When parts of the Soviet Union were gripped by famine in 1946–47, German prisoners were subjected to the same harsh conditions as the rest of the population: yet there was no retaliation for the policy of deliberate starvation which the Wehrmacht had inflicted on the 3.9 million Soviet prisoners of war it captured in 1941, and which had killed 2.8 million of them by early 1942. By the end of 1953, another 20,000 German prisoners had been released, leaving just 10,000 in the Soviet Union.
