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There were 40 known prisoner-of-war camps across Canada during World War II, although this number also includes internment camps that held Canadians of German and Japanese descent. [1] Several reliable sources indicate that there were only 25 or 26 camps holding exclusively prisoners from foreign countries, nearly all from Germany. [2] [3] [4]
Prisoners of war during World War II faced vastly different fates due to the POW conventions adhered to or ignored, depending on the theater of conflict, and the behaviour of their captors. During the war approximately 35 million soldiers surrendered, with many held in the prisoner-of-war camps .
The mortality rate of German and Italian prisoners in Soviet custody was high, estimated at over 30% and over 70%, respectively. This was despite the USSR's public declarations of support for humane treatment of prisoners of war. It is estimated that about 1.5 million Axis European POWs died after surrendering to the USSR. [1]: 237
The Normandy massacres were a series of killings in-which approximately 156 Canadian and two British prisoners of war (POWs) were murdered by soldiers of the 12th SS Panzer Division (Hitler Youth) during the Battle of Normandy in World War II. The majority of the murders occurred within the first ten days of the Allied invasion of France. [1]
Soviet Prisoners of War in World War II, which reports that of 1.5 million returnees by March 1946, 43 percent continued their military service, 22 percent were drafted into labor battalions for two years, 18 percent were sent home, 15 percent were sent to a forced labor camp, and 2 percent worked for repatriation commissions.
The history of Canada during World War II begins with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. While the Canadian Armed Forces were eventually active in nearly every theatre of war , most combat was centred in Italy , [ 1 ] Northwestern Europe, [ 2 ] and the North Atlantic.
On the eve of World War II, Soviet archives indicate a combined camp and colony population upwards of 1.6 million in 1939, according to V. P. Kozlov. [62] Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde estimate that 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in Gulag system's prison camps and colonies when the war started. [65] [66]
Dead Soviet civilians near Minsk, Belarus, 1943 Kiev, 23 June 1941 A victim of starvation in besieged Leningrad suffering from muscle atrophy in 1941. World War II losses of the Soviet Union were about 27 million both civilian and military from all war-related causes, [1] although exact figures are disputed.