administration received clearer instructions that productive force labor required minimally viable
human beings.

The dead who preceded that recalculation left no records the Soviet government was interested in preserving.

Yet within this system, something entirely unexpected was also taking shape.

The Soviet approach to German prisoners was never purely about physical containment or labor extraction.

From an early stage, Stalin’s government identified the prisoners as a potential instrument of a different kind of warfare, a war for the minds of the German soldiers who were still fighting.

In the summer of 1943, following the disaster at Stalingrad, the Soviet government created an organization unlike anything else in the history of the conflict, the National Committee for a Free Germany, known by its German initials as the NKFD.

The committee was founded on July 12th, 1943 in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, a location that housed one of the more prominent German prisoner of war camps, as well as a significant facility for the ideological processing and re-education of selected prisoners.

Its founding membership consisted of 38 people, 28 Wehrmacht prisoners of war, and 10 German communist exiles who had fled to the Soviet Union after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.

Its president was the exiled German communist writer Erich Weinert.

Among the most significant of its members was General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, a senior German officer captured at Stalingrad, who became the head of the affiliated League of German Officers, the BDO, established 2 months after the NKFD itself.

The NKFD’s newspaper, Freies Deutschland, Free Germany, was printed and distributed.

Loudspeakers installed along sections of the Eastern Front broadcast appeals to German soldiers to abandon the fight, surrender, and help bring down the Nazi regime.

NKFD members were attached to Soviet frontline units specifically to conduct this kind of propaganda work.

Reading appeals over loudspeakers, distributing leaflets behind German lines, and in some cases going into Wehrmacht-held territory in German uniform to spread confusion and encourage defection.

Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who surrendered at Stalingrad and spent years in Soviet captivity, eventually joined the NKFD in a radio address broadcast over the Freies Deutschland transmitter in 1944.

He appealed directly to the German military leadership, arguing that continued resistance was destroying Germany for nothing, and calling on officers to act in the national [music] interest by turning against Hitler.

The broadcast, made by a captured German field marshal addressing his former colleagues on behalf of a Soviet-sponsored committee, was considered by the Nazi High Command one of the most significant acts of what they called treason committed by any German officer during the war.

Hitler’s reaction to the NKFD was precisely what the Soviets had calculated.

He was furious.

He stripped the families of officers who joined the NKFD of their state benefits, threatened retaliation, and publicly declared the organization’s members traitors.

The fear that more captured officers might follow Paulus’s path created a genuine anxiety within the German command structure.

Anxiety about what information the Soviets were extracting, what further appeals might be forthcoming, and what effect they might have on troops already exhausted by 3 years of war on the Eastern Front.

The NKFD itself never achieved the kind of mass effect Stalin had hoped for.

Most German soldiers continued fighting until the physical situation made resistance impossible.

The NKFD’s combat units, which occasionally operated behind German lines, had limited military impact.

But as a tool for demonstrating to the German military that their own officers, including some of the most senior, had concluded that the cause was lost, it had an effect that was difficult to quantify but clearly real.

And it illustrated something fundamental about how Stalin’s system operated.

Nothing, not even human beings in captivity, was left unused.

Every prisoner was a potential resource for labor, for information, for propaganda, for the construction of the post-war order Stalin was already planning.

As the war ended and the full scale of what had happened in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps became visible to the world, the question of what to do with those responsible became pressing.

The answer, reached by the Allied powers, was a series of trials, most famously the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which opened in November 1945 and produced verdicts in October 1946.

The Soviet Union was one of the four prosecuting powers at Nuremberg, alongside the United States, Britain, and France.

Soviet prosecutors presented evidence of German crimes on the Eastern Front that was, in terms of scale, the most devastating documentation in the entire proceeding.

The evidence of what had happened to Soviet civilians and Soviet prisoners of war, the mass shootings, the deliberate starvation, the systematic killing of entire categories of people, was central to the prosecution’s case.

But the Soviet presence at Nuremberg also raised questions that were carefully managed but never fully answered.

