During World War II, the Soviet Union committed various atrocities against prisoners of war (POWs). These actions were carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Red Army. In some cases, the crimes were sanctioned or directly ordered by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet leadership.
Before the German invasion of the USSR, the USSR, which had recently annexed parts of Poland as well as the Baltic states, carried out the Katyn massacre of 1940, a series of mass executions of over 20,000 Polish citizens, including 8,000 Polish Army officers, and smaller scale massacres of Baltic states officers. After being invaded by Germany, the USSR carried out various massacres of mostly German POWs. The most infamous included the torture and murder of 160 wounded German soldiers in the massacre of Feodosia (1941-1942), and the 1943 torture, rape and murder of 596 Axis POWs and civilians in the massacre of Grischino. Estimates of German POWs who died in Soviet custody range from over 350,000 to 1.2 million. The mortality rate of German and Italian prisoners in Soviet custody was high, estimated at over 30% and over 70%, respectively. This was despite the USSR's public declarations of support for humane treatment of prisoners of war.
It is estimated that about 1.5 million Axis European POWs died after surrendering to the USSR.
1939–1941
Legal framework The tsarist government ratified the 1907 Hague Convention, but the Soviet Union had not signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. In 1931 USSR passed the "Statute of POWs" that was roughly similar to the Geneva Convention, although it explicitly outlawed many privileges customarily afforded to military officers.
Poland
While the Soviet Union did not consider itself engaged in World War II until Operation Barbarossa in 1941, already on 17 September 1939 it invaded Poland, alongside Germany, in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Neither Poland nor the Soviet Union actually declared war on one another, which made the status of Polish prisoners of war in Soviet custody somewhat unclear under international law, and facilitated Soviet classification of them as "counterrevolutionaries" rather than POWs.
The Soviets often failed to honor the terms of surrender. In some cases, they promised Polish soldiers freedom after capitulation and then arrested them when they laid down their arms; this happened to soldiers under command of Generals Władysław Langner and Mieczysław Smorawiński, among others. Soviet treatment of POWs included "reprisals such as torture, humiliation, robbery and killings through shooting or bayoneting". Some Polish soldiers were murdered shortly after capture in numerous incidents. The highest profile victims of Soviet atrocities of that period included General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński, who was taken prisoner, interrogated and shot together with his adjutant on September 22. Olszyna-Wilczyński Józef Konstanty , entry at Encyklopedia PWN. Retrieved 14 November 2006. Polish Institute of National Remembrance. 16.10.03. From Internet Archive. Around that time, the NKVD also executed about 300 Polish defenders taken captive after the battle of Grodno. On September 24, 25 Polish POWs were murdered in the aftermath of the Battle of Husynne. On September 25, the Soviets murdered staff and patients at a Polish military hospital in the village of Grabowiec near Zamość; Tadeusz Piotrowski mentions the death of 12 officers in this context. After a tactical Polish victory at the battle of Szack on September 28, where the combined Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza (KOP) or Border Protection Corps forces, under General Wilhelm Orlik-Rueckemann, routed the Soviet 52nd Rifle Division, the Soviets executed Polish officers they captured; 18 victims were identified. Also on 28 September 1939, 18 prisoners of war from the Riverine Flotilla of the Polish Navy were massacred in the . Overall, it is estimated that during the invasion, approximately 2,500 Polish soldiers were murdered in various executions and reprisals for offering resistance, by Soviets and Ukrainian nationalists; officers were more likely to be murdered in such way than rank-and-file soldiers.
Some lower ranking soldiers (privates and NCOs), about 60,000, were used as forced laborers before being eventually released. Some were transported to Soviet's Far East (Komi Republic). According to Edmund Nowak, they "were decimated... by inhumane treatment, extremely hard work conditions, cold, diseases and chronic hunger".
One of the Soviet Union's earliest and largest crimes against prisoners of war occurred in the aftermath of the invasion. After the fighting ended, the Soviet Union ended up with several hundred thousands of Polish prisoners of war. Some escaped, were transferred to German custody, or released, but 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD. By mid-November the number of Polish POWs in Soviet custody decreased to about 40,000. However, in December 1939, a wave of arrests resulted in the imprisonment of additional Polish officers (about a thousand). Once at the camps, from October 1939 to February 1940, the Poles were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political pressure to accept the dogma of communism and friendship of the Soviet Union. If a prisoner could not be induced to quickly adopt a pro-Soviet attitude, he was declared a "hardened and uncompromising enemy of Soviet authority". On 5 March 1940, the Soviet Politburo signed an order to execute over twenty thousand of Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" deemed unperformable (declared "avowed enemies of Soviet authority"), kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. The resulting massacre is known as the Katyn massacre, a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish intelligentsia, including about 8,000 military officers (mostly prisoners of war from the invasion of September 1939), carried out by the NKVD in April and May 1940. This was done to deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of its talent, and to reduce future opposition to the Soviet rule, and was part of a wider plan of oppression of Polish populace in the occupied territories.
