[Raellus]

In Fusilier's PbP, the party recently freed a party of about 7-8 NATO POWs from a small Red Army guard detachment not too far from Elblag. The prisoners were put to work maintaining a recently-repaired road bridge over a small river. Seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

I see nothing unrealistic in POWs as being used as labor, especially late in the Twilight War. Armies in 2000 don't have the manpower to maintain the support and logistics infrastructure of modern armies. They're going to use whatever they can get their hands on. I hate to use these examples, but look at how the Soviets, Japanese, and Nazi Germans used prisoners in WWII (think Bridge Over the River Kwai). I think using POWs as labor would be the norm in T2K. The only consideration would be the imprisoning force's ability to feed its prisoners.

Yes, I see small-scale local prisoner exchanges happening from time to time.

Let's say some local partisans nabbed some soldiers from the nearby cantonment. The cantonment is using a few captured partisans to dig a well or something. A prisoner exchange seems perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, if the local cantonment commander has partisans hung, the local partisans will probably do something nasty to its prisoners. The dreaded reprisals cut both ways.

It really depends on the local circumstances and the commanders involved. I'm sure that some commanders are going to have prisoners killed pretty much out of hand. Others might stress that EPWs are cared following the mandates in the Geneva Conventions. In any war, you're going to find humanitarians and sociopaths in the military.

It's worth noting that POWs are a great way to add new PCs to a campaign.