The Soviets returned the favor. They kept THOUSANDS of German prisoners for more than 10 years after the war. They used them for labor... building chemical plants, factories... even the subway system in Moscow.
To Stalin, the German soldiers were criminals; vandals who invaded his country and destroyed it. They were more or less under a criminal sentence in his gulag. It took his death and a special visit to Moscow by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1955 to get them released. Of the 85,000 German POW’s at Stalingrad, only 5,000 returned home. You will note that neither Wilhelm Pieck nor Walther Ulbricht of what became the DDR went to Moscow to secure the release of their fellow countrymen.
As for the Soviet POW’s, I cannot imagine a more grim fate than to be a Jewish soldier in the Red Army who fell into German capitivity.
I have always been fascinated by the “War in the East” and its aftermath. Most Americans only have a superficial understanding of this aspect of World War 2, but the bitter brutal struggle between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union was really the hub of the war; all of the other conflicts basically revolved around what happened on the “Eastern Front.”