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Content Warning for violence and starvation

If captured early during the war, meaning in 1941 and the first months of 1942, the horrifying answer is that you were most likely to starve or executed. In fact, the chance that you would die would be higher than 2:1 since more than half of all Soviet POWs captured by the Germans would not survive captivity.

Of the about 5.7 million Soviet POWs taken into captivity during WWII, 3.5 million or about 57% were killed as the result of German policies. Most of them, 2.8 million, were killed between June 1941 and January 1942. The most common methods of killing was starvation, exposure, and summary execution and in September 1941 the mortality rate of Soviet POWs in German captivity was about 1% per day, which represents one of the most concentrated mass killings in history.

This was the deliberate result of the criminal and murderous agenda of the German state and Wehrmacht of the time. The war against the Soviet Union was for the German leadership to be a war of annihilation. It's goal was not "merely" political dominance as in the case of the war against France. It's declared goal was the political and physical annihilation of, in the words of the German state and army leadership, "Judeo-Bolshevism".

At the very core of the Nazis' worldview was the conviction that the conflict that defined history, the very engine of history, was the war between races, specifically between the "Aryan" and the "Jewish race", with these two representing different "racial characteristics", first and foremost the national and international respectively. According to their warped conspiracy theories the "Jewish race" represented the international and was thus in league and exercised control over Bolshevism/Communism. Communism, the Nazi world view held, was the most potent weapon in the arsenal of the "Jewish race", which is why the Soviet Union was, in their view, the physical and political manifestation of the danger the Jews represented to the Nazis, Germany, and all Germans; a mortal danger in fact that threatened the very survival of all Germans.

Hence, the war against the Soviet Union was always – Hitler-Ribbentrop pact notwithstanding – on the German leadership's agenda, especially since the dangers of Communism and the USSR was something that was an immensely popular view even among the more conservative factions of German society, since the years of 1917-1923 when Europe and Germany experienced a period of violence in connection with revolution, counter-revolution and civil war still loomed large in the mindscapes of German society twenty years later.

So came the summer of 1940. France, at least in the form of its power on the European continent was defeated and the UK was the only power still holding out with little chance of invading the continent in the near future. Still, the German leadership experienced a sense of Zugzwang since they gathered that it was only a matter of time until the United States would enter the war and bring the full industrial arsenal the likes of which the world had never seen against the Third Reich. In this situation, the leadership saw the time as being right to begin what had been the plan all along: To bring about the apocalyptic confrontation that would be needed to break the very pattern of world history up to this point. The destruction of the USSR and by extension of "international Jewry".

The preparation for the military confrontation with the USSR began and from their very beginning they were conceived by the Germans as a war between world-views, races, and between two potential futures, one mortal for the whole of the German people. Delayed by the necessity to intervene in Southeastern Europe, Hitler and the Wehrmacht generals assembled on March 30, 1941 to discuss the way the war that was going to start shortly would be waged. Franz Halder of the Wehrmacht High Command noted in his diary about the meeting (German source – translation my own):

Battle of two world-views. Scathing judgement of Bolshevism, equals asocial criminality. Communism is a mortal danger for the future. We have to abandon an standpoint of soldierly camaraderie. The communist was not a comrade [Halder uses the term "Kamerad", best translated as "military comrade" and not related to the communist use of the term "comrade", which in German is "Genosse"] beofre and will not be a comrade after. It is a war of annihilation. If we don't understand it as such we will as well beat the enemy but in 30 years another communist enemy will oppose us. We don't wage a war to conserve the enemy.

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Battle against Russia: Annihilation of the bolshevik commissar and the communist intelligentsia.

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The battle must be fought against the poison of subversion. This is not a question for the military courts. The officers must know what this is about. They have to fight the fight. The soldiers have to defend themselves with all measures with which they are attacked. Commissars and members of the GPU [the old name of the NKVD] are criminals and must be treated as such.

This view, shared between the military and the political leadership had far reaching consequences to how the Soviet population as well as Soviet POW would be treated. This resulted in both the so-called Commissar Order and the so called Kriegsgerichtsbarkeiterlass or "Barbarossa Decree". The former stated that all political commissar and "thoroughly bolshevized individuals" that German troops came across must be – in the words of the decree – "liquidated". The latter decreed that German soldier must not be persecuted for war crimes committed in the Soviet Union against civilians and POWs alike, that in fact all military courts are expressedly forbidden to do so.

In practical terms, this had far reaching consequences in terms of turning the German war against the Soviets into the highly criminal and murderous enterprise it became. The commissar order formed the basis of the Einsatzgruppen operating behind German lines systematically starting to shoot Jews living in Soviet territory and for the Wehrmacht handing over thousands of POWs, actual political commissars, Jews, and later to be amended to "Asiatic POWs", to the Einsatzgruppen to be shot.

Also the fact that it was explicitly forbidden to persecute any German in the Soviet Union for war crimes paved the way for the Wehrmacht leadership to institute their murderous policy against the Soviet POWs. The political leadership forbid Soviet POWs from being used for labor and the General Quartermaster of the Wehrmacht, Eduard Wagner, gave out the explicit order concerning the Soviet Union that "all Prisoners of War not engaged in labor are to starve".

And so they did by the millions. German POW camps for Red Army soldiers were little more than a fence around an open field. After the encirclement of Smolensk where over 300.000 Soviet priosners were taken one Stalag (Stammlager, German name for a POW camp for rank and NCOs) was described as a fenced-in area barely the size of Berlin's Wilhelm Platz containing 100.000 Soviet POWs. Space was so cramped that those who died could not fall to the ground, as this picture from 1942 shows. Upon capture German soldiers would strip Red Army soldiers of their clothing and boots and while the Jews, commissaars and "Asiatics" would be shot or handed over to the Einsatzgruppen to be shot, the other simply ended up in one of these camps where they wouldn't receive any food.

The descriptions of these camps show a horrific picture. People packed so tightly that they had to defacte where they stood and the dead could not fall. POWs asking their German captures to shoot them. People driven mad by hunger just wailing. People digging holes to find some rudimentary shelter against the elements. The stench of hundreds of thousands of unwashed bodies becoming unbearable. Lice and typhus becoming epidemic. There are even reports of cannibalism for people were so crazy and desperate from hunger that they started eating their dead comrades.

This policy changed somewhat in 1942. With the continued shortage of labor in the Reich, deliberate and outright starvation of the Soviet POWs stopped and they were used for forced labor or in case of some nationalities they were offered to fight for the Germans. While the systematic murder of "Asiatic" POWs stopped, the systematic murder of Jews and Commissars continued. And even if forced to work for the German Reich Soviet POWs were along with the later Italian POWs the only ones not afforded even the most basic protection under the Geneva convention. Meaning that they had to work for the war industry, were denied medical care, and were fed much, much wrose than other POWs. The most striking example of this includes the so-called "Russian bread", a food devised by the Germans specifically for Soviet POWs and forced laborers that consisted of at least 40% saw dust.

While the mortality rate of Soviet POWs dropped from the astronomic heights it had been, over the course of the years from 1942 to 1943 still another million Soviet POWs perished at German hands, sometimes even in the course of systematic murder. One such instance was the so-called "Kugelaktion" (bullet action) a program where former Soviet officers of the Red Army who had made "trouble" during their forced labor were shot systematically in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Another instance is the decentralized euthanasia of Soviet POWs and forced laborers unable to work during the years 1943 and 1944.