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Only a few thousand Soviet [=POWs=] were liberated come the end of the war, though many hundreds of thousands were taken. Although German treatment of Russians in captivity was diabolical, the Red Army\'s attitude to repatriated [=POWs=], who it viewed as traitors and cowards, was almost as bad. As the Red Army moved West and liberated [=POW=] camps, it reconscripted ex-prisoners back into the Red Army, often into penal regiments for the crime of having surrendered. Penal regiments got the hard, dangerous, dirty jobs and the death rate for men condemned to them was far heavier. Also, Stalin had no intention of letting men return to Russia who could tell the true story of the military incompetence of 1941 and 1942 that had abandoned so many of them to capture and slavery. (Prisoners repatriated by Finland at the end of the Winter War in 1940 were liquidated for this reason). This policy, of immediately reconscripting men brutalised by years of German imprisonment, arming them, and sending them straight into a battle that more and more was being fought on German soil, was not good for German civilians unfortunate enough to be in the way of angry men with a desire for revenge. Contrary to public belief, many front-line regular Red Army units did not rape and loot their way into Germany and behaved decently. It was men following up in rear echelons - and newly released and re-armed [=POWs=] - who ran amok in this infamous fashion.
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\\\"Only a few thousand Soviet [=POWs=] were liberated come the end of the war, though many hundreds of thousands were taken. Although German treatment of Russians in captivity was diabolical, the Red Army\\\'s attitude to repatriated [=POWs=], who it viewed as traitors and cowards, was almost as bad. As the Red Army moved West and liberated [=POW=] camps, it reconscripted ex-prisoners back into the Red Army, often into penal regiments for the crime of having surrendered. Penal regiments got the hard, dangerous, dirty jobs and the death rate for men condemned to them was far heavier. Also, Stalin had no intention of letting men return to Russia who could tell the true story of the military incompetence of 1941 and 1942 that had abandoned so many of them to capture and slavery. (Prisoners repatriated by Finland at the end of the Winter War in 1940 were liquidated for this reason). This policy, of immediately reconscripting men brutalised by years of German imprisonment, arming them, and sending them straight into a battle that more and more was being fought on German soil, was not good for German civilians unfortunate enough to be in the way of angry men with a desire for revenge. Contrary to public belief, many front-line regular Red Army units did not rape and loot their way into Germany and behaved decently. It was men following up in rear echelons - and newly released and re-armed [=POWs=] - who ran amok in this infamous fashion.
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The figures of [=POWs=] repatriated to Germany and her allies after the war are also very small relative to the (small) number taken. Germans who survived up to ten years in Soviet captivity have told their stories of neglect and slavery in the Gulag. One statistic stands out: out of 260,000 [=POWs=] taken at Stalingrad alone, only 10,000 lived to see Germany again at the end of the war; and the last of the prisoners from Russia did not return until 1955.
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\\\"The figures of [=POWs=] repatriated to Germany and her allies after the war are also very small relative to the (small) number taken. Germans who survived up to ten years in Soviet captivity have told their stories of neglect and slavery in the Gulag. One statistic stands out: out of 260,000 [=POWs=] taken at Stalingrad alone, only 10,000 lived to see Germany again at the end of the war; and the last of the prisoners from Russia did not return until 1955.\\\"
