Heinrich Himmler Visiting Russian POW Camp.
Even prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, the German
civilian and military leadership made provisions to separate and kill selected
categories of Soviet POWs and to provide the remainder with grossly
insufficient provisions and supplies. While this policy would undergo a number
of modifications over time, it was never completely revised. In the end, of the
3.3 million Red Army soldiers captured before the end of 1941, nearly 2 million
died in German custody. Of the 5.7 million Soviet troops captured over the
course of the entire war, between 2.5 million and 3.3 million perished. 106 By
1945, mass graves for Soviet POWs littered Europe's war-ravaged landscape; mass
graves were found in Norway and France, in Germany and Poland - although most
Soviet POW victims died while still on Soviet soil.
Plans to undersupply Soviet POWs systematically initially
arose in the framework of a general policy of starvation directed at those
populations living in Soviet territories occupied by the German army, designed
in early 1941. These plans, intended both to ameliorate the critical supply
situation on the Eastern Front and to buttress Germany's own limited food
supplies, primarily targeted populations living in northern and central Russia,
Byelorussia, and urban environments. It was, of course, tremendously naive to
imagine that these populations would peacefully starve to death. With only
skeletal occupation forces policing these areas, it was virtually impossible to
prevent Soviet citizens from "illegally" procuring food (with the
notable exception of besieged Leningrad, where approximately 600,000 civilians
died). In the end, it was pressure from regional occupation authorities - who
required a pliable urban workforce and a functioning infrastructure and who wished
to avoid epidemics and public unrest - that led to the abandonment of the
original starvation scheme. Given the enormous and growing supply needs of the
German military on the Eastern Front, however, policy was not fully reversed in
practice. Supplies allocated to the civilian populations remained grossly
insufficient. It was in this context that from September 1941 on, a policy of
selective extermination emerged. The largest group affected were prisoners of
war. Soviet POWs viewed as "unfit for work" were, quite simply, left
to die of starvation: they were physically separated from other POWs and placed
on greatly reduced diets. Largely unable to attain food outside their rations,
they had little chance of survival. The death rate among prisoners quickly skyrocketed;
and, from October 1941 on, larger POW camps witnessed up to four hundred
prisoners' deaths per day - a rate nearly as high as those achieved by the
individual Einsatzgruppen during this same period. Between September and
December 1941, an average of 15,000 Soviet POWs lost their lives each and every
day - according to numerous reports, malnutrition was the leading culprit; disease
was a distant second.
Only in the spring of 1942, which brought an increased
urgency to the utilization of forced labor, did the situation ease somewhat.
Yet, even then, Soviet POWs did not receive adequate nutrition. Only a minor
portion of all Soviet POWs killed died in large-scale executions. According to
the secret "Commissar Order" of June 6, 1941, political officers
among Red Army POWs were to be murdered. Practically, such special treatment
meant that political officers either were shot by the troops who captured them,
were killed by POW camp guards, or were handed over to police authorities, who
either shot them themselves or sent them to concentration camps. The
concentration camp, itself, was virtually equivalent to a death sentence: most
perished within a few months under particularly harsh conditions reserved for
political POWs or were outright murdered in gas chambers or gas vans or through
other methods. It is estimated that 120,000 Soviet POWs were handed over to the
SS and police during the course of the Second World War. Because the data are
highly fragmentary, however, no reliable estimates exist for the total number
of political officers murdered. In addition to political officers, there were
also attempts to single out and murder Jewish and, until September 1941,
"Asian" Soviet POWs. At varying times and in varying regions, other
select POW groups also became the target of exterminatory policies: most
notably, Red Army officers and female Red Army soldiers.
Whereas the "Commissar Order" was largely
abandoned by May 1942, as it inadvertently strengthened military resistance
whenever Red Army soldiers were aware of such policies, other killings of
Soviet POWs continued unabated: up to several hundred thousand Soviet POWs were
shot by German guards during exhausting forced marches, while filing through
the streets of occupied Soviet cities, or while being loaded and unloaded at
railway stations. In these cases, the perpetrators were regular German
soldiers, often on orders from low- or mid-ranking officers. On a typical
forced march, for which insufficient provisions of food, beverage, and carts
were provided, only a handful of officers and rank-and-file guards were
allocated to accompany the prisoners. As senior officers usually planned these
marches, the relatively junior officers and rank-and-file guards assigned to
them were placed in a rather unenviable position. With a demanding schedule and
vastly inadequate supplies, it was inevitable that many POWs would be unable to
finish the journey, and, with so few guards, some would try to flee. In any
event, a situation developed in which guards often chose to execute POWs unable
to continue along the route - a strategy perhaps designed both to motivate the
marchers onward and to forestall possible resistance. In occupied Ukraine, there
were even army-level orders to shoot POWs who could not continue. Taking this
practice into consideration, we must conclude that the German military was
responsible for the direct murder of most Soviet POWs, not the SS or the
police.
