Who is not aware of this detective story, I send to the book by Igor Ivanovich Ivlev "And in response to silence", which can be found on the Web for free
Among other things, it discusses the issue of mass disappearance from the military enlistment offices of the USSR of personal files of an ordinary and non-commissioned officers gone to the WWII front. It is customary to assume that they were not. It has now been proven that they were, according to I.I. Ivlev, they were sent to TsAMO RF in the late 1940s and early 1950s, where they disappeared...
There are many questions - what did these cases look like? Some of these cases were discovered in one of the military registration and enlistment offices of the Arkhangelsk region during the work of the search group of I.I. Ivlev there. If the cases were sent to Podolsk, then HOW was such a huge piece of paper destroyed? How were pension accruals carried out without these cases?
The cases of the Krasno-Pekhorsky RVC (the military registration and enlistment office of the Krasno-Pekhorsky (Kalinin) district that was disbanded in 1957, most of the territory of which became part of the Podolsky district of the Moscow Region) that I found in the Podolsk OVK MO) are precisely personal files, but pay attention - these personal files were conducted right up to 1947 and contained a large amount of information related to the pension support of the families of dead servicemen.
This is a rare find! I worked in many military registration and enlistment offices and have never seen such personal files there, but here a small pile of such files was accidentally preserved in the Podolsk military registration and enlistment office ..
Sergeant Mezin was killed on November 14, 1942. Please note that the military enlistment office informs about this not a military unit, but the financial department of the Moscow Regional Military Enlistment Office. Notice dated 12/10/1942
The military registration and enlistment office writes out such notices - at the top with a tear-off spine. And below. How they differ from each other is not clear. Date 22 12 1942
The soldier died, the pension is calculated.
Estimated pension. 1942
The soldier died, his wife no longer lives at the old address.
a href="http://gallery.ru/watch?ph=bcaV-gczBA" target="_blank">
Mezina's wife, Zenaida Evgenevna, works as a police officer, no children, lives alone in a house of 73 sq.
Moreover, along with the funeral, they immediately receive a notice for the issuance of a pension. True, relatives also had to be looked for.
Separately, the military registration and enlistment office decides for whom the pension is issued.
An interesting thing is an extract from the order of the Main Directorate of Formation and Staffing for SERGEANT. In the OBD, such orders are given only for officers ... it turns out that such orders were for sergeants and privates? For all 20 million? Where are they? Very interesting.
Conclusion: it is clear that there were millions of such cases ... they could greatly help in establishing the fate of military personnel and, in fact, they belong to the OBD. Where are they? Maybe in the archives of the Social Security or regional pension funds??
In the 1990s, a number of documents Soviet era, previously classified as "top secret", began to be made public, however, realizing it, the authorities again closed access to them. Apparently, many secrets of the USSR will remain inaccessible.
Labeled "Top Secret"
The secrecy stamp is imposed for two reasons. First and foremost, most of the documents stored in the archives are state secrets. The second reason has to do with materials related to famous people past, whose heirs do not want publicity of the details of their lives.
In 1918, something happened that today does not allow us to in full get acquainted with the documents of the Soviet past. That year, Lenin received a message in which he was informed how the Red Army soldiers indiscriminately destroyed manuscripts and correspondence. famous writers. The leader immediately called the publicist Bonch-Bruevich with a request to write a pamphlet entitled "Keep the archives." The brochure, which has sold 50,000 copies, has borne fruit.
However, very soon, Soviet officials realized that it was important not only to preserve the archives, but also to restrict access to them by ordinary citizens due to the confidentiality of information contained in some sources.
In 1938, the management of all archival affairs was transferred to the NKVD of the USSR, which classified a huge amount of information, numbering tens of thousands of files. Since 1946, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR received the powers of this department, and since 1995 - the FSB of Russia. Since 2016, all archives have been reassigned directly to the President of Russia.
