German POWs and the Art of Survival

By Simon Rees | Military History  | 4 comments  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

Götterdämmerung—“Twilight of the Gods”—Adolf Hitler’s parting legacy to Europe. Nothing was to be left for the victorious Allies. Where there had been cities, they would find rubble. Where there had been cultivated fields, they would find wilderness. The Führer and his henchmen came close to achieving this goal. Agricultural production had ground to a halt, while in urban centers millions had been bombed out of their homes and were living on the edge of starvation. Distribution of the limited stockpiles of food was severely constrained by the smashed state of Central Europe’s rail and transport infrastructure. To the west the population was swelling daily as an estimated 12 to 14.5 million fled Russian-occupied territory. Survivors of the Nazi slave labor and death camps were in desperate need of aid, as were thousands of newly released Allied POWs. The Western Allies and Soviets were forced to make some tough choices concerning German and Axis prisoners of war.

Under the 1929 Geneva Convention, POWs were entitled to a diet equivalent to that of the occupying troops. Given the circumstances in Europe at the end of the war, however, a 2,000-calorie diet, the recommended daily minimum, would have been impossible to maintain. The bulk of Allied shipping was now earmarked for the Pacific theater; only when the war had been won would supplies be diverted to Europe.

In early April 1945, the United States was responsible for 313,000 prisoners in Europe; by month’s end this total had shot up to 2.1 million. After the fall of the Third Reich, the number rose to a staggering 5 million German and Axis POWs. Of those, an estimated 56,000, or about 1 percent, died—roughly equal to the mortality rate American POWs suffered in German hands.

Those held in Soviet-occupied territory fared far worse. Officially, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 Germans and 1,097,000 combatants from other European nations as prisoners during and just after the war. More than a million of the German captives died. The immense suffering Germany and her Axis partners had caused surely played a key role in the treatment of enemy POWs. “In 1945, in Soviet eyes it was time to pay,” wrote British military historian Max Arthur. “For most Russian soldiers, any instinct for pity or mercy had died somewhere on a hundred battlefields between Moscow and Warsaw.”

Josef Stalin’s regime was ill equipped to deal with prisoners: In 1943 as more enemy units fell into Soviet hands, death rates among POWs lingered around 60 percent. Roughly 570,000 German and Axis prisoners had already died in captivity. By March 1944, conditions began to improve, but for economic reasons: As its manpower was swallowed up in the war effort, the USSR turned to POWs as a surrogate work force. While POWs were not technically part of the gulag system, the lines were often blurred. Camps and detainment centers often comprised poorly constructed huts that offered scant protection from bitter Russian winter winds. The Soviet Union repatriated prisoners at irregular intervals, sometimes in large numbers. As late as 1953, however, at least 20,000 German POWs remained in Russia. After Stalin’s death, those men were finally sent home.

As a young teen in 1939, Milan Lorman witnessed the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the creation of Slovakia as a satellite state of the Third Reich. Lorman’s father, a poor country teacher, diligently traced the family’s Germanic roots to claim entitlements offered by the Third Reich to those of German origin. But there was a cost for such subsidies: In 1943 a letter arrived asking Lorman’s father why his son, now 18, had not volunteered for the SS. The letter alluded to the cessation of entitlements should the teenager fail to join. Under great pressure, young Lorman accepted his fate and volunteered for the Waffen SS.

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Tags: Historical Conflicts, People, Politics, Social History, World War II