Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The tsarist government ratified the 1907 Hague Convention, but the Soviet Union had not signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. [2] In 1931 USSR passed the "Statute of POWs" that was roughly similar to the Geneva Convention, although it explicitly outlawed many privileges customarily afforded to military officers.
However, some other historians, such as Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär claimed that almost all returning Soviet POWs were convicted of collaboration and treason and sentenced to the various forms of forced labour, [19] while admitting that it would be unlikely to study the full extent of the history of the Soviet prisoners of war. [19]
The first POW camps were formed in the European part of the USSR. By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union amassed a huge number of German and Japanese and other Axis Powers POW, estimated over 5 million [1] (of which estimated 15% died in captivity [2]), as well as interned German civilians used as part of the reparations.
The following articles deal with Soviet prisoners of war. Camps for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland (1919–24) Soviet prisoners of war in Finland during World War II (1939–45) Nazi crimes against Soviet prisoners of war during World War II (1941–45) Badaber Uprising of Soviet soldiers held in Pakistan in 1985
According to Russian military historian General Grigoriy Krivosheyev, the Axis powers took 4.6 million Soviet prisoners, of whom 1.8 million were found alive in camps after the war and 318,770 were released by the Axis during the war and were then drafted into the Soviet armed forces again. [86]
The Institute for the Study of War noted in February 2025 that Russia had mostly exhausted its prison population in 2022 and 2023 and could no longer generate significant forces from inmates. It also noted that the Russian government deprived prisoners who volunteer to fight in Ukraine of one-time enlistment bonuses starting January 1, 2025. [16]
This return was quite slow (500,000 Austro-Hungarians out of 2,000,000) and the Russian Civil War delayed the repatriation of some of the prisoners from Russia until 1922. The October Revolution and the Civil War also delayed the return of Russian prisoners from Germany. [39] German prisoners were still being held in Russia as late as 1924. [40]
Joseph R. Beyrle (pron. BYE-er-lee) (Russian: Джозеф Вильямович Байерли; romanized: Dzhozef Vilyamovich Bayyerli; August 25, 1923 – December 12, 2004) is the only known American soldier to have served in combat with both the United States Army and the Soviet Red Army in World War II.