In February 1945, in order to accelerate the victory of the world anti-fascist war, the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain held the Yalta Conference in the Soviet Union.
At the meeting, Stalin, at the request of Roosevelt and Churchill, decided to declare war on Japan within three months of the end of the European theater. But at the same time, Stalin proposed the conditions attached to the war against Japan:
China must recognize the independence of Outer Mongolia.
Sakhalin Island and its nearby islands occupied by the Japanese army were owned by the Soviet Union after the end of the war.
The port of Dalian became a free port and the Chinese side had to guarantee the soviet union's priority interests in the port, and at the same time leased Lushun to the Soviet Union as a military base.
The two railways in the northeast, the Middle East and south Manchuria, are jointly operated by China and the Soviet Union.
Original Russian version of the Yalta Agreement
Despite the harsh demands of the Soviet Union, in order to win the Soviet Union to fight against Japan as soon as possible, THE United States and Britain agreed to Stalin's request and consulted with the Chinese representatives (the Chinese side was notified until a few months after the signing of the Yalta Agreement).
On May 9, 1945, with the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, it marked the final victory of the Allies on the battlefields of Europe. On August 8 of the same year, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and dispatched three fronts the next day, totaling 1.5 million people, to launch a fierce attack on the Kwantung Army entrenched in northeast China.
Surprisingly, the Kwantung Army, known as the "Flower of the Japanese Empire", was defeated by the Main Force by the Soviet Front within 7 days of the war, and the entire campaign lasted 24 days, the Soviet Front killed 83,000 Japanese troops and captured more than 600,000 Japanese troops.
After the war against Japan, what to do with Japanese prisoners of war became a top problem for the Soviet Union, because these prisoners of war were protected by the Geneva Conventions, and the Soviet Union could not kill them at will. But Stalin did not want to let them go, by this time Nazi Germany was already defeated, Japan's defeat was a foregone conclusion, and the possession of these prisoners would add chips to the Soviet Union's future political interests.
In the end, Stalin decided to send these prisoners of war to Siberia for labor reform, and Stalin considered that the Soviet Union had just ended the Great Patriotic War, and although the Soviet Union had won, it also paid a terrible price. Japan's more than 600,000 people are arguably the cheapest labor force, allowing them to go to the Soviet Union to participate in related construction, which will not only speed up the Soviet Union's post-war recovery, but also solve the immediate problems.
Nevertheless, the local authorities of the Soviet Union were not prepared to accept such a large number of prisoners of war, and in this case - the shortage of housing, the lack of cotton clothes, the lack of food and other problems appeared one after another, but the Soviet side had already used these prisoners of war as cheap labor, so the Japanese prisoners of war could only survive under these conditions.
Siberia's climate was cold all year round, and countless prisoners of war died because they did not have cotton clothes to withstand the cold winter, and the prisoners of war did not have enough to eat, clothe, and participate in labor every day, and even if they did not die of exhaustion, they were frozen to death in the following period of time. According to statistics, in the winter of 1946, about 60,000 Japanese prisoners of war died in Soviet Siberian labor camps.
This behavior of the Soviet Union also caused protests in Japan, under the continuous protests of Japan, the Soviet Union chose to repatriate prisoners of war who had lost their ability to work, so there was such a rule at that time: "Prisoners of war can go home as long as they are sick, but whether they have lost their labor force is whether they can return to China is the female nurses of the Soviet Union."
These nurses became the "magistrates" who decided on the prisoners of war, and could decide their fate with a single word, and what they feared most was that the nurses said that they could still participate in the labor and did not need to be repatriated, because it meant that they would continue to be tortured in this labor camp until they died.
brief summary
At that time, more than 600,000 Japanese prisoners of war were sent to Siberia, but fewer than 30,000 successfully returned home, and the rest died in Siberia.
But these dead prisoners of war did not receive sympathy from the Soviets, and the final fate was the wilderness of the mobs, because they committed heinous crimes in China, which was far from enough. And the prisoners of war who died in Siberia after torture seemed to explain to people the truth that "people are watching the sky, not not reporting, but the time has not yet come".