The Osttruppen?

[Art]

It should be added that the legal norm which made voluntary surrender punishable by law existed long before 1941 - it existed in the Russian Empire actually. Practically in 1941-45 it was all but neglected and was applied, probably, only in few isolated cases.

"Stalin declared that all prisoners of war were traitors" was originally a trope of the Nazi propaganda which used a creative interpretation of the mentioned order No.270 for the own purposes.

[Sheldrake]

Order no. 270, which Stalin himself signed, was never published at the time, but its contents were widely disseminated, read out at meetings that the front-line politruks were forced to call... Henceforth, its order stated, any officer or political officer who removed his distinguishing marks inbattle, retreated to the rear or gave himself up as a prisoner would count as a malicious deserter.

So instead "all POWs were considered traitors" we've got:
1) only officers
2) only those surrendering without fight or deserting from battlefield (and both were criminally punishable actions already before July 1941)
3) were called "deserters", not "traitors"

In reality most POW officers recovered before 1945 simply served for up to three months on positions of enlisted men and after that were restored in their ranks and positions. Most enlisted men were simply returned to military after security screening.

...The order came to mean that anyone whose corpse was lost – which tens of thousands were, shot down over rivers and marshes, blown to pieces or gnawed away by rats – counted as a deserter for the army’s purposes. To go missing in action was a dishonourable fate

That's simply a fantasy. Missing in actions were registered as missing in action, their families received state pensions and other social benefits in the same way as families of killed military personnel.

On 11 May 1945, Stalin signed the order that provided for the establishment of another web of camps in central Europe. There were to be forty-five on the 1st and 2nd Belorussian Fronts alone, each one designed to hold up to 10,000 men. By June, there were sixty-nine camps for special prisoners on Soviet territory and a further seventy-four in Europe.

Not everything called "camp" is a prison camp. These were camps for elementary accommodation and catering of civil and military repatriants.

In all, about1.8 million prisoners like him would end up in the hands of SMERSh

That's the total number of POWs repatriated. "In the hands of SMERSh" can be interpreted rather broadly. All were subject to some sort of security screening, the majority returned home or were called to military, the minority (mostly collaborators) went to filtration camps, which didn't necessarily prosecution either. Even the bulk of rank and file of osttruppen actually ended up with 6 years of settlement in places like Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Hmm I would not look forwards to the sort of security screening SMERSh operatives were famed.

I agree that there are camps and camps, but when you quoted my post you omitted the name of the camp that Garilov was sent to for screening. Did you think referring to Sachsenhausen would bring the wrong connotations?

This is getting OT, and we may just need to agree to differ. However Ivan's War isn't the only account to refer to the unhappy fate of PW returning to the USSR. IRRC Solzenitzyn refers in Gulag Archipelago. One of the female pilots was Soviet citizens taken prisoner by the Germans might have a real fear of what might happenn their return.

[Art]

"Gulag archipelago" hardly makes a better historical source than King Arthur's legends. In 2023 it's better to avoid seeing this book as something more than a historical artifact.

Regarding repatriations of Soviet POWs there is a fundamental work of Zemskov (2016):
http://militera.lib.ru/research/zemskov_vn02/index.html
and a PhD thesis by Latyshev (2017):
https://istina.msu.ru/dissertations/47687498/
also a thematic collections of documents from 2019:
http://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/indexes/values/881490

There were many kinds of various "camps" in 1945. Camps for accommodation of repatriated POWs and civilians on foreign territory, filtration camps for suspected collaborators on Soviet territory, POWs camps. GULag camps. All were different entities. For the bulk of repatriants screening of "filtration" was limited to filling questionnaires and short interviews, those who were selected for filtration camps went through a lengthy investigation which typically lasted for several months or more.

What Soviet POWs feared is another question. Nazi propaganda told them that they would be immediately executed upon return, many could believe in that fully or partly.

[Sheldrake]

"Gulag archipelago" hardly makes a better historical source than King Arthur's legends. In 2023 it's better to avoid seeing this book as something more than a historical artifact.

Regarding repatriations of Soviet POWs there is a fundamental work of Zemskov (2016):
http://militera.lib.ru/research/zemskov_vn02/index.html
and a PhD thesis by Latyshev (2017):
https://istina.msu.ru/dissertations/47687498/
also a thematic collections of documents from 2019:
http://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/indexes/values/881490

There were many kinds of various "camps" in 1945. Camps for accommodation of repatriated POWs and civilians on foreign territory, filtration camps for suspected collaborators on Soviet territory, POWs camps. GULag camps. All were different entities. For the bulk of repatriants screening of "filtration" was limited to filling questionnaires and short interviews, those who were selected for filtration camps went through a lengthy investigation which typically lasted for several months or more.

What Soviet POWs feared is another question. Nazi propaganda told them that they would be immediately executed upon return, many could believe in that fully or partly.

Richard Overy, in Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, gives the figure of 5.5 million soviet soldiers and civilians repatriated to the USSR. He claims that 3 million of them were punished in some way on return and of the other C2.5 million and further 600k were subsequently called in and punished.

Any comment on these numbers?

[Art]

What does punishment mean? Bans on certain jobs or party membership, no awards, dismissal from the military for career officers can be viewed as a sort of discrimination or reprisals of a sort. As far as criminal prosecution is concerned these figures are not true. According to Zemskov about 5.5 million civil displaced persons and POWs were repatriated from beyond 1939 borders starting from the autumn of 1944. By March 1946 3,260 thousand were returned to their homes, 1,056 - called to military, 608 - called to military labor battalions, 340 - went to the NKVD for further filtration, 89 thousand were still at camps and accommodation sites abroad by March 1946. Additionally more than 100,000 repatriants were registered after March 1946.