What Did the Soviets Do with the German SS Prisoners Captured in 1945?

at the end of World War II the Red Army began one of the most Relentless operations of the postwar period the mass capture of German soldiers many members of the SS perished in the final months of the war and many were captured by the Allies fully aware of what the SS troops had done to Soviet civilians during the occupation many desperately tried to reach the Americans or the British some succeeded but most fell into Soviet hands for years they had been taught that communists were beasts who would destroy them now they had the chance to

experience Soviet Hospitality the objective was not only to detain them but also to use them as a labor force for the Reconstruction of the devastated Soviet Union survival in these places depended more on luck and physical endurance than on any humanitarian considerations Through Blood and snow the Soviet wrath Unleashed after the battle of kusk ended in catastrophe for the vermar the Germans started retreating from that moment on the Eastern Front became a nightmare for the Nazis fueled by the dark ideas of what the Soviets would do to them if they caught them and whenever the

Soviets had the opportunity to get some German soldiers in their hands they were pretty brutal however many soldiers and even some waffin SS units surrendered to the Soviets although the Soviets were rarely merciful to those in the black uniforms when they saw my uniform they dragged me out of the line of prisoners they stripped me and beat me with rifle butts shouting babiar and smolin I understood why they took us to a camp but for the SS there was no trial just death every day they would call out names and those men never came back

this one was lucky to survive because most of the captured SS members were executed on the spot many of those who were spared were awaiting trials or even without any trials sent to Soviet labor camps rare ones returned even during the war the Soviet Union started sending these prisoners of War to camps and it was all with Stalin's orders there was a huge difference between the regular members of the wchm mar and the SS units the first ones were considered prisoners of War and the last were war criminals this was especially true for members of

the einat grin and SS officers in January 1945 the ninth Army of the vermak was trapped near Warsaw Lieutenant ghard Keller still clearly remembers the chaos we were outgunned outnumbered and Frozen to the Bone every day more of my men were killed or disappeared into the snow taken by the Russians surrender was the only option if you didn't want to perish the treatment of those who surrendered was different depending on the captors the captured and the mood of the Moment One Survivor private hands mailer described his first encounter with the Soviets they stripped us of

everything watches boots anything of value one of our soldiers who resisted was shot on the spot there was no time for Mercy the Soviets Humanity towards the Germans disappeared years ago after all the atrocities they had committed and the brutality against the waffin SS was an ordinary event their distinctive uniforms and Tattoos marked them as ideological soldiers and Soviet troops were painfully aware of the treatment they would have received had the roles been reversed actually they were in that role and many of them witnessed what was left of the places where the SS had set

foot in for them there was no mercy major Friedrich Lutz of the thir SS Panza division Toten cop was captured near Budapest he survived we knew what they thought of us some men tried to discard their uniforms but it was pointless the tattoos on our arms betrayed us Lutz was beaten mercilessly before being marched Barefoot through the snow to a prisoner collection point at least he lived to tell the tale not everyone in Hungary was that lucky near deah a little more than 200 km to the east of Budapest soldiers of the vermak 24th Panza

division had to observe Mass executions of their officers radio operator vilhelm Hower who survived by pure luck and his sharp mind because he faked death among the pile of corpses remembers what the Soviets did to them they were considering these actions as cleaning since every officer who commanded in Nazi Germany was part of the group that committed all those war crimes even high ranking officers were not spared the humiliation of capture General maximilan von Vikes commander of army group EF surrendered to the Red Army in early 1945 after his forces were overpowered in Yugoslavia while

Fon vik was spared immediate execution due to his Rank and the Soviets intentions to interrogate him he had to endure months of harsh conditions before being handed over to Western authorities but for the others who weren't protected by the high rank this capture was just the beginning they had to March for tens of Miles towards the nearest railway stations to be transported to the camps food and water rations were minimal still better than what they gave before the situation turned around those who fell behind or collapsed were shot on sight and among them was a

medic Carl schaer his journal today reflects these horrifying moments for these Soldiers the March was like a death's parade men fell by the dozens their bodies Left Behind as markers of our passage a Soviet officer who followed one of the marches commented coldly the dead are easier to count once again the tables had turned and the ones who survived the March awaited transportation in overcrowded cattle cars they could barely sit and the stench was almost unbearable those who barely made it through the March couldn't survive this and died due to starvation disease or exposure missing