Stalin's affairs
Despite the fact that many documents from the Stalin era have long been declassified, some of them are still hidden away from prying eyes in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. In particular, about 200 cases from the Stalin fund are classified as secret. Of considerable interest to researchers are the cases of Yezhov and Beria, which were published only in parts, and complete information on the cases of executioners who have become enemies of the people, there are still no.
Today, many Russians are requesting investigation files of illegally repressed citizens kept in the archives of the FSB and in the GARF. Access to investigation cases repressed is allowed by law for relatives, as well as for other interested persons. True, the latter can receive the required documents only after the expiration of the 75-year period from the date of the verdict. Often visitors to the archives receive defective copies, in particular, with the names of NKVD officers blacked out.
Some researchers are sure that the cases of the NKVD will never be declassified in full. In March 2014, the interdepartmental Commission for the Protection of State Secrets extended the secrecy period for documents of the Cheka-KGB for 1917-1991 for the next 30 years. This decision also affected a large array of documents relating to the Great Terror of 1937-1938, which were extremely in demand by historians and relatives of the victims of repression.
WWII Archives
Many secrets today still hide the period of the Great Patriotic War. For example, there is still no consolidated work on the operations of the Red Army during the war years with the application of maps in the public domain. Since the release in 1998 of the collection of archival materials "1941", new authentic documents have been published in a very dosed manner. Moreover, researchers do not even have the right to look at the names of cases in the inventories of secret storage.
Historian Igor Ievlev remarks on this: “Apparently, the researchers have already approached the barrier, beyond which, if it is overcome, completely uncomfortable and, probably, even shameful and shameful pages can be opened. real history country".
Also, modern historians cannot get acquainted with the original documents accounting for the number of those called up and mobilized in war time and are still compelled to base themselves on data from the preserved books of conscription, a secondary source. Unfortunately, the draft cards of recruits, the registration cards of the reserve and enlisted personnel of the Red Army, were almost all destroyed.
Not so long ago, on the forum of one of the sites dedicated to the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, one of the readers shared interesting information. According to him, in one of the conversations former employee The military registration and enlistment office told him a long story about the total destruction in 1953 after the death of Stalin of all records and service records and other primary documents for enlisted personnel from pre-war times until the end of the war.
What is the reason for the desire of the leadership of the USSR to hide data relating to mobilization on the eve and during the Second World War? Researchers are sure: in order to hide the real losses of the USSR in the first months of the war.
KGB Archives
The KGB in the USSR, like the CIA in the United States, is an intelligence service that, during its existence, has carried out a huge number of covert operations around the world. Any state security officer will attest that KGB business papers are rarely declassified in original form. They are preliminarily “cleaned out”, removing information that the department does not want to make public for one reason or another.
Almost all the secrets of the Soviet special services known today were published in London in 1996 thanks to former employee Vasily Mitrokhin of the archive department of the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR.
The published materials contain information that could hardly be published in Russia in the foreseeable future. In particular, it was exposed to the public how, between 1959 and 1972, the KGB collected information about American power plants, dams, oil pipelines and other infrastructure in preparation for an operation that could lead to a disruption in the power supply to all of New York.
It contains information detailing the KGB's plans to covertly acquire three American banks in Northern California as part of a covert operation designed to obtain intelligence about high-tech companies in the region. The banks were not chosen by chance, since all of them had previously provided loans to corporations of interest to the KGB. The figurehead in whose name the banks were bought was supposed to be a Singaporean businessman, but the American intelligence services managed to figure out the plans of the KGB.
Even these two facts are enough to understand why the KGB carefully guards its secrets.
Completely personal
Many personal funds related to the life of famous people are also closed to the general public. A lot of things that should not be known are hidden in Stalin's personal archive. But at least the names of these materials are known. There are, in particular, Stalin's outgoing cipher telegrams for the period of the 1930s, the correspondence of the Secretary General with the USSR People's Commissariat of Defense and the USSR Ministry of the Armed Forces for the 1920-1950s, letters from citizens and foreigners addressed to Stalin, documents about Molotov's trip to London and Washington in 1942
In addition, we will probably never know the details of the personal lives of Marina Vladi and Vladimir Vysotsky. Former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov will not reveal state secrets to us, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn will not tell us about his innermost thoughts. Personal archives of public figures are most often closed from public access by their heirs.
