Jewish POWs as Victims of the Holocaust

27 January marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops in 1945. This date has become a symbol of remembrance for the millions of victims of the Nazi regime, among whom the tragic fate of Jewish soldiers and officers taken prisoner occupies a special place.

Of the 65,000 Jewish soldiers of the Polish Army captured by the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, 25,000 had died by mid-1940. They were deliberately separated from other prisoners of war, subjected to torture, and starved.

No less horrific was the fate of Jews who served in the Red Army. Documents from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, available on our website, reveal a terrifying picture of their systematic destruction.

On 23 January 1943, after Soviet troops liberated the village of Alekseyevka near Stalingrad, they discovered Dulag 205, a prisoner-of-war camp. According to a report drawn up by a military commission: “Here, behind barbed wire and under the open sky, 950 Soviet prisoners of war were being held. Most of them could not move without assistance.” The document notes that “in mid-January, a ‘selection’ was carried out, and more than 60 Jewish prisoners were killed on the spot. Some of them were stabbed with bayonets.”

“Their bodies lay in the snow for a long time. Many had their stomachs cut open, limbs severed, and skulls smashed. The faces of the murdered men were disfigured.”

The same report states: “From September 1942 to January 1943, according to many prisoners of war, at least 400 Jewish prisoners were killed in the camp: privates, sergeants, political workers, and commanders. In total, more than 10,000 people passed through the camp. Of these, approximately half were either killed or died from starvation and beatings.”

Special directives from the German command made it clear that captured Jews were to be killed. The testimony of the captured German Gefreiter Ernst Krause confirms the existence of direct orders for their destruction: “I know there was an order to shoot political instructors and Jews on the spot. The shootings were carried out nearby, in the rear, by a special unit... In total, in August, at least 80–90 prisoners were shot in the regiment, more than half of them Jewish soldiers and junior officers.”

Historians note that Jewish prisoners of war were often identified to the Germans by fellow servicemen.

A report drawn up on 24 April 1943 in the village of Nizhnyaya Sosnovka, Leningrad Oblast, is especially revealing: “Near the ruins of the houses, 24 bodies of prisoners of war brutally murdered by the Germans were found. According to the testimony of surviving local residents, all of them were Jews. Some had been stabbed with bayonets; others had had their heads cut off.”

According to researchers’ estimates, 94% of Soviet Jewish servicemen taken prisoner died — at least 85,000 people. Yet even under these inhuman conditions, there were examples of heroic resistance. The best known was the uprising in the Sobibor death camp, led by the Soviet Jewish prisoner of war Alexander Pechersky.

The fate of Jewish prisoners of war during the Second World War is one of the most tragic chapters of the Holocaust. Documentary evidence of mass murder, torture, and inhuman treatment shows that their destruction was a deliberate policy of the Nazi regime, rooted in racial ideology.

Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jewish prisoners of war was a flagrant violation of international law. As early as 1907, the Hague Convention established that prisoners of war were to be under the protection of the belligerent states and entitled to humane treatment. In 1929, the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War set out the rights of POWs in detail and prohibited discrimination on the grounds of race or nationality.

Germany, a party to these agreements, consciously and systematically violated them, creating an unprecedented system for the extermination of prisoners of war on racial grounds.

Freddy Rotman