Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor.
Many were sent to logging camps in Siberia or mining in the Ural Mountains. Imprisonment was generally harsh. A young POW recalled being subjected to “brutal assaults on a daily basis, hunger, disease, and the cold.” Only by 1948 did their situation improve.
Many German civilians were sent to internment and labour camps where they were used as forced labour as part of German reparations to countries in Eastern Europe.
When World War II started, the Soviet Union was effectively an ally of Nazi Germany in a relatively conventional European interstate war. Although the Germans did most of the fighting in Poland, the Soviet Union occupied the eastern part.
Stalag IV-H (Stalag 304): In 1942 at least 1,000 prisoners were "weeded-out" by the Gestapo and shot. Stalag V-A: During 1941–1942 many Soviet POWs arrived but they were kept in separate enclosures and received much harsher treatment than the other prisoners. Thousands of them died of malnutrition and disease.
The treatment of American and allied prisoners by the Japanese is one of the abiding horrors of World War II. Prisoners were routinely beaten, starved and abused and forced to work in mines and war-related factories in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
According to Nazi ideology, Slavs were useless subhumans. As such, their leaders, the Soviet elite, were to be killed and the remainder of the population enslaved or expelled further eastward. As a result of these racist fantasies, millions of Soviet civilians were deliberately killed, starved, or worked to death.
Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor.
Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov (Russian: Василий Александрович Архипов, IPA: [vɐˈsʲilʲɪj ɐlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪtɕ arˈxʲipəf], 30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998) was a Soviet Naval officer who prevented a Soviet nuclear torpedo launch during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Between 1944 and 1950, these expulsions resulted in the deaths of over half a million ethnic Germans, with some experts claiming a death toll in excess of two million. Deaths resulted from a variety of causes, including but not limited to malnutrition, disease, physical violence, and time spent in internment camps.
Exactly 81 years after the start of World War II, around 1.3 million Germans are still missing and their fates may never be cleared up.
After Germany's surrender in May 1945, millions of German soldiers remained prisoners of war. In France, their internment lasted a particularly long time. But, for some former soldiers, it was a path to rehabilitation.
Stalag IX-B (also known as Bad Orb-Wegscheide) was a German World War II prisoner-of-war camp located south-east of the town of Bad Orb in Hesse, Germany on the hill known as Wegscheideküppel.
All in all, 2 million POWs returned from the Soviet Union. Biess argues that, in the immediate postwar period, there were indications that the Germans would be prepared to confront guilt, including Wehrmacht guilt.
Six thousand survived, returning to Germany after the war. Of them, 35 are still alive today.
they were ruthlessly hunted down and killed soviet female soldiers were also targeted for death the germans portraying them as degenerates.
In the winter of 1942/43, Hitler sacrificed twenty-two divisions through his command to hold out at Stalingrad. More than 100,000 German soldiers fell, froze, or starved to death even before the surrender of the Sixth Army. Over 90,000 men ended up in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps—only around 6,000 of them survived.
A German Mediterranean option would have been very different than invading the Soviet Union. Instead of a huge Axis land army of 3 million men, the Mediterranean would have been a contest of ships and aircraft, supporting relatively small numbers of ground troops through the vast distances of the Middle East.
The battles on the Eastern Front of the Second World War constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterised by unprecedented ferocity and brutality, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres.
More than half of the total number of casualties are accounted for by the dead of the Republic of China and of the Soviet Union.
Originally Answered: In ww2 could Russia defeat Germany alone, without outside help? Very unlikely. The USSR came very close to losing as it was. Without aid sent from the US and Britain, the USSR's ability to replace the crippling losses they suffered in material in 1941 and 1942 would have been greatly reduced.
The Japanese used many types of physical punishment. Some prisoners were made to hold a heavy stone above their heads for many hours. Others might be forced into small cells with little food or water. Tom Uren described how a young Aboriginal soldier was made to kneel on a piece of bamboo for a number of days.
Many of the women and children were held in prison camps in terrible conditions and forced on death marches. Some women were killed on sight and others were raped, beaten, and forced to become sex slaves. Much of the book showcases the words of the people who lived through this period.
Crucifixion was a form of punishment, torture and/or execution that the Japanese military sometimes used against prisoners during the war. Edwards and the others were initially bound at the wrists with fencing wire, suspended from a tree and beaten with a baseball bat.