Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) held by Nazi Germany and primarily in the custody of the German Army, were starved and subjected to deadly conditions. Of nearly six million that were captured, around 3 million died during their imprisonment, largely in 1941. Soviet Jews, commissars, Asians, and female combatants were systematically targeted for execution, while many other Soviet prisoners were shot for being wounded, ill, or unable to keep up with forced marches. Soviet prisoners of war were subjected to forced labor under conditions worse than civilian forced laborers or prisoners of war from other countries. More than 100,000 were transferred to Nazi concentration camps, where they were treated worse than other prisoners. Nearly a million Soviet prisoners of war volunteered to serve as auxiliaries to the German military; others joined the SS. Collaborators were essential to the German war effort as well as to the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
The deaths among Soviet prisoners of war were numerically exceeded only by the European Jews and has been called "one of the greatest crimes in military history". Nevertheless, few received any reparations and their fate is much less well studied. Changing and contradictory orders issued by German military leaders has led to debate as to whether the Nazi leadership planned and intended mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of war in 1941 or whether it was initially intended to use Soviet prisoners for forced labor.
Background
Nazi Germany and its allies Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Italy invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The Nazi leadership believed that war with its ideological enemy was inevitable and one reason for the war was the desire to acquire territory, called living space (Lebensraum), which Nazis believed was necessary for Germany's long-term survival. The war aims included securing natural resources, including agricultural land to feed Germany, metals and mineral oil for German industry. To increase the speed of conquest the Germans planned to feed their army by looting and to terrorize the local inhabitants with preventative killings. The vast majority of German military manpower and materiel was devoted to the invasion, which was carried out as a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war. Among the criminal orders issued by the Wehrmacht's High Command (OKW) was the Commissar Order directing the army to shoot captured Soviet commissars as well as suspicious civilian political functionaries. The Nazis believed that the Soviet Union's Slavic population, considered racially inferior, was secretly controlled by an international Jewish conspiracy. Thus, by killing communist functionaries and Soviet Jews, it was expected that resistance would quickly collapse. They anticipated that much of the Soviet population, especially the western areas, would welcome the German invasion and in the long run hoped to exploit tensions between different Soviet nationalities.
The experience of World War I both increased antisemitism in Germany based on the belief that Jews and others had stabbed their country in the back resulting in its defeat, and also the importance of securing enough food supplies for the home front to avoid a repeat of the blockade-induced famine. The Nazis divided the Soviet Union into "deficit areas", especially in the north, that required food imports and "surplus areas", especially in Ukraine. Food deliveries from surplus areas to deficit areas would be redirected to the German army or Germany, which Nazi planners estimated would lead to the starvation of some 30 million people—mostly Russians. These plans were mostly abandoned as they proved impossible to implement. A smaller-scale starvation policy was implemented in Soviet cities (especially besieged Leningrad) and Jewish ghettos, but proved less successful than German planners hoped because of flight and black market activity. The Soviet prisoners of war were held under tighter control, and consequently suffered a higher death rate.