Soviets held U.S. POWS after WWII Yeltsin aide says some Americans still live in Russia
November 12, 1992|By New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — A high-ranking Russian official says that thousands of U.S. prisoners of war captured by the Germans had been transferred to the Soviet Union after World War II and that some were still living in Russia.
The official, Dmitri Volkogonov, a military adviser to President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, told a U.S. Senate committee yesterday that more than 22,000 U.S. soldiers had been taken to the Soviet Union from German prisoner-of-war camps.
The Russian official said most of the U.S. servicemen were returned to the United States shortly after the war, but that 119 U.S. citizens with Russian, Ukranian or Jewish names were kept behind.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-11-12/news/1992317203_1_volkogonov-soviet-union-prison-camps
The number of US PoWs in WW2:
http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/usprisoners_japancomp.htm
Extract: Counting WWII Prisoners of War and Internees
The immense problems of World War II record-keeping in the heat of battle, how POWs and internees are defined, and sometimes unknowable individual circumstances, make an authoritative determination of the precise number of POWs and internees held by Germany and Japan in WWII virtually impossible. In the case of POWs, Charles A. Stenger, formerly with the Veterans Administration (VA), developed a set of figures revised annually since 1976 for POWs and an estimate for current numbers of surviving POWs for the Department of Veterans Affairs Advisory Committee on Former Prisoners of War. According to Dr. Stenger, these figures were compiled in cooperation with the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Archives. They are recognized and used by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and other government agencies. Dr. Stenger lists 27,465 POWs in the Pacific, of whom 11,107 died while in detention. He estimates that 4,477 of the survivors are alive as of January 1, 2003.10
According to Dr. Stenger, figures for civilian internees are less solid. He lists 7,300 American civilians as having been interned by Japan, of whom he estimates 1,969 are alive as of January 1, 2002. He also cites an additional 13,000 Amerasians holding American citizenship who hid during this period, but who were never interned; he estimates that 1,528 of those 13,000 Amerasians are still alive as of January 1, 2002.11 The Office of the Army’s Provost Marshal General, Prisoner of War Division, listed 13,979 American civilian internees (including War, Navy, and Merchant Marine personnel) in its compilation of internees “Formerly Detained by the Japanese Government.”12 The Center for Internee Rights, Inc. (CFIR), an internee advocacy group, calculates that there were 13,996 civilian internees held by Japan, of which the Center calculated 1,497 to be alive as of January 1, 2000.13 According to a January 4, 2002 letter to the editor of the New York Times by Linda Goetz Holmes (see information about her at endnote 41), there are approximately 5,300 surviving U.S. POWs who were held by Japan.14