For example, the personal fund of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, is in the closed access, because the heir - the wife of the writer Natalya Dmitrievna - decides for herself whether to make the documents public or not. She justified her decision by the fact that Solzhenitsyn's poems are often found in documents, which are not particularly good, and she would not want others to know about it.
Difficulties of declassification
In 1991, the archive of the President was formed Russian Federation, which combines documents from the former archive of the President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, and later the first President of Russia Boris Yeltsin. During the first 10 years of the foundation's existence, many materials were declassified, but in the early 2000s this process was suspended, and the documents that had already been made public were classified again.
Andrey Artizov, the head of the Russian Archive, noted in one of his interviews: “We are declassifying documents in accordance with our national interests. There is a declassification plan. To make a decision on declassification, three or four experts with knowledge of foreign languages are needed, historical context, legislation on state secrets”.
What are the leaders of the country afraid of declassifying documents, many of which have already crossed the half-century mark? Researchers call whole line reasons: Among them, for example, is the very difficult issue of cooperation between the USSR and Nazi Germany on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, reflected in numerous documents.
Among other reasons are given: the real scale of the repressions of the Stalinist authorities against their people; destabilization of the world situation by the USSR; facts that destroy the myth of economic aid from the USSR to other states; squandering public funds on bribing governments of third world countries in order to obtain support from the UN.
In fact, all prohibited materials can be summarized in two main categories: documents that cast the Soviet regime in an extremely negative light, and documents that in any way relate to the ancestors contemporary politicians, about which I would like to remain silent. This is understandable, since both can seriously undermine the reputation modern Russia- the successor of the USSR - in the eyes of the whole world.
In the last decade, the number of litigation related to the protection of the rights of military personnel has increased significantly, which is explained, firstly, by the rather big amount violations of the rights of the military on the part of the command, and secondly, the unskilled work of personnel officers. Military personnel, despite being more dependent on their own leadership than civilian employees, are increasingly challenging the actions of personnel authorities in court due to incorrectly drawn up documents, which leads to a violation of the rights and legitimate interests of military personnel.
The personal file of a serviceman is the main document of personal records, which is maintained both for citizens called up for military service and for military personnel undergoing military service under a contract.
In accordance with the Federal Law of March 28, 1998 N 53-FZ "On Military Duty and Military Service", information about military personnel is entered into their personal files and military records, the maintenance and storage of which are carried out in the manner established by legislative and other regulatory legal acts of the Russian Federation<1>.
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<1>
the federal law establishes the following list of information that should contain the personal files of military personnel:
- surname, name and patronymic;
- Date of Birth;
- place of residence and place of stay;
- marital status;
- education;
- place of work;
- fitness for military service for health reasons;
- professional suitability for training in military registration specialties and for military service in military positions;
- basic anthropometric data;
- military service or alternative civilian service;
- passing military training;
- possession foreign languages;
- the presence of military registration and civilian specialties;
- the presence of a sports category of a candidate for master of sports, the first sports category or sports title;
- initiation or termination of a criminal case against a citizen;
- having a criminal record;
- reservation of a citizen who is in reserve, for an authority state power, local government or organization for the period of mobilization and in wartime<2>.
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<2>Federal Law of March 28, 1998 N 53-FZ "On military duty and military service" (as amended on December 8, 2011 N 424-FZ) // SZ RF. 2011. N 50. Art. 7366.
The procedure for the formation and maintenance of the personal file of a conscript is defined in the Instructions for the preparation and conduct of activities related to the conscription of citizens of the Russian Federation who are not in the reserve (2007)<3>.
