War of annihilation
In December 1940, Adolf Hitler began planning an attack on the then allied communist Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. The operation was codenamed "Barbarossa". During the preparation, Hitler made it clear that this is not about the traditional seizure of territories, but about the so-called war of destruction (Vernichtungskrieg). In March 1941, he informed the leadership of the Wehrmacht that it was not enough to be content with a military victory and the expansion to the east of the German living space (Lebensraum). According to him, the communist Soviet Union "… must be destroyed with the use of the most brutal violence." He declared that the "Jewish Bolshevik" intelligentsia and the functionaries of the Communist Party should be executed.
Commissar order
By "commissars' order" dated June 6, 1941, Hitler ordered the destruction of the captured political instructors of the Red Army. (The commissars were responsible for the education of the army in the communist spirit and ideological training, and also exercised political control over the commanders). An agreement was concluded between the SS and the army to carry out the order. According to him, commissars and members of the communist party were filtered out among the prisoners before being sent to the camp. The Nazi Party and the SS entrusted this task to the SS Security Service (SD - Sicherheitsdienst). The "dangerous elements" identified in the mass of prisoners of war were then transferred to those responsible for the security of the front-line territories to special SS detachments, which immediately shot them. On the basis of the "commissar's order", at least 140 thousand Soviet prisoners of war were executed even before they reached the camps. The order was eventually canceled in May 1942 due to objections from the German army commanders, as, in their opinion, it only strengthened the resistance of the Red Army. After that, the commissars were sent to concentration camps (for example, in Mauthausen) and executed there.
German army and Russian prisoners of war: logistics
In accordance with preliminary plans, the German army was preparing for a lightning victory and simply did not count on the logistics and food supply problems that happened in the war with the Red Army. Due to the scarce supply of the front, the Wehrmacht did not prepare for the transportation of prisoners of war - millions of Soviet soldiers walked in foot columns over a hundred kilometers in length towards the camps. Those who lagged behind were shot, civilians who tried to pass food to the starving prisoners were also opened fire. At the direction of the command, the prisoners of war were transported in open wagons. Despite the fact that frosts began in November and it was constantly snowing, only at the end of the month transportation in closed wagons was allowed. But this did not bring significant changes: during the movement they were not given food, and there was no heating in the carriages. Under such conditions, at the beginning of December, 25-70% of the prisoners died on the road.
The next problem was that at the end of the foot marches, in most cases, instead of equipped concentration camps, they were just waiting for a territory surrounded by barbed wire. Neither were the conditions necessary for survival: barracks, latrines, first-aid posts. The chief, who was put in charge of the camp network, received 250 tons of barbed wire, but no logs for the construction of the premises. Millions of Red Army soldiers were forced to endure the terrible winter of 1941-1942. in dugouts, often at 20-40 degrees of frost.
Hunger and epidemics
The Wehrmacht's indifference to prisoners of war was intensified by the fact that, planning the economic exploitation of the occupied Soviet territories, the departments had calculated in advance the possibility of starvation of 20-30 million Russians, as a result of the export of food to Germany. In preliminary calculations for the provision of prisoners of war, the Wehrmacht laid down the minimum costs. Initially, 700 - 1000 calories were calculated per person daily. But, with the passage of time and the increase in the number of prisoners of war, this - and so scanty - portion has decreased even more. The German Ministry of Food Supply considered: "Any portion of food for the prisoners is too large, since it is taken from our own families and soldiers of our army."
On October 21, 1941, the Chief Quartermaster of the Army, General Wagner, responsible for the supply, defined a new, reduced portion of the Russian prisoner as follows: 20 grams of cereal and 100 grams of bread without meat or 100 grams of cereal without bread. According to calculations, this was equal to a quarter of the minimum necessary for survival. After that, it is not surprising that among the several million who were in the camps, there was a terrible famine among the captured soldiers. The unfortunate, in the absence of tolerable food, cooked herbs and shrubs, gnawed the bark of trees, ate field rodents and birds.
After October 31, the prisoners of war were allowed to work. In November, Wagner said that those who were not working "… should be left to starve to death in the camps." Since the Soviet Union was not inclined to sign an international agreement guaranteeing the rights of prisoners of war, the Nazis provided food for only able-bodied prisoners. In one of the documents you can find the following: “In the matter of supplying food to the Bolshevik prisoners, we are not bound by international obligations, as is the case with other prisoners. Therefore, the size of their rations should be determined for us based on the value of their labor."
