crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
transportation of women is also included. This ill-famed document, quoted in several scholarly papers
since 1989, included this declaration:
“... All German men aged 17–44 and German women aged 18–30 who live in the territories of
Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia liberated by the Red Army must be
mobilized and directed to work in the Soviet Union. The NKVD and specifically Comrade Beria is
to be assigned the supervision of mobilization. The NKVD is to be in charge of organizing transit
camps, the admission of mobilized persons, the establishment and launching of marching columns,
and overseeing their guard en route. Charged with ordering the mobilization of the Germans in
accordance with the articles of this provision are, in Hungary, Comrades Malinovsky and Tolbuchin,
in Czechoslovakia Comrade Petrov, or it is to be done via military commanders and on authority of the
front commander.” 4
The deportation of the ethnic Germans in Southeastern Europe was controlled by three persons:
Colonel-General Arkadi Apollonov, head of the main internal troops directorate of the NKVD,
Lieutenant-General Moisei Sladkevic, deputy head of the main internal troops directorate of the NKVD,
and Brigadier General Ivan Gorbatiuk, head of the office for rear security of front armies. (General
Gorbatiuk had already had experience in mobilizing crowds as, a year earlier; he had controlled the
deportation of the penalized Caucasian peoples, the Karachais, Ingush, and Chechens, to central Asia
and Siberia.) The three generals called on the Military Council of the 2 nd and 3 rd Ukrainian Fronts,
and on 26 December 1944 they put a detailed plan on Beria’s desk. They were planning to collect the
Germans from the Yugoslavian and Hungarian territories that had been kept under occupation by the
3 rd Ukrainian Front between 28 December 1944 and 5 January 1945. The Germans of working age
were supposed to be captured in the hinterland of the 2 nd Ukrainian Front that is in the territory east
of the Danube River between 1 and 10 January. The corralling of German nationals in Romania and
Transylvania was planned to take place between 10 January and the beginning of February.
In reality, the performance of this action followed the plans only in rough fashion. In Yugoslavia,
the ‘mobilization’ of Germans capable of work started on 23 December 1944. According to both Soviet
and German sources, 11,000–12,000 persons were deported by the 14 of January. In the second half of
January, the rounding up of yet another contingent of 10,000 deportees was started, but the action had
to be halted due to the worsening situation at the front. 5
In Romania, the deportation of those Germans capable of work who had not fled with the
retreating German troops took place between 11 January and 2 February 1945. The arrests were
ordered by Lieutenant General Vladislav Petrovich Vinogradov, the representative of the Allied Control
Commission in Bucharest, on 3 January 1945, but the execution was left essentially to the Romanian
authorities. On the Soviet side, a squad of 1,500 NKVD executives took part in rounding up ethnic
Germans. Presumably, the Romanian authorities had long prepared for these actions, because they
registered the German nationals remaining in the country at the end of August and again in October
1944. The consequent arrests were carried out on the basis of these lists of registration.
The total number of deported Germans was about 70,000, according to Soviet sources. Most of
the deportees lived in the provinces of Timis and Mures. Roughly the same total is given by German
sources. 6
Presumably, these figures did not include those who were deported from northern Transylvania,
which was under Soviet administration at the time. The deportation of the Saxons living there was
carried out within the framework of deportations in Hungary. Although the directive of the Soviet
State Defence Committee issued on 16 December 1944 expanded deportations to the territories of
Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, too, Soviet sources say only a few hundred Germans in these countries
were capable of work and, thus, transported to labour camps in the Soviet Union.
4
Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, Central European University Press,
2004, pp. 250–252.
5
Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, p. 259; John R. Schindler, “Yugoslavia’s
First Ethnic Cleansing”, in: Steven Béla Várdy and T. Hunt Tooley (eds.), Ethnic Cleansing in 20th-century Europe, Boulder, CO 2003, p.
367.
6
Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, p. 260. The number of deportees was
75,000, according to the following German sources: Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Rumänien, Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 1994, p. 80E;
Georg Weber, Die Deportation von Siebenbürger Sachsen in die Sowjetunion 1945–1949, vol.1, Köln–Weimar–Wien 1995. The number
of deportees ranged between 75,000 and 80,000, according to Günter Schödl, Land an der Donau, Berlin 1995, p. 596.
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