Background information on the appraisal of the German Wehrmacht's personnel documents pertaining to Soviet prisoners of war
The graves of millions of Soviet prisoners of war can be found everywhere in Germany and in the territories of its European neighbours that were occupied by German troops during the course of the Second World War. These range from individual burials in municipal cemeteries to large camp cemeteries with thousands of dead. For lack of documents, most of the dead remained unidentified for decades. Their fate, it was thought, would never be reconstructable.
However, since the end of the war the Soviet Union had been in possession of documents prepared by the Wehrmacht between 1941 and 1945 concerning the fate of its prisoners of war. These papers came from the administrative offices of the liberated prison camps and from the former Wehrmacht Information Office (WASt) in Berlin. They included personnel file cards, arrival records, death and release records and records of transfers to the Gestapo or Sicherheitsdienst (SD).
As the post-Soviet archives gradually opened, German researchers also gained access to relevant holdings in the Central Military Archives in Podolsk near Moscow. Later, holdings of the intelligence services's archives also became accessible. This made it possible in the long term to ascertain the fates of hundreds of thousands of prisoners. However, this required that these captured German documents be jointly processed by the former enemies. At the end of the war, the documents of the Wehrmacht Information Office fell into the hands of US troops largely unscathed. In accordance with international law, the US Army handed these documents over to the Soviet Union in 1945. There they were translated and evaluated by the Red Army and the NKVD in the years that followed. Although the Soviet authorities possessed detailed information about the fate of their prisoners of war, most families received only the vague information that their family member had died in German captivity or was missing. All captured documents pertaining to prisoners of war were used by the Soviet authorities primarily as the basis for investigating surviving prisoners to determine whether they had collaborated with the Germans. This investigation was conducted in the 'filtration camps' that the surviving prisoners were required to pass through before returning home.
