Second Battle of Kharkov and Soviet losses in the spring of 1942

SS-Untersturmführer interrogate Soviet POWs

Waffen-SS officers in a Ukrainian village

Leibstandarte SS collecting Soviet POW's in Ukraine

In May 1942, the Red Army started a drive against Kharkov. The Germans broke into the salient and the battle that followed was an overwhelming German victory, with 170,958 killed, missing or captured and 106,232 wounded Soviets troops compared to just 20,000 casualties for the Germans and their allies according to military historian David M. Glantz. The Soviet losses during the spring 1942 in the southern portion of the Eastern Front amounted to approximately 490,000 POWs, most of whom would die in captivity. By this time at least 4,000,000 Soviet troops had been killed, wounded, or captured. The Soviets’ reserves appeared to be inexhaustible, especially when the losses of the previous year were taken into consideration: Between Kiev and Moscow, they had lost 1,300,000 men captured and 9,000 artillery pieces and 2,000 armored vehicles lost or captured. The Germans was gathering POWs at a staggering rate. As one young SS grenadier wrote: No time to disarm them; a quick hands up, a gesture towards the west and we moved on again. For the Germans, Soviet POWs were expendable: they consumed calories needed by others and, unlike Western POWs, were considered to be subhuman. There's a story going around that the Leibstandarte SS killed 4,000 Soviet POWs in the Kherson Oblast in reprisal in August 1942. The story originally came from the Austrian prolific far-right author and former SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Kernmayr. He wrote in the book Der große Rausch (1948), that after members of the Leibstandarte SS found the mutilated bodies of SS-Sturmmann Gehrken, Lippke, Steiner and Schwillinsky and SS-Schütze Mehnke and Ploetz together with 103 massacred Heer soldiers on August 18 1942, an order was received from divisional commander Josef Dietrich that no prisoners should be taken for three days after the discovery. This unconfirmed story was then repeated by authors Gerald Reitlinger (1956) and George H. Stein (1966) and has since been spread by authors like Sir Max Hastings and many others. These allegations have been researched using war diaries but the allegations remain unproven. There has never even been any accusations from the Soviet authorities regarding this claim. Top image: an SS-Untersturmführer interrogate Soviet POWs in Ukraine. Middle image: Waffen-SS officers in a Ukrainian village. Bottom image: troops of the Leibstandarte SS collecting Soviet POWs in Ukraine. Photo by SS-Kriegsberichter Paul Augustin. Credit: Julius Backman. c. Bundesarchiv.