While it is broadly accepted that there existed a high-level
extermination policy against certain groups of Soviet POWs in German captivity,
it is important to remember that those who died were not the victims of some
anonymous force or faceless system. High-level political orders coincided with
the ground-level actions of German army officers and soldiers. Especially
during the early days of the conflict, German troops regularly exhibited a
tendency toward excessive violence by adhering to "no prisoner" policies,
on orders originating everywhere from army corps to platoon level. On occasion,
officers' orders not to shoot weak and injured Soviet prisoners during forced
marches to the rear were willfully ignored by the troops assigned to them -
usually Sicherungsdivisionen or Landesschu" tzenbataillone, units that
primarily comprised older reservists. Once in camp, from October 1941, Soviet
prisoners were separated into two groups: a group categorized as "fit for
labor" - and, thus, selected for survival - and a group categorized as
"unfit for work" - and, thus, slated for death. While those deemed
"fit for labor" were spatially separated from their less fortunate
comrades, they nonetheless remained subject to overly heavy labor demands and
indiscriminately cruel treatment - in the camps as well as at the workplace -
suggesting that different German troops were involved in the violence. As a
result, the death rate among those "fit for work" remained
extraordinarily high. Even after senior civilian and military authorities introduced
a policy in the spring of 1942 that sought to keep workers alive, Soviet POWs
continued to be overworked, underfed, and brutally treated, resulting in
continued elevated mortality rates. It seems that the mentalities of many
guards and lower-level commanders proved too inflexible for such rapid policy
shifts. From a source perspective, it has been the personal statements and
testaments of surviving Soviet POWs - a source base until recently neglected by
Western researchers as "biased," despite their simultaneous reliance
upon oral testimony in researching the fate of German POWs - that most fully
demonstrate the intensity and unpredictability of the violence inflicted by
German troops upon Soviet prisoners. At the same time, it should be remembered
that many guards did not participate in beatings, torture, or killings.
A number of factors influenced the violence inflicted upon
Soviet POWs. In part, it was the product of a racist ideology deeply entrenched
within the German military, an ideology that produced a sense of absolute
superiority. Interestingly, with the exception of ethnic Germans and Jews,
relatively little distinction was made between different ethnic groups among
POWs. Anti-Communism represented another factor in the maltreatment of Soviet
prisoners. Given the flight and evacuation of Soviet officials from territories
conquered by the Germans, Soviet POWs were, by and large, the only
representatives of the Soviet state ever to fall into German hands.
Accordingly, the German military tended to treat them as if they were responsible
for all Soviet "crimes." This mentality may have contributed to the
fact that the death rate among Soviet POWs remained significantly higher than
that of the 2 million Soviet civilians deported to Germany as forced labor from
1942. The combination of racist and anti-Bolshevik sentiments resulted in the
assignment of particularly exhausting and dangerous work to Soviet POWs, such
as quarry mining. Finally, local emergencies, whether concerning German troop
supplies and transportation or the fear of civil revolt and resistance, often
led regional occupation authorities to undernourish and undersupply Soviet POWs
further, a policy that only elevated their already high death rates. The death
rate in the General Government of Poland and in areas under the control of Army
Group Center in late 1941, for example, exceeded 30 percent per month. The
recurrence of such local emergencies helps to account for the substantial
discrepancies in mortality rates in different regions at any given time.
While economic, military, and political considerations were
not fully independent of ideological motives, they played critical roles in the
ongoing crescendo of violence against Soviet POWs. Indeed, it was precisely the
combination of virulent racism, anti-Communism, and key moments in a deadly
military conflict that produced conditions under which extreme political and
military measures appeared justified and mass death seemed inevitable.
