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.

Special camps of the NKVD / Ministry of Internal Afairs of the USSR are one of the important research areas in the study of the Soviet occupation policy and functioning of Soviet occupation bodies in post-war Germany. Te purpose of the study is to review the main historical works on the history of special camps that have been published since the 1950s. Two periods of this historiography are examined: “pre-archival” (from the 1950s to the mid-1990s) and contemporary (from the mid-1990s up to the present). Te author mainly deals with the German historiography of special camps and evaluates the availability and representativeness of sources and substantive research conclusions important for understanding the principal elements of the Soviet occupation policy in East Germany in the frst post-war years. While in the “pre-archival” studies, which were based on a limited range of sources, the emphasis was placed on identifying individual, albeit important, aspects of the history of special camps (their location, the number of prisoners who passed through them, the criteria for arrest and placement of the civilian population in a special camp in the Soviet zone of occupation of Germany), current works concern a much wider range of issues. Tey deal with not only organizational issues, but also the place of camps in the system of Soviet special services on the territory of East Germany, their role in carrying out repressions against both the German civilian population and Soviet citizens who ended up in the Soviet zone of occupation of Germany afer the end of the war. In current historiography, special camps are defned as special places for confnement, combining the functions of temporary detention of various categories of people for their interning, fltrating and gathering together for further dispatching, for example, to the gulag camps. Te most important conclusion of current studies of the history of special camps is that they became an expressive manifestation of the “export” of Soviet repressive practices and pointed to the real and long-term plans of the Soviet administration to Sovietize East Germany.

The scale and structure of the losses of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War undoubtedly constitute a relevant academic problem. A separate aspect of this problem is the national structure of the losses of the Red Army. So far, in the works covering this issue, researchers have made attempts to establish the national structure of the irretrievable losses of the Red Army using calculation method, based on the erroneous assumption that losses were proportional to the representation of each Soviet ethnic group in the Red Army. This study is based on the albums of the payroll of the Red Army personnel. They were prepared by the General Staff twice a year (ahead of 1 January and 1 July) for the top leaders of the country and the armed forces, and were made even prior to the war. These unique statistical sources that have become available in recent years and are stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation make it possible to partly solve the problem in relation to the establishment of the national structure of the sanitary losses suffered by the Red Army in 1943–1945 (registration of irretrievable losses by nationality was not conducted). The statistical analysis of these sources has showed that the level and structure of sanitary losses among different ethnic groups varied in a fairly wide range and depended on a large number of factors, the major one being the percentage of the ethnic group in the rank and file of the infantry. Being a member of the rank and file almost always, for all nationalities, meant an increased risk of being killed or wounded. This risk, as the study showed, was also amplified if an ordinary soldier belonged to the rifle troops. Although the obtained data cannot be mechanically extrapolated to all the losses of the Red Army as a whole, they nevertheless give an idea of the patterns in the number of losses of different nationalities, at least in the second and third periods of the war (1943–1945), and open prospects for further scholarly debate.