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The extermination of Soviet prisoners of war by Nazi Germany relates to the genocidal policies taken towards the captured soldiers of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. These efforts resulted in some 3.3 million to 3.5 million deaths.

Summary

During Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union (USSR), and the subsequent German-Soviet War, millions of Red Army prisoners of war were taken. Most of them were arbitrarily executed in the field by the German forces (in particular by the notorious Waffen-SS), died under inhuman conditions in German prisoner of war camps and during ruthless death marches from the front lines, or were shipped to Nazi concentration camps for extermination.

According to the estimate by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), some 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in the Nazi custody out of 5.7 million. This figure represents a total of 57%, nearing the Europe's Jewish death rate of over 60%) and may be contrasted with only 8,300 out of 231,000 British and American prisoners, or 3.6%. Some estimates range as high as 5 million dead, including these killed immediately after surrendering (an indeterminate, although certainly very large number). Only 5% of the Soviet prisoners who died were of Jewish ethnicity. Among those who died was even the son of the Soviet dictator Stalin, Yakov Dzhugashvili.

The most deaths took place in a mere eight months of June 1941-January 1942, when the Germans killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POW primarily through starvation, exposure, and summary execution, in what has been called, along with the Rwandan Genocide, an instance of "the most concentrated mass killing in human history (...) eclipsing the most exterminatory months of the Jewish holocaust". By September 1941, the mortality rate among Soviet POWs was on the order of 1% per day. According to the USHMM, by the winter of 1941, "starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions". This terrible starvation (leading many of desperate prisoners to resort to the acts of cannibalism) was a deliberate Nazi policy in spite of food being available, in accordance to the Hunger Plan developed by the Reich Minister of Food Herbert Backe.

By comparison, close to 1 million German prisoners of war died in Soviet labor camps out of 3.15 to 4 million prisoners taken according to estimates by Western historians , whereas the official Soviet number was 570,000 deaths. Death rates in Soviet and German camps were similar

Commissar Order

Prisoner-of-war camps

The prisoners were stripped of their supplies, and as it became colder, their clothing by ill-equipped German troops with fatal results. The camps established specially for the Soviets were called Russenlager; in others, the Soviets were kept separated from the prisoners from other countries. The Allied regulars kept by Germany were usually treated in accordance with the 1929 Geneva Convention (signed by Germany but not by the Soviet Union).

In the case of the Soviet POWs, most of the camps were simply open areas with no housing and were fenced off with barbed wire and watchtowers. These meager conditions forced the crowded prisoners to live in holes they had dug for themselves, which were exposed to the elements. Beatings and other abuse by the guards were common, and prisoners were malnourished, often consuming only a few hundred calories. Medical treatment was nonexistent and a Red Cross offer to help in 1941 was rejected by Adolf Hitler. Some of these conditions were actually worse than those of the prisoners in the German concentration camps.

Camps

Oflag IV-C

Allied officers at Colditz Castle were barred from sharing Red Cross packages with starving Soviet prisoners.

Oflag XIII-A

In July 1941 a new compound, Oflag XIII-D, was set up for higher ranking Soviet officers captured during Operation Barbarossa. It was closed April 1942; the surviving officers (many had died during the winter due to an epidemic) were transferred to the other camps.

Stalag 324

The sick inmates were to be shot once a week.

Stalag 350/Z

According to the 1944 Soviet report, 43,000 captured Red Army personnel either were killed or died from diseases and starvation there.

Stalag 359B

An epidemic of dysentery led to the murder of some 6,000 Red Army prisoners between September 21-28, 1941 (3,261 of them on the first day), conducted by the notorious Police Battalion 306.

Stalag I-B

About 50,000 prisoners died in the camp, the vast majority of them Soviets.

