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Close to five millions of German prisoners of World War II were held by the Soviet Union.

German Army historian Rűdiger Overmans and British historian Richard Overy estimated that 374,000 out of 3.3 million German prisoners of war died in Soviet labor camps The official Soviet number was higher, around 570,000 deaths (mortality rate is between 14% and 30%, depending on low and high estimates of deaths and total POW numbers) An estimate by a special commission says that almost a million of German prisoners died in the Soviet camps between 1941 and 1952. Of the 91,000 German prisoners taken in Stalingrad, only 6,000 survived.

References

1. Rűdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000. ISBN 3-486-56531-1, Richard Overy The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004), ISBN 0-7139-9309-X
2. . 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 war 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)
3. ^ The The Black Book of Communism 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
4. German POWs and the Art of Survival
5. The Great Patriotic War: 55 years on

• World War II prisoners of war held by the Soviet Union
• Soviet-German War
• Eastern Front (World War II)