The Soviet prosecutors attempted at Nuremberg to include in the charges against the German defendants the massacre of approximately 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, and public officials in the forests of Katyn and several other sites in Western Russia in the spring of 1940.

The Soviet position was that Germany had committed this massacre.

In fact, the killings had been carried out by the NKVD under Stalin’s direct order.

A fact that the Soviet Union would not officially acknowledge until 1990.

The Nuremberg Tribunal, aware of the conflicting evidence, quietly dropped the Katyn charge from the final judgment rather than produce a finding that would have directly implicated one of the prosecuting powers in the very kind of crime being tried.

The Katyn massacre was not the only tension that the Soviet participation in the Nuremberg process created.

The Soviet Union had itself committed acts during the war that the categories being developed at Nuremberg, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, could have been applied to.

The invasion of Poland in September 1939 alongside Germany in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the deportation of entire national groups, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and others from their homelands to
Central Asia and Siberia in operations conducted by the NKVD that killed hundreds of thousands of people from exposure, starvation, and disease.

The continued operation of the Gulag [music] in which millions of Soviet citizens remained confined.

None of this appeared in the Nuremberg proceedings.

The trials were conducted by the victorious powers, and the victorious powers were not on trial.

The Germans who were tried and convicted at Nuremberg faced sentences ranging from lengthy imprisonment to death.

Of the 24 major defendants, 12 were sentenced to death and executed by hanging in October 1946.

Hermann Göring, who had been sentenced to death, took his own life the night before his scheduled execution.

The remaining defendants received prison terms of varying lengths, but the Nuremberg trials addressed only the most senior figures.

Across the former German military, hundreds of thousands of officers and soldiers who had participated in crimes on the Eastern Front returned to civilian life, particularly in West Germany, without facing any legal accountability for what they had done.

The mechanisms for comprehensive prosecution simply did not exist, and the political priorities of the early Cold War, in which West Germany’s cooperation was essential to Western strategy, created strong incentives to move forward rather than backward.

Stalin, who had orchestrated the Soviet position at Nuremberg, was not operating from a consistent principle of justice.

He was operating from a consistent principle of power.

The trials were useful because they established legal precedents, documented German atrocities, legitimized Soviet claims as a victim nation, and demonstrated Soviet authority.

These were the reasons for participation, not a general commitment to the accountability of states for their crimes.

The formal end of the war in Europe on May 8th, 1945, did not end the captivity of German prisoners in the Soviet Union, not by a long way.

The 1929 Geneva Convention, which the Soviet Union had not signed, but which it had rhetorically endorsed, required the repatriation of prisoners of war as soon as possible after the conclusion of hostilities.

The Soviet Union’s interpretation of this obligation was, to put it carefully, expansive.

By the end of 1946, most of the German prisoner population still alive had begun to be processed for release.

A large number had been repatriated, and by that [music] point, the Soviet Union actually held fewer German prisoners than Britain and France combined, though tens of thousands remained and would continue to remain for years.

The reasoning given by Soviet authorities was economic.

The Soviet Union had emerged from the war with its Western regions devastated, its infrastructure shattered, its male working-age population decimated by years of military casualties.

It needed labor to rebuild.

The German prisoners provided that labor.

Historian Susan Grunewald, who researched the POW system extensively using Russian archives, concluded that the continued detention of German prisoners was driven primarily by the Soviet Union’s urgent need for reconstruction manpower, rather than by
a deliberate policy of punishment.

This is not a comfortable distinction for the men who lived it.

By the time large-scale repatriation began in the late 1940s, the prisoner population had been sorted through a process of political evaluation.

Those assessed as sufficiently re-educated and politically harmless were sent home.

Those convicted of war crimes by Soviet military tribunals received prison sentences, typically 25 years, and remained.

By 1949, with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet occupation zone, most prisoners had been released, but 85,000 remained in Soviet custody, convicted of war crimes and serving long sentences.

