Altogether, of the 5.2 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by Germany during the war, 2 million are recorded as having died in camps, and another 1.3 million fell into the catch-all category of ‘escapes, exterminations, not accounted for, deaths and disappearances in transit’. Taking only the most conservative figure of 2 million deaths, the Eastern Front’s prisoner-of-war camps killed over a third as many people again as the entire Holocaust.
