German planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union assumed that captured Soviet soldiers would not be fed at the expense of the Reich. Prisoners were herded into open enclosures without shelter, sanitation or adequate rations, and hundreds of thousands died of starvation, exposure and typhus in the winter of 1941-42 alone. The Commissar Order of 6 June 1941 and the associated commando guidelines directed that political officers, Communist Party functionaries and Jews among the prisoners be identified and shot; SS selection teams operated inside the camps, and several thousand Soviet prisoners were among the first people killed with Zyklon B at Auschwitz in September 1941. From spring 1942, as German labour shortages grew, surviving prisoners were put to work in mines, agriculture and armaments. Of roughly 5.7 million captured, about 3.3 million died. Survivors who returned to the Soviet Union were frequently filtered through NKVD screening camps and some were sentenced to the Gulag.
The German army and the SS held Soviet prisoners of war in open enclosures without adequate food or shelter and shot those in designated categories
Krivosheev's archival study of Soviet losses puts total wartime mobilisation at about 34.5 million. German records account for roughly 5.7 million Soviet prisoners taken between 1941 and 1945, of whom about 3.3 million died in captivity — a death rate above 57 per cent, against about 3.5 per cent for British and American prisoners in German hands.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives about 3.3 million deaths out of 5.7 million captured. The range reflects the incompleteness of registration in 1941, when prisoners died in transit and in unregistered enclosures, and differing treatment of prisoners killed on capture or transferred to the SS for execution.
The Commissar Order, the rationing decisions that condemned prisoners to starvation and the SS selections inside prisoner camps are documented in German military orders introduced in evidence at Nuremberg and analysed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Germany