What Stalin Did to Captured Nazi Prisoners Shocked Even His Enemies

In the winter of 1943, 91,000 soldiers of Hitler’s Sixth Army staggered out of the ruins of Stalingrad and into Soviet captivity. Most of them believed the worst was behind them. They were wrong. What Stalin’s system did to these people and the hundreds of thousands who came after them is one of the least explored chapters of the entire war.

And some of what happened was not what anyone on either side expected. To understand what happened to German prisoners in Soviet hands, we must begin at the point where the scale of the problem became undeniable. By November 1942, the German Sixth Army under the command of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus had been fighting in and around the city of Stalingrad on the Volga for months.

The battle consumed divisions on both sides at a pace that defied all comprehension. Streets changed hands, block by block, building by building, sometimes floor by floor. The Soviet defense, led at the front by General Vasily Chuikov’s 62nd Army, held on by the narrowest possible margin through the summer and autumn. On November 19, 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a massive counteroffensive that struck the German flanks north and south of Stalingrad simultaneously.

Within four days the entire Sixth Army was encircled. Some 300,000 German and Axis troops were trapped inside the pocket, dependent on an airlift that could not deliver even a fraction of the supplies they needed. Hitler refused to allow them to break through. A relief column under the command of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein reached within 48 km of the encircled forces in December 1942 but was stopped.

In January 1943, the last two airfields inside the pocket fell to Soviet troops, cutting off even the insufficient air supply. On January 24, Paulus sent a message to Hitler informing him that his men had exhausted their ammunition and food, that the 18,000 wounded had no bandages or medicines, and that a collapse was imminent.

He asked for permission to surrender. Hitler refused. On January 30, 1943, the 10th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler promoted Paulus to Field Marshal. The meaning of this gesture was not subtle. No German or Prussian field marshal has ever surrendered in the military history of this country.

Hitler actually told Paulus what was expected of him. Paulus surrendered the next morning. On February 2, 1943, the remaining forces in the northern pocket also capitulated. 91,000 people, including over 20 generals and 2,500 officers, laid down their arms and were taken prisoner by the Soviets. More than 125,000 Germans had already died inside the pocket during the months of encirclement.

Those who survived were in appalling physical condition. Many suffered from frostbite, severe malnutrition, dysentery and wounds that had not been treated for weeks. The temperature in Stalingrad at the beginning of February was around -25 degrees Celsius. The people who emerged from the ruins were, in the words of one eyewitness journalist, the walking remnants of an army, skeletons wrapped in rags, their faces darkened from weeks spent in the rubble.

Soviet cameras were there to record the surrender. The footage and photographs were disseminated worldwide and their political impact was enormous. Here, for the first time in the war, was visible evidence that the German war machine could be broken. The image of Paulus, tall, gray-haired, emaciated, emerging from the basement of the headquarters to surrender, was broadcast on movie screens around the world.

What the cameras didn’t follow was what happened to these people next. Of the 91,000 men who surrendered at Stalingrad, some 85,000 died in the weeks and months immediately after their capture. The reasons were a combination of the already disastrous physical condition of these men at the time of surrender and the conditions in Soviet POW camps, which, in the harsh winter of early 1943, were unable to adequately shelter, feed or provide medical care to the wave of POWs suddenly placed under their care.

Diseases, especially typhus, swept through the transit camps. Many of the men who survived months of fighting and encirclement died within weeks of the surrender that was supposed to end their ordeal. Only about 6,000 of the 91,000 men who surrendered at Stalingrad survived Soviet captivity and eventually returned to Germany.

The last of them returned home in 1956, 13 years after the battle. But the story of what the Soviet system did to its German prisoners was not just a story of death. It was also, in a way that truly surprised both sides, the story of something altogether more calculated. The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point from which German prisoners began arriving in the Soviet Union in numbers large enough to require a systemic response.

Before Stalingrad there were relatively few German prisoners of war. In the first six months of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht advanced so rapidly and occupied so much territory that the stream of prisoners flowed overwhelmingly in one direction.

Soviet soldiers into German hands. By the end of 1941, over 3 million Red Army soldiers had been taken prisoner by German forces. What happened to most of them is a separate and much darker chapter. About 2 million of those 3 million people were dead by February 1942, killed by starvation, exposure, disease and deliberate executions.

