Overall, about 36% of German POWs in the Soviet Union died. Compared to this, 79% of Italians seems high. However, the majority of them were captured during Operation Saturn, part of the larger battle for Stalingrad. This largely destroyed the Italian army on the Eastern Front, and most of the survivors were withdrawn to Italy. With Italy invaded in mid-1943, there would be no more significant Italian participation on the Eastern Front.

This was a bad time to be captured, since there were many more prisoners than the Soviets were prepared to deal with, move to camps, or care for. They walked much of the way to the camps, otherwise being moved by train with insufficient protection from the cold. Many deaths were due to the cold, but many also died from untreated wounds, disease, and starvation. If they got to the camps, there was better protection from the weather (and it got warmer), more food (but still not enough), better medical care (but not good, and typhus spread through the camps). The Italians fared better than the Germans captured at Stalingrad, whose death rate was almost 95%; they faced the same terrible conditions as the Italians, but were already weakened by malnutrition when trapped in Stalingrad.

Prisoners who were captured later were much more likely to survive. Conditions in the camps improved (not to the point of being good, but at least they were less bad), partly because the Soviets were better prepared and organised, and partly because the food supply situation had improved (there had been starvation deaths among Soviet civilians). Those captured later spent less time in the camps. The approximately 90,000 Germans captured at Stalingrad were only a small fraction of those captured. Most were captured later in the war, and the overall death rate of 36%, while still high, shows the survival advantage of later capture.

(The death rate of Soviet POWs held by Germany was about 60%.)