RAW & UNCENSORED Wochenschau film crew material shows treatment of Soviet POWs - Sept.1941

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Episode 185

This is part two in a series that uses sensational raw footage from a German film crew that was produced in early September of 1941. The material, being processed for use in Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels, had at this stage in the production cycle not yet received the recorded voiceover and more importantly had not yet been censored. Much of the material will be completely new but If you know your stuff you’ll recognize some of the clips, and might even know which newsreel it was shown in.

In part 2 we’ll follow Army Group South as it advances into the Ukraine, get an uncensored feel for the magnitude of the prisoners of war taken and delve into their miserable fate that has gone largely untold. At the end of the video we’ll see part of the released news reel with subtitles so stick around, it’s worth it.

The quick advance of the German armies into the Ukraine in the summer of 1941 created a temporary power vacuum and left the majority of the civilian population to their own devices. This level of individual freedom hadn’t been present during the Soviet’s decades long rule. Under the tight control of their well established terror apparatus, the Soviets squeezed the Ukrainian agricultural base which lead to the death by starvation of around 3.9 million Ukrainians.

Had the war in the east been quickly won by the Germans, the planned “extinction of industry as well as a great part of the population” would have taken place. Cities would have been leveled and entire regions depopulated in preparation for colonization by German agrarian settlers. This was expected to lead to the death by starvation of approximately 30 million.

The whole of the Crimea, for example, was to be integrated into Greater Germany and converted into a massive tourist destination but here the Soviets struck first. Following the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, over 60,000 ethnic Germans, all that the Soviet authorities could get their hands on, were deported from Crimea to Siberia.

For the German “Hunger Plan” to be realized they would need to have complete control of the territories and population which they never fully accomplished and so the Slavic population was largely spared from this horrific fate. The millions of completely vulnerable Soviet POWs, however, were not spared.

POW camps were set up by the Germans in the Ukraine, Belarus and in Poland but weren’t allocated the resources to support the lives of the millions of former Soviet soldiers. In these camps the names of the POWs were not even registered which was an ominous indication as to what was in store for them.

Those that couldn’t work were systematically left to starve to death. In one instance POWs from the camp at Molodechno in Belarus, prisoners submitted a written petition asking to be shot rather than dying slowly of hunger in the cold. During the war some 3.1 million died in German captivity. About 500,000 were shot and the remaining 2.6 million died of starvation and hunger related disease.

This crime has been forgotten to a large extent because Stalin considered the POWs as deserters. After the war, of the few that had managed to somehow survive and were repatriated, most were simply shot by the Soviets. There was no going back. And unlike other victimized groups no-one was specifically interested in correctly representing their memory.

If you are interested in finding out more about the subject I can whole heartedly recommend Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodland’s, Europe between Hitler and Stalin. And now here’s that clip from the produced Wochenschau that some of the footage is found it. If you know which reel number this is write it in the comment section below.