The number of Germans in Soviet captivity at the beginning of 1942 was only about 120,000. After Stalingrad it rose to 170,000. As the war continued to turn against Germany through the summer of 1943, through the collapse of the German position in the south in 1944, through the disastrous failure of Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944, which destroyed an entire German army group, the numbers grew with each passing month.

By April 1945, approximately 2 million Wehrmacht soldiers were in Soviet captivity. By the end of the war, the total number had reached approximately 2.8 million according to Soviet records. Western estimates, which take into account people captured and those who died before formal registration, suggest that the actual number may have been higher, closer to 3 million.

The organization responsible for managing this population was the NKVD, the Soviet Security and Intelligence Agency, which under Stalin served as an instrument of both foreign intelligence operations and internal repression against the Soviet population. The role of the NKVD in managing prisoners of war was not accidental, it was crucial.

The system of camps, transit points and forced labor installations stretched across the entire Soviet Union from the European West to the Siberian East. This infrastructure was in many ways a parallel extension of the Gulag, the extensive network of forced labor camps that had operated in the Soviet Union since the late 1920s, mainly for the purpose of detaining Soviet citizens whom the regime considered politically dangerous or economically useful for exploitation.

German prisoners of war found themselves in a system that, for over a decade, was designed and run to extract the maximum amount of work from people while providing them with the minimum of means to survive. The Soviet Union did not sign the 1929 Geneva Convention relating to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

This fact was significant not primarily because, given the Soviets’ legal obligations, the general principles of international law still applied, but because it shaped the way the Soviet government publicly presented its treatment of prisoners. Soviet declarations throughout the war asserted a commitment to humane treatment.

The gap between these declarations and the conditions in the camps was enormous, especially in 1942 and 1943. And understanding the conditions in these camps requires understanding something about the Soviet Union itself. In those years when German prisoners of war entered the Soviet camp system, they entered an environment that was catastrophic, but catastrophic in a way that was intertwined with the catastrophe of the Soviet Union itself.

In 1942 and 1943, the Soviet Union was a country undergoing one of the most difficult existential trials in modern history. German forces occupied vast swaths of Soviet territory, including some of the most productive agricultural regions of Ukraine and the south. Soviet industrial production was massively disrupted by the early German attacks, and much of it was saved only by extraordinary efforts, dismantling and evacuating entire factories beyond the Urals and beyond.

The civilian population of the unoccupied Soviet Union suffered severe food shortages. Workers in Soviet cities received food rations that barely supported basic bodily functions. The prison population, both ordinary criminals and Gulag political prisoners, received the lowest priority in food allocation of all groups in Soviet society.

German prisoners of war were not at the top of this priority list. Conditions in the camps varied greatly depending on the location, year, and specific NKVD administration exercising supervision. But the common features of the worst periods, mainly from 1941 to 1943, were severe overcrowding, insufficient shelter, minimal food rations, very limited medical care, and high mortality from disease.

The food ration for a German prisoner of war in the Soviet system in 1942 usually consisted of a daily allotment of black bread, thin soup made from any available vegetables or grains and occasionally small amounts of salted fish. The caloric value varied enormously, but in many camps the daily ration fell far below what was required to maintain body weight under the conditions in which these people lived and worked.

During the worst periods, the ration for prisoners classified as unfit for work due to illness or injury was further reduced based on the reasoning that those not doing work did not require as many calories as those who did. The work itself was merciless. German prisoners of war were used throughout the Soviet economy, in coal mines, in railway construction, in forest camps, and on heavy construction projects and in agriculture.

Working days of 10 to 14 hours were the norm. The specific projects they worked on were sometimes visible in the post-war landscape of the Soviet Union. Factories, railways, buildings and infrastructure that bore no trace of recognition for the labor of the prisoners that built them. The West German Maschke Commission, which for years in the 1950s and 1960s investigated the fate of German prisoners of war, concluded that of the approximately 3.6 million German soldiers taken prisoner by the Soviet Union, approximately 356,000 to over a million died in captivity, though Soviet records officially recorded 381,000 deaths.

The discrepancy between these figures, resulting partly from the different methodologies used and partly from the documented incompleteness of Soviet records, has never been fully explained. As of 2017, many relevant files in Russian archives remained classified. It is undisputed that the mortality rate among German prisoners of war in Soviet captivity, however calculated, was one of the highest of any group of prisoners held by any major power during the war.

