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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
German advances through 5 December 1941, with large groups of encircled Red Army soldiers in red. Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. [4] [5] The Nazi leadership believed that war with its ideological enemy was inevitable [6] due to the Nazi dogma that conquering territory to the east—called living space ()—was essential to Germany's long-term survival, [7 ...
The remaining prisoners were evacuated further east, either by train or on foot, while hundreds died due to the inhumane conditions of transport or at the hands of guards. [ 25 ] [ 26 ] At the end of July 1941, 767 prisoners evacuated from Chortkiv were executed by Soviets in Uman [ 27 ] (the Evacuation of Chortkiv Prison ).
In 2004, Vassili Kononov, a Soviet partisan during World War II, was convicted by Supreme Court of Latvia as a war criminal for killing three women, one of whom was pregnant. [230] [231] He is the only former Soviet partisan convicted of crimes against humanity. [232] The sentence was condemned by various high-ranking Russian officials. [233]
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.
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.
According to a RHSA report of 5 December 1941, the Wehrmacht had, since 22 June, handed over to the Einsatzgruppen 16,000 Soviet POWs to be liquidated. [99] Between the launching of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 and the following spring, 2.8 million of the 3.2 million prisoners taken died while in German hands. [100]
One of the Soviet Union's earliest war crimes were those against Polish prisoners of war in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Poland in the 1939; it is estimated that during that conflict, approximately 2,500 Polish soldiers were murdered in various executions and reprisals for offering resistance by Soviets and Ukrainian nationalists.