Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [259]
Although Polish war prisoners continued to turn up in forced-labor battalions and in Gulag camps throughout the war, the first labor camps built on a truly massive scale were not constructed for the Poles. As the Soviet Union’s war fortunes began to turn, the Red Army quite suddenly, and seemingly unexpectedly, began to capture large numbers of German and Axis prisoners. The authorities were utterly, tragically unprepared. In the wake of the German surrender following the Battle of Stalingrad—often remembered as the turning point of the war—the Red Army captured 91,000 enemy soldiers, for whom no facilities and no rations were provided whatsoever. After three or four days, the food that did arrive was hardly sufficient: “a loaf of bread between ten men, plus some soup made from water with a few millet seeds and salted fish.”40
Conditions in the first few weeks of captivity were hardly much better, and not just for the survivors of Stalingrad. As the Red Army advanced to the west, captured soldiers were routinely herded into open fields and left there with minimal food and no medicine, when they were not shot outright. Lacking shelter, prisoners slept in one another’s arms, huddled in the snow, and awoke to find themselves clutching corpses.41 In the first few months of 1943, death rates among captured POWs hovered near to 60 percent, and about 570,000 are officially listed as having died in captivity, of hunger, disease, and untreated wounds.42 The real totals may be even higher, as many prisoners must have died before anyone even managed to count them. Similar death rates prevailed among Soviet soldiers in German captivity: the Nazi-Soviet war was truly a fight to the death.
From March 1944, however, the NKVD undertook to “improve” the situation, and set up a new department of forced-labor camps, specially designed for the POWs. Although they were under the jurisdiction of the secret police, these new camps were not technically part of the Gulag, but rather belonged first to the NKVD’s Administration of War Prisoners (UPV) and, after 1945, to its Main Administration of War Prisoners and Internees (GUPVI).43
The new bureaucracy did not necessarily bring better treatment. Japanese authorities, for example, reckon that the winter of 1945–46—after the war had ended—was the hardest for Japanese prisoners, one in ten of whom died in Soviet captivity. Although they were hardly in a position to pass on useful military information, harsh restrictions on their letters to relatives remained firmly in place: prisoners of war were allowed to write home only after 1946, and then using special forms marked “letter of a POW.” Special censor offices, staffed by censors with foreign-language training, were set up to read their mail.44
Nor did overcrowding cease. Throughout the last year of the war, and even afterward, the numbers of people in these new camps continued to grow, reaching staggering levels. According to official statistics, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 German prisoners of war between 1941 and 1945. Another 1,097,000 other European soldiers fighting for the Axis also fell into Soviet hands—mostly Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, and Austrians, as well as some French, Dutch, and Belgians—and about 600,000 Japanese, a stunning number, considering that the Soviet Union was at war with Japan relatively briefly. By the time of the armistice, the total number of captured soldiers had surpassed four million.45
This figure, large as it is, does not include all the foreigners swept into Soviet camps during the Red Army’s march across Europe. The NKVD, trailing in the army’s wake, were also looking for other types