Overall, the situation of Polish POWs in Soviet camps were much worse than those in German camps, even though most Polish POWs spent significantly less time in the former. Approximately 2-3% of Polish POWs in German camps died during the war; according to Nowak, "the mortality rate among the [Polish] POWs remaining in the Soviet captivity was much higher". For the officers, most of whom perished in the Katyn massacre, it was a stark 97%. A more general estimate for "mortality rate among deportees and POWs from 1939-1941" gave the odds at 20% for adults and 30% for the children. The mortality rate for the military enlisted has been estimated at 35% to 40%.
Baltic states Soviets also committed atrocities against POWs from the armies of the Baltic states following their occupation of that territory in 1940. For example, two hundred Latvian officers were shot in Litene and 80 in Riga; and 560 were deported to Siberian gulags. Only 90 of them returned from Siberia after Joseph Stalin's death.Vieda Skultans (Vieda Skultāne) The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia Published by Routledge, 217 pages 1998 Archaeology of Terror by Dr. hist. Guntis ZemītisLatvian:No NKVD līdz KGB. Politiskās prāvas Latvijā 1940–1986: Noziegumos pret padomju valsti apsūdzēto Latvijas iedzīvotāju rādītājs Latvijas Universitātes, Latvijas vēstures inst.; Red.: R. Vīksnes, K. Kanger; Sast.: Dz. Ērglis, R. Vīksne, A. Žvinklis, S. Boge.— Rīga, 1999.— XVIII, 975 lpp. 2,000 Lithuanian officers and 4,500 soldiers were kept in Soviet camps; most of them are estimated to have died there. In Yukhonovo Camp, about 1,000 Baltic officers were kept; the mortality rate in it was about 90%.
After German invasion of the USSR (1941)
Shortly after the German invasion, Soviet Union revised its laws related to the treatment of POWs; one of the crucial changes was related to officially recognizing the NKVD as the organization in charge of the POWs in the USSR.
Throughout the Second World War, the (Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle, also known as WuSt) collected and investigated reports of crimes against the Axis POWs. According to Alfred de Zayas, "For the entire duration of the Russian campaign, reports of torture and murder of German prisoners did not cease. The War Crimes Bureau had five major sources of information: (1) captured enemy papers, especially orders, reports of operations, and propaganda leaflets; (2) intercepted radio and wireless messages; (3) testimony of Soviet prisoners of war; (4) testimony of captured Germans who had escaped; and (5) testimony of Germans who saw the corpses or mutilated bodies of executed prisoners of war. From 1941 to 1945 the Bureau compiled several thousand depositions, reports, and captured papers which, if nothing else, indicate that the killing of German prisoners of war upon capture or shortly after their interrogation was not an isolated occurrence. Documents relating to the war in France, Italy, and North Africa contain some reports on the deliberate killing of German prisoners of war, but there can be no comparison with the events on the Eastern Front."
In a November 1941 report, the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau accused the Red Army of employing "a terror policy... against defenseless German soldiers that have fallen into its hands and against members of the German medical corps. At the same time... it has made use of the following means of camouflage: in a Red Army order that bears the approval of the Council of People's Commissars, dated 1 July 1941, the norms of international law are made public, which the Red Army in the spirit of the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare are supposed to follow... This... Russian order probably had very little distribution, and surely it has not been followed at all. Otherwise the unspeakable crimes would not have occurred."
According to the depositions, Soviet massacres of German, Italian, Spanish, and other Axis POWs were often incited by unit commissars, who claimed to be acting under orders from Stalin and the Politburo. Other evidence cemented the War Crimes Bureau's belief that Stalin had given secret orders about the massacre of POWs. Unlike with the execution of Polish POWs at Katyn, however, no such directive attributed to Stalin or top Soviet officials, concerning Germans, have been found. However, despite the non-existence of such order, many lower ranking officers and soldiers, encouraged by brutal and simplistic propaganda, believed it exists, or that the execution of German POWs is unofficially expected or sanctioned. In the early years of the war, the justification for such actions was provided by the Stalin's speech of November 6, 1941, in which Stalin said that "From now on our task, the task of the peoples of the U.S.S.R., the task of the fighters, commanders and the political workers of our Army and our Navy will be to exterminate every single German who has set his invading foot on the territory of our Fatherland. No mercy for the German invaders! Death to the German invaders!". Soon afterward, Soviet officials realized that such approach, leading to POW executions, was counterproductive, and reduced the chance of German soldiers surrendering; consequently, in February 1942, Stalin, in another speech, explicitly encouraged taking prisoners.