Japanese Prisoners of War in The Soviet Union

Japanese Prisoners Of War In The Soviet Union

By the end of World War II there were from 560,000 to 760,000 Japanese POWs in the Soviet Union and Mongolia interned to work in labor camps. Of them, about 10% died (50–60,000), mostly during the winter of 1945–1946.

The majority of the approximately 3.5 million Japanese armed forces outside Japan were disarmed by the United States and Kuomintang China and repatriated in 1946. Western Allies had taken 35,000 Japanese prisoners between December 1941 and 15 August 1945, i.e., before the Japanese capitulation The Soviet Union held the Japanese POWs much longer and used them as a labor force.

Read more about Japanese Prisoners Of War In The Soviet Union:  History, Japanese Internees and Russians, Japanese Ex-internees Today, Research in Russia, In Fiction

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    Nothing an interested foreigner may have to say about the Soviet Union today can compare with the scorn and fury of those who inhabit the ruin of a dream.
    Christopher Hope (b. 1944)

    No human being can tell what the Russians are going to do next, and I think the Japanese actions will depend much on what Russia decides to do both in Europe and the Far East—especially in Europe.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.
    Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

    [John] Brough’s majority is “glorious to behold.” It is worth a big victory in the field. It is decisive as to the disposition of the people to prosecute the war to the end. My regiment and brigade were both unanimous for Brough [the Union party candidate for governor of Ohio].
    Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)

    They were right. The Soviet régime is not the embodiment of evil as you think in the West. They have laws and I broke them. I hate tea and they love tea. Who is wrong?
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    It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers’ union. But it would be equally disastrous for the shoemakers’ union to ignore Shakespeare.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)