Stalag II-B

The construction of the second camp, Lager-Ost, started in June 1941 to accommodate the large numbers of Soviet prisoners taken in Operation Barbarossa. In November 1941 a typhoid fever epidemic broke out in the Lager-Ost; it lasted until March 1942 and an estimated 45,000 prisoners died and were buried in mass graves. The camp administration did not start any preventive measures until some German soldiers became infected.

Stalag III-A

Stalag III-C

In July 1941 Soviet prisoners taken during Operation Barbarossa arrived. They were held in separated facilities and suffered severe conditions and disease. The majority of the Soviet prisoners (up to 12,000) were killed, starved to death or died due to disease.

Stalag IV-A

In June-September 1941 Soviet prisoners from Operation Barbarossa were placed in another separated camp. Conditions were appalling, and starvation, epidemics and ill-treatment took a heavy toll of lives; the dead Soviet prisoners were buried in mass graves.

Stalag IV-B

In July about 11,000 Soviet soldiers, and some officers, arrived. By April 1942 only 3,279 remained; the rest had died from malnutrition and a typhus epidemic caused by the deplorable sanitary conditions, and their bodies were buried in mass graves. After April 1942 more Soviet prisoners arrived and died just as rapidly. At the end of 1942 10,000 reasonably healthy Soviet prisoners were transferred to Belgium to work in the coal mines; the rest, suffering from tuberculosis, continued to die at the rate 10-20 per day.

Stalag IV-H

Of the 10,677 inmates in the camp before the typhoid fever epidemic in December 1941, only 3,729 were alive when it ended in April 1942. In 1942 at least 1,000 were "weeded-out" by Gestapo and shot in Buchenwald.

Stalag V-A

During 1941-1942 many Soviet POWs arrived, but they were kept in separate enclosures and received much harsher treatment than the other prisoners. Thousands of them died of malnutrition and disease.

Stalag VI-C

In summer 1941 over 2,000 Soviet prisoners from Operation Barbarossa arrived. Conditions were appalling, starvation, epidemics and ill-treatment took a heavy toll of lives. The dead were buried in mass graves.

Stalag VI-K

Between 40,000 and 60,000 prisoners died there, mostly buried in three mass graves. A Soviet war cemetery is still in existence, containing about 200 named graves.

Stalag VII-A

During the 5,5 years about 1,000 prisoners died at the camp, over 800 of them Soviets (mostly officers). At the end of the war there were still 27 Soviet generals in the camp who had survived the mistreatment that they, like all Soviet prisoners, had been subjected to. The new prisoners were inspected upon arrival by local Munich Gestapo agents; some 484 were found to be "undesirable" and immediately sent to concentration camps and murdered.

Stalag VIII-C

In late 1941 nearly 50,000 prisoners were crowded into a space designed for only one third that number. Conditions were appalling, starvation, epidemics and ill-treatment took a heavy toll of lives. By early 1942 the surviving Soviets had been transferred to other camps.

Stalag VIII-E

The first Soviets arrived in July 1941; by June 1942 more than 100,000 prisoners were crowded into this camp. As a result of starvation and disease, mainly typhoid fever and tuberculosis, close to half of them died before the end of the war.

Stalag VIII-F

Physical and sanitary conditions were terrible and of the estimated 300,000 Soviet prisoners who passed through this camp, about one third (some 100,000) died of starvation, mistreatment and disease.

Stalag X-B

Stalag XI-B

In July 1941, over 10,000 Soviet army officers were imprisoned here. Thousands of them died in the winter of 1941/2 as the result of a typhoid fever epidemic.

Stalag XI-C

In July 1941, about 20,000 Soviet prisoners captured during Operation Barbarossa arrived; they were housed in the open while huts were being built. Some 14,000 POWs died during the winter of 1941–42. In the late 1943 the POW camp was closed and the entire facility became Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

"Weeding-out"

In the "weeding-out programs" (Aussonderungsaktionen) in 1941-1942, the Gestapo further identified Communist Party and state officials, commissars, academic scholars, Jews (some of the circumcised Muslims were mistook for Jews) and other "undesirable" or "dangerous" individuals who survived the Commissar Order selections, and transferred them to concentration camps, where they were immediately summarliy executed. In all, between June 1941 and May 1944 about 10% of all Soviet POWs were turned over to the SS-Totenkopfverbände concentration camp organization or the Einsatzgruppen murder squads and killed.

