While Nazi Germany was well known for the Holocaust, Nazis killed Soviet POWs in massive numbers as well, typically through forced starvation by Himmler's policies, and at a much greater rate than the Holocaust ever achieved. The camp commanders on the ground did not always know this as well. Taken from Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Makowzer (also, sorry for all the Nazi Germany posts. Currently doing some deep dives on it, will start posting more varied content soon):[By this point, rather than waiting for Berlin to organize long-range transportation, some commanders set up POW work units to search for provisions, enlisted the help of local villagers and reminded their own men of the need to treat the prisoners properly. But it was much too little, too late. The death toll rose inexorably. As early as July, there had been mass starvation among the prisoners in Minsk, site of the first major encirclement, and death rates rose sharply after outbreaks of dysentery and typhus. 54,000 had died in camps in the General Government alone by 20 October; another 45,690 died in the next ten days. Further east, by November, the mortality daily in the Brjansk-Vjasma pocket was between 0.6 and 2.2 per cent. In Bobruisk, starving prisoners attempted to break out at night and were shot; the following morning 1,700 – one in ten – lay dead. Long before the world discovered the grisly sight of the overcrowded SS camps in the Reich in 1945, the Wehrmacht’s own POW camps – unseen by any journalists – had contained horrors that were, if anything, greater still in their magnitude. By February 1942, only 1.1 million Soviet POWs remained alive (of the 3.9 million originally captured), and of these only 400,000 were able to work. The overall mortality rate for Soviet POWs in German hands during the Second World War was 57.5 per cent; as many British and American soldiers died in German captivity during the whole war as died in these camps in one day. It was hardly surprising that German generals themselves believed that ‘the Führer wishes for the decimation of the Slavic masses’.By February 1942, though, the propaganda war was the last thing on POW camp commanders’ minds. Johannes Gutschmidt, for instance, was a sixty-five-year-old former officer in the Wilhelmine army and a confirmed royalist. Although he had fewer than 200 men under his command he found himself guarding as many as 30,000 POWs at a time. Doing his best to find food and medical supplies for his detainees, he worried about their lack of shelter from the rain as well as the camp’s vulnerability to partisans reportedly gathering in the woods near by. At the end of October, Gutschmidt recorded the first act of cannibalism in his camp; several prisoners had eaten part of a dead comrade. By mid-November, many of them were dying despite some food being available: they were worn out and suffering from the lack of proper accommodation. As the thermometer plummeted below freezing, the mortality rate approached 1 per cent daily. A typhus epidemic was raging across the camps of the area. Elsewhere, things were even worse: at another camp in Vjasma, there had been 4,000 deaths, and the commander had been threatened with investigation by his shocked superior. On 21 January 1942 Gutschmidt had two Russian soldiers who had been surprised eating corpses shot; the next day, he marked the anniversary of the Kaiser’s birthday. The final entry in his diary, in early March, is a gloomy one:"8 March 1942 [Smolensk] Now all the POWs capable of work are to be sent to Germany to free up armaments workers there for the front. Of the millions of prisoners only a few thousands are capable of working. So unbelievably many have starved to death, many are ill with typhus and the rest are so weak and pitiful that they can’t work in this state. The German administration failed to provide them with enough provisions, and there’s likely to be a nasty bust-up when so few come to Germany to work."]
That's why they call it a war of annihilation.
The treatment of POWs by both the Germans and the Soviets was barbaric. Look how many German POWs made it home after the war, compared to the number captured and sent to the POW camps. Majority weren't released from Soviet camps until the 1950's.
13,000 of the 45,000 American POW's held in Andersonville during the Civil War died.
It is difficult to call it another way, because our total losses amounted to 26.6 million people (civilian and military). 12 millions of them are military losses(soldiers).
Soviet P.O.W’s who were liberated after the war often found them selves sent straight to Gulag. Order 227, those who surrendered were considered traitors, and often family members were punished too.
