Prisoner of War at Siemens
As of autumn 1941, millions of Soviet prisoners of war had to perform forced labour in Germany. The conditions were very bad: There was not enough food, inadequate care for the sick, and most of the prisoners were assigned to hard labour in agriculture and industry. Siemens began ״employing״ Soviet prisoners of war in 1942. One of them was Petr Fedorovich Didenko, who was around twenty years old at the time. He was deported to the German Reich in late 1942 and transported to a camp in Berlin-Tiergarten as prisoner number 47055. He worked for more than two years for Siemens in the cable factory. He was forced to do unskilled labour in 12-hour shifts alongside a German worker. He described the discipline during the work as brutal and arbitrary. Didenko survived the forced labour and was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. He was deployed as a soldier in Germany for another year. Back in the Soviet Union, he helped rebuild his war-ravaged country. As a consequence of his traumatic experiences as a prisoner of war, he retired early as an invalid. His date of birth and death are not known.