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<3>Order of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation of October 2, 2007 N 400 "On measures to implement the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of November 11, 2006 N 663" (as amended on January 19, 2011; June 29, 2012) // Russian newspaper. 2007. No. 284.
A personal file is opened for a citizen subject to conscription for military service, upon initial registration with the military. Cases are formed on paper and in in electronic format and are stored as a database of personal records of conscripts.
Personal files are placed in the card index and in the archive of the military commissariat. Access to personal files or the database is strictly limited.
The issuance of personal files into the hands of conscripts or their relatives, their expulsion to medical institutions and other organizations is not allowed. If necessary and if there is a corresponding request, the organization can be sent duplicates of personal files certified by the military commissar or extracts from them. Storage of personal files outside the filing cabinet or archive is not allowed. For work during the working day, personal files are issued to performers against receipt.
The personal files of conscripts are maintained by certain officials in compliance with the requirements of the Federal Law "On Personal Data"<4>.
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<4>Federal Law of July 27, 2006 N 152-FZ "On Personal Data" // SZ RF. 2006. N 31. Part 1. Art. 3451.
Files are filled in with ink or ballpoint pen. Entries identifying the address of the place of residence of the conscript or his relatives are made with the indication of the postal code. Entries in the personal file are clarified and, if necessary, corrected each time the conscript arrives at the military commissariat. According to changes in the recruit's registration card, changes are made to the personal record database.
A file of personal files is formed after checking the compliance of the presence of personal files of conscripts with the data of registration and alphabet books before compiling an annual report on the conscription of citizens for military service.
In each section of the card index, in accordance with its structure, an inventory of the personal files of conscripts is compiled, in which their number is marked with a pencil. In column 9 of the alphabetical book, a pencil is made to record the location of a personal file in one or another section of the card index, and also indicates the expected term for calling a citizen to the draft board. In this column, after the transfer of a citizen to the reserve or removal from military registration for various reasons, the entry is made in ink or a ballpoint pen.
The personal files of each category of persons in the corresponding section of the card index are distributed by year of birth, and in them - alphabetically and are stored in equipped cabinets that ensure the safety of documents.
The composition of the documents and the maintenance of the personal files of military personnel undergoing military service under the contract are established by several regulatory legal acts.
In accordance with the Regulations on the procedure for passing military service, the first copy of the contract for military service after its entry into force is attached to the personal file of the serviceman who has concluded the contract, and the second is handed over to the serviceman.<5>.
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<5>Regulations on the procedure for military service, approved. Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of September 16, 1999 N 1237 "Issues of military service" (as amended by Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of July 12, 2012 N 980) // SZ RF. 2012. N 29. Art. 4075.
The procedure for maintaining the personal files of contract servicemen is carried out in accordance with the requirements of the Manual on accounting for personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, approved by Order of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation of December 19, 2005 N 085<6>. In accordance with it, in addition to the contract, the following documents are placed in the personal file:
- order of the corresponding military official on appointment to the position;
- achievement list;
- autobiography;
- Photo;
- attestation and additional materials;
- a card on access to information constituting a state secret;
- documents characterizing the serviceman (questionnaire, copies of documents on education);
- documents on retraining, advanced training, length of military service, etc.
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<6>Reference book personnel work in military organizations: Practical edition / Astakhov A.A. Series "Law in the Armed Forces - Consultant". M .: "For the rights of military personnel", 2009. Issue. 98. S. 180.
Changes in the list of attestation and additional materials of a personal file are determined by the instructions of the Main Directorate of Personnel of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
Personal files are first compiled in military educational institutions in two copies simultaneously with the preparation of submissions for the assignment of the first officer rank to cadets.
The personal files of ensigns are drawn up in one copy.
If enrollment in ensigns (warrant officers) comes from among sergeants and soldiers undergoing military service, then a personal file is opened in a military unit. For candidates entering military service under a contract for military positions of ensigns from among those liable for military service - in the military commissariat.