the sight of gulags their final Dreadful destination the stench was unbearable urine sweat and death all mingled we tried to keep each other alive sharing scraps of bread and snow but it wasn't enough remember France Keller a vermar soldier who was on a train to perm for these men the war was over and the next chapter of their lives began but in reality the war still very much raged and The Final Battle for Berlin started and in the capital city the remaining soldiers had nowhere to hide the fall of the black Sun Berlin's last captives

when the battle for Berlin started it was basically all over and only delusional Nazis still believed in any chance for victory even heinrick himler himself attempted to negotiate A Separate Peace with the Allies behind Hitler's back soon the news leaked and himler was declared a traitor like himler in custody suicides became common among SS officers they knew what awaited them if captured in a building near the Reich chancell SS General vilhelm moner gathered his men for Last Stand and as the Soviets overwhelmed their position some of them decided to perform Collective suicide they sat in

a circle their faces pale but resolved some whispered prayers others just stared at the ground when the order came they swallowed the capsules in silence I couldn't do it the Soviets caught me hours later Wilhelm MOA didn't do that he tried to flee however as Soviet Engineers began flooding the tunnels with gasoline and setting them on fire Mona and his remaining men had to appear and surrender as a high ranking SS officer Mona had to endure brutal interrogation survivors claimed to have heard his screams he was eventually sent to the Soviet Union where he spent

6 years in solitary awaiting trial and was eventually released due to lack of evidence still the question mark over his alleged torture Still Remains because the Soviet claims it didn't happen and he didn't talk about it some other SS offic tried to blend in and erase their past they often blended into the streams of refugees trying to escape others were less fortunate Soviet soldiers eager for Retribution organized brutal searches for SS members and the ones who were found suffered a lot we found them hiding in the basement huddled together like rats they had burned their

papers and changed into civilian clothes but we knew who they were we dragged them into the street and the people screamed for justice some were shot on the spot others were taken away none of them would live long the fear and paranoia entered the SS ranks faster than the Soviets and the words of their brutality preceded them major Dietrich Zigler of the raffan SS led a group of young soldiers when he was captured as Soviet t34 tanks emerged on the streets he issued desperate orders to hold the line fight to the last man soon their

position was overrun and their situation was lost at that moment Zigler overwhelmed by fear ditched his uniform in an attempt to blend in with vermark regulars his last attempt was futile because the Soviet troops recognized him he was maybe snitched by some of his subordinates but the more likely reason was his SS issued pistol they knew Zigler later wrote in a smuggled note from captivity they always knew for the Soviets there was no difference between men and women when it comes to war criminals and although they weren't typical members of the many women were known

for their sadism during the war especially female guards of the concentration camps a Soviet journalist who followed the Red Army clearly remembered how they dragged one woman from the ruins of a building she was accused of having been a guard at ravensbrook although her identity wasn't confirmed the woman a civilian was forced to strip in the street to reveal SS tattoos on her body from that moment she was a civilian no more Soviet soldiers tied her to a lamp poost leaving her to the vengeful crowd she was beaten till she fell unconscious and one Soviet

Soldier eventually put an end to her misery with a gunshot on the other hand vermark soldiers who surrendered didn't face the same justice as the SS the soldiers who were ranked lower were often just disarmed and sent to the camps for the prisoners of War there their chances were much higher than the Soviets had in German camps the ones who were high ranked were always interrogated but mostly treated better at first later most of them ended up being trialed for war crimes by early May Berlin was reduced to ruins Hitler was dead and the SS

once the Elite Force effectively ceased to exist with its members arrested hunted or dead the vear had capitulated but this wasn't the end for the people who were involved in these two organizations especially for the ones captured by the Soviets one Soviet Soldier describing the fall of Berlin wrote in his journal we fought for every street every building and when it was over there was no joy only silence the city was a graveyard and the people we found there looked like ghosts they asked us for Mercy but we had seen too much and lost too

much there was no mercy left to give finally the war was over and the Allies faced a dilemma what to do with these war criminals and what to do about the organizations consisting of hundreds of thousands of people the crimes were too severe to be left unpunished also should the whole country be put on trial who should be sentenced and how here the Allies had different opinions but the Soviets were the most harsh Justice in red the Soviet pursuit of Nazi war criminals the most well-known trials for the war criminals and the ones in charge

of the Nazi war Machinery were the nurburg trials held between November 1945 and October 1946 these trials were held by all the Allied Powers together signaling the beginning of prosecutions for for crimes against peace war crimes and crimes against humanity the Soviet Union was the nation that mostly insisted on the trial and the lawyer Aaron trainin first formulated and used the idea of a crime against peace although the spotlight was on the most important Nazi leaders like Herman guring Rudolph Hess or Wilhelm kitle the number of convicted reached 161 from 199 defendants among them 37

