Treatment of Captured Female Soviet Soldiers by the Germans
Initially, there was an order to shoot Soviet uniformed females on sight, but it was quickly rescinded. Still, plenty of female fighters were shot. They were commonly raped and tortured before that. And that started very early on. Of course, the treatment got more brutal as time went on and Germans got angrier. But plenty of women were not shot. Instead, they were mistreated in concentration and death camps. They were regularly raped by the guards (both Germans and locals) and tortured in ways that I can’t even describe. Naturally, they also had to work. And they were exterminated at will.
Pictured - Soviet female POWs who were taken in the summer of 1941.
On this day 18th April 1945.
The Western Allies reported that German prisoners taken since the Normandy invasion had reached two million, with the exact count at 2,055,575.
Numerous research has been undertaken to ascertain the conditions of German Prisoners of War in Western hands.
POWs died due to exposure and the illnesses related to this, but no evidence can be found that the Western Allies deliberately set these events in motion.
No policy similar to the Germans treatment of Soviet POWs has ever been proven.
Certainly after the end of the war the situation deteriorated for POWs as the inability of the Western allies to feed the German population due to destroyed infrastructure as well as the vast movement of German civilians fleeing the Soviets.
Over four million Germans were imprisoned, captured and interned for labor in the USSR after WWII. Not all of them managed to find the road back home.
“If I do survive, I will be able to find out what the Bolsheviks are. Perhaps communism really is the ideal way out for the people. After all, we also do a lot of things wrong,” Helmut Bon thought as he was captured by Soviet soldiers somewhere in the Pskov region in February 1944. Bohn would spend 1944-1947 in the USSR as a military prisoner and later describe this in a book titled ‘At the Gates of Life’. Not all Germans interned in the USSR lived to write a book, however.
1941. The Western front. Hitler's soldiers surrender to the Soviet military guard. / Vladimir Grebnev/TASS
Over four million Germans were imprisoned, captured and interned for labor in the USSR after WWII. Not all of them managed to find the road back home.
“If I do survive, I will be able to find out what the Bolsheviks are. Perhaps communism really is the ideal way out for the people. After all, we also do a lot of things wrong,” Helmut Bon thought as he was captured by Soviet soldiers somewhere in the Pskov region in February 1944. Bohn would spend 1944-1947 in the USSR as a military prisoner and later describe this in a book titled ‘At the Gates of Life’. Not all Germans interned in the USSR lived to write a book, however.
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December 1941, Moscow region. Soviet soldiers convoy a column of captured German soldiers.
Anatoliy Garanin / Sputnik
The Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees was organized in the USSR even before the war started. By 1941, there were eight labor camps for war prisoners in the USSR, but the number of prisoners grew slowly: about ten thousand in 1941 and 1942. But, after the Stalingrad battle and the Soviet onslaught in the Don region, the number of prisoners grew quickly: over 200 thousand in 1943, and over 800 thousand more by the end of the war.
Formally, a German prisoner’s route was as follows: From the place they were captured at, they were taken to the front line receiving and forwarding camps and, from there, transported to the mainland camps. But, in reality, during the war, most prisoners stayed at the front line camps that often were just huts and dugouts. “Until we arrive at the camp, the daily ration is about a liter of liquid soup and three hundred grams of stale bread. Those days when we were ordered to chop wood for the Russian field kitchen, we were given some hot tea for dinner. We, about a dozen prisoners, were kept under lock and key in a goat pen, overseen by a junior female Red Army lieutenant,” Helmut Bon wrote
Death rates were high among the Germans in the labor camps. According to Soviet statistics, from 1945 to 1956, over 580,000 people died in prison camps, over 356,000 of them Germans. Almost 70% of deaths occurred in the winter of 1945-1946. In comparison, as historian Viktor Zemskov wrote, about 1.8 million Soviet citizens died in German captivity during the years of war.
It must be remembered that the estimated number of Soviet deaths was at least 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody, out of 5.7 million. This figure represents a total of 57% of all Soviet POWs.