When ensigns are awarded the first officer ranks, their personal files are not redrawn and are kept at their place of service. For the personnel body of the appointing authority, a second copy of the personal file is drawn up.
Personal files are kept by officials of personnel departments of military command and control bodies, military units and organizations, military commissariats, which are entrusted with the work of maintaining records. They are personally responsible for the correctness of the information recorded in personal files.
All documents of the personal file are filed in the cover of the established sample by sections. The service record, which is the main document of the personal file, and autobiographies are filed at the beginning of the personal file in all copies.
Sheets of documents filed in a personal file are not numbered. In each section of the personal file, internal inventories are kept, in which the names of all documents filed or attached to the case, the dates of their compilation and the number of sheets are recorded. Previously compiled inventories of documents are not subject to re-compilation and are not certified during transmission.
Withdrawal from the personal file of individual documents is carried out only with the permission of the commander of the military unit or the head of the personnel body. About seized documents in the internal inventory of the relevant section, a record is made about when the document was seized, where and under what outgoing number it was sent, or where it was filed after the seizure. If the seized document is destroyed, the number and date of the act of destruction shall be indicated. The record of the seizure of documents is certified by the signature of the chief of staff of the military unit or the head of the personnel body and the official seal.
Documents filed in a personal file and their copies in the hands of military personnel are not issued. Compiled track records are maintained throughout the service of military personnel.
For mutual verification of the completeness and correctness of the credentials, a reconciliation of personal files conducted in military units at the place of service is carried out with the personal files of personnel bodies. The terms and procedure for reconciliation of personal files are established by the heads of the relevant personnel bodies as necessary, but at least once every two years.
A personal file, upon official request, may be sent to another body of military command, military unit or organization for familiarization with its materials when resolving issues of transferring a serviceman to a new duty station. When a decision is made to transfer a serviceman, his personal file is sent to the appropriate personnel agency.
For servicemen undergoing military service under a contract, transferred from the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation to other federal executive bodies, which provide for military service, and vice versa, personal files are again compiled, which, upon completion, are assigned the stamp "Secret". The old track records that were maintained for these servicemen in other federal executive bodies are filed in the section " Additional materials"The first copy of the personal file.
Summing up, we can state the existence of a special procedure for the formation and maintenance of personal files of military personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, which is established by military legislation and regulatory legal acts of the military department.
L.D. Shapovalova
K. i. n.,
Associate Professor, Russian State University for the Humanities
“It is difficult to write about secret documents precisely because of their secrecy,” writes rambler.ru. “No one, except for those initiated into state secrets, knows what they contain. At best, one can only roughly enumerate those cases that may relate secret materials.
Remain inaccessible to researchers many documents related to the activities supreme bodies state power of the USSR in the 1930s-1980s, especially during the Second World War. Until 2044, the archives of the NKVD relating to the Great Terror of the 1930s are classified, so that the truth about this tragic time will be revealed, at best, to the children of living researchers. What in the Soviet past can so discredit the present Russian state if it is brought to light?"
The authors of the material note that these are only their assumptions, since it is not known whether such events really took place, and if so, on what scale, and whether the documents testifying to them have been preserved. But the assumptions are not taken from the ceiling, but are based on indirect data given in publications that appear from time to time.
These can be, for example, documents on the mechanisms for organizing and carrying out the mass "Red Terror" during the Civil War, the origin of the Bolsheviks' funds during the revolution and their true ties with Germany, which was hostile in those years, about the secret negotiations of the Soviet leadership both with Germany and and with the Entente, with the financial circles of the West, about all the circumstances of the conclusion Brest Peace and the role of specific individuals in its conclusion, the cooperation of the Bolsheviks with the Islamists in the East, the use of prisoners of war and military advisers from Germany and Austria-Hungary in the creation of the Red Army, the role of the institution of hostages in forcing "bourgeois specialists" to work for Soviet power, about the total genocide of the "bourgeoisie" in Petrograd in 1918, about the suppression popular uprisings in 1918-1921 and all the circumstances of the famine in the Volga region in 1921-1922, about the genocide of the Cossacks.
