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On 8 July, Ministerial Counsellor Xaver Dorsch, head of the central office of the Organisation Todt construction agency, visited Dulag 127 in Drosdy near Minsk. It was subordinated to the 286th Security Division. The transit camp had been set up in an open field on the Svisloch River; there were no buildings.¹¹ Two days after his visit, Dorsch reported on what he had seen in a letter to soon-to-be Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg:
The prisoner camp in Minsk accommodates in an area roughly the size of Wilhelmplatz around 100,000 prisoners of war and 40,000 civilian prisoners. Squeezed into this confined space, the prisoners can hardly move and are forced to relieve themselves where they stand. […] The prisoners of war, for whom the food problem cannot be solved, have gone in some cases six to eight days without food and know only one obsession in their state of bestial apathy brought on by starvation: to find something edible. […] During the night, the starving civilians fall upon those with supplies and beat each other to death to obtain a piece of bread. The only possible language of the weak guard detachment, which carries out its duty day and night without being relieved, is firearms, of which it ruthlessly avails itself.¹²
Despite the extreme heat, some of the [Axis] guards forbade the prisoners to drink from the river; hundreds were shot while attempting to do so.¹³
In the first two months of the war, despite their drastic undernourishment, most Soviet prisoners still possessed a remnant of physical resilience, and weather conditions were favorable.
Around this time, however, the first hunger-related epidemics broke out. Already in September 1941, death rates increased considerably. During that month, between 5,000 and 9,000 Soviet prisoners died in Army Group Centre’s rear area alone, and 9,000 in the POW camps of the Government General. In Stalag 342 (Molodechno) in General Commissariat Belarus, 200 prisoners a day were dying with a terrible constancy — around 6,000 per month in a single camp. There, prisoners tormented by hunger even requested the Wehrmacht guards in writing to end their suffering by shooting them.¹⁴
Cases of cannibalism occurred in the Molodechno camp in early September and in Borisov no later than the end of the month. Cannibalism is also documented in other camps in Belarus, namely those in Bobruisk, Mogilev, Minsk, and Glubokoye.¹⁵
Instances of cannibalism were likewise reported for the camp in Shepetovka and a transit camp in the vicinity of Krivoy Rog, both in Ukraine, in late September and October 1941, respectively.¹⁶ In all POW camps, the [Axis] authorities imposed the death penalty for cannibalism.¹⁷
In Adabash, a branch camp of Stalag 305 in Kirovograd, Ukraine, the camp authorities even had six offenders pose for photographs with the remains of the corpse they had disemboweled and partially eaten, before having them shot.¹⁸
[…]
From October 1941, mass mortality in all Wehrmacht camps holding Soviet POWs assumed monstrous proportions: in October, November, and December, between 300,000 and 500,000 prisoners died each month; in January 1942, it was 155,000; in February, 80,000; and in March, 85,000. During November 1941, 83,000 prisoners died in the Government General alone: 38.2 percent of the prisoners present at the start of the month. In the rear area of Army Group Centre, the death toll for November came to around 80,000.³²
During a discussion in Berlin in late November 1941, Göring informed the Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, of conditions in the POW camps (including cases of cannibalism) and disparagingly compared the Soviet prisoners to ‘a herd of ravenous animals’ (una mandria di animali famelici).³³
The clearest and most direct instruction for the murder of a substantial share of the Soviet POWs was issued by Quartermaster General Wagner during a meeting of the chiefs of staff of all armies and army groups deployed on the Eastern Front with the chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, on 13 November in Orsha. Wagner declared unequivocally: ‘Prisoners of war in the POW camps who are not working have to starve to death.’³⁴ This was a death sentence for 55 percent of the prisoners.³⁵
A rare letter sent by a captive soldier to his family illustrates the suffering of Soviet prisoners in Kaunas’s Sixth Fort, which had been converted into a POW camp. Captured north of Novgorod on 14 September 1941, F. J. Koshedub was transferred from one camp to another before making the journey on foot from Gomel to Kaunas, ‘where a ready-made mass grave is awaiting me’. On 19 October, he wrote:
Since the first day of captivity, I’ve been starving and I expect every day to be my last. […] We are incarcerated in the Sixth Fort. […] We are sleeping in a pit under open skies. We receive 200g of bread a day, half a litre of boiled cabbage and half a litre of tea with mint. Everything is unsalted, so that we don’t swell up. With sticks and steel rods, we are driven to work, though we don’t receive any extra food. We have millions of lice. For two months, I haven’t shaved, washed or changed my clothes. I have underwear, overgarments, a military coat, a field cap and shoes with putties. It is cold, muddy and dirty. Between 200 and 300 men die every day. That is the situation I’m in, and my days are numbered. Only a miracle can save me. So farewell, my darlings; farewell, my loved ones, friends and acquaintances. If a good person can be found to pass on my letter, at least you’ll know where I met my inglorious and bitter death.³⁶
