The German Wehrmacht treated Soviet prisoners of war as "Slavic subhumans." Their lives were considered worthless. Behind the front they were housed in holding and transit camps situated on open fields. Conditions were catastrophic also in the few provisional camps in Germany. By the beginning of 1942, hunger, heat, cold, disease, and executions by gunfire had taken the lives of some two million victims among more than three million prisoners of war.
In expectation of rapid victory, Soviet prisoners of war were initially withheld from forced labour in the German Reich. The authorities feared this would pose a security threat as well as endanger the "purity" of the German people. However, beginning in the summer of 1941 the use of prisoners of war for work deployments began to be practiced on large scale.
Largely at the urging of the mining sector, the prohibition against the use of Russians ("Russeneinsatz") was withdrawn in 1941. From then on, Soviet prisoners of war were often forced to work in mines. The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the Wehrmacht) ordered that they only be deployed in work crews and separate from German workers. After 1942 the mortality rate among Soviet prisoners of war was particularly high, due to arduous working and living conditions.
In the summer of 1942, Karl Schmitt, head of the Wehrmacht mining division in in Liège, Belgium, took a vacation trip with his wife to Berlin. On the way he visited the prisoner of war camp in Zeithain, Saxony. At his request the Soviet prisoners of war were assessed in terms of their physical fitness for work deployment in the German-controlled Belgian mines.