"The fate of some national minorities is also incomprehensible - for example, historians do not know for certain where after civil war almost half a million Chinese who lived in Russia have gone, the material notes. - Until now, only local archives and indirect publications can judge the scale of popular resistance to collectivization and measures to suppress it, in which units of the regular Red Army were involved, including military aviation and chemical troops. The scale of military cooperation between the Red Army and the German Reichswehr in 1922-1935 is only partially disclosed.
Also, the scale of sales abroad is still unknown. Soviet government cultural values from private collections, churches and museums confiscated during the revolution. Until now, all documents on the Holodomor in the early 1930s have not been declassified, and not only in Ukraine, but also in southern Russia, in Kazakhstan and other regions.
“Regarding the period of World War II, declassification of plans for an offensive war against Germany, for dividing the world into spheres of influence, in relation to neighboring states, can cause obvious damage to the state,” the article notes. “Historians suspect a taboo on the publication of genuine data on the losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic war It is obvious that if in fact there was an order from Stalin to evict in one day all the invalids of the Great Patriotic War from major cities, then the documents testifying to this will never be made public in our state. The seal of secrecy will obviously remain indelibly on all Soviet plans for a war with the United States after 1945, on many documents relating to foreign policy of this period."
As for the post-war times closer to us, documents on the scale of gratuitous assistance from the USSR to the countries of the Third World and the composition of such assistance, about the war in Afghanistan and about biomedical experiments on living people, which may were held in the USSR. Although it is precisely the classification of such documents that gives rise to monstrous rumors about the secrets that are hidden in them. And these rumors often cause even more damage to the prestige of the state than possible discovery archives.
"I remember how stubbornly Gorbachev denied the existence of secret annexes to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and documents on the Katyn massacre, writes tverdyi-znak in his LiveJournal. - But they were in the archives, and Gorbachev was well aware of their existence. And he was silent."
AiF.ru continues to publish interviews with Research Fellow of the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO) Anton Migai. The expert spoke about how Soviet troops during the Great Patriotic War, a record was kept of the dead and missing, as well as how work is now being done to clarify these data.
According to German data, about 5 million Soviet citizens were taken prisoner during the war, but the data could be restored only about a small part of the prisoners - about a million people. In the second part of the interview, the expert spoke about why not all data on Soviet prisoners of war in German camps was published or available to specialists, as well as how the Nazis kept records of prisoners and when all the data from these archives would be declassified.
Vladimir Shushkin, AiF.ru: What happened if our fighter was taken prisoner? Did our part record him as retired?
Anton Migay: Missing. If someone saw that he raised his hands, ran away to the territory of the enemy, then they write "surrendered". Well, basically, of course, it was recorded as "missing." Further we turn to the German archives. A soldier was recorded in the list of prisoners ...
Transportation of Soviet prisoners of war by the Germans, 1941. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Federal Archives of Germany
- And this is his German part recording? Does she take someone prisoner and record in her unit on the spot?
- On the spot, in the archive of the unit. Then they are sent to transit points, to transit camps. It has its own stats. They are sent to what is called Dulag. This is just a transit camp, from the German abbreviation (Dulag = Durchgangslager - transit, or transit camp - ed.). They have their own statistics of the dead, they have their own statistics of the sick, the living, they have their own statistics of further movements. Again, how are these statistics kept? Do the Germans consider it necessary to keep a surname record? Does the soldier give his real name, surname, patronymic? Or some other? Dies nameless? And if he dies, did they count him, did they not count him? Many factors on which the soldier is taken into account. But if the prisoner of war passed the transit camp, he was sent further behind the front line - to Germany or to the territory occupied by Germany, sent to work, there is already a more detailed account. They are already photographed there, fingerprints are already being taken there. The so-called "green card" is started, since they are made of green cardboard. Again, the German clerk, who did not speak Russian, wrote down by ear, and the person's surname changed beyond recognition. The place of birth has changed beyond recognition. A photograph and a fingerprint is still a rare success, because they could decide not to take pictures or there was no such opportunity. They didn't take pictures then. They were too lazy to take fingerprints.
