Pariahs Among Pariahs: Soviet-Jewish POWs in German Captivity, 1941–1945 by Aron Shneyer (review)

Of a total of 5,745,000 Soviet POWs captured by German forces during World War II, at least three million died in captivity. It does not require much imagination to comprehend the terrible fate of Soviet-Jewish soldiers who fell into the hands of German forces charged with exterminating "Judeo-Bolshevism." Aron Shneyer's synthesis of archival research and testimony from numerous former Soviet republics relates considerably more information than his title suggests. While the heart of the text concerns the fate of approximately 85,000 Soviet-Jewish military personnel taken into captivity, Shneyer also meticulously reconstructs the history of Jews in the Soviet military services beginning with the Russian Civil War (1918–1922). Moreover, for comparison's sake, Shneyer addresses Jewish participation in other combatant nations' militaries and their differing experiences in German captivity. The result is an impressive resource for historians unfamiliar with Soviet languages and archives, but who are interested in attaining a full picture of this sizeable subgroup of Holocaust victims. Shneyer's intent is not to write a traditional monograph emphasizing analysis and marking a place in the historiography so much as it is a recovery operation. He relates the testimony and accounts of dozens of POWs, perpetrators, and bystanders in concise, unadorned language. The author's interviews and correspondence with veterans is included in the last section of the book.

Shenyer notes that the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) had primary responsibility for POW camps on Reich territory, including the General Government, but the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) operated camps in war zones and occupied territory. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine established their own camps independent of the OKW (pp. 16–17). While at least some Western POWs received the protection of international conventions, most Soviet and Polish POWs endured horrific treatment—hundreds of thousands of POWs were housed in open air enclosures with limited food and water—either by the Wehrmacht's intentional design or gross incompetence. The results were catastrophic. Between July 1941 and spring 1942 approximately 1.5 to 2 million Red Army personnel "were tortured to death, died from hunger and illness, or were shot" (p. 23). Marginal improvements were implemented in 1943 after the OKW and the SS agreed to harness POWs for war industries.

Shneyer breaks down the numbers of Jewish volunteers, officers, female personnel, doctors, and other medical staff, and the numbers of Jews serving in "national," or ethnic divisions in the Red Army (for instance, the 201^st Latvian Infantry Division and the 16^th Lithuanian Division). He demonstrates a consistent overrepresentation of Jewish personnel in the Red Army and its political apparatus from the earliest days of the revolution. A fact that engendered anger and mistrust among various Soviet nationalities, a sentiment easily stoked by their Nazi occupiers. Shneyer estimates 39.6 percent of all Jewish military personnel were killed during the war, while the average for the Red Army was 25 percent (p. 113).

In one particularly fascinating chapter, Shneyer describes the Wehrmacht and SS campaign to tailor antisemitic propaganda to Soviet POWs and Ukrainian civilians. The content was designed to inflame centuries of preexisting antisemitism while seamlessly linking Jews with Bolshevik oppression. Although many Jews could rely on their comrades to either conceal their Jewish identity or share food and resources with them, Shneyer recounts dozens of instances in which POWs betrayed Jews on the promise of better treatment: "the fate of Jewish POWs always depended on those who shared their German captivity," Shneyer writes. "Moreover, when a starving prisoner could receive a reward in the form of bread, cigarettes, etc., for betraying a Jew to the enemy, simply remaining silent and not giving a Jew away was also … the saving of life" (p. 347).

German treatment of POWs was determined in part by the infamous "Commissar Order" of June 1941. Seeking to extirpate every trace of Soviet Jewry in the occupied territories, the Einsatzgruppen, with...