[History] MOST POWS WANT TO GO HOME—BUT AFTER WORLD WAR II, SOME FACED DEATH ON ARRIVAL

[REFLX]

When the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945, the United States military had custody of a staggering number of enemy prisoners of war: 4.3 million total worldwide, with more than 400,000 held in prison camps inside the domestic United States. German personnel represented the single largest group of prisoners. However not every soldier in German uniform who fell into American hands—whether through capture, surrender, or exchange of custody with another ally—was actually a German citizen.

Between 1939 and 1945, tens of thousands of Frenchmen, Poles, Dutchmen, and Norwegians wound up in German uniform, either voluntarily or through coercion. Nearly a million Soviet citizens, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks had served in the German military for a myriad of reasons, plus many more millions of captured Soviet soldiers held as prisoners of the Germans were now in American or British hands; it was they who would represent one of the thorniest problems among the former allies in the war’s aftermath.

FORCED REPATRIATION?
Prisoner of war issues during WWII were at least notionally governed by the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, but the conduct of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union demonstrated all too clearly the limitations of international conventions and laws of war. The Soviet Union was not a signatory to the 1929 Convention; Japan signed it but never ratified it; Germany was a full signatory. The legal distinction between them was largely irrelevant, because those three nations were categorically guilty of the worst treatment of prisoners of war of any belligerents during that conflict.

As many as 3 million Soviet soldiers died in German captivity. Japanese treatment of captured Allied soldiers was infamously brutal, with a death rate estimated at 27.1 percent among prisoners of Western armies (the mortality rate for American POWs in Japanese hands was more than 30 percent). Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners was even worse, with a nearly 100 percent death rate—only 56 Chinese prisoners were officially recorded as being released from Japanese custody at the end of the war, for the grim reason that Imperial Japanese forces killed most Chinese prisoners outright. The Soviets, at the end of the war, held as many as 3,060,000 German POWs. How many of those men died in captivity is debated, but of the 1.3 million German military personnel listed as missing in action, the vast majority of them are assumed to have died as Soviet prisoners. More than 50,000 Japanese POWs perished in Soviet prison work camps after the war was over.

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