Only Italian prisoners of war, whose mortality rate in Soviet captivity was estimated at 56 to 79%, the highest among all national groups, exceeded this rate. The Italians were captured mainly in the winter of 1942 and 1943, already weakened, lacking equipment for the cold, and arriving at the camps at the precise moment when Soviet food supplies were at their tightest.

The experience of a German prisoner of war dying in a camp in Siberia in 1943 was, in its physical details, little different from the experience of a Soviet prisoner of war dying in a German camp in Ukraine in 1942, featuring hunger, hypothermia, disease, and exhaustion. The machine was different, the ideology behind it was different, but the body on the frozen ground looked almost the same.

Individual camps stretched from the Urals to the Soviet Far East. Camps in the Komi Republic, the Siberian taiga and Central Asia held prisoners in conditions where winter temperatures dropped to -30 degrees Celsius or lower. The camp infrastructure was adapted from the existing Gulag network and often physically shared with it. Some prisoners worked in coal mines in Donbas, others were used in the construction of railways in the Urals.

A significant number were used to rebuild Soviet cities that German forces themselves had destroyed, a grim cyclicality that the Soviet authorities saw not as irony but as practicality. In the camps, officers and privates were separated, formally in accordance with the Geneva Convention standards that the Soviet Union technically did not ratify. Officers were dismissed from heavy physical work, but this dismissal was often the only material distinction they received.

The food they received was marginally better, but they shared the same exposure to the same diseases, particularly typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis, which were transmitted through the camp populations regardless of rank. The mortality rate peaked in the first half of 1943 and then declined as the Soviet economy recovered, fewer people arrived in the disastrous condition that the prisoners of war from Stalingrad were in, and as the NKVD camp administration received clearer instructions that productive forced labor required minimally viable human beings.

The dead who preceded this recalculation left no records that the Soviet government would be interested in preserving. However, something completely unexpected was also taking shape within this system. The Soviet approach to German prisoners of war was never based solely on physical detention or exploitation of labor.

From an early stage, Stalin’s government identified prisoners of war as a potential instrument of a different kind of war, supplementing the war that killed German soldiers who were still fighting. In the summer of 1943, after the disaster at Stalingrad, the Soviet government created an organization unlike anything else in the history of that conflict: the National Committee for a Free Germany, known by its German acronym NKFD.

The Committee was founded on July 12, 1943, in Krasnogorsk near Moscow, at the site of one of the most notorious prisoner-of-war camps for Germans, as well as a significant facility for the ideological processing and re-education of selected prisoners. Its founding members numbered 38 people, 28 Wehrmacht prisoners of war and 10 German communists in exile who fled to the Soviet Union after Hitler took power in 1933.

Its chairman was the German communist writer Erich Weinert, who lived in exile. Among its most important members was General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, a high-ranking German officer captured at Stalingrad, who became head of the related League of German Officers, the BDO, established two months after the NKFD itself. The NKFD newspaper, Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), was printed and distributed.

Loudspeakers installed along sections of the Eastern Front broadcast appeals to German soldiers to abandon the fight, surrender, and help overthrow the Nazi regime. NKFD members were assigned to Soviet front-line units specifically to conduct this type of propaganda work, reading appeals over loudspeakers, distributing leaflets behind German lines, and in some cases entering Wehrmacht-controlled territory in German uniforms to sow confusion and encourage desertion.

Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who surrendered at Stalingrad and spent years in Soviet captivity, eventually joined the NKFD. In a radio address broadcast by Freies Deutschland in 1944, he addressed the German military command directly, arguing that further resistance was destroying Germany in vain and calling on officers to act in the national interest by turning against Hitler.

“Further resistance is destroying Germany in vain. Act in the national interest by turning against Hitler.”

The speech delivered by the captured German field marshal addressing his former colleagues on behalf of a Soviet-sponsored committee was considered by the Nazi high command to be one of the most serious acts of what they called treason committed by any German officer during the war. Hitler’s reaction to the NKFD was exactly what the Soviets had predicted. He was furious.

He deprived the families of officers who joined the NKFD of state benefits, threatened retaliation, and publicly declared members of the organization traitors. The fear that more captured officers might follow Paulus’s example caused real anxiety within the German command structure, raising concerns about what information the Soviets were extracting, what further appeals might follow, and what impact they might have on troops already exhausted by three years of war on the Eastern Front.

