Beginning in 1942, the NKVD Institute 99, which was responsible
for foreign prisoners of war, began to recruit prisoners to serve as es-
pionage agents, and as part of a future pro-Soviet German govern-
ment. The Free German Committee recruited senior officers, includ-
ing Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus, who had been captured at
Stalingrad, and the German commander of Army Group Center, cap-
tured in the summer of 1944. Many of the German officials collabo-
rated with the Soviets to save their lives and the lives of their troops.
Others believed that a pro-Soviet Germany would be the best future
for their country. German prisoners were also prized as laborers;
some of the best-constructed apartment buildings in Moscow were
built by German prisoners of war in the late 1940s. The last German
prisoners of war returned to West Germany in 1955.
Institute 99, later known as the NKVD’s Chief Directorate for
Prisoners of War and Internees (Glavnoye Upravleniye po delam
Voennoplennikh i Internirovannikh, or GUPVI), also targeted the
officers and soldiers of Hitler’s allies. As Moscow began to plan for
the occupation of Eastern Europe, the NKVD began a program of
recruiting future agents from the prison population. Pal Maleter,
who later led the Hungarian revolt against Moscow in 1956, was
initially recruited while languishing in a prison camp to serve in a
pro-Soviet Hungarian military unit. Despite thousands of words
written about American prisoners of war in Soviet camps, there is
no evidence that there was any effort to keep Americans who had
been in German captivity.PRISONERS OF WAR, SOVIET. The Wehrmacht captured more
than 4.4 million Soviet forces, most in the dark days of 1941–1942.
More than a million of these died of hunger and disease in
1941–1942. Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov, a junior officer, was captured
and later killed while trying to escape from a German camp. Many
senior Soviet officers formed resistance cells inside prison camps.
Major General I. M. Shepetov, captured at Kharkov in the spring of
1942, was executed in a Nazi concentration camp a year later for or-
ganizing Soviet prisoners.
The fate of former prisoners of war who returned to their own lines
was horrific. The Soviet Union—like Nazi Germany—was not a sig-
natory to the Geneva Convention. Soviet law held that there was no208 •PRISONERS OF WAR, SOVIET06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 208