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The POW and internees were handled by 24 frontline camps, 72 transit camps, over 500 labor camps and "special camps", 421 "worker battalions" (рабочий батальон), 214 "special hospitals", and 322 camps for handling of repatriation, over the whole territory of the Soviet Union. [1] Many POWs were used for the reconstruction of ...
German POWs were forced into slave labor during and after World War II by the Soviet Union. Based on documents in the Russian archives, Grigori F. Krivosheev in his 1993 study listed 2,389,600 German nationals taken as POWs and the deaths of 450,600 of these German POWs including 356,700 in NKVD camps and 93,900 in transit.
The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956. [1] According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht POWs died in NKVD camps (356,700 German nationals and 24,367 from other nations).
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 ...
Most German POW survivors of the forced labor camps in the Soviet Union were released in 1953. [3] [4] Estimates of German POW casualties (in both East and West and cumulative for both the war and peacetime period) range from 600,000 to 1,000,000. [5]
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.
Historians debate the full extent of Soviet reprisals against repatriated soldiers, with some arguing that nearly all returning POWs were subjected to forced labor or imprisonment. In 1995, Russia formally recognized former Soviet POWs as veterans, granting them equal rights with other war participants.
Gulag or Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerej was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The Gulag penal system was restricted, with little to no communication between different camps, and were not discussed in the wider Soviet society. [4] As a result, each camp developed its own culture and set of rules, each functioning as distinct ...