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REIMANN: It was really gruesome. I was present when they were being transported from KOROSTEN to just outside LWOW. They were driven like cattle from the trucks to the drinking troughs and bludgeoned to keep their ranks. There were troughs at the stations; they rushed to them and drank like beasts; after that they were given just a bit of something to eat. Then they were again driven into the wagons; there were sixty or seventy men in one cattle truck! Each time the train halted ten of them were taken out dead: they had suffocated for lack of oxygen. I was in the train with the camp guard and I heard it from the “Feldwebel,” a student, a man with spectacles, an intellectual, whom I asked: “How long has this been going on?”—“Well, I have been doing this for four weeks; I’ll not be able to stand it much longer, I must get away; I don’t stick it any more!” At the stations the prisoners peered out of the narrow openings and shouted in Russian to the Russians standing there: “Bread! And God will bless you,” etc. They threw out their old shirts, their last pairs of stockings and shoes from the trucks and children came up and brought them pumpkins to eat. They threw the pumpkins in, and then all you heard was a terrific din like the rearing of wild animals in the trucks. They were probably killing each other. That finished me. I sat back in a corner and pulled my coat up over my ears. I asked the “Feldwebel”: “Haven’t you any food at all?” He answered: “Sir, how should we have anything, nothing has been prepared!”

NEUFFER: No, really, all that was incredibly gruesome. Just to see that column of PW after the twin battle of VYASMA—BRIANSK, when the PW were taken to the rear on foot, far beyond SMOLENSK. I often travelled along that route—the ditches by the side of the roads were full of shot Russians. Cars had driven in to them; it was really ghastly.¹⁷⁶

The mass starvation of Russian POWs was the result of the absence of adequate measures to feed them. It began in the summer of 1941 and reached its high point that winter, before relenting somewhat in the spring of 1942. By that time some two million Red Army soldiers were dead.

German policies toward POWs changed as the German wartime economy began to suffer from a labor shortage, and the German leadership recognized the instrumental value of people it would have preferred to let starve. Nonetheless, the Wehrmacht brass never fundamentally changed their policy, even if isolated individuals did fight for POWs’ lives and protested, however unsuccessfully, against their abysmal treatment.¹⁷⁷

Reports of the horrible conditions in POW camps occur even more often than recollections of executions in the surveillance protocols. The mass deaths of tens of thousands of people were apparently something remarkable even to hardened veterans of the Eastern Front. A soldier named Freitag recalled: