INCONVENIENT HISTORY: For many years after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, which already had a slave population estimated at 20,000,000 souls, was rounding up hordes of defeated German peoples in the seized territories.

The slaves were mostly men, but women and children too, and were marched eastwards into its gulag slave labour camps.

Millions of German Slaves

‘German prisoners in Russian hands are estimated to number from four to five million. 

When Berlin and Breslau surrendered, the long grey-green columns of prisoners were marched east, downcast and fearful toward huge depots near Leningrad, Moscow, Minsk, Stalingrad, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Sevastopol.

Congressional Report

All fit men had to march twenty-two miles a day. Those physically handicapped went in handcarts or carts pulled by spare beasts.’ – Congressional Report, March 29 1946. p. 2864.

The Western Allies meekly protested at the illegal, forced and brutal conscription of civilian slaves, and their deportation to foreign lands

General Dwight Eisenhower

The Soviets ‘produced a proclamation signed by General Dwight Eisenhower a year earlier which conceded agreement on this point.’ 

The protests stopped.  Very few of those millions of enslaved Germans, press-ganged to Stalin’s gulags, returned from their slavery.

Souls of one quarter of mankind

‘The souls of one quarter of mankind have been seared by the violation of that American promise. 

‘The ghosts of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter now wander amid the clanking chains of a thousand slave camps.’ – U.S. News, July 18 1952.

Historians generally estimate that around 18 million people passed through the Soviet Gulag camp system during its existence, especially the main period from the late 1920s until Stalin died in 1953.

Eighteen Million

The figure of 18 million refers to people who were imprisoned in the labour camp system itself.

If one also includes those sent to labour colonies, internal exile, deportation settlements and special settlements, the total number subjected to various forms of forced confinement and exile under the Soviet system rises substantially.

Then 22 million

Some archival studies suggest more than 14 million passed through Gulag camps from 1929-1953, plus another 7-8 million deported or exiled, although there is overlap between categories.

Dead Slaves and mainstream media don’t speak

Modern archival research has led many historians to conclude that roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million people died in the Gulag camp system, though estimates vary and some scholars argue the real figure may have been higher.

Gulag Archipelago

The term ‘Gulag Archipelago’, spread by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is often used more broadly to describe the entire network of Soviet forced-labour camps across the USSR.

In that sense, the commonly cited answer is that about 18 million prisoners served sentences in the Gulag system during the Soviet era, with millions more Europeans of twenty-one captive nations affected by related systems of exile and deportation.

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At various times, a proportion of inmates were ordinary criminal offenders, while political prisoners, wartime prisoners of war and their relatives, ethnic deportees and others made up the rest.

The Sell-Out

At Potsdam, just before Clement Attlee replaced Winston Churchill, Churchill asked Stalin why he was demanding so many German prisoners of war and civilians for Gulag reconstruction work.

Stalin replied, ‘We have lost close to five million in this war from German aggression.’ Churchill finally left the Potsdam conference on July 26, 1945.

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