It was not until 1955 that a resolution was reached following the visit of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to Moscow in September of that year, during which the establishment of diplomatic relations between West Germany and the Soviet Union was tied implicitly to the return of the remaining German prisoners.

The last German POWs from the Second World War arrived back in West Germany in early 1956, more than a decade after the war’s end.

Some never came back at all.

The West German Maschke Commission’s figures, approximately 1,094,250 dead in Soviet captivity, represent the most comprehensive independent accounting.

Those men are buried across the Soviet Union in marked and unmarked graves in the frozen soil of Siberia and the Urals and the steppes in the ground beneath facilities they themselves helped build.

Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, was released from Soviet captivity in 1953.

He did not return to West Germany.

Instead, he settled in East Germany in Dresden, where he worked in military historical research and gave public lectures criticizing what he described as the irresponsibility of the Nazi leadership that had sent men to unnecessary deaths.

He never saw his wife again.

She died in West Germany in 1949 while he was still in Soviet captivity.

He died in Dresden in 1957.

His story, captured enemy turned Soviet-sponsored spokesman, then released into the divided Germany that the war had produced, contained within it in compressed form almost everything that was strange and terrible and complicated about what the Soviet system had done with the men it had taken prisoner.

There is a final dimension to this story that is rarely included in accounts focused exclusively on the German prisoners, and without it, the picture is incomplete.

When the war ended, millions of Soviet soldiers who had spent time in German captivity were repatriated to the Soviet Union.

Most of them had not collaborated with the Germans.

Most had survived through a combination of endurance and luck, emerging from the conditions of the German camps, where, as noted earlier, approximately 3 million of their fellow soldiers had died.

As survivors of one of the worst prisoner of war systems in history, Stalin’s government did not receive them as heroes.

Soviet military and political doctrine, as shaped by Stalin, held that any soldier who allowed himself to be captured rather than fighting to the last or taking his own life had committed an act of cowardice or potential treason.

Order number 270, issued by Stalin on August 16th, 1941, at the height of the catastrophic early German advances, explicitly classified any commander or political officer who surrendered as a traitor subject to execution and held that their families would lose all state support and benefits.

For rank-and-file soldiers, the order created a climate in which capture was treated as presumptive guilt rather than misfortune.

The order was, in part, a desperate measure taken during a moment of existential crisis when the Red Army was suffering defeats of staggering scale, but it established a principle that persisted.

Upon their return, millions of former Soviet prisoners of war were subjected to NKVD filtration, interrogation processes designed to determine whether they had collaborated with the Germans, worked as informants, or participated in units that had fought alongside the Wehrmacht.

The vast majority passed through this process and were eventually reintegrated into Soviet society, but a significant number were not.

Those found guilty of collaboration or simply accused of it were sentenced to terms in the Gulag.

Some received sentences of 10 years or more.

They had survived German captivity only to be imprisoned in their own country’s camps.

The men who had not collaborated and who were cleared by filtration nonetheless returned to a society in which being a former prisoner of war carried a stigma.

They were not recognized as veterans in the formal sense.

They did not receive the state benefits that veterans with unblemished records were entitled to.

It was not until 1995, 50 years after the war’s end, that former Soviet prisoners of war finally received formal legal recognition as veterans in Russia with the associated benefits that status carried.

The system that had held German prisoners for labor and ideology had treated its own soldiers suffering as a form of weakness to be punished.

This was not an accident or an oversight.

It was entirely consistent with how Stalin’s Soviet Union operated.

Human beings, whether enemy prisoners or its own citizens, were resources to be used, controlled, and when necessary, discarded.

The machinery did not distinguish very carefully between those who had served it and those who had opposed it.

What happened to the men on both sides of the wire, the Germans in the Soviet camps, and the Soviets in the German camps, and then the Soviet survivors in their own country’s camps, tells a story that no single national narrative can fully contain.

It was a war in which the systems built to destroy each other ground up their own people with nearly equal efficiency.

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