crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
As a team, we tried to point to the common roots of different types of population movements and
to emphasize the connections among events which appear initially not to connect with each other. We
tried to give a complex picture which included all these elements of migrations plus components which
were not yet studied intensively, such as the migration of forced labourers and their repatriation. We
agreed that ‘forced labour’ was a special form of migration during the war, provoked by the German
and Soviet need to exploit at the highest possible level all resources available in the occupied countries.
Nevertheless, team members thought that we did not need to deal with the history of German, Poles,
Hungarian, and Romanian POWs and civilian internees who were captured by the Red Army and who
were transported to the Soviet Union. They argued that their story did not fit within the framework
of the ESF project. On the other hand, however, the fate of Soviet POWs in German custody and the
history of forced labourers who were transferred to Germany from various regions of occupied Europe
were in the focus of the team’s interest.
Insisting on the ‘official’ framework of this project was evidence that my Western European
colleagues did not understand that, without studying the fate of German, Polish, Hungarian, and
Romanian forced labourers in the Soviet Union, we could not give a whole picture on war-related
migration. However, this topic was not eliminated totally. Our book on the World War II related
migrations, to be published at the end of this year, will include the history of Hungarian prisoners, if not
the forced labourers of other Eastern European countries.
The fate of foreign prisoners, soldiers, and civilian internees could be a topic doomed to oblivion,
because its exposure would necessitate revising the currently formulated and accepted ‘Western’ views
of the Second World War’s end, and put the onus on the Soviet leadership for the mass extinction of
Hungarians and other prisoners. My experience with the ESF team and my familiarity with the work
of Western historians suggest that the Western world generally agrees that scholars and politicians do
not need to deal with the wrongs committed by the Soviet Union, since these wrongs are seen to be
balanced – and even blotted out – by the Soviet Union’s participation in the defeat of Nazism. The
subject of Soviet captivity barely appears in international scholarship, and the scholarly researcher or
interested lay public face a scarcity of serious works and monographs. Yet the topic has a huge and, by
now, almost completely accessible source material.
Russian archives are more or less open. Also, important documents concerning the fate of prisoners
can now be perused in published document collections. In addition to the Russian and Hungarian
archival sources, dozens of personal accounts have appeared as books or in journals since the collapse
of Communism.
From my research using these various sources, I have concluded that the hundreds of thousands
of Hungarians and other foreign prisoners held captive in the Soviet Union should not be regarded as
‘prisoners of war’ but as forced labourers. Among the pieces of evidence to support this usage is the fact
that the Soviet leadership had established a camp system as early as the very beginning of the war, in
September, 1939, which was intended for accommodating and utilizing the work not only of captured
enemy soldiers, but also of civilians.
On 19 th September 1939 – that is, a few days after the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union – the
People’s Commissar of the Interior, Lavrentiy Beria, issued a decree about setting up a new forcedlabour
camp system for prisoners of war and foreign internees. The new camp system, called the
Directorate for the Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees of the Commissariat for the Interior, was
referred to in Soviet documents as UPVI (Upravlenyija Voennoplennih i Internirovannih). According to
Soviet sources, 380–390 thousand people were deported from the Eastern European territories annexed
between 1939 and 1941 to the inner territories of the Soviet Union. However, some Polish historians
say that nearly one million people, mainly civilians were deported from Polish territories alone. 1 The
fact that the camp system was set up in an early phase of the war shows that the Soviet leadership did
not differentiate between civilians and soldiers, and that the war served the purpose of supplying Soviet
work-force demands as well as expanding the Communist regime.
In addition, the combining of forced labour with reparation claims derived from the Soviet system.
During British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s visit to Moscow in December 1941, Stalin already
was making clear to the British delegation that, after the war, the Soviet Union would claim not only
1
See for instance: Z. S. Siemaszko, W sowieckim osaczeniu, London 1991; W. Wielhorski, Los Polakow w Niewoli Sowieckiej, London
1956; K. Sword, Deportation and Exile. Poles in the Soviet Union 1939–1948, MacMillan, London 1994.
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