Death register of the Bautzen special camp 1945-1956

The list of names of those who died in the special camp was compiled on the basis of the 'Death Register of the Bautzen Special Camp 1945-1956'.  The death register includes to the best of our knowledge all the names of those who died in the Bautzen special camp. These include the internees, persons convicted by Soviet military tribunals and in the Waldheim trials, who died in Bautzen between May 1945 and December 1956. The list is based on the prison record book of the Soviet camp administration and on the records of the cemetery administrations in Dresden, Görlitz and Zittau. In doubtful cases, the spelling of the name and the death date listed in the cemetery records are assumed to be correct. The register is regularly updated. Information provided by relatives is helpful; the spellings of names can be corrected and dates of birth listed more precisely. The camp administration's files listed only the year of birth. Where the precise date of birth is not known, it has been listed as 1 January to facilitate data processing. The register was last updated in July 2009.

Access database: Death register

Notes on use

The death register contains all names that could be identified, in alphabetical order. Most of these have been re-transliterated from the Soviet camp administration's prison record book. The record book lists all names in Russian, i.e., as Cyrillic transliterations. As the names were often simply written down phonetically, even the Russian documents may list several variants of the same name. This is due in part to the widely differing pronunciations in various German dialects. Such distortions cannot always be resolved when re-transliterating the names into their original German form.

The names have been entered in alphabetical order. The first field contains what is thought to be the proper form of the German surname. This is followed by the given name and the surname transliterated from Russian.

Some restrictions apply with respect to the spelling of names in the death register: Given names and surnames are listed in only one of the spelling variants commonly encountered in German; other spellings are not listed. For example, the list includes 'Walther' but not 'Walter', and 'Meier' but not 'Meyer', 'Maier' or 'Mayer'. In some cases several given names are listed because the actual first name cannot be clearly determined. Combined names may occasionally be separated. Academic titles are not listed. Attributes of nobility are listed but are not necessarily complete or accurate. Phonetic transliterations have been used wherever the name could not be matched to a customary German spelling. In such cases, an effort has been made to correct for the peculiarities of Russian pronunciation.