[4] The German 6th Army surrendered in the Battle of Stalingrad, 91,000 of the survivors became prisoners of war raising the number to 170,000[4] in early 1943. [50] The Soviet Union and the western allies employed German POW labor up until 1949. Bd. Information about the forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union was suppressed in the Eastern Bloc until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reichling was an employee of the Federal Statistical Office who was involved in the study of German expulsion statistics since 1953. As a result of the offensive in Belarus, known as … Consequently, 111,831 (61,375 men and 50,456 women) able bodied adult ethnic Germans from Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary were deported for forced labor to the USSR. American soldiers casually climbed over the still twitching bodies, killing the wounded. [19], There is currently an ongoing research program in collaboration between Russia and Germany:[20], The ethnic German minority in the USSR was considered a security risk by the Soviet government and they were deported during the war in order to prevent their possible collaboration with the Nazi invaders. The last surviving 10,000 of them were not released from the Soviet Union until 1955, after a decade of forced labor. it is known that 6,000 German officers were sent from the West to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which at the time was one of the NKVD special camp and from which it is known that they were transferred to POW camps. And the debate about the Soviet treatment of German POWs continues long after World War II ended. 6. It was not until 1956 that the last of these Kriegsverurteilte ('war convicts') were repatriated, following the intervention of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Moscow. A. Deported from Eastern Europe to USSR 1945-1950 as reparations labor, Total 600,000. Figures do not include "Forced Repatriation" and "Resettlers" Ethnic Germans from the USSR who had been resettled by Germany in Poland during the war. von T. Schieder. [9] In his revised Russian language edition of Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses, Krivosheev put the number of German military POWs at 2,733,739 and dead at 381,067 (356,700 German nationals and 24,367 from other nations)[10] However, Soviet era sources are disputed by historians in the West, who estimate 3.0 million German POWs were taken by the USSR and up to 1.0 million died in Soviet captivity. Even today the total number of Germans and Axis allies in Soviet captivity remains a contentious issue. From 1953 to 1961, the Schieder commission made estimates of the numbers of German civilians who died in the expulsions and those deported to the USSR for forced labor. Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union, German prisoners of war in the United States, German prisoners of war in northwest Europe, German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war, G. I. Krivosheev Rossiia i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil, "Ex-Death Camp Tells Story Of Nazi and Soviet Horrors", Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union&oldid=1002246578, German prisoners of war in World War II held by the Soviet Union, Military history of Germany during World War II, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 23 January 2021, at 14:47. [1] The study was published by Central European University Press. Persons held in these short-lived camps east of the line were subsequently transferred to NKVD special camps in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany or to the Soviet Union for forced labor[4] By May 1945 the NKVD had selected for deportation to the USSR 66,152 German civilians who were considered suspected Nazi party members and government officials, as well as 89,110 able bodied adults (mostly men) for forced labor. No figures were given for Romania and Hungary. [13][14], According to Edward Peterson, the U.S. chose to hand over several hundred thousand German prisoners to the Soviet Union in May 1945 as a "gesture of friendship". Image taken by Lt. O’Brien, No. The West German Search Service working with the German Red Cross attempted to trace German civilians deported to the USSR and estimate the approximate number who died. Again the number of POWs rose – to 2,000,000 in April 1945. Kiel, 1959. The official Soviet numbers are that 350,000 to 400,000 German POWs perished in Soviet imprisonment, which historians have determined to be far too low. According to Russian historian Grigori F. Krivosheev, Soviet NKVD figures list 2,733,739 German "Wehrmacht"(Военнопленные из войск вермахта) POWs taken with 381,067 having died in captivity. These civilian deaths in the Federal Archive Report are not listed above in the Russian archive statistics. [39], F. Klaipėda (Memel) residents- Ethnic Germans who remained in Klaipedia after the war. Former American POWs should thank the diplomats who signed the Geneva Convention every day for the rest of their lives. Figures: Rüdiger Overmans ca was set for a war of annihilation waged by … 1944 Six... Luftwaffe POWs at Camp Vilvoorde, the Red Army advanced to the Oder river and the... Known in the USSR and that death toll was 4,500 to 5,000 were employed instead as conscript labor historical. 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