NKVD special camps (German : Speziallager) were NKVD-run late and post-World War II internment camps in the Soviet-occupied parts of Germany from May 1945 to January 6, 1950. They were set up by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) and run by the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). [1] On 8 August 1948, the camps were made subordinate to the Gulag. [2] Because the camp inmates were permitted no contact with the outside world, the special camps were also known as silence camps (German : Schweigelager). [3]
The Soviet occupation authorities did not admit to the existence of the camps until the Western press led the Soviet Union to respond with a moderate propaganda campaign of their own admitting and defending the camps' existence. [4] No inmates were released before 1948. [2] On January 6, 1950, the camps were handed over to the East German government, [2] who tried the remaining detainees. [2] Officially, 157,837 people were detained, including 122,671 Germans and 35,166 citizens of other nations, at least 43,035 of whom did not survive. [2] The actual number of German prisoners was about 30,000 higher. [5]
The NKVD Main Camp Administration (GULAG) controlled the special camps from Moscow. All of the camp commanders were senior Soviet military officers. and the camps were laid out to GULAG camp specifications just as in Siberia or Central Asia. The camps, however, were not slave labor camps attached to factories or collective farms. On the contrary, prisoners were not allowed to work. Strictly speaking they were not death camps such as the Nazi annihilation camps in Poland, but the death rate nevertheless was very high due to malnourishment and disease. [6]
People were arrested because of alleged ties to the Nazis, because they were hindering the establishment of Stalinism, or at random. [7] The legal basis for the arrests was the Beria-order No. 00315 of 18 April 1945, ordering the internment without prior investigation by the Soviet military of "spies, saboteurs, terrorists and active NSDAP members", heads of Nazi organizations, people maintaining "illegal" print and broadcasting devices or weapon deposits, members of the civil administration, and journalists. [8] This was the same type of NKVD order for administrative arrest and deportation to Gulag camps in the Soviet Union used extensively by the Soviet security services where the victims had absolutely no legal recourse. [9]
Inmates were classified "sentenced" or "interned" depending on whether they were tried by a Soviet military tribunal (SMT) or not. [10] A decree [11] issued by the Allied Control Council on 30 October 1946 made a trial prior to internment obligatory, yet in November 1946 only 10% of the inmates were "sentenced", this proportion rose to 55% in early 1950. [10]
Of the "interned", 80% were members of the Nazi Party in early 1945, two thirds in late 1945, and less than half after February 1946. [7] Of the "sentenced", 25% were members of the Nazi Party in 1945, 20% in 1946, 15% in 1947, just above 10% in 1948, and less than 10% since 1949. [7] A significant actual prosecution of Nazi war crimes by the SMT did not take place. [7] Among the alleged Nazis were also boys suspected to be Werwolf members: [12] About 10,000 internees were youths and children, half of whom did not return. [13]
Among the inmates were many supporters or members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which the Soviet authorities sought to suppress, particularly from 1946. [14] When the Social Democratic Party was merged into the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), renamed Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), Social Democrats were interned to ensure Marxist–Leninist dominance in the party. [14] Also, people were interned as "spies" because they were suspected of opposing the authoritarian regime, e.g. for having contacts with organizations based in the Western occupation zones, on the basis of Article 58 of the Soviet penal code dealing with "anti-Soviet activities". [14] In the Bautzen special camp, 66% of the inmates fell into this category. [14]
The Soviet authorities enforced a policy of total isolation of the inmates. A decree of 27 July 1945 reads: "The primary purpose of the special camp is the total isolation of the contingent therein and the prevention of flights", and prohibits all mail and visitors. [15] Another decree of 25 July 1946 confirmed the "total isolation from the outside world" as a primary purpose, and further reads:
[Inmates of special camps] are to be isolated from the society by special measures, they are not to be legally charged, and in contrast to the usual procedure in legal cases, their cases are not to be documented. [16]
No inmate could contact a relative, nor the other way around (with some exceptions in the early stage of the camps). [16] Relatives were not able to retrieve any information and were not even informed of inmate deaths. [17] Exceptions were not made. In one case, the chief of special camp No. 8 asked the supreme chief of the special camps, Colonel Mikhail Sviridov , whether people arrested in their summer clothes were allowed to request winter clothes from their relatives, and pointed out that the situation was very urgent and that some of the inmates did not even have shoes. Sviridov forbade contact. [17]
In late 1947 the inmates were allowed limited access to Communist newspapers, which represented their first contact with the outside world since their arrests. [18]
A first 27,749 were released mid-1948 after a revision of 43,853 cases by a joint commission of SMAD, MGB and MVD (the successor of the NKVD). [2] Among the released were primarily people whose arrest was based on a suspected Nazi background, which was found to be of low significance by the commission. [2]
The total number of detainees and deaths is uncertain. In 1990 the Soviet Ministry for the Interior released numbers, which were based upon a collection of data compiled after the dissolution of the camps by the last head of its administration in 1950. According to these numbers, 122,671 Germans, 34,706 citizens of the Soviet Union, and 460 foreign citizens had been received. While 40,244 detainees were deported to the Soviet Union, 45,635 were released, 786 were shot and 43,035 died. 6,680 Germans were turned over to POW camps, 128 inmates managed to escape. 14,202 German detainees were handed over to the East German Ministry of the Interior. [19] A critical examination of the data by Natalja Jeske concluded that approximately 30,000 more Germans were detained in the special camps than officially acknowledged. [5] The official number of deaths is nonetheless considered to be accurate. Older estimates, according to which 65,000 to 130,000 or between 50,000 and 80,000 interned persons had died, are too high. [20] Most people died from starvation and diseases. The death rate was particularly high from the end of 1946 to early 1947, when the already low food rations had been reduced further. The food rations for detainees did not differ significantly from the food rations in the Soviet occupation zone in general, but the prisoners were cut off from the black market. [21]
Among the dead were an estimated 12,000 discovered in 1990 in mass graves near the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Six thousand of the captives in Sachsenhausen were German officers sent there from Western Allied camps. [22] The major causes of death of the prisoners were starvation, disease, particularly tuberculosis and dysentery or torture and execution. Their health was completely neglected. [23]
A total of ten camps existed, set up in former Nazi concentration camps, former stalags, barracks, or prisons.
