The war in Donbass continues for the third year.

During this time, Ukraine has repeatedly announced massive participation - many thousands - in hostilities.

However, according to yesterday's data from Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, six are currently under investigation and six are behind bars. The trials took place behind the scenes, without the involvement of the media.

At the same time, there are tens, if not hundreds of times more Ukrainians detained for working in the LDPR.

Correspondent.net I decided to collect all the versions about Russian participation in the ATO.

Ukrainian data

The Ukrainian side has repeatedly provided confirmation of the participation of the Russian military in hostilities in the Donbass: from Pskov paratroopers to the detention of special forces.

At the same time, data on the number of Russian military personnel stationed in Donbass constantly varies.

In June 2015, President Petro Poroshenko said that there were 200 thousand Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine.

“Today, by order of Putin, there are 200 thousand people on our territory, equipped with an arsenal of tanks and anti-aircraft missile launch systems. One of them shot down a civilian airliner from Malaysia last year,” Corriere della Sera quotes Mr. Poroshenko.

In April 2016, Poroshenko already stated that there were 6,000 professional Russian military personnel and a 40,000-strong army of militants in the combat zone in Donbass.

According to the Ministry of Defense, the number of Russians fighting for the LDPR is .

Western opinion

The OSCE, the main international organization that monitors the situation in the ATO zone, has never stated the presence of Russian personnel in the Donbass.

The Secretary General of the Organization, Lamberto Zannier, stated that the presence of regular units of the Russian army in Ukraine.

“There have always been Russian citizens there, perhaps coming there for some reason, entering the region and supporting the separatists. We have evidence of people coming privately - we ourselves met with them and talked. However, are there any other Russian military units […] are more difficult to demonstrate,” Zannier said.

But the United States, which does not participate in the Minsk and Normandy formats, has always been more categorical.

“Russian military and equipment are still in the Donbass. Russia bears direct responsibility for the implementation of the Minsk agreements,” said American diplomat John Tefft.

US Ambassador to the OSCE Daniel Baer announced the continued supply of Russian weapons to Donbass.

“Russia shows no signs of stopping its aggression; on the contrary, it has increased the intensity of violence,” he emphasized.

Russian response

In April 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that there were no Russian troops in Ukraine.

“When asked whether there are our troops in Ukraine or not, I say directly and definitely: there are no Russian troops in Ukraine,” Putin replied.

At his press conference in December 2015, Putin noted that there were no regular Russian troops in Ukraine “resolving military issues.”

“We never said that there are no people there who are involved in resolving certain issues in the military sphere, but this does not mean that regular Russian troops are present there, feel the difference,” Putin said.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov always denied everything.

“We see that the Ukrainian side is now trying to justify its inability to fulfill what it signed up for by citing the difficult security situation, the “mythical” presence of Russian troops - which has never been confirmed or proven by anyone. The launched “disinformation” floats in the media space, as we can see today,” says Lavrov.

What's up

39 Russian citizens have been prosecuted for starting a war against Ukraine, six of whom have already received prison sentences. Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko stated this.

“In total, 39 citizens of the Russian Federation, of which 31 are military personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, have been brought to criminal responsibility for participation in unleashing and waging an aggressive war against Ukraine. Indictments have been sent to the court against 10 citizens of the Russian Federation, of which 6 have already been sentenced to imprisonment for a term of 11 to 15 years," the prosecutor general said.

The Prosecutor General's Office also notified 18 representatives of the government and leadership of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, including Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation Sergei Glazyev and Head of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu, of suspicion of committing crimes against the fundamentals of Ukraine's national security.

“Finally, I managed to unfasten the belt with the pistol holster, and I handed it to the first Russian who approached. Then I raised my hands again. Without saying a word, the Russian emptied my pockets: handkerchief, cigarettes, wallet, gloves - it looked like he would need all of this,” recalled the first seconds in Soviet captivity Heinrich von Einsindel, Luftwaffe pilot, count and great-grandson of Otto von Bismarck (his mother was Countess Bismarck). On August 24, 1942, young Count Einsindel was 20 years old when his plane was shot down over Stalingrad.

“In the steppe, September nights are quite cold, but I was not even allowed to move in order to somehow warm up. As soon as I started to move, the guards swung their rifle butts at me,” the captured pilot wrote in his memoirs, published many years later.

There were no conditions for keeping prisoners in the active army, at best - dugouts and tents, more often - nights in the open air. Therefore, they tried to send them as quickly as possible to a reception point 20-40 kilometers from the front line, guarded by NKVD troops, and from there to assembly points and front-line transit camps.

What is a reception center for prisoners, where for the first time they were not only interrogated, but also officially processed, sanitized (they shaved their heads and changed into Russian uniforms without insignia, if any), the Wehrmacht signalman told in his book “Before the Gates of Life” Helmut Bohn, captured near Nevel in 1944: “Until we arrive at the prisoner of war camp, the daily food allowance is about a liter of liquid soup and three hundred grams of stale bread. But on those days when we were chopping wood for the Russian field kitchen, we were given some hot tea for dinner.<...>We chopped firewood on the street in front of the goat pen in which about a dozen of us prisoners were kept under lock and key.<...>In this goat pen, a woman in the uniform of a junior lieutenant of the Red Army was in charge of us.”

GUPVI Archipelago

The Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees (UPVI, later - GUPVI, that is, the Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees) existed in the NKVD system even before the start of the Great Patriotic War. In 1941, he was in charge of 8 camps. “To receive prisoners from military units, in accordance with the mobilization plan developed by the NKVD Gulag, from the beginning of the war it was necessary to deploy 30 reception points for prisoners of war, but in reality, only 19 points were deployed in combat conditions,” writes in his monograph “Go with peace. On the history of the repatriation of German prisoners of war from the USSR (1945-1958)” historian Vladimir Vsevolodov.

As the Nazis advanced, prisoner of war camps had to be closed and moved, rather than opened, in August 1941 there were only three left - Gryazovets in the Vologda region, Suzdal in the Vladimir region and Starobelsky in the Voroshilovgrad region (now the Lugansk region of Ukraine). As of January 1, 1942, 8,925 people were kept in the six GUPVI camps existing on the territory of the USSR. Most of them were captured during the battle of Moscow.

A year later, the number of prisoners increased tenfold. On paper, the movement of “enemy manpower” was carried out like this: from the army reception point they arrived at the assembly point, from there in trains to the front-line reception and transit camps, and from there to the rear camps. In fact, writes Vsevolodov, of the 282,451 prisoners “accounted for” in January-February 1943, only 19 thousand people were taken to stationary camps - the rest were “stuck” in front-line camps. These transit camps were either peasant huts in villages evacuated or destroyed by the Nazis, or simply tents and dugouts.

Heinrich von Einsindel described how prisoners were transported from one camp to another: “The next day the first group was sent out of the camp: two hundred people who left in columns of four.<...>...We marched straight through the steppe, accompanied by 30-40 heavily armed Red Army soldiers. In 24 hours they made us cover about 70 kilometers. Then we were allowed to rest for several hours right on the road, after which we walked another 40 kilometers in about twelve hours. Then we had to wait three days at the station for the arrival of the train. Then they stuffed us into fifty people into each carriage. Most of us had already contracted dysentery, and death had begun to reap its harvest.”

In the process of transferring from the active army to the NKVD troops, while staying in improvised camps and during the stages in 1943, the majority of those taken prisoner died: according to the UPVI data, which Vsevolodov refers to, 176,186 people arrived during the year, and those who left (mostly died) - 157,460 people. By January 1, 1944, more than 95 thousand people were kept in GUPVI camps, of which 60,854 were former soldiers of the German army.

By May 1, 1945, more than 140 GUPVI camps with a capacity of more than a million people operated in the USSR and in the liberated territories of Europe. In 1946 there were already 240 of them - the largest number in the entire history of the Soviet system of prisoner of war and internment camps.

Great-grandson of Bismarck and other anti-fascists

It also happened that prisoners did not immediately end up in rear camps, but remained near the front line not because of logistics problems, but for propaganda reasons. Heinrich von Einsindel recalled how the Russian military who captured him did not hide their delight when they had a descendant of the “Iron Chancellor” in their hands. After a series of interrogations, he was asked to write a leaflet calling for surrender. “I said hi to my parents and my friends. I reported that I was being treated correctly. I stated that I believed that Germany would lose this war and that Bismarck's warning about a war with Russia was again confirmed."

Helmut Bohn, who wrote a similar leaflet, recalled how he was taken to read it to the Germans over a loudspeaker on the front line: “Finally, the car stops.<...>A mechanic attaches a loudspeaker to the roof of the cab. I pin three texts on the music stand.<...>At the signal, I begin to read: “German soldiers and officers! In the cauldron near Kursk, the victorious Red Army destroyed eleven German divisions. Corporal Helmut Bohn speaks here. Put an end to the madness! Surrender one by one and in groups...”.”

Vsevolodov writes that since 1943, the leadership of military units and NKVD employees even released prisoners “to their own” for propaganda purposes. During the fighting on the Volga in January and February 1943, 439 people released in this way not only returned, but also brought with them another 1,955 prisoners. In January-February 1945, in battles against the garrison in Polish Poznan, 211 prisoners brought with them 4,350 soldiers and officers who decided to surrender. “According to incomplete data, only in the period from January 1943 to June 1945, the use of this method led to the capture of 91,539 people,” the historian reports.