[…]
By the beginning of February 1942, that is, over the space of little more than 7 months, 2 million Soviet prisoners of war had died or been murdered in [Axis] custody. This was almost 60 percent of the 3.35 million Red Army soldiers captured during this period, most of them by the end of October 1941.⁴²
On Reich territory, at least 265,000 Soviet POWs died during these months; this constituted a death rate of around 53 percent. (By contrast, death rates among Polish and Soviet civilian forced laborers inside Germany were well below 10 percent.) The fact that this rate of mortality was scarcely lower than the death rate in the POW camps east of the Reich’s borders not only sheds an unmistakeably clear light on living conditions for captive Soviet soldiers in Germany.⁴³
It also throws into stark relief the common fate of Soviet POWs in [Axis] captivity regardless of their whereabouts and gives the lie to the claim that long transportation routes and the associated supply problems were to blame for the mass mortality. Over an extended period between October 1941 and February 1942, just as many people died in a single large POW camp in the occupied Soviet territories as could be murdered during the same time by an entire SS Einsatzgruppe.⁴⁴
Indeed, as of winter 1941/42, captured Soviet troops constituted the largest single victim group of [the Western Axis’s] mass-killing policies.
(Emphasis added. Click here if you have time for more.)
The fate of Soviet POWs during the winter of 1941/42 even prompted Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg, mentioned earlier, to send a letter of protest to Chief of the OKW Wilhelm Keitel at the end of February 1942:
The fate of the Soviet prisoners of war in Germany is […] a tragedy of the greatest magnitude. From 3.6 million prisoners of war, today only several hundred thousand are fully capable of working. A large proportion of them have starved or perished as a result of the adverse weather conditions. Thousands have succumbed to typhus. It is clear that feeding such masses of POWs gives rise to difficulties. All the same, […] death and ruin on the scale described could have been avoided. Within the Soviet Union, for example, the local population, according to the available information, was quite willing to provide the prisoners of war with food. What’s more, a few perceptive camp commandants have successfully taken this path.
In the majority of cases, however, the camp commandants prohibited the civilian population from giving the POWs food, and instead preferred them to starve to death. Even on the march to the camps, the civilian population was not allowed to give food to the POWs. Indeed, in many cases in which POWs could no longer go on during marches due to starvation and exhaustion, they were shot before the eyes of the horrified civilian population and their corpses left behind. In numerous camps, no shelter whatsoever was provided for the POWs. By rain and by snow, they lay under the open sky. They were not even given the tools necessary to dig burrows or holes. A systematic delousing of the POWs in the camps and of the camps themselves was evidently not carried out. Remarks were heard such as: ‘The more of these prisoners die, the better it is for us.’⁴⁵
It is clear from Rosenberg’s letter that the woefully inadequate accommodation in the camps and starvation resulting from the refusal to allow the civilian population to give prisoners food were the main causes of the mass mortality among Soviet POWs. Rosenberg was a senior party official and a member of the Nazi old guard. He was himself guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, for which he would be executed in Nuremberg after the war.
At the beginning of September 1941, he had expressly declared that the provisions of the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which stipulated that prisoners of war ‘must be humanely treated’ and had been signed by Germany and Russia, were not valid in the occupied Soviet territories.⁴⁶
Even he, however, was appalled at the Wehrmacht’s inhuman treatment of captive Soviet soldiers. Rosenberg had known about what was happening in the POW camps since the first half of July 1941, when he had received a detailed report about conditions in a transit camp in Drosdy near Minsk. At the time, however, he was not willing to openly condemn this treatment.
Only at the end of February 1942, in a radically different situation following the deaths of 2 million Soviet POWs, did he support appeals made by a senior member of his staff (Dr. Otto Bräutigam, the real author of Rosenberg’s letter) for an improvement in conditions and protest.
This extermination—I hardly need remind you—was inspired principally by the brutal European colonization of Turtle Island, wherein millions of humans had to perish so as to free up room and other resources for monopolist settlers.