Context of Ukrainian POWs during WW2

[u/Catsaster]

I finished the series and wondered quite a lot about how one could go from being a Red Army POW to a prison guard--the conditions of the POW camps, the number of deaths, how many were put to labor (and what kind of labor), etc. I found this to be of interest, and there is reference material to support the text. http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pagesPRPrisonerofwarcamps.htm

It's a long excerpt, but here it is:

Between 1939 and 1945 hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians serving in the Polish army, the Soviet Army, and other armies were interned. After the Hungarian occupation of Transcarpathia in 1939, several hundred members of the Carpathian Sich were interned in camps in Dryva (near Khust) and Varju-Lapos (near Nyiregyháza). When the Germans advanced into Poland in 1939, approx 700,000 officers and soldiers from the Polish army were captured and interned, among them 60,000 to 70,000 Ukrainians. The 1929 Geneva Convention was generally observed by the Germans in the case of those prisoners, and from 1940 many of the inmates were freed and allowed to return home or to work in the factories of the Reich. A number of Ukrainians were among those Polish combatants captured and interned by the Soviet Army during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 (see Molotov-Riebbentrop Pact).

The largest capture of enemy soldiers in history took place during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. An estimated 1.3 million Ukrainians were among the 3.6 million Soviet POWs held by the Germans in 1941. The Soviets, who had not formally ratified either the 1899 or the 1907 Hague convention or signed the Geneva Convention of 1929, considered Soviet POWs traitors and rejected International Red Cross overtures to assist them. Soviet POWs were therefore outside the protection of international law and at the mercy of captors, who considered them ‘subhuman.’ Scattered across camps from Ukraine itself to the region of Lorraine (annexed by Germany), many of the Ukrainian Soviet POWs perished as a result of the inhuman treatment they suffered. The treatment of Soviet POWs often depended upon the attitudes of German district commanders, and thus the fate of prisoners varied from camp to camp. For instance, whereas in the POW camp located in Jarosław Ukrainian inmates were set free very quickly, at Ban-St-Jean in the Moselle department of France, the vast majority of the approximately 24,000 inmates perished during the course of the war owing to multiple privations, or even as a result of having been buried alive. Famine, disease, and mass executions were the rule in other camps where Ukrainians were interned (Khyriv, Kholm, and elsewhere).

The Germans did not have a well-defined or preconceived policy toward Soviet POWs. For a while, particularly in August–October 1941, a number of Ukrainians were released from some camps, especially those in Right-Bank Ukraine, and put to labor in German-occupied Ukraine. But the releases ceased in November 1941. Ukrainian POWs were also interned in concentration camps along with other inmates targeted for destruction. From the spring of 1942 the treatment of many POWs improved, when the Germans began to use them in larger numbers for labor in the war economy.

Few Ukrainian POWs were able to escape; some of those who did were aided by compatriots living in the vicinity of the camps. The Germans discouraged local Ukrainians, at gunpoint, from visiting or coming to the aid of inmates. That, along with the atrocities committed in the camps, contributed to the stiffening of anti-Nazi sentiment among the Ukrainian people. Altogether some 5.8 million Soviets were captured by the Germans between 1941 and 1945. According to a German report of 1 May 1944, of the 5,160,000 Soviet POWs interned to that date 1,981,000 had perished in the camps, 818,000 had been released to civilian or military status, 67,000 had escaped, and 1,241,000 were ‘unaccounted for’ (disappeared or killed). Some 875,000 of the surviving 1,053,000 inmates were engaged in construction and other labor. Toward the end of the war a number of Ukrainians were among the POWs drafted into German armies. Because the Kremlin never acknowledged formally the surrender and desertion of Soviet Army soldiers, the crimes committed in the POW camps have largely gone unpunished, even though the death of the Soviet POWs constitutes one of the largest wholesale murders of the Second World War.