A few months after his capture, Luftwaffe pilot Einsindel found himself in a camp in a monastery in the village of Oranki, Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) region. One of the first anti-fascist schools was already operating there - a camp unit designed to “re-educate” captured Wehrmacht soldiers who agreed to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. Einsindel recalled the German communist emigrant Wagner, who recruited prisoners: “In the evenings, he invited everyone to conversations, and those who came were assigned to work in the kitchen or some other encouragement. After the person was treated kindly with such “gifts,” Wagner asked him if he would like to join the camp group of anti-fascists. If he refused, he was immediately deprived of all the privileges he had been given.”

Since 1944, cadets of anti-fascist schools were entitled to an increased food allowance - 700 grams of bread, like captive production leaders who fulfilled more than 80% of the norm. German historian and researcher on the problem of prisoners Stefan Karner in the book “GUPVI Archipelago. Captivity and internment in the Soviet Union" provides the following data on the number of anti-fascists among prisoners "in one of the largest soldier camps": in July 1943 - 4.5%, in December 1943 - 27.6%, in April 1944 - 67.1%, in July 1944 - 96.6% of the total number of prisoners in this camp.

Karner quotes the story of one of the former cadets of such a school, Wilhelm F., about how the educational process proceeded: historical materialism was taught by a professor from the Lenin Higher School in Moscow, and the remaining subjects (the history of the CPSU, European labor movements and political economy according to Marx’s “Capital” ) - German-speaking communist emigrants. “The classes consisted of lectures, consultations, and seminars.<...>Classes were held from 8.30 to 14.00 and from 17.00 to 19.30. In April they began to issue officers' allowances. After the hardships and hunger in ordinary work camps, every lunch became a real holiday.<...>There was also good medical care, sports and cultural events.” The main motivation for joining the ranks of anti-fascist cadets was the promise of a quick return to their homeland for the prisoners, they later recalled.

In March 1943, the school moved from the Oran camp to camp No. 27 in Krasnogorsk near Moscow. There, in the factory House of Culture, the founding conference of the “National Committee “Free Germany”” - an organization of German political emigrants and prisoners of war - was held. Its vice-president was the same great-grandson of Bismarck, Heinrich von Einsindel, who was transferred to Krasnogorsk.

Here, in the 27th camp, many high-ranking prisoners of war were kept: in particular, the commander of the 6th Army, Field Marshal General Friedrich Paulus. He was placed in a separate house called a block house in zone No. 1.

In the summer of 1944, Lieutenant General Vincent Müller, commander of the 12th Army Corps of Army Group Center, captured along with hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and officers during Operation Bagration, became a temporary inhabitant of camp No. 27 in Krasnogorsk. Müller is known for the fact that on July 17, 1944, he led a 57,000-strong column of prisoners of war that marched in Moscow from the hippodrome and Dynamo stadium along Leningradsky Prospekt and Gorky Street (now Tverskaya), and then along the Garden Ring. This propaganda campaign carried out by the NKVD and removed for Soviet newsreels, was called “The Great Waltz”.

"Harvest"

The mass capture of soldiers and officers of the Nazi army during Operation Bagration by troops of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts was part of another large-scale operation called the “harvest of German labor.” Here is what Vladimir Vsevolodov writes about her: “Prisoners began to be viewed by the USSR not only as a battle trophy, important in wartime, and as a source of labor used to cover the costs of their maintenance, but also as a resource intended for use in the country’s economy not only during the war, but most importantly - in the post-war period. For the USSR, prisoners who fell into its power provided an opportunity to replace their own human losses.”

Based on data on the dead and missing soldiers and officers of the Red Army in 1941 and 1942 (almost 4 million people), Stalin at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 declared the need to have a “replacement element” on the territory of the USSR - 4 million German citizens , enemy prisoners who, within a few years after the end of the war, would rebuild destroyed Soviet cities and boost industry. “The first step in this direction was the creation in November 1943 of the Commission under the NKID for compensation of damage caused to the USSR by Nazi Germany and its allies, which was headed by the Soviet diplomat I.M. May. The commission had to substantiate the idea put forward by Stalin.”

In 1944, this commission developed a reparations program, which spoke about the use of prisoner labor for ten years: “This issue has two aspects: on the one hand, reparations should serve the purpose of speedily restoring the damage caused by Germany to the USSR and other countries, on the other hand , reparations, in particular, reparations by labor, i.e. the removal from the German national economy of several thousand working units annually, must inevitably have a weakening effect on its economy and its military potential,” the use of German labor was justified in a note addressed to the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs cases to Vyacheslav Molotov.

In practice, this meant the expansion of the NKVD structures: UPVI turned into GUPVI, and by the summer of 1944 this body appeared on all fronts and in the armies. Various instructions regulated the treatment of prisoners, the timing of their transportation, the requirements for their physical condition, and cases of mass deaths were investigated.

But by the autumn of 1944 it became clear that if only enemy soldiers and officers were captured, then the plan to involve 4 million Germans in forced labor would not be fulfilled. “The German civilian population became a new object of economic interest for the Soviet Union; the Germans were not citizens of the Reich, living on the territory of countries allied to Nazi Germany, occupied by the Red Army. The “harvest” program among this category of the German civilian population as part of the task of “reparation by labor” was put into action shortly after the signing of the armistice agreement with Romania on September 12, 1944,” writes Vsevolodov.

The first filtering of residents of territories already controlled by the Red Army was carried out in October-November 1944, the work was led by Deputy People's Commissar of the NKVD Arkady Apollonov: “In the reporting territory, a total of 551,049 persons of German nationality were identified, of which 240,436 were men and 310,613 women, of whom were of working age 199,679 men only.”

On December 16, 1944, the practice of internment was regulated by the top secret Resolution of the State Defense Committee No. 7161: “Mobilize and intern all able-bodied Germans aged 17 to 45 years, women from 18 to 30 years old, located in the territory liberated by the Red Army, with the assignment to work in the USSR Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia."

The mobilization order was announced in populated areas, having previously cordoned it off (both NKVD troops and gendarmerie from among local residents were used). Those mobilized were ordered to “have clothing, bedding, dishes, hygiene items and food for 15 days. All products must be packed in bags or suitcases suitable for transportation, with a total weight of up to 200 kg,” writes Karner.

As they moved deeper into Germany, the Soviet military captured both female Wehrmacht service personnel (about 20 thousand women) and members of paramilitary organizations (Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, and the like). Also, more than 200 thousand German civilians were interned in the Soviet Union.

“...In the “accounting” of the “harvest” plan there were not only income items, but also an expenditure part. It amounted to 462,475 people, including 318,489 who died during the war, as well as 55,799 prisoners transferred to form national units that participated in the war on the side of the USSR, etc.,” Vsevolodov points out.

After the end of the war, the NKVD troops did not stop operations to capture and send to the Soviet Union both former soldiers of the German army and civilians. Historians note that American troops, starting on May 4, 1945, gave all prisoners of war status as “disarmed enemy.” The command of the British army did not consider as prisoners of war those who surrendered after the surrender of Germany (they were referred to in the documents as “surrendered enemy”). The USSR (as well as France) declared all German soldiers and officers who came under its power as prisoners of war.

On June 5, 1945, the “Declaration of the Defeat of Germany” was adopted, which legitimized all these actions: all statuses given to former Wehrmacht soldiers and officers by the commanders-in-chief of the victorious countries were recognized as legitimate.

In total, according to various sources, there were from 3 to 3.8 million German prisoners of war and internees in Soviet camps.

He who works eats

In the USSR, all these prisoners were received in more than two hundred camps throughout the country from Khabarovsk to Donbass: prisoners of war from Gorlovka camp No. 242 built houses in the destroyed Stalingrad, in camp No. 236 in Georgia they worked in the oil industry and built roads, in camps No. 195 and No. 286 in Vilnius and Tallinn built airports and residential buildings, in camp No. 256 in Krasny Luch (Voroshilovgrad region) they worked in coal mines.

Interned and mobilized Germans worked mainly in the coal mines of Donbass, as well as in the metallurgy, fuel and oil industries. The internees also lived in camps, but the zones were mixed for men and women, only they had to spend the night in different barracks. They worked as part of the so-called worker battalions - 750, 1000, 1250 and 1500 people.

Vsevolodov in his book “Shelf life is permanent: a brief history of the prisoner of war and internment camp of the UPVI NKVD-MVD USSR No. 27” provides data on what percentage of prisoners working at enterprises in the Soviet Union made up the total number of workers. In March 1947, every fifth worker in the construction of ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy enterprises was captured, in the aviation industry - almost every third, in the construction of power plants - every sixth, in the construction of fuel enterprises and in the production of building materials - every fourth. Many prisoners worked directly at metallurgical plants and coal mines. If the camp was not in the steppe, then almost every one had a so-called camp assignment or camp point in the forest - for timber harvesting.

From the memoirs of former prisoner of war Reinhold Braun: “At first we had to load two wagons with wood during a work shift, then the norm was increased to three wagons. Later we were forced to work sixteen hours a day - on Sundays and holidays.<...>We returned to camp at nine or ten o'clock in the evening, but often at midnight. There we received watery soup and fell asleep exhausted, so that the next day at five in the morning we would go to the plot again.”

