As the Red Army overpowered the Wehrmacht, German prisoners accumulated. In the USSR, more than 200 camps were created for them, in which, according to various estimates, from 3 to 3.8 million prisoners of war and internees of the Nazi coalition worked. The key principle of their content was simple - "who does not work, he does not eat." But food in the first two or three years was meager (there was famine in the USSR, and the Russians themselves were malnourished), in 1946 even grass was included in the diet.
But there was a lot of work: the Germans built houses, airports and train stations, roads, worked in the oil industry, in the mining industry, in mines and at the machine, in logging and in metallurgy. They did everything under supervision - they worked and lived. As is always the case in such situations, many prisoners looked for various ways to avoid the hardest work and get as much food, smoke, drink, money, etc.
So, according to the memoirs of the SS man published by I. Pykhalov, in one case the prisoners carried bricks - they took two by the arm and dragged them. But one took not four, but only two bricks. When the guards asked him why he took only two, the prisoner replied that everyone else was lazy and simply did not want to walk twice. Oddly enough, the prisoner was not punished.
According to the memoirs of the German non-commissioned officer Hans Becker, who was captured after the Battle of Kursk (and who stayed in the USSR until his liberation in 1950), there were many ways to avoid hard labor. In the book "In the war and in captivity …" (M., 2012) Becker describes how he and other Germans who happened to be with him did it. Not all Soviet guards were professional camp guards. Often, prisoners were left in the care of chauffeurs, artisans or other workers for the Germans to help them work. Then it was possible to observe such an overseer, study his psychological weaknesses and use them for different purposes.
Becker's first overseer was the Russian chauffeur Nikolai. Thanks to the gullibility and kindness of Nikolai (who even allowed the Germans to call him simply Kolya), the captives stole some of the goods, for example, food. In addition, Kolya turned out to be a drunkard, and when he realized that the Germans could drive a car, he began to drink and let them drive the car. The Germans behaved well, and Kolya began to trust them. Drinking carelessly, the warden from time to time left the prisoners alone, as "it seemed he did not believe that we would try to escape."
It was not far from the front, and, of course, the captives did not fail to deceive the trust of the Russian overseer at the first opportunity. They hijacked the car they were entrusted with and rushed to the front line. At that time, Becker was lucky - with their "chamberlain" Walter, they reached the German positions. But less than a year later, when the Wehrmacht was retreating to the west, he was again taken prisoner. And this time it was no longer possible to escape - the prisoners were sent to the deep rear, to work in prisoner of war camps to restore the USSR economy destroyed by the Germans.
A camp is a system organized to suppress prisoners with the help of the overseers' authority. More often than not, the guards themselves deceived the prisoners, extracting personal benefit from their labor: for example, they overestimated the plans for logging in order to simply sell the excess over the really established norm; or sold part of the products intended for prisoners. But as Becker writes, in the camps there were opportunities to cheat and the prisoners. Where the discipline of the guards was not strict enough, the prisoners quietly left the camp in order to get something edible or tobacco in the neighboring villages, or even steal in the fields (for example, dig up potatoes).
But it was not possible to arrange stable long-term well-being on deception. In the end, the prisoners and warders in most cases came to a kind of conspiracy - the prisoners worked conscientiously and, on occasion, helped the guards, and the warders softened the detention regime and turned a blind eye to minor violations of the Germans. This was until the very end in 1955, when the last German prisoners were sent from the USSR to their home.
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Konstantin Dmitriev