On November 9, 1941, Soviet POWs struggled to get water from a half-frozen creek. Soviet Red Army POWs from the POW column came to the assembly point and drank water from the frozen creek.

 　On the Eastern Front of World War II, on November 9, 1941, Soviet POWs struggled to get water from a half-frozen creek. Soviet Red Army POWs from the POW column came to the assembly point and drank water from the frozen creek. The brutal mistreatment of POWs by the Germans forced many Soviet soldiers to watch in humiliation.

　Various figures are available on the number of Soviet soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Germans. According to the Germans, the number was estimated at 5.2 million, and according to the Soviet General Staff, 4.5 million. Complicating the Soviet POW figures was Nazi Germany's directive to dispose of Soviet POWs to the maximum extent possible. The number of those disposed of was approximately 1.5 million. The most frightening figure is how many of the Soviet POWs returned home. The average of the total number of POWs obtained from sources was assumed to be 6.5 million. Only about 1.7 million of these were able to return to the Soviet Union after the war. About 1 million of them continued to serve in the Soviet Red Army, and about 200,000 were deported to the concentration camps of the Internal People's Commissariat (NKVD). Returned were among those in the Soviet army who had collaborated with Nazi Germany in every way possible. About 600,000 Soviet POWs helped to build industries and build German cities. The other nearly 4.5-5 million Soviet POWs went where they went, and Soviet soldiers never returned. They were held in concentration camps until they died.

　　It was assumed that about 60% to 70% of the Soviet Red Army died in captivity. About 70% is actually cruel. Only 5% of British POWs died; the conditions of difference between 5% and 70% were unimaginable. The death rate for American POWs was only 1%. The first to be gassed were Soviet POWs. Later, Jews were used for mass executions by gassing. British and American soldiers were not gassed. According to the German archives, in the first year of World War II alone, about 6,000 Soviet Red Army soldiers were killed daily in the camps. About 1.5 million Soviet prisoners of war died on Ukrainian territory alone, and about 900,000 died in concentration camps in Poland.

　The Soviet Union once refused to sign an international convention on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. When World War II broke out, Stalin declared his willingness to be bound by the treaty. Germany ignored Stalin's declaration. Nazi propaganda used the Soviet Union's refusal to sign international treaties as an excuse to abuse captured Red Army soldiers. In German concentration camps, Soviet POWs faced terrible fates of starvation, epidemics, cold, violent guards, and lack of housing; in the spring of 1942, the Germans, in desperate need of exploitable labor, recounted the POWs, and of the approximately 3.5 million Soviet soldiers captured in 1941, about 60 percent died or executed. Subsequently, the living conditions in the camps were forced labor in war-production factories. Of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs captured by the Germans, an estimated 3.3 million died in captivity.

　After the end of World War II, former POWs returned to the Soviet Union and were forced into infiltration camps where they had to prove their innocence of aiding and abetting the enemy Germans. New imprisonment awaited many of the POWs who returned to their homeland, and POWs remained disgraced until the mid-1950s.