From a conversation with engineer Herman Pesl, which Stefan Karner cites in his book: “We installed telegraph poles...<...>They should not wobble when an electrician climbs on them. We burned them, tarred them and dug them deep into the ground. The Russians also erected telegraph poles. And then they told us: “Why aren’t you working? Look there, how much the Russians have put in.” I then snuck there and looked. They set up pillars, deepening them by 40 cm, placed several stones around them, watered them with water and that was it, the job was done. And we dug them in one and a half meters. Then I told my people: “Gentlemen, from now on we’ll end all this. Now we’ll do it like the Russians.”

Pesl explained to his brigade that otherwise they would receive only 50% of the ration and would soon turn into goons: food standards changed over the years, but always depended on production standards. So, for example, in 1944, 500 grams of bread were received by those who produced up to 50% of the norm, 600 grams - by those who fulfilled up to 80%, 700 grams - by those who fulfilled more than 80%. In 1946, the “Basket of Additional Nutrition for Prisoners” included edible herbs: gooseberry, plantain, sorrel, mallow, sorrel, nettle, rapeseed, sverbiga, dandelion, borage and others.

Mortality rates in the camps were particularly high in the final years of the war and the winter of 1945–1946, primarily due to inadequate nutrition. According to the archives of the GUPVI NKVD of the USSR, from 1945 to 1956, 580,548 people died in prison camps, of which 356,687 were Germans. Almost 70% of deaths occurred in the winter of 1945-1946.

Vsevolodov cites statistics from Krasnogorsk camp No. 27 as an example and divides the history of mortality into two periods: “The first period covers 3.5 years - from July 1942 to December 1, 1945. The second period is the last four full years of the camp's existence (1946-1949). Of the total number of deaths of 770 people, 730 deaths occurred in the first period, and 40 in the second.”

The camp in Krasnogorsk described by the historian was far from the largest in the country: its maximum occupancy was in 1944 - 11 thousand people, in 1946 - a little more than 4 thousand people. Camp branches were scattered throughout the Moscow and neighboring regions: in the Moscow region of Lytkarino, prisoners worked at a glass factory, in the village of Mordves, Tula region, they worked on subsidiary farms, worked at factories in Dmitrov, Tushino and in the village of Konakovo, Kalinin region, harvested timber at the stations of Krivandino, Guchkovo (now - the city of Dedovsk) and Rumyantsevo.

In Krasnogorsk, prisoners built a school building, an NKVD archive, a city stadium of the Zenit society, houses for factory workers and a new residential town with a comfortable community with a House of Culture, houses and a pioneer camp for engineering and technical workers of the Ministry of Geology in the village of Opalikha. They also built houses for employees of various bodies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and carried out work on the repair and improvement of the Dynamo stadium in Moscow.

The camp had its own carpentry workshop with qualified cabinet makers from prisoners, from whom they ordered furniture for Soviet sanatoriums and government agencies. The services of the camp's auto repair shop were used by the Ministry of Internal Affairs' motor depot (drivers brought captured cars for service); costumes were ordered from the camp's atelier by employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, employees of the Pravda newspaper, and artists from Moscow theaters. The writer Boris Polevoy sewed his suit from a captured tailor.

The historian notes that the archival building, which now houses the State Archive of Film and Photo Documents in Krasnogorsk, was not only built by German workers, but also designed by the German architect Paul Spiegel, who was also in captivity.

Spiegel was one of the qualified specialists who, since 1945, were identified in the camps of the GUPVI system and registered in a special way, and then recruited to work in their specialty. “According to the NKVD, as of October 15, 1945, in the UPVI camps there were 581 various specialists: physicists, chemists, mechanical engineers, scientists with doctorates, professors and engineers,” Vsevolodov points out.

Karner writes that by 1946, 1,600 specialists had already been selected in the GUPVI camps: “Among them there were about 570 general mechanical engineering engineers, almost 260 civil engineers and architects, about 220 electrical engineers, over 110 doctors of physical and mathematical sciences and technical sciences , as well as engineers of 10 other specialties. Among them were prominent scientists and managers of well-known German companies, such as Christian Manfred, former technical director of the Argus motor-building company, certified by the USSR Academy of Sciences as a major specialist in gas turbines and jet engines.”

Highly qualified specialists, by order of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, were given special working conditions: many of them were transferred from the camps and provided with housing near the facilities or enterprises where they worked. Everyone was paid a salary - approximately the same as Soviet engineers, and half was paid in the currency of the country whose subjects the prisoners were. This “free” life continued as long as one or another department needed a specific specialist: “The Ministry of Internal Affairs retained the right at any time to send back to the camp those specialists who did not prove themselves at work within three months or for some other reason did not could be used in production."

Prisoners in the Gulag

And Christian Manfred, and Paul Spiegel, and Heinrich Einsindl, and ordinary prisoners of war who worked in coal mines, construction sites and logging sites - more than three million people in total - were not convicted of any war crimes. After detention, each prisoner was interrogated many times, and NKVD officers also collected testimony from his subordinates, residents of Nazi-occupied territories - and if evidence of his involvement in war crimes was found, the prisoner was not expected to go to a GUPVI camp, but to death or hard labor in the Gulag.

On April 19, 1943, decree No. 39 of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR was issued “On punitive measures for Nazi villains guilty of murder and torture of the Soviet civilian population and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors to the motherland from among Soviet citizens and for their accomplices” signed Chairman of the Presidium Mikhail Kalinin. The document provided for the death penalty or up to 20 years of hard labor for the Nazis and their collaborators. Executions were ordered to be carried out “publicly, in front of the people, and the bodies of those hanged to be left on the gallows for several days, so that everyone would know how they are punished and what kind of retribution will befall anyone who commits violence and reprisals against the civilian population and who betrays their homeland.”

From 1943 to 1949, in accordance with Decree No. 39, thousands of sentences were passed in the Soviet Union, including on German citizens. Most of the defendants taken prisoner were sentenced behind closed doors, right in the assembly camps. But there were also open, public trials - they lasted for several days, both spectators and journalists, including foreign ones, were allowed there (for example, in 1943, even correspondents attended the trials in Krasnodar and Kharkov BBC And The New York Times). A total of 21 such court hearings took place, 17 of them against German war criminals.

On December 19, 1943, on the Market Square in Kharkov, those convicted of torturing prisoners and civilians, as well as the mass murders of SS man Hans Rietz, secret police official Reinhard Retzlaff and Abwehr officer Wilhelm Langheld were hanged. On December 20, 1945, on Zadneprovskaya Square in Smolensk, non-commissioned officer Willy Weiss, who killed 500 prisoners of war, and six other soldiers of the Nazi army, found guilty of mass murder, rape, and burning people alive, were hanged. On January 5, 1946, on Kalinin Square in Leningrad, the former commandant of Pskov, Heinrich Remlinger, on whose orders about 8 thousand people were killed, and seven other convicted Nazi criminals were hanged. Executions were carried out in public with a large gathering of local residents and filmed for newsreels.

Among the accused who appeared before these courts were those who received long sentences: gendarmerie officers Franz Kandler and Johann Happ, who shot prisoners of war and civilians in Odessa, were each sentenced to 20 years of hard labor; Deputy Commandant of Bobruisk Bruno Goetze and Hans Hechtl, who shot 280 people and burned 40 houses, each received 20 years of hard labor by a court in Minsk; Corporal Johann Lauer received the same amount - 20 years of hard labor - in Kyiv, who participated in executions in Ternopol, Vinnitsa, Poltava, Mariupol, Lvov.

Since 1947, the death penalty was abolished in the Soviet Union, and the highest punishment was 25 years of exile at hard labor. There were convict camps in Vorkuta, Kazakhstan, Norilsk, Taishet and Kolyma. In January 1950, “at numerous requests from the working people,” the death penalty for certain charges was returned - by the decree “On the application of the death penalty to traitors to the Motherland, spies, and subversive saboteurs.”

Karner talks in his book about SS Major General Helmut Becker, who in 1947 in Kyiv was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor and served his sentence in Vorkuta. In September 1952, Becker and his comrades in the camp department, while working on a construction site, allegedly discovered an ownerless grenade casing and did not report the discovery, fearing the wrath of the camp authorities. According to the investigation into the circumstances of Becker’s execution, referred to by the author of the book “GUPVI Archipelago,” it was this careless discovery that led to the accusation of the SS general of sabotaging construction work. A military tribunal sentenced him to death, and in February 1952 Becker was shot.

Karner gives general statistics of convicted prisoners of war: “... in total, 37,600 prisoners of war were convicted, of which about 10,700 were convicted in the first years of captivity, and about 26 thousand in 1949-1950.<...>...from 1942 to 1953, at the NKVD trials, 263 people were sentenced to death, the rest to imprisonment for up to 25 years.”

Among those sentenced to 25 years were the head of the Abwehr 3 counterintelligence unit, Lieutenant General Franz Bentivegni, who participated in the preparation of the attack on the Soviet Union; commander of the Group of Forces "Center", Field Marshal General Ferdinand Scherner and many others. And like many others, Bentivegna and Scherner were released to their homeland in 1955.

Return to Germany

The repatriation of captured Germans from the Allied states to Germany began almost immediately after the end of the war. In August 1945, the Directorate of Prisoners of War and Displaced Citizens under the Control Council was created. The members of the Directorate were the heads of the departments of prisoners of war and displaced persons in each zone of occupation of Germany.