POW card. Notes in Russian were already made when working with the archive. A photo:
If such a card was issued to a prisoner of war, she travels with him. He was sent to work at the plant, the card was sent there, a note was made. Died - marked. If a prisoner of war continued to fight in the camp, organized some kind of underground group, sabotage, poured sand into the rotating parts of machine tools, assembled a radio receiver, read reports from the Soviet Information Bureau, and the Gestapo exposed him, he ceased to be a prisoner of war. He became, according to the laws of the Third Reich, a criminal. He was sent to an extermination camp as a political prisoner.
But here there is such a small line that people, perhaps, did not feel, but according to office work, he ceased to be listed as a prisoner of war and became a criminal. Some, apparently, from the point of view of the legislation of the Third Reich, he lost his rights. But what rights did he have? Talking about this, of course, is ridiculous, but all the same, these moments were also taken into account, and this was also reflected in this very “green card”. If, from the point of view of the laws of Germany of that time, a person is dangerous, a corresponding note was made here. Either the map was crossed out in red, or the abbreviation "Darkness and Fog" ("Nacht und Nebel") was written. This meant that the person was directed to destruction.
Soviet prisoners of war in the camp, August 1942. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Federal Archives of Germany
Having received such a card, a person did not live in the camp for a long time, he was destroyed. For other categories of crimes, they were sent to work teams in the camp. Someone survived, again, there were underground groups. The prisoners themselves worked with the cards. If the prisoner was in some kind of underground group, then he was given a command, and the personal card could be moved somewhere, shifted to another box, changed his surname. Prisoners under numbers, a huge number of people. Someone moved the card somewhere, the person was lucky, the person survived. But accounting, again, was kept, and it’s good if the documentation of this concentration camp has reached us. At the end of the war, the Nazis destroyed the camps, and most importantly, the archives of the camps. To prevent these archives from being used in court for an indictment. They worked with them, they entered the archive. They worked with them in the archive. We tried to understand how the German clerk reflected the surname "Smirnov" or "Semyonov", as it is written, and brought it into a single database.
Did you manage to get a lot of German archives?
- Enough. Everything that fell into the Soviet zone of occupation. Archival documents were first of all confiscated and sent for processing. Naturally, it wasn't just us. Naturally, went to the British, Americans.
- Do you have access to the data that the allies had in their zone of occupation?
- We have access now. Archival agencies continue to declassify. Even now they continue to declassify. I can’t tell you specifically whether they have an analogue according to these documents of our Memorial OBD database. Hardly. For each specific surname, you need to go to work there.
Soviet prisoners of war in the camp. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Federal Archives of Germany
- That is, all the databases were not transferred to the Soviet Union?
— No, a lot of things were not transmitted. A lot is still stored there. Well, of course, not like in years cold war, official services are no longer so relevant to this, but it is stored. Something is classified, or rather, not declassified. Something just lies. Russia, countries of the former Soviet Union are transmitted from time to time. For some political action. Someone comes and delivers. Here at this level.
- Why is it classified? Is it just automatic? Fifty years there, conditionally?
- It was classified in the 40s, because they worked with it. And the declassification period is not 50, but mostly 100 years. Therefore, it has not yet been declassified. You know, let's go a little further. Mata Hari, a well-known such spy in the First World War. So, her case is still classified. All because she was shot in 1917, and the term of secrecy was 100 years. That's just in next year maybe her personal file will be declassified. Although, it would seem, everything is already known about her. And all the data is of purely academic interest. Well, everything in the West is stored approximately at this level.