From the beginning of 1942, due to the protracted war, there was a shortage of workers. The Germans wanted to replace their conscript contingent with Russian prisoners of war. Due to the mass deaths due to hunger, the Nazis experimented with various solutions to the problem: Goering suggested feeding them unsuitable carrion, specialists from the Ministry of Supply developed a special "Russian bread" that consisted of 50% rye bran, 20% sugar beet pomace and 20% cellulose flour and 10% straw flour. But "Russian bread" turned out to be unsuitable for human food and, since the soldiers were getting massive illness because of it, its production was stopped.
Due to hunger and the lack of basic conditions, POW camps soon became hotbeds of epidemics. It was impossible to wash, there were no latrines, the lice spread typhoid fever. In the winter of 1941-1942, as well as at the end of 1943, tuberculosis, which raged due to the lack of vitamins, became the cause of mass death. Wounds without medical care rotted, developed into gangrene. Sore, frozen, coughing skeletons spread an intolerable stench. In August 1941, a German intelligence officer wrote to his wife: “The news coming from the east is again terrible. Our losses are obviously great. It is still bearable, but the hecatombs of corpses have laid a burden on our shoulders. We constantly learn that in the arriving parties of Jews and prisoners of war, only 20% survived, hunger is a widespread phenomenon in the camps, typhus and other epidemics are raging."
Appeal
The German guards treated the weakened Russian prisoners of war, usually as people of the inferior race (Untermensch). They were often beaten, killed just for fun. It was a duty to treat them roughly. In the order of September 8, 1941, it was prescribed: “Disobedience, active or passive resistance must be immediately stopped by force of arms. The use of weapons against prisoners of war is lawful and correct. " General Keitel, who was later executed as a war criminal after the Nuremberg trials, in the summer of 1942 ordered the prisoners of war to be branded: “The stigma has the shape of an acute angle of about 45 degrees with a side length of 1 centimeter, pointed upwards, and is placed on the left buttock at the palm's distance from anus ". For those trying to escape, the prisoners were required to open fire without warning, the captured fugitives were to be handed over to the nearest Gestapo. This was tantamount to immediate execution.
Losses
In such conditions (transportation, maintenance, food, treatment), Soviet prisoners of war died en masse. According to German data, between June 1941 and January 1942, an average of 6,000 prisoners of war died every day. In overcrowded camps in the occupied Polish territories, 85% of 310 thousand prisoners died before February 19, 1942. The report of the department of the "four-year plan", which is under the direction of Goering, reads the following: “We had 3, 9 million Russian prisoners at our disposal. Of these, 1.1 million survived. Between November and January alone, 500,000 Russians died."
In 1941, Himmler instructed the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, to start building a new camp suitable for housing and providing work for 100 thousand prisoners of war. But, contrary to the original plan, in the fall of 1941, only about 15 thousand Russian prisoners arrived in Auschwitz. According to the memoirs of Hess, "Russian barbarians" killed each other for bread and there were frequent cases of cannibalism. They built a new camp. By the spring of 1942, 90% of them had died. But Auschwitz II, the concentration camp at Birkenau, was ready.
During the Second World War, about 5 million Red Army soldiers were captured. About 60% of them, that is, 3 million, died. This was the worst ratio in all the theaters of World War II.
Stalin and Soviet prisoners of war
The heavy burden of responsibility for the deaths of millions of captured Red Army soldiers rests with their own government and the communist dictator Joseph Stalin that rules it. During the Great Terror of 1937-38, the Red Army also did not escape purges. Three out of five marshals were executed (Tukhachevsky, Blucher, Yakir), out of 15 army commanders - 13, out of 9 admirals - eight, out of 57 corps commanders - 50, out of 186 division commanders - 154, in total - about 40 thousand officers, on false accusations of conspiracy and espionage. All this happened just before the approaching Second World War. As a result of the purges, before the German attack on June 22, 1941, most of the high and middle commanding officers did not have the appropriate training and experience.
Stalin's crimes are compounded by his mistakes. Despite warnings from intelligence and headquarters, he believed until the last moment that Hitler was only bluffing and would not dare to attack. Under Stalin's pressure, the Red Army had only offensive plans and did not develop a defensive strategy. For his mistakes and crimes, the country paid a huge price: the Nazis occupied about two million square kilometers of Soviet territory, a third of the national wealth was lost in the war, amounting to about 700 billion rubles. The Soviet Union suffered terrible losses: during the German occupation, 17-20 million civilians were killed, 7 million soldiers died on the fronts, and another 5 million were taken prisoner. Of the prisoners of war, 3 million people died.
In connection with the tragedy of prisoners of war, Stalin bears a special responsibility. The Communist Soviet Union did not sign the Hague Convention, an international agreement on the rights of prisoners of war, which did not guarantee that captured Red Army soldiers would be treated appropriately, at the same time, it abandoned the basic protection of its own military. Due to the decision of the communist leadership, the Soviet Union had practically no ties with the International Red Cross, that is, maintaining relations through an organization (letters, information, parcels) was impossible. Due to the Stalinist policy, any control over the Germans was impossible, and Soviet prisoners of war were defenseless.
