A column of German POWs captured near Leningrad are marched through the ruins of a small village as Russian civilians look on. Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during the war, most of them during the great advances of the Soviet forces in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post war reconstruction. According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht soldiers died in Soviet labor camps (356,700 German nationals and 24,367 from other nations). Other sources put this number at close to one million. By 1950, five years after the war, most of the surviving German POWs were released. The last remaining German POWs in Soviet custody were released in 1956, eleven years after the end of the war. Near Leningrad (now, Saint Petersburg), Leningrad Oblast, Russia, Soviet Union. December 1942. Image taken by Simon Friedland.
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