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Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all had been released. In 1956 〔Rüdiger Overmans, ''Soldaten hinter Stacheldraht. Deutsche Kriegsgefangene des Zweiten Weltkriege.'' Ullstein., 2000 Page 277 ISBN 3-549-07121-3〕 the last surviving German POW returned home from the USSR. According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht POWs died in NKVD camps (356,700 German nationals and 24,367 from other nations).〔G. I. Krivosheev. ''Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses''. Greenhill 1997 ISBN 1-85367-280-7 Pages 276-278.〕〔In his revised Russian language edition of ''Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses'' Krivosheev put the number of German military POW at 2,733,739 and dead at 381,067 ( G. I. Krivosheev Rossiia i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil ; statisticheskoe issledovanie OLMA-Press, 2001 ISBN 5-224-01515-4 Table 198 )〕 German historian Rüdiger Overmans maintains that it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that one million died in Soviet custody. He believes that among those reported as missing were men who actually died as POWs.〔Rüdiger Overmans. ''Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg''. Oldenbourg 2000. ISBN 3-486-56531-1 Page 286-289〕〔Rüdiger Overmans, ''Soldaten hinter Stacheldraht. Deutsche Kriegsgefangene des Zweiten Weltkriege.'' Ullstein., 2000 Page 246 ISBN 3-549-07121-3〕 ==German POWs in the USSR== In the first months of the Soviet-German war, few Germans were captured by Soviet forces. After the Battle of Moscow and the retreat of the German forces the number of prisoners in the Soviet prisoner of war camps rose to 120,000 by early 1942.〔Rüdiger Overmans, ''Soldaten hinter Stacheldraht. Deutsche Kriegsgefangene des Zweiten Weltkriege.'' Ullstein., 2000 Page 272 ISBN 3-549-07121-3〕 The German 6th Army surrendered in the Battle of Stalingrad, 91,000 of the survivors became prisoners of war raising the number to 170,000〔 in early 1943. Weakened by disease, starvation and lack of medical care during the encirclement, many died of wounds, disease (particularly typhus), malnutrition and mistreatment in the months following capture at Stalingrad; only approximately 6,000 of them lived to be repatriated after the war.〔(The Great Patriotic War: 55 years on ) The BBC put the number of POW captured at Stalingrad at 91,000 of whom 6,000 survived〕 As the desperate economic situation in the Soviet Union eased in 1943, the mortality rate in the POW camps sank drastically. At the same time POWs became an important source of labor for the Soviet economy deprived of manpower. With the formation of the “National Committee Free Germany” and the “League of German Officers”, pro-communist POWs got more privileges and better rations. As a result of Operation Bagration and the collapse on the southern part of the Eastern front, the number of German POWs nearly doubled in the second half of 1944. In the first months of 1945 the Red Army advanced to the Oder river and on the Balkans. Again the number of POWs rose - to 2,000,000 in April 1945.〔 A total of 2.8 million German Wehrmacht personnel were held as POWs by the Soviet Union at the end of the war according to Soviet records. A large number of German POWs had been released by the end of 1946, when the Soviet Union held fewer POWs than the United Kingdom and France between them. With the creation of a pro-Soviet German state in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany - the German Democratic Republic - in October 1949, all but 85,000 POWs had been released and repatriated. Most of those still held in had been convicted as war criminals and many sentenced to long terms in forced labor camps - usually 25 years. It was not until 1956 that the last of these ''Kriegsverurteilte'' ('war convicts') were repatriated, following the intervention of West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Moscow.〔Rüdiger Overmans: ''Soldaten hinter Stacheldraht. Deutsche Kriegsgefangene des Zweiten Weltkriegs.'' Ullstein, München 2002, ISBN 3-548-36328-8, p.258〕〔Andreas Hilger: ''Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in der Sowjetunion 1941-1956. Kriegsgefangenschaft, Lageralltag und Erinnerung''. Klartext Verlag, Essen 2000, ISBN 3-88474-857-2, p. 137 (Tabelle 3 and Tabelle 10)〕 British historian Richard Overy estimated that 356,000 out of 2,880,000 million German prisoners of war died in Soviet labor camps.〔Richard Overy The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004), ISBN 0-7139-9309-X〕 According to Edward Peterson, the U.S. chose to hand over several hundred thousand German prisoners to the Soviet Union in May 1945 as a "gesture of friendship".〔Edward N. Peterson: ''The American Occupation of Germany'', pp 116, "Some hundreds of thousands who had fled to the Americans to avoid being taken prisoner by the Russians were turned over in May to the Red Army in a gesture of friendship."〕 Niall Ferguson maintains that ''it is clear that many German units sought to surrender to the Americans in preference to other Allied forces, and particularly the Red Army.''〔Niall Ferguson: ''Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat'' War in History, 2004, 11 (2) 148–192 pg. 189〕 Heinz Nawratil maintains that U.S. forces refused to accept the surrender of German troops in Saxony and Bohemia, and instead handed them over to the Soviet Union.〔Heinz Nawratil ''Die deutschen Nachkriegsverluste unter Vertriebenen, Gefangenen und Verschleppter: mit einer Übersicht über die europäischen Nachkriegsverluste''. Munich and Berlin, 1988, pp. 36f.〕 According to a report in the New York Times thousands of prisoners were transferred to Soviet authorities from POW camps in the West, e.g. it is known that 6,000 German officers were sent from the West to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which at the time was one of the NKVD special camp and from which it is known that they were transferred to POW camps . Soviet Ministry for the Interior documents released in 1990 listed 6,680 inmates in the NKVD special camps in Germany 1945–49 who were transferred to Soviet POW camps.〔Michael Klonovsky ; Jan von Flocken Stalins Lager in Deutschland : 1945 - 1950 ; Dokumentation, Zeugenberichte. ISBN 9783550074882 P. 18〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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