War is bloody and very brutal. At the beginning of World War II, the Soviet army was caught off guard by the German "blitzkrieg", and hundreds of thousands, millions of Soviet officers and soldiers were divided and surrounded by the German army and taken prisoner. The number of Soviet prisoners of war in world war ii was greater than the total number of prisoners of war in the other Allied countries combined, at about 5.7 million. When the Allies liberated the captured in the camp in 1945, only 1 million Soviet prisoners of war survived. So where did the rest go?
After the end of World War II, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg confirmed the whereabouts of Soviet prisoners of war; 2 million Russian prisoners of war died of starvation, freeze, and illness, and the rest were killed by SS security guards. Why was Germany so cruel to Soviet prisoners of war? Today we will take a look at how the Germans treated Soviet prisoners.
On the day of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler issued an order: "All Soviet troops captured in battle or in resistance shall be shot on the spot." To this end, Germany has also set up a special action group to thoroughly investigate the occupied areas in order to concentrate on the capture of decisive prisoners, Jews and political suspects.
After the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, millions of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner by the Nazis under the brutal German attack. Under Hitler's orders, the fate of Soviet prisoners of war can be imagined, do not think that escaping the execution is a kind of luck, in fact, their purgatory life has just begun. In order to make room for the so-called "living space" of the German Nazis, Soviet prisoners of war had only access to very little food and thin clothing to protect themselves from the cold, and when winter came, a large number of Soviet prisoners of war were starved to death and frozen to death.
The Wehrmacht had revealed that their mission was to starve Soviet prisoners of war to death. For eighteen of the twenty days there was no food, only verbal abuse, whipping, and unjustified shootings, and often the prisoners of war could not understand the german intentions.
When the first soviet winter ended, 1/3 of the German-controlled POW camps died, and in some places even reached 95%. After the battle for Moscow, the Red Army found a camp for Soviet prisoners of war in a village on the edge of Moscow, and locals said that the camp had more than 3,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and only 15 were finally liberated by the Red Army.
The treatment of Soviet and Anglo-American prisoners of war in Germany was simply incomparable. A captured RAF pilot once described the life of Soviet prisoners of war this way: "Compared with the leisurely life of British prisoners of war, the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war is simply terrible." Every day Soviet prisoners of war squatted on the garbage heap, carefully clasping the food scraps from the canned food with their fingers. The Allied prisoners of war managed to pass on their few foodstuffs and cigarettes to soviet prisoners of war, but the result of this was often that Soviet prisoners of war were shot, because the German Nazis stipulated: "Any attempt by Soviet prisoners of war to cross the border is not allowed." ”
In this way, of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured, 3.7 million died at the hands of the Germans. It is no wonder that when the Red Army captured Berlin, it returned the German prisoners of war the same way as they did, and later to the Japanese prisoners of war.
Later, the German army also had a deep reflection on its own crimes, and erected a memorial cemetery in Germany for the Soviet prisoner of war camp, which was forgiven by the people of the world. Germany treats history a million times better than the narrow island nation of Japan.