In the USSR, the course of repatriation was regulated by decisions of the Government and orders of the NKVD. The first GKO resolution was issued back in June 1945, it dealt with the repatriation of 225 thousand “sick and weakened” German and Austrian prisoners of war. In fact, under this decree, even more prisoners were released from the camps - about 232 thousand, including 195,684 Germans. Two months later, on August 13, 1945, the NKVD issued an order to release more than 700 thousand people, 412 thousand people from this list were Germans.

Until 1947, the “sick and weakened” made up the majority of repatriates going to Germany: thus, the internal affairs bodies, fulfilling international agreements, at the same time got rid of the “manpower” that had become unsuitable for forced labor.

“I could barely stand on my feet. Survived a severe heart attack. Staggering, I entered the room where the medical examination commission was located.<...>From the conversation I realized that I was too young to be allowed to go home - I was 23 years old - and that I should stay in Russia and continue to work, recalled Rudolf Honold, who was in the camp in Stalino (now Ukrainian) until March 1948 Donetsk). - And then my doctor helped. She convinced the camp officers, proved to them that because of my bad heart and large weight loss - and I then weighed a little over 40 kg - I could not be useful to Russia.<...>After endless negotiations, I heard the cherished word that my doctor had hardly achieved for me: go home.”

According to the instructions in force in the camps, prisoners had to be removed from work 10 days before being sent to Germany, paid the money they earned, carried out sanitation, vaccinated and returned personal belongings. Soviet rubles were not allowed to be exported, so before leaving, prisoners bought products that could be exchanged en route, mainly sweets and tobacco: “For example, prisoner Wilhelm Lotze, repatriated in 1949, carried with him almost 6 kg of sweets (cookies and candies ), 2355 cigarettes and 600 grams of tobacco.”

Boxcars with bunks were used to transport prisoners. According to the instructions, two-axle cars were to be loaded with 40-45 people, and four-axle Pullman cars - 80-90 people. There were 60-65 cars in one train. Such trains were guarded by soldiers of the NKVD convoy service - 30-36 people per train.

“The next day, when we approached the transport on which we were supposed to travel further,” recalled former prisoner of war Hans Schwarzwalder, “we were amazed at what we saw. An "ancient" passenger train with wooden benches stood waiting for us. The locomotive was pushing clouds of black smoke into the air. He worked on brown coal. It was impossible to open the windows. Trains ran many hours late on single track tracks.”

At this stage, the condition of the already not the healthiest prisoners deteriorated significantly: this was facilitated not only by the long journey in cramped conditions, but also by the lack of food and even water. The NKVD archives preserved some examples of violations committed during the transportation of repatriates: in August 1948, prisoners of war on a train from a camp in Karaganda did not receive bread for two days; passengers on a train traveling from a camp in Georgia in June 1948 were given two buckets of water for 64 cars; on the train from camp No. 199 in the Novosibirsk region there was no catering unit at all to feed prisoners; the convoy that accompanied the train with prisoners from Volsk in April 1948 was fed by prisoners; repatriates traveling from the Tambov region in April 1948 were not fed for seven days.

As the trains progressed, prisoners of war could be subjected to additional filtering, identifying among them former members of the SS, SA, SD and Gestapo who were mistakenly sent for repatriation. It is known that in Brest from 1946 to 1950, 4,450 people were taken off the trains and returned to the camps.

In Germany, German prisoners, as a rule, arrived at the Ministry of Internal Affairs assembly camp No. 69 in Frankfurt an der Oder and spent another two or three days there. This was the first place where those who returned, even from behind barbed wire, could be seen by their compatriots. The spectacle was depressing: in 1947, 70% of prisoners arriving at the camp were sick and left Frankfurt an der Oder on hospital trains.

Those who could move independently returned to their place of residence - and the further procedure depended on whose occupation zone it was located in. This is how Hans Schwarzwalder described his transfer to the Americans: “A rosy-cheeked Red Army recruit stood with a bayonet attached to his rifle at a distance from his guard house and, before we ran 20 meters along a narrow bridge to the Americans on the other side, examined the repatriates. Finally you are free! Indescribable luck! Many threw themselves on the ground and kissed her! We are back in our homeland! [...] "Amis" (Americans) greeted us coldly, with emphatic politeness. We got scrambled eggs, cocoa and white bread. Again new checks, there was nothing here without a stamp and signature. Three hours later I reached my goal. In my hands I had 80 DM (Deutschmarks, German marks - MZ), a certificate of release and a ticket to Munich. Another telegram home: “It’s all over, I’ll arrive in two days. Big greetings from Hof.”

Those who turned out to be residents of East Germany had to undergo camp quarantine, and then, with a certificate of release, register at the police station. The repatriate was also required to undergo a medical examination, register with the employment service, and after that could receive food cards. All movements of former prisoners in East Germany until 1948 were recorded by the SVAG (Soviet Military Administration of Germany), and after that by the internal affairs bodies of the GDR.

In 1945, according to the GUPVI, 1,009,589 prisoners of war were repatriated from USSR camps, more than 600 thousand of them were Germans.

In 1946, more than 146 thousand German prisoners of war and about 21 thousand internees were repatriated.

In 1947, about 200 thousand Germans were repatriated, some of them to Poland, since they were citizens of this country.

In 1948, more than 311 thousand German prisoners of war and internees were repatriated.

In 1949, more than 120 thousand former prisoners of war and about 38 thousand interned Germans left the USSR.

On May 5, 1950, it was officially announced that the repatriation of German prisoners of war was completed. The TASS news agency stated that a total of 1,939,063 German prisoners of war had been repatriated since 1945. “There are 13,532 convicted German prisoners of war left in the USSR; 14 people were temporarily detained due to illness.”

Several thousand more people left the USSR in 1951-1953. In 1955, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Moscow. After the signing of the agreement with Germany, about 10 thousand more Germans were repatriated. The last batch of former prisoners was handed over to German authorities on January 16, 1956.

In 1941, the Germans took 4 million prisoners, of which 3 died in the first six months of captivity. This is one of the most heinous crimes of the German Nazis. The prisoners were kept for months in barbed wire pens, in the open air, without food, people ate grass and earthworms. Hunger, thirst, and unsanitary conditions, deliberately created by the Germans, were doing their job. This massacre was against the customs of war, against the economic needs of Germany itself. Pure ideology - the more subhumans die, the better.

Minsk. July 5, 1942 Drozdy prison camp. Consequences of the Minsk-Bialystok cauldron: 140 thousand people on 9 hectares in the open air

Minsk, August 1941. Himmler came to look at the prisoners of war. A very powerful photo. The look of the prisoner and the views of the SS men on the other side of the thorn...

June 1941. Area of ​​Rasseiniai (Lithuania). The crew of the KV-1 tank was captured. The tankman in the center looks like Budanov... This is the 3rd mechanized corps, they met the war on the border. In a 2-day oncoming tank battle on June 23-24, 1941 in Lithuania, the corps was defeated

Vinnitsa, July 28, 1941. Since the prisoners were hardly fed, the local population tried to help them. Ukrainian women with baskets and plates at the gates of the camp...

Right there. Apparently, the security still allowed the food to be passed on by the thorn.

August 1941 Concentration camp “Umanskaya Yama”. It is also Stalag (prefabricated camp) No. 349. It was set up in the quarry of a brick factory in the city of Uman (Ukraine). In the summer of 1941, prisoners from the Uman cauldron, 50,000 people, were kept here. In the open air, like in a paddock

Vasily Mishchenko, former prisoner of “Yama”: “Wounded and shell-shocked, I was captured. He was among the first to end up in the Uman pit. From above I clearly saw this pit still empty. No shelter, no food, no water. The sun is beating down mercilessly. In the western corner of the semi-basement quarry there was a puddle of brown-green water with fuel oil. We rushed to it, scooped up this slurry with caps, rusty cans, just with our palms and drank greedily. I also remember two horses tied to posts. Five minutes later there was nothing left of these horses.”

Vasily Mishchenko was with the rank of lieutenant when he was captured in the Uman cauldron. But not only soldiers and junior commanders fell into the cauldrons. And the generals too. In the photo: Generals Ponedelin and Kirillov, they commanded Soviet troops near Uman:

The Germans used this photo in propaganda leaflets. The Germans are smiling, but General Kirillov (on the left, in a cap with a torn star) has a very sad look... This photo session does not bode well

Again Ponedelin and Kirillov. Lunch in captivity

In 1941, both generals were sentenced to death in absentia as traitors. Until 1945, they were in camps in Germany, they refused to join Vlasov’s army, they were released by the Americans. Transferred to the USSR. Where they were shot. In 1956, both were rehabilitated.

It is clear that they were not traitors at all. Forced staged photos are not their fault. The only thing they can be accused of is professional incompetence. They allowed themselves to be surrounded in a cauldron. They are not alone here. Future marshals Konev and Eremenko destroyed two fronts in the Vyazemsky cauldron (October 1941, 700 thousand prisoners), Timoshenko and Bagramyan - the entire Southwestern Front in the Kharkov cauldron (May 1942, 300 thousand prisoners). Zhukov, of course, did not end up in cauldrons with entire fronts, but for example, while commanding the Western Front in the winter of 1941-42. I finally drove a couple of armies (33rd and 39th) into encirclement.

