crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
financial reparations but also restitutions in kind. In August 1943, a committee was set up within the
Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to make a detailed plan for the ‘Soviet reparations program’.
This committee was led by Ivan Mayski, the former Soviet ambassador to London. On 24 November
1943, after the Western allies approved of German reparations to be paid partly in the form of forced
labour, the ‘Governmental Reparations Committee for the Damages Caused to the Soviet Union by
Hitler’s Germany and its Allies’ was also established. The first plans elaborated by the Mayski committee
already included the idea that using prisoners for the reconstruction of the destroyed areas would
constitute part of the reparations. Stalin made it explicit both in Yalta and at the Potsdam Conference,
too, that he wanted to make soldiers of enemy countries in captivity work on the territory of the Soviet
Union, in order to compensate for – at least partially – the tremendous losses of human and financial
resources which the Soviet Union suffered.
Besides the Soviet intent to obtain forced labourers, including civilians, deportations were also
motivated by the intentions of exercising collective punishment and political cleansing. In the course
of the huge population transfer programs carried out between 1942 and 1944, considerations of internal
security and the policy of collective retaliation were both represented. Up until June 1942, 1.2 million
Germans were deported to Central Asia and Siberia, and the number of those who were taken to the campworlds
of GUPVI and GULAG by force involved perhaps several tens of thousands. Under the – in fact,
groundless – Soviet charges of ‘cooperation with the German invaders’, that is, based on the principle
of collective responsibility, a total of about 900 thousand Karachais, Kalmyks, Ingush, Chechens,
Balkarians and Crimean Tatars were removed from their homeland and resettled in the Asian regions
of the Soviet Union between November 1943 and June 1944. In November 1944, the Meshets, Kurds,
and Hemchins living alongside the Turkish border joined those numbers. These latter groups were also
resettled to Siberia on an ethnic basis and out of inner and border security considerations.
The practice of collective punishment and that of cleansings carried out on an ethnic and class
basis resumed in Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945 in the same manner as they had occurred in 1941. In
1944 and 1945, the forward surging Soviet military forces opened the path leading to the exploitation
of the defeated countries’ material and human resources.
In Romania, the subjects of deportations were, first of all, those refugees who moved to the
contemporary territory of Romania from North Bukovina and Bessarabia, regions which were part
of Romania during the war. Since these regions were incorporated into the Soviet Union at the end of
the war, Soviets considered those civilians who fled from the former Romanian territories to be their
citizens. According to official data of the Romanian Armistice Enforcement Commission, 56,450 such
persons were forcibly repatriated during the period from 23 August 1944 to 30 September 1946. (Of this
total, 38,352 were Bessarabians, 8,198 were Bukovinians and 9,900 persons were originated from the
area east of the Dniester River. 2 ) According to Viorel Achim, a Romanian scholar, the actual number of
deportees was even higher, since out-transports were carried out even after September 1946.
Most of the refugees were not transported to their former homelands but to labour camps or
forced residences in the inner regions of the Soviet Union. So, in reality, ‘repatriation’ meant actions to
collect forced labourers. This conclusion was admitted by the Deputy Chairman of the Allied (Soviet)
Control Commission himself, General Vladislav P. Vinogradov. When the Chairman of the Romanian
Armistice Enforcement Commission, Savel Radulescu asked Vinogradov to delay the ‘repatriation’ on
30 December 1944, the Soviet general said the following: “The work force is so necessary to us that we
can not delay (the repatriation).” 3
The available sources contain no information as to when Stalin gave instructions to deport ethnic
Germans of a working age living in the occupied territories. In a report of the People’s Commissar of
the Interior, Lavrentiy Beria, dated 24 November 1944 and written for Stalin, Beria wrote about having
started preparations for such a deportation. By that time, the NKVD officers sent to the 2 nd , 3 rd , and 4 th
Ukrainian Fronts had already estimated how many persons could be deported from each particular
area.
Originally, Beria calculated only the male workforce. But in directive No. 7161 of the State
Defense Committee, issued on 16December 1944 and ordaining the start of the deportations, the
2
Viorel Achim, “Romania and the Refugees from Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina after 1944”, Annali dell’Istituto storico italogermanico
in Trento, XXIX (2003), p. 679. The author refers to two sources: Veaceslav Stăţvilă, “Populaţia Basarabiei în perioda celui de
al doilea război mondial”, Revista de Istorie a Moldovei, 3 (1993), p. 686.
3
Ibid., p. 683.
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