German POWs

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

German prisoners of war in Moscow (1944)

 

Approximately 3 million German prisoners of war were captured by the USSR during WWII, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POW were employed as forced labor in the USSR wartime economy and post war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all had been released, in 1956 the last surviving German POW returned home from the USSR.

 

In July 1944, some 50,000 German prisoners were paraded through Moscow. Even marching quickly and twenty abreast, they took 90 minutes to pass. In a symbolic gesture the streets were washed down afterward.

 

 

The Germans finally got to Moscow but not the way they intended. This endless line of ragged prisoners marched through the capital in July 1944. Millions of Axis POWs were treated brutally. Some were executed; most were sent to labor camps where they faced almost certain death from starvation, exposure and disease.

                         

This rare color photograph, from May 1945, only days after the war’s end, shows recently-surrendered German soldiers interned in a British Prisoner Of War Camp in occupied Germany. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers spent weeks and weeks in such open-air camps before they were discharged and allowed to return to their homes. The many dugouts must be beds the soldiers created for themselves. It must have been warmer sleeping in dugouts than on flat ground.

Hitler in his desperation sent boys to fight. Captured by the Americans, two boys from the Hitlerjugend Division