Vyazemsky cauldron, October 1941. While the generals were learning to fight, endless columns of prisoners walked along the roads

Vyazma, November 1941. The infamous Dulag-184 (transit camp) on Kronstadskaya Street. The mortality rate here reached 200-300 people per day. The dead were simply thrown into pits

About 15,000 people are buried in the dulag-184 ditches. There is no memorial to them. Moreover, on the site of the concentration camp in Soviet times, a meat processing plant was built. It still stands there today.

Relatives of dead prisoners regularly come here and made their own memorial on the fence of the plant

Stalag 10D (Witzendorf, Germany), autumn 1941. The corpses of dead Soviet prisoners are thrown from a cart

In the fall of 1941, the death of prisoners became widespread. Added to the famine was cold and an epidemic of typhus (it was spread by lice). Cases of cannibalism appeared.

November 1941, Stalag 305 in Novo-Ukrainka (Kirovograd region). These four (on the left) ate the corpse of this prisoner (on the right)

Well, plus everything - constant bullying from the camp guards. And not only Germans. According to the recollections of many prisoners, the real masters in the camp were the so-called. policemen. Those. former prisoners who went into service with the Germans. They beat prisoners for the slightest offense, took away things, and carried out executions. The worst punishment for a policeman was... demotion to ordinary prisoners. This meant certain death. There was no turning back for them - they could only continue to curry favor.

Deblin (Poland), a batch of prisoners arrived at Stalag 307. People are in terrible condition. On the right is a camp policeman in Budenovka (former prisoner), standing next to the body of a prisoner lying on the platform

Corporal punishment. Two policemen in Soviet uniform: one is holding a prisoner, the other is beating him with a whip or stick. The German in the background laughs. Another prisoner in the background is standing tied to a fence post (also a form of punishment in prison camps)

One of the main tasks of the camp police was to identify Jews and political workers. According to the order “On Commissars” of June 6, 1941, these two categories of prisoners were subject to destruction on the spot. Those who were not killed immediately upon capture were looked for in the camps. Why were regular “selections” organized to search for Jews and communists? It was either a general medical examination with pants down - the Germans walked around looking for circumcised ones, or the use of informers among the prisoners themselves.

Alexander Ioselevich, a captured military doctor, describes how selection took place in a camp in Jelgava (Latvia) in July 1941:

“We brought crackers and coffee to the camp. There is an SS man standing, next to a dog and next to him a prisoner of war. And when people go for crackers, he says: “This is a political instructor.” He is taken out and immediately shot nearby. The traitor is poured coffee and given two crackers. “And this is yude.” The Jew is taken out and shot, and he is again given two crackers. “And this one was an NKVDist.” They take him out and shoot him, and he gets two crackers again.”

Life in the camp in Jelgava was inexpensive: 2 crackers. However, as usual in Russia during wartime, people appeared from somewhere who could not be broken by any shooting, and could not be bought for crackers.

The exact number of Soviet prisoners of war during the Great Patriotic War is still unknown. Four to six million people. What did captured Soviet soldiers and officers have to go through in Nazi camps?

The numbers speak

The question of the number of Soviet prisoners of war during the Second World War is still debatable. In German historiography this figure reaches 6 million people, although the German command spoke of 5 million 270 thousand.
However, one should take into account the fact that, violating the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the German authorities included in the prisoners of war not only soldiers and officers of the Red Army, but also party employees, partisans, underground fighters, as well as the entire male population from 16 to 55 years old, retreating along with Soviet troops.

According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the losses of prisoners in the Second World War amounted to 4 million 559 thousand people, and the commission of the Ministry of Defense chaired by M. A. Gareev announced approximately 4 million.
The difficulty of counting is largely due to the fact that Soviet prisoners of war did not receive registration numbers until 1943.

It is precisely established that 1,836,562 people returned from German captivity. Their further fate is as follows: 1 million were sent for further military service, 600 thousand - to work in industry, more than 200 thousand - to NKVD camps, as having compromised themselves in captivity.

Early years

The largest number of Soviet prisoners of war occurred in the first two years of the war. In particular, after the unsuccessful Kyiv defensive operation in September 1941, about 665 thousand soldiers and officers of the Red Army were captured by Germans, and after the failure of the Kharkov operation in May 1942, more than 240 thousand Red Army soldiers fell into German hands.

First of all, the German authorities carried out filtration: commissars, communists and Jews were immediately liquidated, and the rest were transferred to special camps that were hastily created. Most of them were on the territory of Ukraine - about 180. Only in the notorious Bohuniya camp (Zhytomyr region) there were up to 100 thousand Soviet soldiers.

The prisoners had to make grueling forced marches - 50-60 km a day. The journey often lasted for a whole week. There was no provision for food on the march, so the soldiers were content with pasture: everything was eaten - ears of wheat, berries, acorns, mushrooms, foliage, bark and even grass.
The instructions ordered the guards to destroy all those who were exhausted. During the movement of a 5,000-strong column of prisoners of war in the Lugansk region, along a 45-kilometer stretch of route, the guards killed 150 people with a “shot of mercy.”

As Ukrainian historian Grigory Golysh notes, about 1.8 million Soviet prisoners of war died on the territory of Ukraine, which is approximately 45% of the total number of victims among prisoners of war of the USSR.

Soviet prisoners of war were subject to much harsher conditions than soldiers from other countries. Germany called the formal basis for this that the Soviet Union did not sign the Hague Convention of 1907 and did not accede to the Geneva Convention of 1929.

In reality, the German authorities were implementing a directive from the High Command, according to which communists and commissars were not recognized as soldiers, and no international legal protection was extended to them. Since the beginning of the war, this applied to all prisoners of war of the Red Army.

Discrimination against Soviet prisoners of war was evident in everything. For example, unlike other prisoners, they often did not receive winter clothing and were assigned exclusively to the most difficult jobs. Also, the activities of the International Red Cross did not extend to Soviet prisoners.

In camps intended exclusively for prisoners of war, conditions were even more horrific. Only a small part of the prisoners were housed in relatively suitable premises, while the majority, due to incredible crowding, could not only lie down, but also stand. And some were completely deprived of a roof over their heads.

In the camp for Soviet prisoners of war, the Uman Pit, prisoners were kept in the open air, where there was no way to hide from the heat, wind or rain. The “Uman pit” essentially turned into a huge mass grave. “The dead lay for a long time next to the living. Nobody paid attention to the corpses anymore, there were so many of them,” the surviving prisoners recalled.

Diet

One of the orders of the director of the German concern IG Farbenindastry noted that “increasing the productivity of prisoners of war can be achieved by reducing the rate of food distribution.” This directly applied to Soviet prisoners.

However, in order to maintain the working capacity of prisoners of war, it was necessary to charge an additional food allowance. For a week it looked like this: 50 gr. cod, 100 gr. artificial honey and up to 3.5 kg. potatoes. However, additional nutrition could only be received for 6 weeks.

The usual diet of prisoners of war can be seen in the example of Stalag No. 2 in Hammerstein. Prisoners received 200 grams per day. bread, ersatz coffee and vegetable soup. The nutritional value of the diet did not exceed 1000 calories. In the zone of Army Group Center, the daily bread quota for prisoners of war was even less - 100 grams.

For comparison, let’s name the food supply standards for German prisoners of war in the USSR. They received 600 grams per day. bread, 500 gr. potatoes, 93 gr. meat and 80 gr. croup
What they fed Soviet prisoners of war bore little resemblance to food. Ersatz bread, which in Germany was called “Russian”, had the following composition: 50% rye bran, 20% beets, 20% cellulose, 10% straw. However, the “hot lunch” looked even less edible: in fact, it was a scoop of stinking liquid from poorly washed horse offal, and this “food” was prepared in cauldrons in which asphalt was previously boiled.
Idle prisoners of war were deprived of such food, and therefore their chances of survival were reduced to zero.

Job

By the end of 1941, a colossal need for labor was revealed in Germany, mainly in the military industry, and they decided to fill the deficit primarily with Soviet prisoners of war. This situation saved many Soviet soldiers and officers from the mass extermination planned by the Nazi authorities.

According to the German historian G. Mommsen, “with appropriate nutrition” the productivity of Soviet prisoners of war was 80%, and in other cases 100% of the labor productivity of German workers. In the mining and metallurgical industry this figure was lower – 70%.

Mommsen noted that Soviet prisoners constituted “an important and profitable labor force,” even cheaper than concentration camp prisoners. The income to the state treasury received as a result of the labor of Soviet workers amounted to hundreds of millions of marks. According to another German historian, W. Herbert, a total of 631,559 USSR prisoners of war were employed in work in Germany.
Soviet prisoners of war often had to learn a new specialty: they became electricians, mechanics, mechanics, turners, and tractor drivers. Remuneration was piecework and included a bonus system. But, isolated from workers in other countries, Soviet prisoners of war worked 12 hours a day.

Resistance

Unlike other prisoners of concentration camps, for example, Jews, there was no unified and massive Resistance movement among Soviet prisoners of war. Researchers cite many reasons to explain this phenomenon: the effective work of the security service and the constant hunger experienced by the Soviet military. It is also noted as an important factor that Stalin called all Soviet prisoners “traitors,” and Nazi propaganda did not fail to take advantage of this.