Concentration and extermination camps

At least 140,000 up to 500,000 Soviet prisoners of war died or were executed in Nazi concentration camps, most of them by shooting or gassing. Some were also experimented on (in one such case, a Dr. Heinrich Berning from Hamburg University starved prisoners to death while performing "famine experiments"; in another, prisoners were shot using dum-dum bullets).

Auschwitz concentration camp

From about 15,000 Soviet POWs who were brought to Auschwitz I for work, only 92 remained alive at the last roll call (about 3,000 of them were killed by being shot or gassed immediately after arriving). The Soviets were treated worse than any other prisoners. Out of the first 10,000 brought to work in 1941, 9,000 died in the first five months. A group of about 600 Soviet prisoners were about these gassed in the first Zyklon-B experiments on September 3 1941; in December 1941, a further 900 Soviet POWs were murdered by means of gas. In March 1941, Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction of a large camp for 100,000 Soviet POWs at Birkenau, in close proximity to the main camp. Most of the Soviet prisoners were dead by the time Birkenau was reclassified as the Auschwitz II concentration camp in March 1942.

Buchenwald concentration camp

8,483 Soviet POWs were selected in 1941-1942 by a task force of three Dresden Gestapo officers and sent to the camp for immediate liquidation by a gunshot to the back of the neck, the infamous Genickschuss using a purpose-built facility.

Chełmno extermination camp

The victims murdered at the Chełmno killing center included several hundred Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.

Dachau concentration camp

Some 500 Soviet prisoners of war were executed by a firing squad at Dachau.

Flossenbürg concentration camp

More than 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war were executed in Flossenbürg by the end of 1941; executions continued sporadically through 1944. The POWs at one of the sub-camps staged a failed uprising and mass escape attempt on May 1, 1944. The SS also established a special camp for 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war within Flossenbürg itself.

Gross-Rosen concentration camp

65,000 Soviet POWS killed by feeding them only a thin soup of grass, water, and salt for six months. In October 1941 the SS transferred about 3,000 Soviet POWs to Gross-Rosen for execution by shooting.

Hinzert concentration camp

A group of 70 POWs were told that they would undergo a medical examination, but instead were injected with potassium cyanide, a deadly poison.

Majdanek

The first transport directed toward Majdanek consisted of 5,000 Soviet POWs; arriving in the fall of 1941 they soon died of starvation and exposure. Executions were conducted by the shooting of prisoners in trenches.

Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp

Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War the camps started to receive a large number of Soviet POWs; most of them were kept in huts separated from the rest of the camp. The Soviet prisoners of war were a major part of the first groups to be gassed in the newly-built gas chamber in early 1942; at least 2,843 of them were murdered in the camp. According to USHMM, "so many POWs were shot that the local population complained that their water supply had been contaminated. The rivers and streams near the camp ran red with blood."

Neuengamme

Sachsenhausen concentration camp

The Soviet POWs were victims of the largest part of the executions that took place at Sachsenhausen. Thousands of them were murdered immediately after arriving at the camp, including 9,090 executed between August 31 and October 2, 1941.

Sobibór extermination camp

Soviet prisoners of Jewish ethnicity were among hundreds of thousands people gassed at Sobibór. Soviet soldier, Alexander Pechersky, led the successful mass breakout after which the Germans closed the camp.

Forced labour camps

In January 1942, Hitler authorized better treatment of the Soviet POWs because the war had bogged down, and German leaders decided to use prisoners for forced labour (see forced labor in Germany during World War II). Their number increased from barely 150,000 in 1942, to the peak of 631,000 in the summer of 1944.

