Abstract

The NKVD (MVD) special camps in the Soviet zone of occupation in post-war Germany remain an element of the Soviet occupational policy relatively unknown and practically unstudied in Russian historiography. The present article deals with these special camps on the basis of the extensive archival material deposited in the Fund of the Special Camps Division in the State Archives of the Russian Federation. The author analyzes various aspects of their functioning, such as the reasons and prerequisites for their organization, the development of the camp network in 1945–1948, the contingent of the camps, their staff, as well as their place in the system of the organs of the Soviet military administration and role in the activities of the Soviet state security organs in East Germany in the first post-war years. The special camps are defined as a distinct type of detention. They cannot be identified with either internment camps or concentration camps, as has been suggested in some German publications on this issue. They were intended for detention of the Germans who were arrested by the Soviet state security organs and previously involved in the Nazi party-state and militarized structures, as well as the Soviet citizens convicted to various terms of imprisonment by military tribunals. In this sense, they can really be named “special camps” where various categories of people were temporarily detained. A large number of contradictions in the functioning of the special camp system and, due to the very high mortality rate, its relative inadequacy to the task of providing the Soviet economy with the demanded workforce ultimately led to the gradual dissolution of the special camps by the Soviet government. Additionally, from the point of view of foreign policy, information about the camps with tens of thousands of prisoners in the Soviet occupational zone damaged the international reputation of the USSR, especially in the context of the aggravation of the “German question” in the early years of the Cold War. All this factors entailed substantial revision of the Soviet “camp policy” in East Germany in 1948 and complete dissolution of the special camps.