Soviet POWs in Wehrmacht Camps: Between Extermination, Forced Labour and Collaboration

This article reviews the current findings regarding the issue of Soviet prisoners of war held by the Wehrmacht. The author focuses on three main aspects of the Red Army soldiers’ captivity: extermination, mass labour and collaboration. The first phenomenon, which has often been associated with a deliberate extermination of prisoners as part of the so-called commissars’ order, resulted from the ideological premises of the war of annihilation which had been waged against the USSR. However, the author demonstrates that the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht was in fact pursuing the same goal, as it neglected the preparation of the camps, the so-called Russenlager, to house prisoners, and showed indifference to the high mortality rate of the Red Army soldiers. This happened despite the fact that a significant part of German administration was convinced of the need to send Soviet prisoners of war to work in the Third Reich. The use of the Red Army soldiers in labour, which rose steadily after 1942, was accompanied by attempts to improve their situation, but these activities were carried out only inconsistently. As a result, the Third Reich’s authorities did not fully exploit the potential of this workforce, nor did they make political use of the anti-Sovietism of those Soviet prisoners of war who joined the collaborative formations.