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Nazi Germany operated around 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps (German: Kriegsgefangenenlager) during World War II (1939-1945). [ 1 ] Germany signed the Third Geneva Convention of 1929, which established norms relating to the treatment of prisoners of war.
Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction.
In total, the number of German soldiers who surrendered to the Western Allies in northwest Europe between D-Day and April 30, 1945, was over 2,800,000 (1,300,000 surrendered up to March 31, 1945, and over 1,500,000 surrendered in the month of April).
20 sty 2020 · In August 1944, the liquidation of KL Plaszow began, the "death march" of the last group of about 600 prisoners began on 14 January 1945. Several million people lost their lives in the camps created in occupied Poland, due to direct and indirect extermination.
German prisoners captured by the Red Army suffered greatly; approximately 91,000 were captured at end of Battle of Stalingrad but few returned home, being sent instead for work in labour camps. At the end of war, POWs are usually repatriated swiftly , which was relatively straightforward for Allied POWs in Germany.
The most well known German prisoner of war camps were known as either Stalags, short for the German word Stammlager, or Oflags, short for the German Offizier Lager. Oflags (ringed in red on the map) were German prison camps for officers while Stalags (ringed in blue) were for both officers and enlisted men.
POWs in Germany. The Germans were hardly the genial hosts, whether you were a POW during World War I or World War II. There was severe punishment for escape attempts, there were meager rations and drafty bunkhouses, and there were irregular deliveries of packages from the Red Cross.
