Enemy capture is the inevitable fate of many soldiers and officers who take part in any major battle. The Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) was not only the bloodiest in the entire history of mankind, it also set an anti-record for the number of prisoners. More than 5 million Soviet citizens went to Nazi concentration camps, only about a third of them returned to their homeland. They all learned a thing or two from the Germans.
The scale of the tragedy
As you know, during the First World War (1914-1918), more than 3.4 million Russian soldiers and officers were captured by representatives of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Of these, about 190 thousand people died. And although, according to numerous historical testimonies, the Germans treated our compatriots much worse than the captured French or British, the conditions in which Russian prisoners of war were kept in Germany in those years are incomparable with the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
The racial theories of the German National Socialists led to massacres, torture and atrocities perpetrated against defenseless people, monstrous in their cruelty. Hunger, cold, disease, unbearable living conditions, slave labor and constant bullying - all this testifies to the systematic extermination of our compatriots.
According to various experts, from 1941 to 1945, the Germans captured about 5.2-5.7 million Soviet citizens. There is no more accurate data, since no one thoroughly took into account all partisans, underground fighters, reservists, militias and employees of various departments who found themselves in enemy dungeons. Most of them died. It is known for certain that after the end of the war, more than 1 million 863 thousand people returned to their homeland. And about half of them were suspected by the NKVD of aiding the Nazis.
The Soviet leadership, in general, considered every soldier and officer who surrendered to prison, almost a deserter. And the natural desire of people to survive at any cost was perceived as a betrayal.
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Nazis made excuses
At least 3.5 million Soviet soldiers and officers died in captivity. High-ranking Nazis during the Nuremberg trials (1945-1946) tried to justify themselves by the fact that the Soviet leadership did not sign the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Say, this fact allowed the Germans to violate the norms of international law in relation to Soviet citizens.
The fascists were guided by two documents:
the directive "On the treatment of political commissars" of June 6, 1941 (the war has not yet begun), which obliged soldiers to shoot communists immediately after capture;
the order of the Wehrmacht command "On the Treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War" of September 8, 1941, which actually freed the hands of the Nazi executioners.
More than 22 thousand concentration camps were created on the territory of Germany and the occupied states. It is simply impossible to tell about all of them in one article, therefore we will cite as an example the notorious "Uman pit", located on the territory of the Cherkasy region of Ukraine. There, Soviet prisoners of war were kept in a huge open-air pit. They died en masse from hunger, cold and disease. Nobody removed the corpses. Gradually, the Umanskaya Yama camp turned into a huge mass grave.
Ability to survive
The main thing that Soviet prisoners of war learned while staying with the Germans was to survive. By some miracle, about a third of the prisoners managed to overcome all the hardships and hardships. Moreover, rational fascists often fed only those concentration camp inhabitants who were used in various industries.
So, in order to maintain the efficiency of Soviet citizens in a camp located near the village of Hammerstein (now the Polish town of Charne), each person received daily: 200 g of bread, vegetable stew and a substitute for a coffee drink. In some other camps, the daily ration was halved.
It is worth saying that bread for prisoners was made from bran, cellulose and straw. And the stew and drink were small portions of a foul-smelling liquid, often causing vomiting.
If we take into account the cold, epidemics, backbreaking work, then one has only to marvel at the rare ability to survive, developed by Soviet prisoners of war.
Saboteur schools
Very often, the Nazis put their prisoners before a choice: execution or cooperation? On pain of death, some soldiers and officers chose the second option. Most of the prisoners who agreed to cooperate with the Nazis served as guards in the same concentration camps, fought with partisan formations, and participated in numerous punitive operations against civilians.
But the Germans often sent the most intelligent and active accomplices who gained confidence to the sabotage schools of the Abwehr (Nazi intelligence). Graduates of such military educational institutions were thrown into the Soviet rear by parachute. Their task was to spy for the Germans, spread disinformation among the population of the USSR, as well as various sabotage: undermining railways and other infrastructure.
The main advantage of such saboteurs was their knowledge of Soviet reality, because no matter how you teach the son of a White Guard emigrant, raised in Germany, he will still differ from a Soviet citizen in his demeanor in society. Such spies were quickly identified by the NKVD. A traitor who grew up in the USSR is quite another matter.
The Germans approached the training of agents carefully. Future saboteurs studied the basics of reconnaissance work, cartography, subversion, they parachuted and drove various vehicles, mastered Morse code and working with a walkie-talkie. Sports training, methods of psychological influence, collection and analysis of information - all this was included in the course of the novice saboteur. The term of training depended on the intended task and could last from one month to six months.
There were dozens of such centers organized by the Abwehr in Germany and in the occupied territories. For example, the Mission intelligence school (near Kaliningrad) trained radio operators and reconnaissance officers to work deep in the rear, and in Dahlwitz they taught parachutism and subversion, the Austrian town of Breitenfurt was a center for training technicians and flight personnel.
Slave work
Soviet prisoners of war were mercilessly exploited, forcing them to work 12 hours a day, and sometimes more. They were involved in heavy work in the metallurgical and mining industries, in agriculture. In mines and steel mills, prisoners of war were valued primarily as free labor.
According to historians, approximately 600-700 thousand former soldiers and officers of the Red Army were involved in various industries. And the income received by the German leadership as a result of their exploitation amounted to hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks.
Many German enterprises (breweries, car factories, agricultural complexes) paid the leadership of the concentration camps for the "rent" of prisoners of war. They were also used by farmers, mainly during sowing and harvesting.
Some German historians, trying to somehow justify such exploitation of concentration camp prisoners, argue that in captivity they mastered new working specialties. They say that former soldiers and officers of the Red Army returned to their homeland as experienced mechanics, tractor drivers, electricians, turners or locksmiths.
But it's hard to believe. After all, highly skilled labor at German enterprises has always been the prerogative of the Germans, and the Nazis used representatives of other peoples only to perform hard and dirty work.