Today we are talking about the only army in the history of war in the world that has been captured by more than 10 million officers and soldiers. That is, the Nazi German army in World War II, in the Eastern Front of World War II, before the German army surrendered, the Soviet army captured 3.77 million German troops, after the German army announced its surrender, captured 1.59 million German troops, and the Soviet army captured a total of 5.368 million German troops.
After the war, the Soviets also released 680,000 German soldiers, weak and old, on the spot, and did not take them into prisoner-of-war camps. As for the more than 200,000 Soviets who participated in the German army, they were not counted.
After the German surrender was announced in May 1945, the German army strength was probably 180,000 in the southeast theater, 450,000 in Austria, and 650,000 near Prague... A large number of troops were also captured by the Soviets, a total of 1.59 million German troops.
In the early summer of 1944, the Wehrmacht had more than 1.5 million troops in France and the Low Countries, but only 900,000 of them belonged to the field units of the German Army and the Waffen-SS.
From June to November 1944, German losses in Russia, Romania and Hungary were: 214,000 dead and 626,000 missing; in France, 54,000 dead and 339,000 missing. The total number of deaths and disappearances amounted to 1.2 million, but excluding the number of wounded, the estimated number of wounded was three times the number of deaths.
Throughout 1944, one hundred and six divisions were annihilated or forced to disband, a figure equal to the total number of divisions Germany had at the beginning of the war in 1939.
Twenty-five out of every hundred Germans born in 1924 died or went missing, and the other thirty-one became severely crippled to varying degrees. In 1939, 48.8 per cent of the population was male, and by 1946 it had fallen to 44 per cent. Before the war, there were 1,463,300 more women than men, and this number had increased to 7,279,400.
Although, on May 6, the Allies demanded unconditional surrender of the Germans on all fronts. This surrender should take effect at midnight on May 8. From this moment on, not only fighting is forbidden, but all movement of the army is prohibited. However, the three armies in the Czech Republic, Moravia, Austria, and Yugoslavia, with about 2 million men, launched a final assault on the American lines.
The German "South", "Southeast" and other large army groups escaped the dividing line between the United States and the Soviet Union in time, but the Americans did not allow the German army to surrender to them. As the German columns pouring in from all directions increased extremely rapidly, and continued to draw closer to them in defiance of any demands of the Americans, they had to send aircraft to land on the German retreat, forcing the German columns to stop advancing.
But one German army group after another desperately broke through the interception and marched rapidly toward the American prisoner-of-war camp. They were all terrified of being captured by the Soviets and sent to Central Asia, the Far East, and Siberia for hard labor.
The German Army Group C and Army Group G also surrendered to the Allies before Germany announced unconditional surrender. But in any case, the number of German personnel in the broad sense near the end of the war that could be captured by the Soviet army and the Allies was absolutely sufficient, even enough for the Soviet army and the Allies to catch pigs and vomit.