Many were dispatched to the coal mines (between July 1 and November 10, 1943, 27,638 Soviet POWs died in the Ruhr Area alone), while others were sent to Krupp, Daimler-Benz or countless smaller companies, where they provided labour while being slowly worked to death. The largest "employers" of 1944 were mining (160,000), agriculture (138,000) and the metal industry (131,000). Not less than 200,000 prisoners died during forced labor.

Soviet reprisals against former POWs

The Soviet POWs who survived German captivity were often accused by the Soviet authorities of collaboration with the Nazis or branded as traitors under Order No. 270, which prohibited any soldier from surrendering. On 11 May 1945, Soviet government created more than 100 new "filtration camps", each for 10,000 people. More than 4.2 million Soviet citizens, including 1,545,000 surviving prisoners of war, were repatriated between May 1945 and February 1946. According to The Black Book of Communism, 19.1% of them were sent to penal battalions of Red Army, 14.5% were sent to forced labour "reconstruction battalions" (usually for two years), and 360,000 people were sentenced to ten to twenty years in Gulag. The survivors were released during the general amnesty for all POWs and accused collaborators in 1955, after the death of Stalin.

Soviet historian G.F. Krivosheev gives slightly different numbers based on documents provided by the KGB: 233,400 were found guilty of collaborating with the enemy and sent to Gulag camps out of 1,836,562 Soviet soldiers that returned from captivity. Latter data do not include millions of civilians who have been repatriated (often involuntarily) to the Soviet Union, and a significant number of whom were also sent to Gulag or executed (i.e. Betrayal of the Cossacks). Many Western and modern Russian scholars contend that "Soviet historians engaged for the most part in a disinformation campaign about the extent of the prisoner-of-war problem." They claim that almost all returning POWs were convicted of collaboration and treason hence sentenced to forced labour.

Thousands of prisoners indeed survived through collaboration, many of them joining German forces including the SS. Among the repressed were, however, even the universally acclaimed heroes of the war against Nazism. For example, "Sasha" Pechersky, who led the successful uprising in Sobibor death camp and then re-joined the Red Army where he was injured in combat and won a medal for bravery, but was later imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag anyway.

Quotes

"The war between Germany and Russia is not a war between two states or two armies, but between two ideologies–namely, the National Socialist and the Bolshevist ideology. The Red Army must be looked upon not as a soldier in the sense of the word applying to our western opponents, but as an ideological enemy. He must be regarded as the archenemy of National Socialism and must be treated accordingly." -- General Hermann Reinecke

"This struggle has nothing to do with soldierly chivalry or the regulations of the Geneva Conventions." -- Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

"Women in uniform are to be shot." -- Field Marshal Günther von Kluge

"In the majority of cases, the camp commanders have forbidden the civilian population from putting food at the disposal of prisoners and they have rather let them starve to death." -- Reich Minister of the Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg

"These cursed Untermenschen have been observed eating grass, flowers and raw potatoes. Once they can't find anything edible in the camp they turn to cannibalism." -- Colonel Falkenberg, commandant of Stalag 318 (VIII-F)

"The barbaric, Asiatic fighting methods are originated by the political commissars. Action must therefore be taken against them immediately, without further consideration, and with all severity. Therefore, when they are picked up in battle or resistance, they are, as a matter of principle, to be finished immediately with a weapon." -- Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars, June 6, 1941

"Ruthless enforcement at the least sign of resistance and disobedience! Weapons are to be used mercilessly in breaking resistance. Escaping POWs must be fired upon immediately without warning, with intent to kill. Nor is softness called for against the industrious and obedient POW. He interprets it as weakness and draws his own conclusions." - Instructions for Guarding Soviet Prisoners of War, September 1941

"We must break away from the principle of soldierly comradeship. The communist has been and will be no comrade. We are dealing with a struggle of annihilation." -- Adolf Hitler

See also

• Babi Yar - Soviet POWs among victims (70,000-120,000 people executed between 1941 and 1943).
• Ponary massacre - Execution of some 7,500 Soviet POWs in 1941 (among about 100,000 murdered there between 1941 and 1944).

