Nazi leader Adolf Hitler violates the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact by sending German military forces into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone along the Rhine River in western Germany.

In May 1935 France signed a treaty of friendship and mutual support with the USSR. Germany claimed the treaty was hostile to them and Hitler used this as an excuse to send German troops into the Rhineland in March 1936, contrary to the terms of the treaties of Versailles and Locarno.

The treaty was lengthy, and ultimately did not satisfy any nation. The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up territory to Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland, return Alsace and Lorraine to France and cede all of its overseas colonies in China, Pacific and Africa to the Allied nations.

In 1919 the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, which formally ended World War I, in part because President Woodrow Wilson had failed to take senators’ objections to the agreement into consideration. They have made the French treaty subject to the authority of the League, which is not to be tolerated.

On 31 December 2006, Britain made a final payment of about $83m (£45.5m) and thereby discharged the last of its war loans from the US. By the end of World War II Britain had amassed an immense debt of £21 billion.

On Oct. 3, 2010, Germany finally paid off all its debt from World War One. The total? About 269 billion marks, or around 96,000 tons of gold.

These were: the lack of productivity of its war economy, the weak supply lines, the start of a war on two fronts, and the lack of strong leadership. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, using the Blitzkrieg tactic, the German Army marched far into Russia.

Hitler had so far refused to fully mobilise the German economy and so weapons production was inadequate. Even in mid-1941 only 250 new tanks were being built each month, insufficient to properly equip the army on the eve of a major new campaign, or keep up with the inevitable mechanical and combat losses.

World War II

The German 6th Army surrendered in the Battle of Stalingrad, 91,000 of the survivors became prisoners of war raising the number to 170,000 in early 1943. As a result of Operation Bagration and the collapse on the southern part of the Eastern front, the number of German POWs nearly doubled in the second half of 1944.

Six thousand survived, returning to Germany after the war. Of them, 35 are still alive today. We visited ten of these veterans, to trace the memories of the battle in their faces and voices.

Other Losses contends that nearly one million German prisoners died while being held by the United States and French forces at the end of World War II. Specifically, it states: “The victims undoubtedly number over 800,000, almost certainly over 900,000 and quite likely over a million.

Gulag labor crews worked on several massive Soviet endeavors, including the Moscow-Volga Canal, the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Kolyma Highway. Prisoners were given crude, simple tools and no safety equipment. Some workers spent their days cutting down trees or digging at frozen ground with handsaws and pickaxes.

Almost immediately following the death of Stalin, the Soviet establishment took steps in dismantling the Gulag system. The Gulag system ended definitively six years later on 25 January 1960, when the remains of the administration were dissolved by Khrushchev.

Vorkuta Gulag

Surviving Kolyma was more difficult than any other Gulag locale. Prisoners mine gold at Kolyma, the most notorious Gulag camp in extreme northeastern Siberia.

Gulag camps existed throughout the Soviet Union, but the largest camps lay in the most extreme geographical and climatic regions of the country from the Arctic north to the Siberian east and the Central Asian south.

Before the 1950s, camps did not provide dishes, and prisoners ate food from small pots. Portion of hand-made spoon from labor camp Bugutychag, Kolyma, 1930s. Spoons were considered a luxury in the 1930s and 1940s, and most prisoners had to eat with their hands and drink soup out of pots.

The tentative historical consensus is that, of the 18 million people who passed through the gulag system from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million died as a result of their incarceration.

Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerey

One important difference between the GULAG system and the Nazi concentration camps was that a person sentenced to five years of hard labor in a Soviet labor camp could expect, assuming he or she survived, to be released at the end of the sentence.

The exact population of German POWs in World War I is difficult to ascertain because they were housed in the same facilities used to detain civilians of German heritage residing in the United States, but there were known to be 406 German POWs at Fort Douglas and 1,373 at Fort McPherson.

By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, unleashing World War II, there were six concentration camps in the so-called Greater German Reich: Dachau (founded 1933), Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg in northeastern Bavaria near the 1937 Czech border (1938), Mauthausen, near Linz.

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