"Some ten years ago I began the enormous task of researching the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in the hands of the Axis in World War II. I worked through masses of material in various languages, and grew familiar with the fate of Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, etc, in Germany, Italy, Finland and Bulgaria. It was horrible. I'd never read about such suffering.
World War II was total war. Few were spared some misfortune, many were the war's victims. Some of those victims have been forgotten, but few have been more forgotten than those members of the Red Army who became prisoners of war of Hitler's Germany. Statistics, based on Germany's own records, show that out of 5,700,000 Soviet soldiers captured by Germany between 1941 and 1945 3,370,000 of them died in captivity.
Soviet prisoners of war were the responsibility of Germany's armed forces, the Wehrmacht, an organization which stressed that it fought a clean war and that Hitler and the SS were to blame for the darker aspects of the conflict. But, on the Eastern Front, and in the Army's treatment of Soviet prisoners in particular, there was no question of honourable warfare. And no question that international law, which did in fact protect Soviet soldiers (contrary to what is often claimed), would be applied to troops whom the Germans saw as untermenschen…"
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