The NKFD itself never achieved the mass effect Stalin had hoped for. Most German soldiers continued to fight until the physical situation made resistance impossible. The NKFD combat units that occasionally operated behind German lines had limited military impact, but as a tool for demonstrating to the German military that their own men, including some of the highest ranks, had concluded that the cause was lost, it had an effect that was difficult to measure but clearly real and illustrated something fundamental about the way Stalin’s system worked.

Nothing, not even people in captivity, was left unused. Every prisoner was a potential resource for work, for obtaining information, for propaganda, for building the post-war order that Stalin was already planning. As the war ended and the full scale of what had happened in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps became apparent to the world, the question of what to do with those responsible became urgent.

The response developed by the Allied Powers was a series of trials. The most famous of these is the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which began its deliberations in November 1945 and issued its verdicts in October 1946. The Soviet Union was one of the four prosecuting powers at Nuremberg, along with the United States, Great Britain and France.

Soviet prosecutors presented evidence of German crimes on the Eastern Front that, in terms of scale, constituted the most devastating documentation in the entire proceedings. Evidence of what happened to Soviet civilians and Soviet prisoners of war, mass shootings, deliberate starvation, and the systematic killing of entire categories of people, were crucial to the prosecution’s case.

But the Soviet presence in Nuremberg also raised questions that were carefully controlled but never fully answered. Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg attempted to include in the charges against German defendants the massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, and government officials in the Katyn forest and several other locations in western Russia in the spring of 1940.

The Soviet position was that the massacre was committed by the Germans. In fact, the killings were carried out by the NKVD on Stalin’s direct orders, a fact that the Soviet Union did not officially acknowledge until 1990. The Nuremberg Tribunal, aware of the contradictory evidence, quietly removed the Katyn charge from its final verdict rather than issue a ruling that would have directly incriminated one of the prosecuting powers with the very type of crime it was trying.

The Katyn massacre was not the only tension that Soviet participation in the Nuremberg trials caused. The Soviet Union itself committed acts during the war to which the categories developed at Nuremberg—crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity—could be applied: the invasion of Poland in September 1939 together with Germany, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; the deportation of entire national groups (Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and others) from their homelands to Central Asia and Siberia in operations conducted by the NKVD, which killed hundreds of thousands of people from exposure, starvation, and disease; and the continuation of the Gulag operation, where millions of Soviet citizens were still held.

None of this appeared in the Nuremberg trials. The trials were conducted by the victorious powers, and the victorious powers did not sit in the dock. The Germans who were tried and convicted at Nuremberg received sentences ranging from long prison terms to the death penalty. Of the 24 main defendants, 12 were sentenced to death and executed by hanging in October 1946.

Hermann Göring, who was sentenced to death, took his own life the night before his scheduled execution. The remaining defendants received prison sentences of varying lengths, but the Nuremberg trials involved only the highest-ranking officials. Throughout the former German armed forces, hundreds of thousands of officers and soldiers who participated in crimes on the Eastern Front returned to civilian life, particularly in West Germany, without any legal responsibility for what they had done.

The mechanisms for comprehensive prosecution simply did not exist, and the political priorities of the early Cold War, in which West German cooperation was crucial to Western strategy, created strong incentives to look to the future rather than the past. Stalin, who organized the Soviet position at Nuremberg, was not guided by a coherent principle of justice; he was guided by a coherent principle of power.

The trials were useful because they established legal precedents, documented German atrocities, legitimized Soviet claims as a victim nation, and demonstrated Soviet power. These were the reasons for participation, not a general obligation to hold states accountable for their crimes. The formal end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945, did not end the captivity of German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union.

At the very least, the 1929 Geneva Convention, which the Soviet Union did not sign but which it rhetorically supported, required the repatriation of prisoners of war as soon as possible after the end of hostilities. The Soviet Union’s interpretation of this obligation was, to put it mildly, expansive. By the end of 1946, most of the still-living German prisoners of war were being scheduled for release.

Large numbers were repatriated, and at this point the Soviet Union actually held fewer German prisoners than Britain and France combined, although tens of thousands remained and would remain for years to come. The justification given by the Soviet authorities was economic in nature. The Soviet Union emerged from the war with its western regions devastated, its infrastructure destroyed, and its working-age male population decimated as a result of years of military losses.

