During World War II, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) held by Nazi Germany and primarily in the custody of the German Army were starved and subjected to deadly conditions. Of nearly six million who were captured, around three million died during their imprisonment.

In June 1941, Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union and carried out a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war. Among the criminal orders issued before the invasion was for the execution of captured Soviet commissars. Although Germany largely upheld its obligations under the Geneva Convention with prisoners of war of other nationalities, military planners decided to breach it with the Soviet prisoners. By the end of 1941, over 3 million Soviet soldiers had been captured, mostly in large-scale encirclement operations during the German Army's rapid advance. Two-thirds of them had died from starvation, exposure, and disease by early 1942. This is one of the highest sustained death rates for any mass atrocity in history.

Soviet Jews, political commissars, and some officers, communists, intellectuals, Asians, and female combatants were systematically targeted for execution. More prisoners were shot because they were wounded, ill, or unable to keep up with forced marches. Over a million were deported to Germany for forced labor, where many died within sight of the local population. Their conditions were worse than civilian forced laborers or prisoners of war from other countries. More than 100,000 were transferred to Nazi concentration camps, where they were treated worse than other prisoners. An estimated 1.4 million Soviet prisoners of war served as auxiliaries to the German military or SS; collaborators were essential to the German war effort and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Deaths among these Soviet prisoners of war have been called "one of the greatest crimes in military history", second in number only to those of civilian Jews but far less studied. Although the Soviet Union announced the death penalty for surrender early in the war, most former prisoners were reintegrated into Soviet society. Most defectors and collaborators escaped prosecution. Former prisoners of war were not recognized as veterans, and did not receive any reparations until 2015; they often faced discrimination due to the perception that they were traitors or deserters.

Background Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The Nazi leadership believed that war with its ideological enemy was inevitable due to the Nazi dogma that conquering territory to the east—called living space ()—was essential to Germany's long-term survival, and the reality that the Soviet Union's natural resources were necessary to continue the German war effort. The vast majority of German military manpower and materiel was devoted to the invasion, which was carried out as a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war. Due to supply shortages and inadequate transport infrastructure, the German invaders planned to feed their army by looting (although in practice they remained dependent on shipments from Germany) and to forestall resistance by terrorizing the local inhabitants with preventative killings.

The Nazis believed that the Jews had caused the German defeat in the First World War, and that the Soviet Union's Slavic population was secretly controlled by an international Jewish conspiracy; by killing communist functionaries and Soviet Jews, they expected that resistance would quickly collapse. The Nazis anticipated that much of the Soviet population (especially in the western areas) would welcome the German invasion, and hoped to exploit tensions between Soviet nationalities in the long run. Soviet citizens were categorized according to a racial hierarchy: Soviet Germans, Balts and Muslims at the top, Ukrainians in the middle, Russians towards the bottom, Asians and Jews lowest. Informed by Nazi racial theory and Germany's experience during World War I, this hierarchy heavily influenced the treatment of prisoners of war.

Another lesson from World War I was the importance of securing food supplies to avoid a repeat of the blockade-induced famine in Germany. Planners considered cordoning off the Soviet Union's "deficit areas" (particularly in the north) that required food imports from its "surplus areas", especially in Ukraine, to redirect this food to Germany or the German army. If the food supply was cut off as planned, an estimated 30 million people—mostly Russians—were expected to die. In reality, the army lacked the resources to cordon off these large areas. More than a million Soviet civilians died from smaller-scale blockades of Soviet urban areas (especially besieged Leningrad and Jewish ghettos) that were less effective than expected because of flight and black market activity. As prisoners of war were held under tighter control than urban or Jewish civilians, they had a higher death rate from starvation.

Planning and legal basis

Before World War II, the treatment of prisoners of war had occupied a central role in the codification of the law of war and detailed guidelines were laid down in the 1907 Hague Convention. Germany was a signatory of the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, and generally adhered to it with non-Soviet prisoners. These laws were covered in Germany's military education, and there was no legal ambiguity that could be exploited to justify its actions. Unlike Germany, the Soviet Union was not a signatory of either convention; its offer to abide by the Hague Convention's provisions regarding prisoners of war if the German army did likewise was rejected by Adolf Hitler several weeks after the start of the war. The OKW said that the Geneva Convention did not apply to Soviet prisoners of war, but suggested that it be the basis of planning. Law and morality played (at best) a minor role in this planning, in contrast to the demand for labor and military expediency. On 30 March 1941, Hitler said privately that "we must distance ourselves from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship" and fight a "war of extermination" because Red Army soldiers were "no comrade" of Germans. No one present raised any objection. Although some in the military opposed the mass deaths of prisoners in 1941 on utilitarian grounds, Abwehr officer Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was one of the few who favored treating Soviet prisoners according to the law.

