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From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union by Susan C. I.Grunewald. Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024. xii + 241 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐7602‐1

Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: A captured enemy soldier transforms from a mortal threat into a burden, a bargaining chip, and a potential ally.For Soviet officials, German prisoners of World War II were also desperately needed laborers.Susan Grunewald's book examines all of these facets of the history of Soviet interactions with German POWs.The main argument of this work is that the history of German prisoners is inseparable from the history of the Gulag.The same institution that ran the Gulag, the Commissariat/Ministry of Internal Affairs (NKVD/MVD), also held prisoners of war.Like Gulag prisoners, Germans experienced high mortality in wartime because of the combination of a lack of food and heavy workloads.At the same time, Gulag officials had a mandate to reeducate Germans, particularly in the years after the war when returning POWs might become Soviet sympathizers in divided Germany.The book has five chapters, organized primarily by theme.The first explores the origins of German POWs and conditions in the camps.Prisoners entered Soviet camps in large numbers after the German defeat at Stalingrad, and some 1.5 million remained in Soviet hands for months or years after the war ended as forced laborers.Predictably, German prisoners experienced desperate conditions during the war and conditions improved after 1945.As in the Gulag, release of prisoners often occurred not because prisoners had completed sentences but because they were no longer capable of working due to illness or disability.Chapter 2 is the most novel of the work, employing mapping to analyze the geography of the deployment of German prisoners.Scholars have argued that the Gulag served as a form of colonization, settling people in bleak, remote lands with important natural resources.The German camps were largely not in these areas, though, but instead in western regions, where prison labor contributed to the reconstruction of the areas most impacted by the war.After all, Grunewald argues, Soviet officials did not think of Germans as permanent settlers but as temporary laborers.Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine attempts at Sovietization of German prisoners, their repatriation, and their commemoration.Soviet officials hoped that German prisoners would see the errors of Nazism and become friends of the USSR.During the war, converted German POWs were supposed to produce pro-Soviet propaganda that would undermine the Wehrmacht.After the war, it meant preparing potential activists for the Soviet zone of Germany and, after 1949, East Germany.For some prisoners, participation in Soviet reeducation programs was genuine.Others hoped to secure their liberation or improved opportunities in Soviet-dominated Germany through apparent subscription to Soviet norms.The book shows that repatriation primarily occurred in waves that corresponded to shifts in geopolitics: upon Germany's defeat in 1945; in an attempt to create goodwill with the creation of East
DOI: 10.1111/russ.12727
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4405819689
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