In addition, numerous prisons were either directly assigned to or seized by the NKVD. [10]
Numerous prisons and filtration camps were set prior to May 1945, in an area that is today Poland and Russia, Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. The Soviet forces detained German civilians in the regions they conquered in early 1945. Some were sent for Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union and others transferred to the NKVD special camps in occupied Germany after May 1945. These temporary prisons and camps were set up according to the same Beria-doctrine as their counterparts west of the Oder-Neisse line. [24] Almost the complete male German population remaining east of Oder and Neisse, numbering several tens of thousands, was arrested as "Hitlerites" by the NKVD. [25] Only very few actual Nazis were among them. [25]
According to records from the Soviet archives by early May 1945 215,540 persons were interned by the Red Army on the territory of present-day Poland: 138,200 Germans, 36,660 Poles,27,880 USSR citizens and 10,800 from other countries. Amongst the 215,540 detained 148,540 were sent to the USSR, 62,000 were held in prisons in the battle area and 5,000 died [26]
As of 10 May 1945, there were NKVD camps in what is today Poland and Russia
NKVD prisons in
and NKVD camps as well as NKVD prisons in
An additional NKVD prison was in Slovak Ružomberok. [27] [28]
A couple of weeks after the war had come to an end, the prisoners were subsequently transferred to the Soviet Occupation Zone. [29] While immediately after the Soviet occupation of that zone some people detained west of the Oder-Neisse line were transferred to Landsberg east of that line, inmates from camps east of the line who had not been deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor were transferred to camps west of the line following the Potsdam agreement. [30]
While the abovementioned camps and prisons were all listed in attachment 1 to the Beria-doctrine 00461, signed by Beria's substitute Tshernyshow, there were other camps not included in this list. [28] Already on 15 December 1944, Beria had reported to Stalin and Molotov that
These were all the people holding German citizenship remaining in these countries. [31]
Additional NKVD camps in Poland, which were likewise not listed in the Beria-doctrine 00461, are known from Polish sources. [32] These camps included
and others. [32]
The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided on 28 September 1949 to hand the camps over to the authorities of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), that was about to be formed from the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. [2] The East German republic was officially founded on 7 October 1949. On 6 January 1950, Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov ordered [33] the handing over to the East German Ministry of Internal Affairs of 10,513 inmates for further detention and of 3,500 for trial. [2]
These trials were the so-called Waldheim trials (German : Waldheimer Prozesse) - a series of show-trials. They took place in Waldheim prison in Saxony and handed down previously prepared and overly long sentences. [2] The trials often lasted only a few minutes, and took place behind closed doors. The judges refused to admit evidence for the accused. The sentences were based on the original NKVD arrest protocols, which often involved torture. By June 1950 over 3,000 had been condemned to various additional prison sentences. Many of the convicted had already spent over four years interned in the special camps, and more than half were emaciated and sick. The Waldheim trials introduced the vigorous use of the judicial system as an instrument of political repression of all dissident elements in the GDR. [34] Many of these sentences were revised in 1952. [2] Before the hand-over, a number of inmates were deported to Siberia - their fate remains unknown as of 2015. [13]
The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й", but the full official name of the agency changed several times.
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Werwolf was a Nazi plan which began development in 1944, to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany in parallel with the Wehrmacht fighting in front of the lines. There is some argument that the plan, and subsequent reports of guerrilla activities, were created by Joseph Goebbels through propaganda disseminated in the waning weeks of the war through his "Radio Werwolf", something that was not connected in any way with the military unit.
Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to prosecute those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. It was revised several times. In particular, its Article 58-1 was updated by the listed sub-articles and put in force on 8 June 1934.
The Soviet occupation zone in Germany was an area of Germany that was occupied by the Soviet Union as a communist area, established as a result of the Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945. On 7 October 1949 the German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly referred to in English as East Germany, was established in the Soviet occupation zone.
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners throughout World War II. Prominent prisoners included Joseph Stalin's oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; assassin Herschel Grynszpan; Paul Reynaud, the penultimate prime minister of the French Third Republic; Francisco Largo Caballero, prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War; the wife and children of the crown prince of Bavaria; Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera; and several enemy soldiers and political dissidents.
Joachim Hoffmann was a German historian who was the academic director of the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office.
Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union was considered by the Soviet Union to be part of German war reparations for the damage inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union during the Axis-Soviet campaigns (1941–1945) of World War II. Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor. German prisoners of war were also used as a source of forced labor during and after the war by the Soviet Union and by the Western Allies.
Boris Meissner was a German lawyer and social scientist, specializing in Soviet studies, international law and Eastern European history and politics.
The Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees was an NKVD department in charge of handling of foreign civilian internees and prisoners of war (POWs) in the Soviet Union during and in the aftermath of World War II (1939–1953).
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 POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956. According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht POWs died in NKVD camps. A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity. According to German historian Rüdiger Overmans ca. 3,000,000 POWs were taken by the USSR; he put the "maximum" number of German POW deaths in Soviet hands at 1.0 million. Based on his research, Overmans believes that the deaths of 363,000 POWs in Soviet captivity can be confirmed by the files of Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt), and additionally maintains that "It seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that 700,000 German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody."
NKVD special camp Nr. 2 was an NKVD special camp located at the site of the former Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp.
NKVD special camp Nr. 7 was a NKVD special camp that operated in Weesow until August 1945 and in Sachsenhausen from August 1945 until the spring of 1950. It was used by the Soviet occupying forces to detain those viewed as enemies of the people by the Soviet regime.
The NKVD Special Camp No. 1 was a special camp operated by the NKVD from 1945 to 1948, during the Soviet occupation of parts of Germany. It was located 4 km to the east of Mühlberg, Brandenburg using the shacks of the former German run prisoners-of-war camp Stalag IV-B. The prisoners mainly consisted of members of the lower and medium ranks of the Nazi Party, German military personnel, youth wrongly accused of belonging to the German Werwolf resistance, and other persons who were regarded by the Soviets as being potentially dangerous like journalists, teachers, policemen, farmers, factory owners and politicians in addition to several arbitrarily accused people. Conditions in the camp were characterized by bad sanitary conditions, malnutrition and lack of basic medical service. The camp had over 21,800 prisoners during its existence, including 1,490 women and over 1,300 teenagers. At most, it held 12,000 prisoners at a time.
Hermann Christian Wilhelm von Strantz was a Prussian officer, and later General of Infantry during World War I. He was a recipient of Pour le Mérite.
The Democratic Bloc of Parties and Mass Organisations was a national popular front of political parties and organizations in Soviet-occupied East Germany and the first years of the German Democratic Republic.
Mass surveillance in East Germany was a widespread practice throughout the country's history, involving Soviet, East German, and Western agencies.
Bruno Kaiser was a Marxist scholar of German studies who became a journalist and, during the Nazi period, a resistance activist. In his later years he became, in addition, a distinguished librarian.
From the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet policy—intended to discourage defection—advertised that any soldier who had fallen into enemy hands, or simply encircled without capture, was guilty of high treason and subject to execution, confiscation of property, and reprisal against their families. Issued in August 1941, Order No. 270 classified all commanders and political officers who surrendered as culpable deserters to be summarily executed and their families arrested. Sometimes Red Army soldiers were told that the families of defectors would be shot; although thousands were arrested, it is unknown if any such executions were carried out. As the war continued, Soviet leaders realized that most Soviet citizens had not voluntarily collaborated. In November 1944, the State Defense Committee decided that freed prisoners of war would be returned to the army while those who served in German military units or police would be handed over to the NKVD. At the Yalta Conference, the Western Allies agreed to repatriate Soviet citizens regardless of their wishes. The Soviet regime set up many NKVD filtration camps, hospitals, and recuperation centers for freed prisoners of war, where most stayed for an average of one or two months. These filtration camps were intended to separate out the minority of voluntary collaborators, but were not very effective.
NKVD screening and filtration camps, originally known as NKVD special-purpose camps / NKVD special camps, were camps for the screening of the Soviet soldiers returned from enemy occupied territories, enemy imprisonment, or enemy encirclement. There was concern among Soviet leaders that citizens that had been outside the supervision of the government and security services may need screening to ensure their political loyalty.