Prisoners of War
Forced labour was also included in the Morgenthau Plan draft from September 1944, and was included in the final protocol of the Yalta conference the Soviet Union and the western allies employed German POW labor up until 1949
German POWs were impressed into forced labor during and after World War II by the Soviet Union. Russian sources list 2,571,600 German military taken prisoner and the deaths of 450,600 these POW including 356,700 in NKVD camps and 93,900 in transit. These figures are disputed by sources in the west that give a higher number of POW captured and estimate losses may be higher than those reported by the USSR. Richard Overy puts total number of German POW captured by the USSR at 3,300,000 The research project by Rudiger Overmans could confirm that 363,000 German POW died in Soviet custody In addition, Overmans believes that, it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that 700,000 German military personnel reported missing actually died in Soviet custody; Overmans estimates the actual death toll of German POW is about 1.1 million men (including 1.0 million in the USSR), he maintains that among those reported as missing were men who actually died as POW.
Read more about this topic: Forced Labor Of Germans In The Soviet Union
Famous quotes containing the words prisoners of, prisoners and/or war:
“We are prisoners of the world’s demented sink.
The soft enchantments of our years of innocence
Are harvested by accredited experience
Our fondest memories soon turn to poison
And only oblivion remains in season.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“When posterity judges our actions here it will perhaps see us not as unwilling prisoners but as men who for whatever reason preferred to remain non-contributing individuals on the edge of society.”
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“Stiller ... took part in the Spanish Civil War ... It is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined—a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.”
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