It needed labor to rebuild, and German prisoners of war provided this workforce. Historian Susan Grunewald, who has conducted extensive research on the POW system using Russian archives, concluded that the continued detention of German prisoners was motivated primarily by the Soviet Union’s urgent need for manpower for reconstruction, rather than by any deliberate policy of punishment.

This is not a comfortable distinction for men who have experienced it. Before mass repatriation began at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, the POW population was sorted through a political evaluation process. Those deemed sufficiently re-educated and politically harmless were sent home. Those convicted of war crimes by Soviet military tribunals received prison sentences, usually 25 years, and remained.

By 1949, with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet occupation zone, most of the prisoners had been released, but 85,000 remained in Soviet captivity, convicted of war crimes and serving long sentences. Only in 1955 was a solution reached after West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow in September of that year, during which the establishment of diplomatic relations between West Germany and the Soviet Union was implicitly linked to the return of the remaining German prisoners.

The last German prisoners of war from World War II returned to West Germany in early 1956, more than a decade after the end of the war. Some never returned. The data of the West German Maschke Commission, citing about 300,000 to nearly 400,000 people who died in Soviet captivity, constitute the most comprehensive, independent compilation.

These people are buried throughout the Soviet Union in marked and unmarked graves, in the frozen earth of Siberia, the Urals, and the Steppes, in the soil beneath structures they themselves helped build. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who surrendered the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, was released from Soviet captivity in 1953.

He did not return to West Germany. Instead, he settled in East Germany in Dresden, where he worked on military history research and gave public lectures criticizing what he described as the irresponsibility of the Nazi leadership, which sent people to unnecessary deaths.

He never saw his wife again; she died in West Germany in 1949 while he was still in Soviet captivity. He died in Dresden in 1957. His story—captured enemy, turned into a Soviet-sponsored spokesman, and then released into the divided Germany that the war had created—contained in a condensed form almost everything that was strange, terrible, and complicated about what the Soviet system did to the people it captured.

There is another dimension to this story that rarely appears in accounts focused solely on German prisoners, and without it the picture is incomplete. When the war ended, millions of Soviet soldiers who had spent time in German captivity were repatriated to the Soviet Union. Most of them did not collaborate with the Germans; most survived through a combination of endurance and luck, escaping the conditions in German camps where, as mentioned earlier, some 3 million of their comrades-in-arms died as survivors of one of the worst POW systems in history.

Stalin’s government did not welcome them as heroes. Soviet military and political doctrine, shaped by Stalin, held that any soldier who allowed himself to be captured rather than fight to the end or take his own life was committing an act of cowardice or potential treason. Order No. 270, issued by Stalin on August 16, 1941, at the height of the disastrous early German offensives, explicitly classified any commander or political officer who surrendered as a traitor subject to execution and stipulated that their families would lose all state support and benefits.

For ordinary soldiers, this order created a climate in which being taken prisoner was treated as a presumed guilt, not an unfortunate fate. The order was partly a desperate measure taken at a moment of existential crisis when the Red Army was suffering losses of staggering proportions, but it established a principle that endured.

Upon their return, millions of former Soviet prisoners of war were subjected to NKVD filtration interrogation processes to determine whether they collaborated with the Germans, worked as informants, or participated in units fighting alongside the Wehrmacht. The vast majority went through this process and were eventually reintegrated into Soviet society, but a significant number did not.

Those found guilty of collaboration or simply accused of it were sentenced to stay in the Gulag. Some received sentences of 10 years or more, having survived German captivity only to be imprisoned in camps in their own country. Men who did not collaborate and who were cleansed through filtration nevertheless returned to a society where being a former war prisoner carried a heavy stigma.

They were not considered veterans in the formal sense, and they did not receive state benefits to which veterans with unblemished service records were entitled. It was not until 1995, 50 years after the end of the war, that former Soviet prisoners of war finally received formal, legal recognition in Russia as veterans, along with the benefits associated with that status.

The system that held German prisoners for work and ideology treated the suffering of its own soldiers as a form of weakness that deserved punishment. This was not an accident or an oversight; this was entirely consistent with the way Stalin’s Soviet Union functioned. Human beings, whether enemy prisoners or our own citizens, were resources to be exploited, controlled, and, if necessary, discarded.

The machine did not distinguish very carefully between those who served it and those who opposed it. What happened to people on both sides of the wire—Germans in Soviet camps and Soviets in German camps, and then Soviet survivors in camps in their own country—tells a story that no single national narrative can fully encompass.