Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II , most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in In the first six months of Operation Barbarossa , few Germans were captured by Red Army forces.
After the Battle of Moscow and the retreat of the German forces the number of prisoners in the Soviet prisoner of war camps rose to , by early Weakened by disease, starvation and lack of medical care during the encirclement, many died of wounds, disease particularly typhus spread by body lice , malnutrition and maltreatment in the months following capture at Stalingrad: only approximately 6, of them lived to be repatriated after the war.
At the same time POWs became an important source of labor for the Soviet economy deprived of manpower. With the formation of the " National Committee for a Free Germany " and the "League of German Officers", anti-Nazi POWs got more privileges and better rations.
As a result of Operation Bagration and the collapse on the southern part of the Eastern front, the number of German POWs nearly doubled in the second half of In the first months of the Red Army advanced to the Oder river and on the Balkans.
Again the number of POWs rose — to 2,, in April A total of 2. A large number of German POWs had been released by the end of , [9] when the Soviet Union held fewer POWs than the United Kingdom and France between them [ citation needed ]. With the creation of a pro-Soviet German state in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany — the German Democratic Republic — in October , all but 85, POWs had been released and repatriated.