References

1. Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, Total War - "The total number of prisoners taken by the German armies in the USSR was in the region of 5.5 million. Of these, the astounding number of 3.5 million or more had been lost by the middle of 1944 and the assumption must be that they were either deliberately killed or done to death by criminal negligence. Nearly two million of them died in camps and close on another million disappeared while in military custody either in the USSR or in rear areas; a further quarter of a million disappeared or died in transit between the front and destinations in the rear; another 473,000 died or were killed in military custody in Germany or Poland." They add, "This slaughter of prisoners cannot be accounted for by the peculiar chaos of the war in the east. ... The true cause was the inhuman policy of the Nazis towards the Russians as a people and the acquiescence of army commanders in attitudes and conditions which amounted to a sentence of death on their prisoners."
2. "Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century", Greenhill Books, London, 1997, G. F. Krivosheev
3. Christian Streit: Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die Sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941-1945, Bonn: Dietz (3. Aufl., 1. Aufl. 1978), ISBN 3801250164 - "Between 22 June 1941 and the end of the war, roughly 5.7 million members of the Red Army fell into German hands. In January 1945, 930,000 were still in German camps. A million at most had been released, most of whom were so-called "volunteers" (Hilfswillige) for (often compulsory) auxiliary service in the Wehrmacht. Another 500,000, as estimated by the Army High Command, had either fled or been liberated. The remaining 3,300,000 (57.5 percent of the total) had perished."
4. NAZI PERSECUTION OF SOVIET PRISONERS OF WAR United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - "Existing sources suggest that some 5.7 million Soviet army personnel fell into German hands during World War II. As of January 1945, the German army reported that only about 930,000 Soviet POWs remained in German custody. The German army released about one million Soviet POWs as auxiliaries of the German army and the SS. About half a million Soviet POWs had escaped German custody or had been liberated by the Soviet army as it advanced westward through eastern Europe into Germany. The remaining 3.3 million, or about 57 percent of those taken prisoner, were dead by the end of the war."
5. Jonathan Nor, Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II - "Statistics show that out of 5.7 million Soviet soldiers captured between 1941 and 1945, more than 3.5 million died in captivity."
6. American Jewish Committee, Harry Schneiderman and Julius B. Maller, eds., American Jewish Year Book, Vol. 48 (1946-1947), Press of Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1946, page 599
7. NAZI PERSECUTION OF SOVIET PRISONERS OF WAR USHMM
8. Stalin and the Nazi war of annihilation Progressive Labor Party
9. ^ War against subhumans: comparisons between the German War against the Soviet Union and the American war against Japan, 1941-1945., James Weingartner, 3/22/1996
10. British Imperial War Museum - Invasion of the Soviet Union display (Holocaust Exhibition) Berkeley Internet Systems
11. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (p. 290) - "2.8 million young, healthy Soviet POWs" killed by the Germans, "mainly by starvation ... in less than eight months" of 1941-42, before "the decimation of Soviet POWs ... was stopped" and the Germans "began to use them as laborers" (emphasis added).
12. ^ "Case Study: Soviet Prisoners-of-War (POWs), 1941-42". Gendercide Watch. Retrieved 2007-07-22.
13. ^ THE TREATMENT OF SOVIET POWS: STARVATION, DISEASE, AND SHOOTINGS, JUNE 1941- JANUARY 1942 USHMM
14. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule Canadian Slavonic Papers
15. ^ Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7, page 322
16. ^ According to Anne Applebaum, "In the few months of 1943, death rates among captured POWs hovered to 60 percent ... Similar death rates prevailed among Soviet soldiers in German captivity: the Nazi-Soviet was was truly a fight to the death" (cited from Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Doubleday, April, 2003, ISBN 0-7679-0056-1; page 431.Introduction online)