However, since 1943, pockets of protest among Soviet prisoners of war began to arise more and more often. Thus, in Stalag Zeithain, the central figure around whom the Resistance was organized was the Soviet writer Stepan Zlobin. With his comrades, he began publishing the newspaper “The Truth about Prisoners.” Gradually, Zlobin’s group grew to 21 people.
A larger-scale Resistance among Soviet prisoners of war, according to historians, began in 1944, when confidence arose in the inevitable death of the Nazi regime. But even then, not everyone wanted to risk their lives, hoping for a quick release.

Mortality

According to German historians, until February 1942, up to 6,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were killed daily in prisoner of war camps. This was often done by gassing entire barracks. In Poland alone, according to local authorities, 883,485 Soviet prisoners of war are buried.

It has now been established that the Soviet military were the first on whom toxic substances were tested in concentration camps. Later, this method was widely used to exterminate Jews.
Many Soviet prisoners of war died from disease. In October 1941, a typhus epidemic broke out in one of the branches of the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex, where Soviet soldiers were kept, killing about 6,500 people over the winter. However, without waiting for a fatal outcome, the camp authorities exterminated many of them with gas right in the barracks.
The mortality rate among wounded prisoners was high. Medical care was provided to Soviet prisoners extremely rarely. No one cared about them: they were killed both during the marches and in the camps. The wounded's diet rarely exceeded 1,000 calories per day, let alone the quality of the food. They were doomed to death.

Return

Those few soldiers who survived the horrors of German captivity faced a difficult test in their homeland. They had to prove that they were not traitors.

By special directive of Stalin at the end of 1941, special filtration and testing camps were created in which former prisoners of war were placed.
More than 100 such camps were created in the deployment zone of six fronts - four Ukrainian and two Belarusian. By July 1944, almost 400 thousand prisoners of war had undergone “special checks”. The vast majority of them were transferred to the district military registration and enlistment offices, about 20 thousand became personnel for the defense industry, 12 thousand joined the assault battalions, and more than 11 thousand were arrested and convicted.

Warning: photographic materials attached to article +18. BUT I STRONGLY ASK YOU TO SEE THESE PHOTOS
The article was written in 2011 for the website The Russian Battlefield. All about the Great Patriotic War
the remaining 6 parts of the article http://www.battlefield.ru/article.html

During the times of the Soviet Union, the topic of Soviet prisoners of war was under an unspoken ban. At most, it was admitted that a certain number of Soviet soldiers were captured. But there were practically no specific figures; only the most vague and incomprehensible general figures were given. And only almost half a century after the end of the Great Patriotic War we started talking about the scale of the tragedy of Soviet prisoners of war. It was difficult to explain how the victorious Red Army under the leadership of the CPSU and the brilliant leader of all time during 1941-1945 managed to lose about 5 million military personnel only as prisoners. And after all, two-thirds of these people died in German captivity; only a little more than 1.8 million former prisoners of war returned to the USSR. Under the Stalinist regime, these people were “pariahs” of the Great War. They were not stigmatized, but any questionnaire contained a question about whether the person being surveyed was in captivity. Captivity is a tarnished reputation; in the USSR it was easier for a coward to arrange his life than for a former warrior who honestly paid his debt to his country. Some (though not many) who returned from German captivity spent time again in the camps of their “native” Gulag only because they could not prove their innocence. Under Khrushchev it became a little easier for them, but the disgusting phrase “was in captivity” in all kinds of questionnaires ruined more than one thousand destinies. Finally, during the Brezhnev era, prisoners were simply bashfully kept silent. The fact of being in German captivity in the biography of a Soviet citizen became an indelible shame for him, attracting suspicions of betrayal and espionage. This explains the paucity of Russian-language sources on the issue of Soviet prisoners of war.
Soviet prisoners of war undergo sanitary treatment

Column of Soviet prisoners of war. Autumn 1941.

Himmler inspects a camp for Soviet prisoners of war near Minsk. 1941

In the West, any attempt to talk about German war crimes on the Eastern Front was regarded as a propaganda technique. The lost war against the USSR smoothly flowed into its “cold” stage against the eastern “evil empire”. And if the leadership of the Federal Republic of Germany officially recognized the genocide of the Jewish people, and even “repented” for it, then nothing similar happened regarding the mass extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians in the occupied territories. Even in modern Germany, there is a strong tendency to blame everything on the head of the “possessed” Hitler, the Nazi elite and the SS apparatus, as well as in every possible way to whitewash the “glorious and heroic” Wehrmacht, “ordinary soldiers who honestly fulfilled their duty” (I wonder which one?). In the memoirs of German soldiers, very often, as soon as the question comes about crimes, the author immediately declares that the ordinary soldiers were all cool guys, and all the abominations were committed by the “beasts” from the SS and Sonderkommandos. Although almost all former Soviet soldiers say that the vile attitude towards them began from the very first seconds of captivity, when they were not yet in the hands of the “Nazis” from the SS, but in the noble and friendly embrace of “wonderful guys” from ordinary combat units, “ who had nothing to do with the SS."
Distribution of food in one of the transit camps.


Column of Soviet prisoners. Summer 1941, Kharkov region.


Prisoners of war at work. Winter 1941/42

Only from the mid-70s of the 20th century did attitudes towards the conduct of military operations on the territory of the USSR begin to slowly change; in particular, German researchers began studying the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in the Reich. The work of Heidelberg University professor Christian Streit played a big role here. "They are not our comrades. The Wehrmacht and Soviet prisoners of war in 1941-1945.", which refuted many Western myths regarding the conduct of military operations in the East. Streit worked on his book for 16 years, and it is currently the most complete study about the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Nazi Germany.

Ideological guidelines for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war came from the very top of the Nazi leadership. Long before the start of the campaign in the East, Hitler, at a meeting on March 30, 1941, stated:

"We must abandon the concept of soldier's comradeship. The communist has never been and will never be a comrade. We are talking about a struggle for destruction. If we do not look at it this way, then, although we defeat the enemy, in 30 years the communist danger will arise again... "(Halder F. "War Diary". T.2. M., 1969. P.430).

“Political commissars are the basis of Bolshevism in the Red Army, bearers of an ideology hostile to National Socialism, and cannot be recognized as soldiers. Therefore, after being captured, they must be shot.”

Hitler stated about his attitude towards civilians:

“We are obliged to exterminate the population - this is part of our mission to protect the German nation. I have the right to destroy millions of people of the lower race who multiply like worms.”

Soviet prisoners of war from the Vyazemsky cauldron. Autumn 1941


For sanitary treatment before shipping to Germany.

Prisoners of war in front of the bridge over the San River. June 23, 1941. According to statistics, NONE of these people will survive until the spring of 1942

The ideology of National Socialism, coupled with racial theories, led to inhumane treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. For example, of the 1,547,000 French prisoners of war, only about 40,000 died in German captivity (2.6%), the mortality rate of Soviet prisoners of war according to the most conservative estimates amounted to 55%. For the fall of 1941, the “normal” mortality rate of captured Soviet military personnel was 0.3% per day, that is, about 10% per month! In October-November 1941, the mortality rate of our compatriots in German captivity reached 2% per day, and in some camps up to 4.3% per day. The mortality rate of Soviet military personnel captured during the same period in the camps of the General Government (Poland) was 4000-4600 people per day. By April 15, 1942, of the 361,612 prisoners transferred to Poland in the fall of 1941, only 44,235 people remained alive. 7,559 prisoners escaped, 292,560 died, and another 17,256 were “transferred to the SD” (i.e., shot). Thus, the mortality rate of Soviet prisoners of war in just 6-7 months reached 85.7%!

Finished off Soviet prisoners from a marching column on the streets of Kyiv. 1941

Unfortunately, the size of the article does not allow for any sufficient coverage of this issue. My goal is to familiarize the reader with the numbers. Believe me: THEY ARE TERRIFYING! But we must know about this, we must remember: millions of our compatriots were deliberately and mercilessly destroyed. Finished off, wounded on the battlefield, shot at the stages, starved to death, died from disease and overwork, they were purposefully destroyed by the fathers and grandfathers of those who live in Germany today. Question: what can such “parents” teach their children?

Soviet prisoners of war shot by the Germans during the retreat.


Unknown Soviet prisoner of war 1941.

German documents on attitude towards Soviet prisoners of war

Let's start with the background that is not directly related to the Great Patriotic War: during the 40 months of the First World War, the Russian Imperial Army lost 3,638,271 people captured and missing in action. Of these, 1,434,477 people were held in German captivity. The mortality rate among Russian prisoners was 5.4%, and was not much higher than the natural mortality rate in Russia at that time. Moreover, the mortality rate among prisoners of other armies in German captivity was 3.5%, which was also a low figure. In those same years, there were 1,961,333 enemy prisoners of war in Russia, the mortality rate among them was 4.6%, which practically corresponded to the natural mortality rate on Russian territory.

Everything changed after 23 years. For example, the rules for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war prescribed:

"... the Bolshevik soldier has lost all right to claim to be treated as an honest soldier in accordance with the Geneva Agreement. It is therefore entirely consistent with the point of view and the dignity of the German armed forces that every German soldier should draw a sharp line between himself and Soviet prisoners of war. The treatment must be cold, although correct. Any sympathy, much less support, must be strictly avoided for the German soldier assigned to guard Soviet prisoners of war, must be noticeable to others at all times.”