The suffering of the Red Army men strengthened Stalin's inhuman views. The dictator believed that only cowards and traitors are captured. A soldier of the Red Army was obliged to fight to the last drop of blood and had no right to surrender. Therefore, in the Soviet military reports there was no separate column for prisoners of war who were declared missing. This means that officially Soviet prisoners of war did not seem to exist. At the same time, the prisoners were considered traitors and their family members, branded as enemies of the people, were deported to the Gulag. Russian soldiers who escaped from the German encirclement were considered potential traitors, they ended up in special filtration camps of the NKVD. Many of them, after grueling interrogations, were sent to the Gulag.
Stalin did not forgive defeat. In the summer of 1941, unable to stop the German offensive, he ordered the execution of the command staff of the Western Front: Pavlov, Klimovsky, Grigoriev and Korobkov. The generals, Ponedelin and Kachalin, who disappeared in battle, were sentenced in absentia to capital punishment. Although later it turned out that Kachalin had died, his family was arrested and convicted. Ponedelin was taken prisoner wounded, unconscious, spent four years in German captivity. But, after his release, he was arrested, and he spent another five years - now in Soviet - camps. In August 1950, he was convicted and executed a second time.
Stalin tried with inhuman methods to stop the mass retreat of the Soviet troops fleeing from the Germans. From the commanders of the fronts and armies, he continuously demanded "… to exterminate cowards and traitors on the spot." On August 12, 1941, in order number 270, he ordered: “Commanders and political workers who, during a battle, tear off their insignia and defect to the rear or surrender to the enemy, are considered malicious deserters, whose families are subject to arrest, as relatives of those who violated the oath and betrayed their homeland. To oblige all higher commanders and commissars to shoot on the spot such deserters from the command staff … If the head or part of the Red Army, instead of organizing a repulse to the enemy, prefer to surrender, destroy them by all means, both ground and air, and deprive the families of the Red Army soldiers who surrendered to the captivity of state benefits and help ".
On July 28, 1942, at the height of the German offensive, the Dictator was in a hurry to slow him down with a new cruel order: “Not a step back! This should now be our main call … To form within the army … armed barrage detachments, … to oblige them in case of panic and indiscriminate withdrawal of divisions, to shoot on the spot alarmists and cowards … ". But Stalin ordered to shoot not only at the retreating soldiers. In the fall of 1941, it was reported from Leningrad that the Germans were leading Russian women, children and old people in front of them as a shield during the offensive. Stalin's answer: “They say that among the Leningrad Bolsheviks there are those who do not imagine it possible to open fire on such delegations. Personally, I believe that if there are such people among the Bolsheviks, they must be destroyed first of all. Since they are more dangerous than the Nazis. My advice is not to be sentimental. Enemy and voluntary, or caught with a rope, accomplices should be beaten everywhere … Beat the Germans and their envoys everywhere, be they anyone, destroy the enemy, it doesn't matter whether he is a volunteer or caught by a rope."
Stalin's insensitivity is well demonstrated by the fact that when he was told that his son, Senior Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, had been taken prisoner by the Nazis and the Nazis were ready to exchange him for a German prisoner, the dictator did not react with a word to the news and never mentioned his son again. Jacob committed suicide in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp by throwing himself on barbed wire.
The consequence of the Stalinist terror was that this was the first war when the Russians en masse went over to the side of the enemy. About two million people served as volunteers (grooms, cooks, workers, etc.) in various parts of the German army. Tens of thousands of prisoners of war joined the Russian Liberation Army.
After liberation in 1945, the suffering of civilians and prisoners of war did not end. The Soviet authorities repatriated 4.2 million Soviet citizens by February 1946. Of these, 360 thousand were sent as traitors to the Gulag, sentenced to 10-20 years. Another 600,000 were sent to forced reconstruction work, usually for two years. Several thousand soldiers of Vlasov's army were executed, and 150 thousand people were sent to Siberia or Kazakhstan.
As a result, it can be determined that on the eastern front of the Second World War, two inhuman totalitarian dictatorships waged a truly all-out war of annihilation with each other. The main victims of this war are the civilian population of the Soviet and Polish territories, as well as the Red Army men, betrayed by their own fatherland and not considered people by the enemy. Considering the role of the Nazis, it can be determined that the tragedy of Soviet prisoners of war was an inseparable part of German policy towards the Slavs, therefore it falls under the definition of genocide.