were sentenced to death by hanging not by firing squad that way the Allies wanted to show that these people weren't soldiers and officers anymore they were war criminals also the SS was proclaimed a criminal organization but the nurburg trials were far from being the only one conducted on the Nazis after the war although the Soviet Union participated in the international Military Tribunal at nurburg the Soviets felt that they needed to do more as the ones whose people suffered the most under the Germans so they conducted their own series of Trials against members of the SS

and the vermar the collaborators also faced consequences these trials were all similar Swift and unforgiving showing anger and desire for Revenge the Soviet trials began almost immediately after the war ended some even during the liberation of the country the Press followed closely these trials and used similar names as the prosecution in the courtroom to refer to the defendants terms such as thugs Bandits degenerates and perverts one of these trials took place in keev especially for the members of the SS einat grupin survivors and Witnesses spoke about the unsettling scenes like the one where the children

were forced to dig their graves before being executed interestingly enough the accused SS officers mostly showed no remorse during the trial they almost always said that they had orders that needed to be carried away their indoctrination was completed years ago one of the rare ones who accepted his guilt was fredrich yekan during the Ria trials in 1946 he was the SS General who implemented the jeen system for faster mass murder having around 100,000 Souls on his conscience he showed some remorse I have to take full responsibility for what happened in the borders of ostland and

this greatly increases my guilt I will accept a sentence in full either true or a lie this confession didn't save him and Jaan was hanged in January 1946 most of the convicted were hanged publicly with the local population present enjoying the gruesome end of their former oppressors often responsible for the deaths of their loved ones there was no mercy and as one of the Jewish survivors of the babiar massacre said to one of the SS einat's grin accused during a trial in 1946 you looked at us like animals less than human I watched you shoot

my wife wife and son you laughed now you stand here in front of me and you ask for Mercy did you show Mercy to my family Cold Justice German lives in the gags of the Soviet Union the Germans who ended up in Soviet gulags after the war were a mix of vermark soldiers SS officers and civilian collaborators they had different stories before the end of the war but here they were all the same first they needed to survive the journey to cold Eastern r desperate and Afraid after the capture and trials not like what they

did to the Jews but this time they had to endure overcrowded and unheated trains and were forced to March for weeks without any compassion they were fed irregularly mostly some scraps many were ill from dentry or typhus the ones who were already weak didn't survive the long route to the camp and they didn't get the funeral their bodies were thrown from the train arrival at the gulag offered no relief it was a new world for them scary unimaginable unpredictable and inevitable the camps contained only bare wooden Barracks surrounded by barbed wire the guards hated the

prisoners with burning passion since many of them lost family members and comrades during The Invasion these guards often Unleashed their anger on prisoners with beatings and kicking the barracks inside resembled those where the Germans were once guards and the Soviets let the natural conditions create the atmosphere inside it was cold overcrowded with no heat and real shelter and it was filthy but these prisoners weren't there just to be removed from the civilization they were there to work the day started a little before Dawn with a rude awakening and the first thing to do was work

no matter what the weather was like and the work was very demanding and physical Germans had to cut trees and mine with primitive tools as well as construct buildings railroads and other infrastructure it was slave labor they had quotas that needed to be fulfilled and these were unrealistically high failure to succeed meant less food many couldn't withstand it and perished in the camps one of the most well-known prisoners in the Soviet prisons was Friedrich palus the former Field Marshal who had commanded the German sixth Army and surrendered at Stalingrad in 1943 he was the only

German field Marshall ever who surrendered and was treated as a traitor because of that maybe that was the reason palus lived in better conditions than most other Germans also he was used for Soviet propaganda purposes although isolated he never experienced the horrors of the gulags and after 10 years of imprisonment palus was released he lived in communist East Germany where he lived the remaining four years of his life unlike palus ordinary vermak soldiers like heines glla a 21-year-old were not spared glla was imprisoned in a camp in kma Infamous for its brutal conditions in smuggled

letters glla described the conditions he was living and working in he was freezing and he was hungry still he survived a decade there before he was released but the consequences took a toll on his health and glla didn't live long enough to celebrate his 40th birthday the fates of many of these inmates depended on pure luck or the fact who was their guard at the time some guards were excessively cruel beating prisoners on a daily basis While others considered this as just a regular job and didn't participate in the beatings falling ill also could mean