Soviet prisoners of war were practically not fed. Take a closer look at this scene.

A mass grave of Soviet prisoners of war discovered by investigators of the Extraordinary State Commission of the USSR


Driver

In Western historiography, until the mid-70s of the 20th century, there was a quite widespread version that Hitler’s “criminal” orders were imposed on the opposition-minded Wehrmacht command and were almost not carried out “on the ground.” This "fairy tale" was born during the Nuremberg trials (action of the defense). However, an analysis of the situation shows that, for example, the Order on Commissars was implemented in the troops very consistently. The “selection” of the SS Einsatzkommandos included not only all Jewish military personnel and political workers of the Red Army, but in general everyone who could turn out to be a “potential enemy.” The military leadership of the Wehrmacht almost unanimously supported the Fuhrer. Hitler, in his unprecedentedly frank speech on March 30, 1941, “pressed” not on the racial reasons for the “war of annihilation,” but rather on the fight against an alien ideology, which was close in spirit to the military elite of the Wehrmacht. Halder's notes in his diary clearly indicate general support for Hitler's demands; in particular, Halder wrote that “the war in the East is significantly different from the war in the West. In the East, cruelty is justified by the interests of the future!” Immediately after Hitler's keynote speech, the headquarters of the OKH (German: OKH - Oberkommando des Heeres, High Command of the Ground Forces) and OKW (German: OKW - Oberkommando der Wermacht, High Command of the Armed Forces) began to formalize the Fuhrer's program into specific documents. The most odious and famous of them: "Directive on the establishment of an occupation regime on the territory of the Soviet Union subject to seizure"- 03/13/1941, "On military jurisdiction in the Barbarossa region and on the special powers of the troops"-05/13/1941, directives "On the behavior of troops in Russia"- 05/19/1941 and "On the treatment of political commissars", more often referred to as the “order on commissars” - 6/6/1941, order of the Wehrmacht High Command on the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war - 09/8/1941. These orders and directives were issued at different times, but their drafts were ready almost in the first week of April 1941 (except for the first and last document).

Unbroken

In almost all transit camps, our prisoners of war were kept in the open air in conditions of monstrous overcrowding


German soldiers finish off a wounded Soviet man

It cannot be said that there was no opposition to the opinion of Hitler and the high command of the German armed forces on the conduct of the war in the East. For example, on April 8, 1941, Ulrich von Hassel, together with the chief of staff of Admiral Canaris, Colonel Oster, visited Colonel General Ludwig von Beck (who was a consistent opponent of Hitler). Hassel wrote: “It is hair-raising to see what is documented in the orders (!) signed by Halder and given to the troops regarding the actions in Russia and the systematic application of military justice to the civilian population in this caricature that mocks the law. Obeying orders Hitler, Brauchitsch sacrifices the honor of the German army." That's it, no more and no less. But opposition to the decisions of the National Socialist leadership and the Wehrmacht command was passive and, until the very last moment, very sluggish.

I will definitely name the institutions and personally the “heroes” on whose orders genocide was unleashed against the civilian population of the USSR and under whose “sensitive” supervision more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war were destroyed. This is the leader of the German people A. Hitler, Reichsführer SS Himmler, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, Chief of the OKW Field Marshal General Keitel, Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, Field Marshal General f. Brauchitsch, Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces, Colonel General Halder, headquarters of the operational leadership of the Wehrmacht and its chief artillery general Yodel, head of the legal department of the Wehrmacht Leman, department "L" of the OKW and personally its chief, Major General Warlimont, group 4/Qu (head of department f. Tippelskirch), general for special assignments under the Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, lieutenant general Muller, Chief of the Army Legal Division Latman, Quartermaster General Major General Wagner, head of the military administrative department of the ground forces f. Altenstadt. And also ALL commanders of army groups, armies, tank groups, corps and even individual divisions of the German armed forces fall into this category (in particular, the famous order of the commander of the 6th Field Army, F. Reichenau, duplicated almost unchanged across all Wehrmacht formations) falls into this category.

Reasons for the mass captivity of Soviet military personnel

The unpreparedness of the USSR for a modern highly maneuverable war (for various reasons), the tragic start of hostilities led to the fact that by mid-July 1941, out of 170 Soviet divisions located in border military districts at the beginning of the war, 28 were surrounded and did not emerge from it, 70 formations class divisions were virtually destroyed and became unfit for combat. Huge masses of Soviet troops often rolled back randomly, and German motorized formations, moving at a speed of up to 50 km per day, cut off their escape routes; the Soviet formations, units and subunits that did not have time to retreat were surrounded. Large and small “cauldrons” were formed, in which most of the military personnel were captured.

Another reason for the mass captivity of Soviet soldiers, especially in the initial period of the war, was their moral and psychological state. The existence of both defeatist sentiments among some of the Red Army soldiers and general anti-Soviet sentiments in certain strata of Soviet society (for example, among the intelligentsia) is no longer a secret.

It must be admitted that the defeatist sentiments that existed in the Red Army caused a number of Red Army soldiers and commanders to go over to the enemy’s side from the very first days of the war. Rarely, it happened that entire military units crossed the front line in an organized manner with their weapons and led by their commanders. The first precisely dated such incident took place on July 22, 1941, when two battalions went over to the enemy side 436th Infantry Regiment of the 155th Infantry Division, under the command of Major Kononov. It cannot be denied that this phenomenon persisted even at the final stage of the Great Patriotic War. Thus, in January 1945, the Germans recorded 988 Soviet defectors, in February - 422, in March - 565. It is difficult to understand what these people were hoping for, most likely just private circumstances that forced them to seek salvation of their own lives at the cost of betrayal.

Be that as it may, in 1941, prisoners accounted for 52.64% of the total losses of the Northwestern Front, 61.52% of the losses of the Western Front, 64.49% of the losses of the Southwestern Front and 60.30% of the losses of the Southern Front.

Total number of Soviet prisoners of war.
In 1941, according to German data, about 2,561,000 Soviet troops were captured in large “cauldrons”. The reports of the German command reported that 300,000 people were captured in the cauldrons near Bialystok, Grodno and Minsk, near Uman - 103,000, near Vitebsk, Mogilev, Orsha and Gomel - 450,000, near Smolensk - 180,000, in the Kyiv region - 665,000, near Chernigov - 100,000, in the Mariupol area - 100,000, near Bryansk and Vyazma 663,000 people. In 1942, in two more large “cauldrons” near Kerch (May 1942) - 150,000, near Kharkov (at the same time) - 240,000 people. Here we must immediately make a reservation that the German data seems to be overestimated because the stated number of prisoners often exceeds the number of armies and fronts that took part in a particular operation. The most striking example of this is the Kyiv cauldron. The Germans announced the capture of 665,000 people east of the Ukrainian capital, although the total strength of the Southwestern Front at the start of the Kyiv defensive operation did not exceed 627,000 people. Moreover, about 150,000 Red Army soldiers remained outside the encirclement, and about 30,000 more managed to escape from the “cauldron.”

K. Streit, the most authoritative expert on Soviet prisoners of war in the Second World War, claims that in 1941 the Wehrmacht captured 2,465,000 soldiers and commanders of the Red Army, including: Army Group North - 84,000, Army Group "Center" - 1,413,000 and Army Group "South" - 968,000 people. And this is only in large “boilers”. In total, according to Streit, in 1941, the German armed forces captured 3.4 million Soviet troops. This represents approximately 65% ​​of the total number of Soviet prisoners of war captured between June 22, 1941 and May 9, 1945.

In any case, the number of Soviet prisoners of war captured by the armed forces of the Reich before the beginning of 1942 cannot be accurately calculated. The fact is that in 1941, submitting reports to higher Wehrmacht headquarters about the number of captured Soviet soldiers was not mandatory. An order on this issue was given by the main command of the ground forces only in January 1942. But there is no doubt that the number of Red Army soldiers captured in 1941 exceeded 2.5 million people.

There is also still no exact data on the total number of Soviet prisoners of war captured by the German armed forces from June 1941 to April 1945. A. Dallin, using German data, gives a figure of 5.7 million people, a team of authors led by Colonel General G.F. Krivosheeva, in the edition of her monograph from 2010, reports about 5.059 million people (of which about 500 thousand were called up for mobilization, but captured by the enemy on the way to military units), K. Streit estimates the number of prisoners from 5.2 to 5 .7 million

Here it must be taken into account that the Germans could classify as prisoners of war such categories of Soviet citizens as: captured partisans, underground fighters, personnel of incomplete militia formations, local air defense, fighter battalions and police, as well as railway workers and paramilitary forces of civil departments. Plus, a number of civilians who were taken for forced labor in the Reich or occupied countries, as well as taken hostage, also came here. That is, the Germans tried to “isolate” as much of the USSR’s male population of military age as possible, without really hiding it. For example, in the Minsk prisoner of war camp there were about 100,000 actually captured Red Army soldiers and about 40,000 civilians, and this is practically the entire male population of Minsk. The Germans followed this practice in the future. Here is an excerpt from the order of the command of the 2nd Tank Army dated May 11, 1943:

“When occupying individual settlements, it is necessary to immediately and suddenly capture existing men aged 15 to 65 years, if they can be considered capable of bearing arms, and send them under guard by rail to transit camp 142 in Bryansk. Captured, capable of bearing arms , to announce that from now on they will be considered prisoners of war, and that at the slightest attempt to escape they will be shot.”

