German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union
German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union A Soviet POW removes the charred remains of a comrade with meat hook from the location of an engagement between the German and Red Army Many Soviet prisoners of war who survived German captivity during World War II were accused by the Soviet authorities of collaboration with the Nazis or branded as traitors under Order No. 270, which prohibited any soldier from surrendering. They were sent to penal battalions of the Red Army, forced labour "reconstruction battalions" or sentenced to ten to twenty years in the Gulag. Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956. According to Soviet record...