Life and Death of Soviet POWs in Occupied Ukraine, 1941-1944

While the history of the Holocaust is being researched ever increasingly worldwide, much less is known about the second largest group of victims of National Socialist rule, the captured Red Army soldiers. An estimated two and a half to three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captiv- ity. Thousands were killed directly, but most died as a result of the catastrophic conditions due to inadequate accommodation and starvation. Several facets of this tragedy have been researched, in particular the German policy towards Soviet prisoners of war and their fate in the concentration and labour camps in the German Reich. However, the lives and deaths of the Red Army men and women in occupied Ukraine, where most of them were held in camps immediately after their capture and almost a million perished, are only known in outline. The aim of the project is to reconstruct an almost unknown chapter of National Socialist extermina- tion policy and at the same time to embed the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in the history of the "Third Reich" and its occupation policy and also in the development of Soviet society under occupa- tion. To date, we know very little about the specific contexts in occupied Ukraine in particular. The following questions will be addressed in the project: How did German starvation and forced la- bour policies affect the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war? What role did German perceptions of Ukrainians and ethnic hierarchies play? How were female Red Army prisoners treated when they were captured? What specific fate did Jewish prisoners of war suffer? What role did the topography and local occupation policy play in the provision of food and accommodation? How were the camps structured? How did the prisoners of war perceive themselves and how were they perceived by the local population? The expansion of the Russian war of aggression into Ukraine in February 2022 put the latter at the centre of international interest, not least in the field of historical studies. Indeed, Ukraine was the scene of extreme mass violence in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Second World War. The most important effect of this project is a better understanding of German violence in Eastern Europe, but also of the pecularities of a special type of war. The extent of the mass crimes committed against Soviet prisoners of war in Ukraine is largely unknown in Austria and throughout Europe. Moreover, for decades there was hardly any interest on the part of the Soviet Union to deal with this topic.

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