a death sentence since Medical Care didn't exist in these camps pneumonia tuberculosis and scurvy were regular among the inmates around 350,000 German prisoners didn't survive until the end of their sentence One Survivor remembered how he and a group of prisoners had to dig trenches in the permafrost for 12 hours a day the soil was freezing and hard and the cold was so intense that men would lose fing fers and Toes due to weather conditions even the food was a part of mistreatment prisoners mostly ate watery soup cold water soup and just a few small pieces

of bread each day there was no meat and not nearly enough nutrients to endure hard work many turned to stealing food risking severe punishments like beating to death many prisoners lost their minds due to hunger and there were accounts of grass eating and even cannibalism also punishable by death France Vaga one of those who survived described how desperate they were in hunger we would scrape the frost from the walls of their Barracks to quench their thirst we ate anything we could find potato peels bits of grass hunger was the only thing permanent in the Soviet

system there were no names like the Nazis earlier did to them the Soviets now forbade any human individuality from these prisoners instead of names they were numbers to increase dehumanization there was no communication with the outside world families of those who were sentenced in the Soviet Union often had no idea what happened to their loved ones yet many survived and after Stalin's death life they became a little easier releases became more common when the kushev era began in the Soviet Union but many weren't that lucky even today there are many bones in the cold Russian

soil covered by unmarked Graves Shadows of captivity the Forgotten struggle of Germany's lost soldiers those who survived D had problems fitting into the new world still considered as Nazis also the trauma of the gulags never left them but there was no sympathy for the Nazi German soldiers since both post-war German countries wanted to erase and forget that part of their history most of these prisoners of War served some 8 to n years in the labor camps and were freed somewhere around 1953 the war had been over for years but they were fighting on the front

inside to find a place in the New World when Heinrich shriber in the ancient days of War vermar Sergeant arrived in Munich in 1955 the city was both familiar and different he had nothing but a small bundle of belongings wrapped in a faded blanket he changed I was not the man who left and Munich was not the city I remembered the division between East and West had solidified and there was a shadow over former SS members many of them had false hopes of job security as soldiers but they were considered ashamed of the p and

the military wasn't highly regarded in Germany anymore they had no clothes no property no job and no work skills the German authorities didn't support their citizens and behaved badly to those who returned from captivity stating that they deserved their fate as war criminals Herman Bower a former SS officer firsthand felt that new reception his wife had remarried because of no news from him she thought Bower died I was a stranger in my own home finding a job was an impossible task and he was constantly watched by the police even the others who returned from the

gulags looked down on the SS veterans they treated us like lepers not soldiers but war criminals no matter if we did anything or not those who managed to find jobs often worked as physical laborers and only low paid jobs shriber became a janitor at a local school since his school days were cut short because of drafting he wanted to be an engineer the students would whisper about me he said to them I was just another old soldier who had lost everything and he was one of the lucky ones still some managed better especially their younger

ver marked veterans who took advantage of post-war reconstruction efforts in West Germany in that reconstruction they build new lives jobs in factories were desirable and better paid so they built or rebuilt homes this also influenced positively on their view of themselves since they were not destroying anymore they were constructing something new yet for every positive story there were many more dark ones most of these men from dark stories had one thing in common they just couldn't fit in although it was not researched enough the toll on their mental health was enormous there were no tests

and exams but it was clear they suffered from PTSD Nightmares of the camps were common in sleep along with the memories of those who didn't return I could hear their voices they would call out to me in the dark don't leave us behind said rega one of the survivors many still had the guilt of being part of a war machine and seeing and committing atrocities and Horrors suicide rates among them were high and many turned to alcohol to forget as previously mentioned Bower eventually went to a small village to run away from everything I became

a ghost He said in one of his final interviews no one wanted to know me and I didn't want to know anyone in time Germany moved on but they didn't We Were Soldiers prisoners survivors shriber once wrote in a letter to a friend but we were also forgotten they looked at us with disgust as if we were some kind of remnant of dirt that they must clean up writes gotl beederman in his Memoirs although they were treated the way they were some other facts influenced them even more many couldn't believe that some high Nazi officials

who weasel their way out of punishment soon returned to the key positions of Industry government conclusion after the war the SS and vermark prisoners of War faced the hardest time in the Soviet Union unlike the West here it was a desire for revenge and Justice various Destinies caught various people and like there were many war criminals who avoided punishment there were many regular people who were just soldiers who didn't commit any atrocities that faced cruel punishments it was the end of the war and the one who won chose Justice many state that the punishment fits

the crime and it is still a publicly accepted opinion in Russia and when they returned even though they were free of their Soviet captors and survived their captivity that captivity still lived in most of them