High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Nazi crimes against Soviet Prisoners of War relates to the genocidal policies taken towards the captured soldiers of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. These efforts resulted in some 3.3 to 3.5 million deaths, about 60% of all Soviet POWs. During Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union (USSR), and the subsequent German Soviet War, millions of Red Army prisoners of war were taken. Some of them were arbitrarily executed in the field by the German forces, died under inhuman conditions in German prisoner of war camps and during ruthless death marches from the front lines, or were shipped to Nazi concentration camps for extermination.