Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POW were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all had been released. In 1956 the last surviving German POW returned home from the USSR. According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht POW died in NKVD camps (356,700 German nationals and 24,367 from other nations). German estimates put the actual death toll of German POW in the USSR at about 1.0 million. They maintain that among those reported as missing were men who actually died as POW.