Taking this into account, the number of Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans in 1941-1945. ranges from 5.05 to 5.2 million people, including about 0.5 million people who were not formally military personnel.

Prisoners from the Vyazma cauldron.


Execution of Soviet prisoners of war who tried to escape

ESCAPE


It is also necessary to mention the fact that a number of Soviet prisoners of war were released from captivity by the Germans. Thus, by July 1941, a large number of prisoners of war had accumulated in assembly points and transit camps in the OKH area of ​​responsibility, for whose maintenance there were no funds at all. In this regard, the German command took an unprecedented step - by order of the Quartermaster General dated July 25, 1941 No. 11/4590, Soviet prisoners of war of a number of nationalities (ethnic Germans, Balts, Ukrainians, and then Belarusians) were released. However, by order of OKB dated November 13, 1941 No. 3900, this practice was stopped. A total of 318,770 people were released during this period, of which 292,702 people were released in the OKH zone and 26,068 people in the OKV zone. Among them are 277,761 Ukrainians. Subsequently, only persons who joined volunteer security and other formations, as well as the police, were released. From January 1942 to May 1, 1944, the Germans released 823,230 Soviet prisoners of war, of which 535,523 people were in the OKH zone and 287,707 people were in the OKV zone. I want to emphasize that we do not have the moral right to condemn these people, because in the overwhelming majority of cases it was for a Soviet prisoner of war the only way to survive. Another thing is that most of the Soviet prisoners of war deliberately refused any cooperation with the enemy, which in those conditions was actually tantamount to suicide.



Finishing off an exhausted prisoner


Soviet wounded - the first minutes of captivity. Most likely they will be finished off.

On September 30, 1941, an order was given to the commandants of the camps in the east to keep files on prisoners of war. But this had to be done after the end of the campaign on the Eastern Front. It was especially emphasized that the central information department should be provided only with information on those prisoners who, “after selection” by the Einsatzkommandos (Sonderkommandos), “finally remain in the camps or in the corresponding jobs.” It directly follows from this that the documents of the central reference department do not contain data on previously destroyed prisoners of war during redeployment and filtration. Apparently, this is why there are almost complete absence of complete documents on Soviet prisoners of war in the Reichskommissariats “Ostland” (Baltic states) and “Ukraine”, where a significant number of prisoners were kept in the fall of 1941.
Mass execution of Soviet prisoners of war in the Kharkov region. 1942


Crimea 1942. A ditch with the bodies of prisoners shot by the Germans.

Paired photo to this one. Soviet prisoners of war are digging their own grave.

The reporting of the OKW Prisoner of War Department to the International Committee of the Red Cross covered only the OKW subordinate camp system. The committee began to receive information about Soviet prisoners of war only in February 1942, when a decision was made to use their labor in the German military industry.

System of camps for holding Soviet prisoners of war.

All matters related to the detention of foreign prisoners of war in the Reich were handled by the Wehrmacht prisoners of war department as part of the general administration of the armed forces, led by General Hermann Reinecke. The department was headed by Colonel Breuer (1939-1941), General Grevenitz (1942-1944), General Westhoff (1944), and SS-Obergruppenführer Berger (1944-1945). In each military district (and later in the occupied territories), transferred to civilian control, there was a “commander of prisoners of war” (commandant for prisoners of war affairs of the corresponding district).

The Germans created a very wide network of camps for holding prisoners of war and “ostarbeiters” (citizens of the USSR forcibly driven into slavery). Prisoner of war camps were divided into five categories:
1. Collection points (camps),
2. Transit camps (Dulag, Dulag),
3. Permanent camps (Stalag, Stalag) and their variety for the command staff of the Red Army (Oflag),
4. Main work camps,
5. Small work camps.
Camp near Petrozavodsk


Our prisoners were transported under such conditions in the winter of 1941/42. Mortality during the transfer stages reached 50%

HUNGER

The assembly points were located in close proximity to the front line, where the final disarmament of prisoners took place, and primary accounting documents were compiled. Transit camps were located near major railway junctions. After “sorting” (precisely in quotes), the prisoners were usually sent to camps with a permanent location. The Stalags varied in number and simultaneously housed a large number of prisoners of war. For example, in “Stalag -126” (Smolensk) in April 1942 there were 20,000 people, in “Stalag - 350” (outskirts of Riga) at the end of 1941 - 40,000 people. Each "stalag" was the base for a network of main work camps subordinate to it. The main work camps had the name of the corresponding Stalag with the addition of a letter; they contained several thousand people. Small work camps were subordinate to the main work camps or directly to the stalags. They were most often named after the name of the locality in which they were located and after the name of the main work camp; they housed from several dozen to several hundred prisoners of war.

In total, this German-style system included about 22,000 large and small camps. They simultaneously held more than 2 million Soviet prisoners of war. The camps were located both on the territory of the Reich and on the territory of the occupied countries.

In the front line and in the army rear, the prisoners were managed by the corresponding OKH services. On the territory of the OKH, only transit camps were usually located, and the stalags were already in the OKW department - that is, within the boundaries of the military districts on the territory of the Reich, the General Government and the Reich Commissariats. As the German army advanced, the dulags turned into permanent camps (oflags and stalags).

In the OKH, prisoners were dealt with by the service of the Army Quartermaster General. Several local commandant's offices were subordinate to her, each of which had several dulags. The camps in the OKW system were subordinate to the prisoner of war department of the corresponding military district.
Soviet prisoner of war tortured by the Finns

This senior lieutenant had a star cut out on his forehead before his death.


Sources:
Funds of the Federal Archive of Germany - Military Archive. Freiburg. (Bundesarchivs/Militararchiv (BA/MA)
OKW:
Documents from the Wehrmacht propaganda department RW 4/v. 253;257;298.
Particularly important cases according to the Barbarossa plan of the L IV department of the Wehrmacht operational leadership headquarters RW 4/v. 575; 577; 578.
Documents of GA "North" (OKW/Nord) OKW/32.
Documents from the Wehrmacht Information Bureau RW 6/v. 220;222.
Documents of the Prisoners of War Affairs Department (OKW/AWA/Kgf.) RW 5/v. 242, RW 6/v. 12; 270,271,272,273,274; 276,277,278,279;450,451,452,453. Documents of the Department of Military Economics and Armaments (OKW/WiRuArnt) Wi/IF 5/530;5.624;5.1189;5.1213;5.1767;2717;5.3 064; 5.3190;5.3434;5.3560;5.3561;5.3562.
OKH:
Documents of the Chief of Armaments of the Ground Forces and the Commander of the Reserve Army (OKH/ChHRu u. BdE) H1/441. Documents of the Department of Foreign Armies "East" of the General Staff of the Ground Forces (OKH/GenStdH/Abt. Fremde Heere Ost) P3/304;512;728;729.
Documents of the head of the archive of the ground forces N/40/54.

A. Dallin "German rule in Russia 1941-1945. Analysis of occupation policy." M. From the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1957.
"SS in action." Documents about crimes. M. IIL 1960
S. Datner “Crimes of the Nazi Wehrmacht against prisoners of war in World War II” M. IIL 1963
"Criminal goals - criminal means." Documents on the occupation policy of Nazi Germany on the territory of the USSR. M. "Politizdat" 1968
"Top secret. For command only." Documents and materials. M. "Science" 1967
N. Alekseev “Responsibility of Nazi criminals” M. “International Relations” 1968
N. Muller "The Wehrmacht and the Occupation, 1941-1944. On the role of the Wehrmacht and its governing bodies in the implementation of the occupation regime on Soviet territory" M. Military Publishing House 1974
K. Streit "Do not consider them soldiers. The Wehrmacht and Soviet prisoners of war 1941-1945." M. "Progress" 1979
V. Galitsky. "The problem of prisoners of war and the attitude of the Soviet state towards it." "State and Law" No. 4, 1990
M. Semiryaga "The Prison Empire of Nazism and Its Collapse" M. "Legal Literature" 1991
V. Gurkin "On human losses on the Soviet-German front in 1941-1945." NiNI No. 3 1992
"The Nuremberg Trials. Crimes against humanity." Collection of materials in 8 volumes. M. "Legal literature" 1991-1997.
M. Erin "Soviet prisoners of war in Germany during the Second World War" "Questions of History" No. 11-12, 1995
K. Streit "Soviet prisoners of war in Germany/Russia and Germany during the years of war and peace (1941-1995)." M. "Gaia" 1995
P. Polyan "Victims of two dictatorships. Life, work, humiliation and death of Soviet prisoners of war and ostarbeiters in a foreign land and at home." M. "ROSSPEN" 2002
M. Erin "Soviet prisoners of war in Nazi Germany 1941-1945. Research problems." Yaroslavl. YarSU 2005
"War of Extermination in the East. Crimes of the Wehrmacht in the USSR. 1941-1944. Reports" edited by G. Gortsik and K. Stang. M. "Airo-XX" 2005
V. Vette "The Image of the Enemy: Racist Elements in German Propaganda against the Soviet Union." M. "Yauza", EKSMO 2005
K. Streit "They are not our comrades. The Wehrmacht and Soviet prisoners of war in 1941-1945." M. "Russian Panorama" 2009
"The Great Patriotic War without the classification of secrecy. The book of losses." A team of authors led by G.F. Krivosheeva M. Evening 2010