17. ^ Template:De icon "Das "Sterbelager" von Hemer "Bekannt und gefürchtet" bei sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen
18. ^ Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II By Jonathan Nor, TheHistoryNet
19. Strods, Heinrihs (2000). "Salaspils koncentrācijas nometne (1944. gada oktobris – 1944. gada septembris". Yearbook of the Occupation Museum of Latvia. 2000: pp. 87–153. ISSN 1407-6330. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help) Template:Lv icon
20. Stalag 1B Hohenstein
21. Stalag and Oflag POW Prisoner of War Camps
22. "Zeithain Russian Camp": Stalag 304 (IV H), 1941-1942
23. Remembering Bergen-Belsen
24. ^ No Mercy: The German Army's Treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War
25. Nazi Doctors & Other Perpetrators of Nazi Crimes
26. Using Science For The Greater Evil, Newsweek, Dec 1, 2003
27. Auschwitz - deportees, camp topography, SS garrison Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum
28. A Tortured Legacy Literature of the Holocaust
29. Work Camp for Russian POWs Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum
30. The Systematic Character of the National Socialist Policy for the Extermination of the Jews: Electronic Edition, by Heinz Peter Longerich
31. People in Auschwitz University of North Carolina Press
32. Gross-Rosen timeline USHMM
33. Extermination camp Majdanek The Holocaust: Lest we forget
34. ^ FORCED LABOR: SOVIET POWS JANUARY 1942 THROUGH MAY 1945 USHMM
35. Template:Ru icon Россия и СССР в войнах XX века - Потери вооруженных сил Russia and USSR in the wars of XX century - Losses of armed forces
36. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller, Gerd R. Ueberschär, Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945: A Critical Assessment, Berghahn Books, 2002, ISBN 1571812938, Google Print, p.239
37. Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198201710, Google Print, p.1059
38. Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Houghton Mifflin Books, 2003, ISBN 0618257470, Google Print, p.xi
39. Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, University of Chicago Press, 1999, ISBN 0226273407, Google Print, p.373
40. Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996, ISBN 0275951138 Google Print, p.134
41. Rosemary H. T. O'Kane, Paths to Democracy: Revolution and Totalitarianism, Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0415314739, Google Print, p.164 - "Nearly 80 per cent of were sent to forced labour, some given fifteen to twenty-five years of 'corrective labour', others sent off to hard labour; all were categorized as 'socially dangerous'."
42. Extract from the Commissar's Order for "Operation Barbarossa," June 6, 1941 Yad Vashem

Further reading

• The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany by Gerhard Hirschfeld, Wolfgang J. Mommsen
• Template:De icon Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die Sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941-1945 by Christian Streit

External links

• Case Study: Soviet Prisoners-of-War (POWs), 1941-42
• Execution of Soviet POWs at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen
• NAZI PERSECUTION OF SOVIET PRISONERS OF WAR
• No Mercy: The German Army's Treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War
• Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II
• Soviet Prisoners of War in Norway 1941-1945: Organisation of the camps and treatment of the Prisoners
• The "Russian" Prisoners of War in Nazi-Ruled Ukraine as Victims of Genocidal Massacre
• THE TREATMENT OF SOVIET POWS: STARVATION, DISEASE, AND SHOOTINGS, JUNE 1941-JANUARY 1942
• Template:De icon Die deutschen Verbrechen an den sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen (The German crimes against the Soviet prisoners of war)
• Template:De icon Kampf für Entschädigung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener (Fight for compensation of Soviet war prisoners)

• Misplaced Pages articles needing copy edit from February 2008
• Groups targeted in the Holocaust
• Military history of the Soviet Union during World War II
• Prisoners of war massacres
• Soviet prisoners of war
• World War II casualties
• World War II prisoners of war held by Germany