Which of the soldiers in World War II did the Germans want to take prisoner

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

German captivity during the Second World War is one of the most difficult topics for Russian history, which has been overgrown with all sorts of myths since perestroika in the USSR. Most importantly, throughout the war, Nazi captivity did not bode well for most of the Red Army soldiers.

This is especially true of the first stage of the war, when the "civilized" Europeans destroyed Soviet servicemen like unnecessary things. For three categories of prisoners of war, captivity meant guaranteed death.

The problems of Soviet prisoners of war have been and continue to be studied by many historians not only in the republics of the former USSR. The crimes of the Nazis, including the "white and fluffy" Wehrmacht (which is also one of the propaganda myths created during the Cold War in West Germany), are actively studied abroad.

One of the leading experts in this field from the “German” side is the Swiss scientist Christian Streit, the creator of the fundamental work “They are not our comrades. The Wehrmacht and Soviet POWs 1941-1945 . In it, the scientist thoroughly studied the problems of the destruction of Soviet citizens who were captured, relying on documents available in German archives.

The practice of dealing with Soviet prisoners of war, devoid of any humanity, directly stemmed from Nazi ideology and the plans of the Reich elite to clear the living space for the German nation in the East. At the initial stage of the war, Soviet prisoners were simply destroyed like unnecessary things.

Only when it became clear that the war would drag on did the situation of captured soldiers and officers from the Red Army slightly improved. However, this was not dictated by some kind of "awakening of conscience", but by cold-blooded calculation - the intention to use the captives for the Reich economy for some time before they die. But as already noted at the very beginning, the three categories of the military of the USSR most often were not even taken prisoner.

Category one: Jews

In the Reich, the Jews were proclaimed one of the main ideological enemies, who must be destroyed physically. In general, the history of anti-Semitism in Germany is a separate huge topic, closely intertwined with the history of Christianity, all of Europe, as well as the history of the Civil War in Russia and the White emigration.

In 1941, Jews on the territory of the USSR occupied by the Germans were exterminated with particular zeal, especially if they were soldiers of the Red Army. The already mentioned Christian Streit in his research describes cases when, at the initial stage of the war, German soldiers simply staged unauthorized executions of prisoners, forcing Soviet soldiers to take off their pants before that. Everyone who was found to be circumcised was sent with a bullet in the back of the head to the nearest ditch.

In the course of such shootings, a huge number of non-Jews were destroyed, since there was a representative number of Muslims or atheists in the Red Army, who nevertheless came from Muslim families. Often these people were also circumcised.

Of course, the extermination of Jewish Red Army men was not only in the form of spontaneous soldiers' courts: the Germans actively destroyed this category of prisoners on a systematic basis in the death camps.

In addition, after the occupation of Poland, the Baltic countries, Ukraine and Belarus, the Germans helped to maintain anti-Semitic sentiments among the local population, which also resulted in pogroms and lynching trials. The worst of all was in the territories recently annexed to the USSR.

Category two: commissioners

There was a similar attitude towards Soviet political workers. Moreover, Nazi ideology equated Jews and political workers in the USSR. Soviet power in Germany was presented as "Jewish", as the fruit of a worldwide conspiracy against the "civilized world."

It is striking that many ideological myths created by the branch of Joseph Goebbels are still actively used in the modern Black Hundred and anti-Soviet environment. The communists as a whole were proclaimed in Germany as another important ideological enemy of the German people, and therefore, from the point of view of the Nazis, they did not deserve anything but physical elimination.

And first of all, this concerned the most active, passionate and potentially dangerous members of the Bolshevik Party - the army commissars.

At the first stage of the war, the practice of eliminating political workers also extended to the officers of the Red Army as a whole. Even if we forget about the ideological component of the genocide of the Soviet population, the Nazis killed commissars and officers, including for purely pragmatic reasons.

The German leadership was seriously afraid that the commissars and other chiefs, once in captivity, would act as a cementing element for the mass of Soviet fighters, would prepare escapes, sabotage and other actions.

In this regard, the Nazis feared for Germany's experience in World War I, when thousands of German prisoners of war returning from Russia were imbued with ideas of peace, revolution and Bolshevism. Returning to their units, they undermined the fighting efficiency of the already tired Kaiser army.

It should be understood that although the Nazis in the 1930s carried out a thorough cleaning of the internal political field in Germany, the Communist Party in the future Third Reich was included in the top 5 political forces of the country for a long time, and shortly before the destruction it was the most numerous party after the Nazi, being its direct enemy. In other words, there were many people in Germany who sympathized with the leftist idea.

The latter perfectly illustrates and confirms the fact that German defectors appeared on the Soviet side shortly before June 22, 1941, who reported the imminent start of the war.

Category three: partisans and underground fighters

The Nazis treated the partisans and underground workers who undermined the German rear with particular cruelty. The reason for the destruction of the partisans was extremely pragmatic, which does not in the least justify it.

They killed prisoners from among the underground and partisans for two simple reasons: the destruction of the passionate part of the population of the occupied territory, prone to struggle, and the intimidation of the rest of the population, which, according to the Nazis, should not even try to do anything. The partisans were destroyed both by SS and Wehrmacht units, and by detachments created from collaborators.

The Second World War became an absolutely inhuman conflict in history, in which the Axis participants trampled on all unwritten human and written international laws. Primarily on the Eastern Front. It is still ridiculous to hear that the position of Soviet prisoners of war stemmed directly from the fact that the USSR did not sign the international convention for the treatment of prisoners of war.

The grain of truth lies in the fact that Germany signed this convention and, despite not signing it in the USSR, she had to at least try to comply with all the rules of war. However, due to ideological reasons, the laws of the "civilized world" did not apply to the "eastern barbarians".

At the same time, the USSR had its own normative documents regulating the treatment of prisoners of war of other states in the event of war. And the Soviet practice in this respect was radically different from the German one - there was no question of any systematic, purposeful destruction of any categories of prisoners.