But, in reality, during the war, most prisoners stayed at the front line camps that often were just huts and dugouts. But, after the Stalingrad battle and the Soviet onslaught in the Don region, the number of prisoners grew quickly: over 200 thousand in 1943, and over 800 thousand more by the end of the war.įormally, a German prisoner’s route was as follows: From the place they were captured at, they were taken to the front line receiving and forwarding camps and, from there, transported to the mainland camps. By 1941, there were eight labor camps for war prisoners in the USSR, but the number of prisoners grew slowly: about ten thousand in 19. The Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees was organized in the USSR even before the war started. Soviet soldiers convoy a column of captured German soldiers. But, indeed, eventually during the war, over three million Soviet citizens were taken to Germany to serve in hard labor, so the USSR wanted to compensate for that – and also for the tens of millions of people who perished during the war.ĭecember 1941, Moscow region. “Withdrawal of several thousand working units from the German national economy every year must inevitably have a weakening effect on its economy and on its military potential,” foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov wrote to Stalin. This number, historian Elena Shmaraeva notes, was derived from the approximate numbers of Soviet soldiers perished and lost without trace by the time the Tehran Conference was held – also about four million.īy 1944, the Soviets had devised a labor program for German war prisoners. Stalin argued that the USSR needed a “replacement element” – about four million German citizens, who would restore destroyed Soviet cities and raise industry. Stalin defined the number of prisoners USSR “needed” in 1943 at the Tehran Conference. Inhumanly enough, the Soviet authorities saw German war prisoners as means to compensate for Soviet population losses. “Prisoners of war were regarded by the USSR not only as a source of labor, but also as a resource intended for use in the country’s economy not just during the war, but, most importantly – in the postwar period,” historian Vladimir Vsevolodov writes. December 7, 1943: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin during a conference at Tehran.
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