From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union

Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History

by Susan Grunewald

From Incarceration to Repatriation explores their lives and memories of the nearly 1.5 million German POWs that were held by the Soviet Union during and after World War II and released in phases through 1956, seven years longer than any other Allied nations. Susan Grunewald argues that Soviet leadership deliberately kept able-bodied German POWs to supplement their labor force after the end of the war. The Soviet Union lost 27 million citizens and a quarter of its physical assets during the war, motivating Soviet leadership to harness the labor of German POWs for as long as possible. Engaging with recently declassified documents in former Soviet archives, archival material from multiple German governments, as well as innovative use of digital humanities methods and GIS mapping, Grunewald demonstrates that Soviet authorities detained German POWs primarily for economic rather than punitive reasons. In fact, the GIS mapping of the historical materials makes it clear that most of the 4,000 POW camps across the USSR were strategically located near industrial, infrastructure, and natural resource sites that were critical to postwar economic reconstruction. From Incarceration to Repatriation is the first book to draw together the distinct fields of Soviet and German history to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of German POW captivity in the USSR during and after the Second World War. Attending to the ways the memory of the German POWs remains in circulation in both the former Soviet Union and Germany, Grunewald tracks the political repercussions of war commemoration.

Genres: World War II

258 pages, Hardcover

Published July 15, 2024

Reviews

[Steve]

I happened upon Professor Grunewald’s discussion of this book on a New Books Network podcast. It was she who put me on to Homecomings, previously reviewed. From Incarceration to Repatriation delves further into the Soviet treatment of German POWs, providing greater insight into their experience, going so far as to examine average caloric intake compared across time and rank. As with Homecomings, I found the commentary on evolving war memories, which reflect larger political dimensions, of particular interest.

Despite a general belief that the Soviets rivalled the Nazis in the horrific treatment of POWs, the record supports a more generous conclusion. The author points out that as of 8 May 1945, the Soviets held 3,180,000 German POWs, and that somewhere between 363,000 and 700,000 Germans died in Soviet custody, a remarkably large number for sure. While there is no doubt of the brutal experience of German POWs under Soviet administration – provided the captured person lived long enough to enter a prison camp – the broader context is that everyone in the Soviet Union suffered miseries, citizen, soldier, and POW alike. There’s good reason to believe German POWs experienced a better set of conditions than those citizens committed to the Gulag. Professor Grunewald notes the Soviet Union lost nearly 27 million soldiers and civilians during the Great Patriotic War while the productive economic base in its occupied territory was badly impaired, if not close to entirely destroyed. The Soviets were intent on using their captives as replacement laborers, and, therefore, had an incentive to see to the basic health of their POWs. Further, the Soviets intended to build a compliant East German state while planting the seeds for future inroads into the West – repatriated POWs inclined to foster sympathies toward Moscow were considered important assets. This author has conducted impressive, detailed research, provided significant access to Russian archives – I imagine that experience alone worthy of another book that I would much enjoy reading.