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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.
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 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.
Unlike Gulag camps, located primarily in remote areas (mostly in Siberia), most of the POW camps after the war were located in the European part of the Soviet Union (with notable exceptions of the Japanese POW in the Soviet Union), where the prisoners worked on restoration of the country's infrastructure destroyed during the war: roads ...
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]
The following is a list of prisoner-of-war camps in the Soviet Union during World War II. The Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War in 1929. Polish POWs
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
25–31% of Russian losses (as a proportion of those captured, wounded, or killed) were to prisoner status, for Austria-Hungary 32%, for Italy 26%, for France 12%, for Germany 9%; for Britain 7%. Prisoners from the Allied armies totaled about 1.4 million (not including Russia, which lost 2.5–3.5 million soldiers as prisoners). From the ...