There is still disagreement between historians as to the role of ideological versus logistical factors in explaining the mass deaths of prisoners in 1941. Anti-Bolshevism, antisemitism, and racism are often cited as the main reasons behind the mass death of prisoners as part of the planned racial restructuring of Germany's empire, but the situation of prisoners of war was also a consequence of the inability to satisfy conflicting demands for security, food, and labor. Although the 3 million Soviet prisoners captured was fewer than expected by the German military, little planning had been done for housing and feeding them. The deaths have been attributed to murderous neglect, or a logistical failure that interrupted German planners' intent to use the prisoners as a labor reserve.

Capture

By mid-December 1941, 79 percent of prisoners captured to date (more than two million) had been apprehended during thirteen major battles where large Soviet forces were surrounded; three or four Soviet soldiers were captured for each one killed. The number of Soviet soldiers captured fell dramatically after the Battle of Moscow in late 1941. The ratio of prisoners to killed also fell, but remained higher than the German side.

Military factors such as poor leadership, lack of arms and ammunition, and being overwhelmed by the German advance were the most important factors causing the mass surrender of Red Army soldiers. The behavior of Soviet soldiers ranged from fighting to the last bullet to making a conscious choice to defect. Opposition to the Soviet government was another important factor in surrenders and defections, which far exceeded the defection rate of other belligerents. Historian Mark Edele estimates that at least hundreds of thousands (possibly more than a million) Soviet soldiers defected during the war.

Soviet soldiers were usually captured in encirclements by Axis front-line troops, who took them to a collection point. From there, the prisoners were sent to transit camps. When many of the transit camps were shut down beginning in 1942, prisoners were sent directly from the collection point to a permanent camp. Sometimes the prisoners were stripped of their winter clothing by their captors for their own use as temperatures dropped late in 1941. Wounded and sick Red Army soldiers usually received no medical care.

Summary executions Especially in 1941, German soldiers often refused to take prisoners on the Eastern Front and shot Soviet soldiers who tried to surrender—sometimes in large groups of hundreds or thousands. The German military did not record deaths that occurred prior to prisoners arriving at the collection points. These murders were not ordered by the high command, and some military commanders recognized their harmfulness to German interests. Nevertheless, efforts to discourage such killing had mixed results at best and no verdicts against the perpetrators are known. Although the Red Army shot enemy prisoners less commonly than the German Army did, the execution of prisoners by both armies contributed to a mutual escalation of violence.

To prevent the growth of a partisan movement, Red Army soldiers overtaken by the German advance without being captured were ordered by the Supreme Command of Ground Forces (OKH) to present themselves to the German authorities under the threat of summary execution. Despite the order, few soldiers turned themselves in; some evaded capture and returned to their families. Although most Red Army soldiers who were apprehended were not executed, thousands or tens of thousands were.

Before the beginning of the war, the OKW ordered the execution of captured Soviet commissars and suspicious civilian political functionaries. More than 80 percent of front-line German divisions fighting on the Eastern Front carried out this illegal order, shooting an estimated 4,000 to 10,000 commissars. These killings did not reduce Soviet resistance, and came to be perceived as counterproductive; the order was rescinded in May 1942. Although female combatants in the Soviet army defied German gender expectations, the OKH ordered them to be treated as prisoners of war. Some front-line units executed female combatants and others did not, but ultimately few survived to reach prisoner-of-war camps in Germany.

Prisoner-of-war camps

By the end of 1941, 81 camps had been established on occupied Soviet territory. Permanent camps were established in areas under civilian administration and areas under military administration that were planned to be turned over to civilian administration. Due to the low priority attached to prisoners of war, each camp commandant had autonomy limited only by the military and economic situation. Although a few tried to ameliorate their conditions, most did not. At the end of 1944, all prisoner-of-war camps were placed under SS chief Heinrich Himmler's authority. Although military authorities from the OKW down also distributed orders to refrain from excessive violence against prisoners of war, historian David Harrisville says that these orders had little effect in practice and their main effect was to bolster a positive self-image in German soldiers.

Death marches