This probably doesn’t come as a surprise , but a declassified U.S. report from 1993 says that thousands of South Korean POWs captured during the Korean War were sent to the Soviet Union [Chosun Ilbo, English] and never repatriated:
According to the report, the former North Korean officer Kan San Kho stated in November 1992 that he assisted in the transfer of thousands of South Korean POWs into 300 to 400 camps in the Soviet Union, most in the taiga but some in Central Asia as well. Already in May 1953, Zygmunt Nagorski, a reporter with the magazine Esquire, covered the transfer of South Korean POWs and their life in the Soviet Union in an in-depth report based on testimony from two agents of the Russian Interior Ministry and an employee of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
According to the report, Uncle Joe suggested that the communists hold on to some 20 percent of UN POWs captured:
According to the 1993 report, “The exploitation of POWs as Soviet state policy was blatantly contained in the minutes of a Sept. 19, 1952 meeting between Stalin and Chinese Foreign Minister Chou en-lai in which he recommended that the Communists keep back 20 percent of United Nations POWs as hostages.” The POWs sent to the Chukotsk Peninsula [Wikipedia], apparently at least 12,000 of them, “were used to build roads, electric power plants, and airfields. There was a high mortality rate among all these prisoners.”
What’s more, according to a CIA document from Aug. 8, 1951, an independence activist/politician by the name of Park (1906~?), who was awarded in absentia the Independence Medal in 1990, was NOT kidnapped by North Korean troops [Hanguk Ilbo, Korean] during their occupation of Seoul as previously believed. In fact, he led North Korean troops on a kidnapping spree in September 1950 to bring some 4,600 leading South Korean figures to the North (executions and escapes along the way reduced the number to about 3,000), including independence activists and politicians Kim Kyu-shik [Wikipedia], Ahn Jae-hong [Doosan Encyclopedia, Korean] and novelist Lee Gwang-su [Doosan Encyclopedia, Korean].
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It seems a bit odd that thousands of POWs would have altogether disappeared in Soviet Union. The Gulag system was being dismantled after the Korean War ended, and even the last German (and Finnish) POWs who were alived were allowed to return home at around ‘56. Conditions in the Soviet camps were sure horrible, but I don’t think its likely that none would have survived until the demise of Soviet Union.
Wow. Just wow. To both bits of news: the ROK POWs and this Mr. Park character. Wow.
Weren’t the Soviets suspected of also keeping some Allied troops - prisoners they “liberated” from the Germans plus other guys caught behind their lines - after WWII? I seem to recall reading about an American being “discovered” living in the Ukraine in the early 1990s. He’d been there since 1945! Anyway, the notion of South Korean troops finding themselves in the USSR doesn’t shock me, but I don’t know if 12 000 would be an accurate number.
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[...] brings me to this post by The Marmot, telling the sad story of yet another North Korean violation of the 1953 Armistice. We now [...]