This is I guess more than a bit hypothetical but given the utter barbarism of the eastern front and the winter war, if say, Portugal offered to intern Russian prisoners for the Finns and Germans to make sure they were properly taken care of (if eithe4r made statements that wartime privations made things “difficult”) and got food allowances from the Allied blockade commission for that end on strictly humanitarian grounds (less likely than you’d think given the inhuman calculus even the British deep state was under in 1941-42) could this even have been done under international law, in order to avert a potential humanitarian crisis?
Or more realistically if the Western Allies offered point-blank to take all the Axis POWS off the Soviet’s hands so they didn’t have to feed or house them and could ship them off on departing unloaded lend-lease ships, would Stalin have agreed and thereby potentially saved hundreds of thousands to millions of lives of Axis POWs?
Basically were Stalin and Hitler more or less determined to torture enemy soldiers to death for vindictive fun or were they not properly incintivized to let them go to other places?
EDIT: I feel the need to put this in for clarification. I’ve been an anti-communist all my life, I was coming of age just as the USSR collapsed, and have generally held that the Nazis and the Communists are the same kind of evil. I generally hold to this. However, this POW issue, in this case, is almost certainly an exception. Watch this video by definitely non-Communist (I think he’s Austrian School) Youtuber TIK, specifically starting at the 18:00(-21:00) mark, where he makes the case that outside of the special case of Stalingrad POWS, which wasn’t actually the Soviet’s fault, Soviet POW deaths were not worse than other Allied powers
I recommend a visit to the Konzentrationslager (KZ) Buchenwald.
Soviet soldiers were summarily shot in the neck as they went through a medical summary.
Furthermore Nazi doctrine was to simply starve all Soviet POWs but treat western allied troops better for propaganda purposes and eventually possible joining allied forces to eradicate Stalin, as Himmler (spoiler) will pursue in a desperate attempt to save the Third Reich
Appreciate your input
It is important to remember that Nazis viewed Russians as unfit humans and did not fit their view of The Aryan Race and therefore were not part of the Nazi grand plan which is why so many Russian POWs were killed, starved and worked to death.
On the other side the Russians had Stalin who treated Nazi POWs with barbaric attitudes and sent millions to the Gulags where many Nazi POWs lived and died with many survivors not being returned to Germany until years after the war ended.
Now onto the western allies who became POWs it varied greatly as to whether they were placed in camps with regular Nazi forces as guards or in Camps with the dreaded SS guards. Those with regular Nazi military guards were generally well treated and looked after according to the Geneva convention. On the other hand those with SS guards faced a more uncertain fate. Some camps well treated well while others were just a step above concentration camps and there is plenty of evidence of mistreatment by the SS.
While we never will know exact numbers TIK actually made a well sourced video.
The Gulags were nasty but Stalin used Pows for forced labour and keeping them alive greatly enhanced productivity. The National Socialist let lots of Soviet prisoner starve and the population was not much better with well dressed German teachers leading a parade of schoolkids throwing garbage at starving Soviets. (Nette leute mit Swastika hinter den Augen).
TIK and others also make the point that the death number of Stalingrad were much/much higher because the Germans kept on fighting until they were almost starved to and/or wounded. The survival chances were thus less than e.g. the quick surrenders of Bagration.
Chewie, this video is awesome. Can you link some more of his videos, namely on how many KIAs were probably ACTUALLY done on the Germans and Soviets. To be clear, I’ve been working on an alt-history project and the premise has always been a better-prepared Wehrmacht that doesn’t win but fights more or less the same battles but suffers significantly less attrition (and the officer who designs the entire east front war effort in the pre-war actually saves a lot of Soviet POWs compared to OTL, but he’ll never know that and the body count will still be high).
At this point, I’ve watched enough TIK to know he doesn’t think very highly of Wikipedia but I can’t anticipate where he thinks it will be wrong nor why.
