Tens of thousands of prisoners were shown on the newsreels to cinema
audiences in the Reich as commentaries gloated over victories. Of
every 100 Pows shown, only three would survive.
The first problem on being taken prisoner was to survive the
engagement. The intensity of fighting often precluded this. The
consequences of failure in tank-infantry engagements, for example,
were normally fatal.
German anti-tank NCO Kurt Meissner described what normally occurred:
taken. That was war. There were times when such things happened. If we
felt we could not collect or care for prisoners then they were killed
in action. But I do not mean that they were killed after being taken
The two biggest encirclement battles had netted 328,000 prisoners at
Bialystok and Minsk during the first weeks of the advance and then
another 310,000 were taken at Smolensk. General von Waldau, Chef des
prisoners had been taken by the end of July.
This was to rise to 3.3 million by December. Perhaps two million
Soviet PoWs are estimated to have perished in the first few months
alone. Artillery Leutnant Siegfried Knappe was astonished at the
phenomenal numbers giving up:
The infantry brought them in by the thousands, by the tens of
thousands and even by the hundreds of thousands'
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