Gulag

Nor did overcrowding cease. Throughout the last year of the war, and even afterward, the numbers of people in these new camps continued to grow, reaching staggering levels. According to official statistics, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 German prisoners of war between 1941 and 1945. Another 1,097,000 other European soldiers fighting for the Axis also fell into Soviet hands—mostly Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, and Austrians, as well as some French, Dutch, and Belgians—and about 600,000 Japanese, a stunning number, considering that the Soviet Union was at war with Japan relatively briefly. By the time of the armistice, the total number of captured soldiers had surpassed four million.⁴⁵

This figure, large as it is, does not include all the foreigners swept into Soviet camps during the Red Army’s march across Europe. The NKVD, trailing in the army’s wake, were also looking for other types of prisoners: anyone accused of war crimes, anyone thought to be a spy (even for an Allied government), anyone thought to be anti-Soviet for any reason, anyone to whom any secret police took a personal dislike. Their scope ranged particularly wide in those central European countries where they intended to remain after the war’s end. In Budapest, for example, they quickly picked up some 75,000 Hungarian civilians, sending them first to temporary camps in Hungary, and then to the Gulag—along with the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian war prisoners who were already there.⁴⁶

Just about anyone could be arrested. Among the Hungarians picked up in Budapest, for example, was George Bien, age sixteen. He was arrested, along with his father, because they owned a radio.⁴⁷ At the other end of the social spectrum, NKVD officers also arrested Raul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who had singlehandedly saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to Nazi concentration camps. In the course of his negotiations Wallenberg had had many dealings with both fascist authorities and Western leaders. He also came from a prominent, and wealthy, Swedish family. For the NKVD, those were sufficient reasons for suspicion. They arrested him in Budapest in January 1945, along with his chauffeur. Both men disappeared into Soviet prisons—Wallenberg was registered there as a “prisoner of war”—and were never heard from again. Throughout the 1990s, the Swedish government searched for clues as to Wallenberg’s ultimate fate, to no avail. It is now widely assumed that he died under interrogation, or was executed soon after his arrest.⁴⁸

In Poland, the NKVD set its sights on the remaining leaders of the Polish Home Army. This partisan army had, up until 1944, actually fought alongside Soviet troops against the Germans. As soon as the Red Army crossed the old Polish border, however, NKVD troops captured and disarmed Home Army partisan units, and arrested Home Army leaders. Some hid in Poland’s forests, and continued fighting until the mid-1940s. Others were executed. The rest were deported. Thus did tens of thousands of Polish citizens, both partisans and suspect civilians, wind up in the Gulag and the exile villages after the war.⁴⁹

But no occupied country was exempt. The Baltic states and Ukraine were, as I’ve said, subjected to vast postwar repressions, as were Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and, most of all, Germany and Austria. The NKVD hauled everyone who was discovered in Hitler’s bunker at the time of the Red Army’s advance on Berlin back to Moscow for interrogation. They picked up several of Hitler’s distant relations in Austria too. Among them were a cousin, Maria Koopensteiner, to whom Hitler had once sent some money, as well as her husband, her brothers, and one of the brother’s sons. None, not even Maria, had laid eyes on Hitler since 1906. They were all to die in the USSR.⁵⁰

In Dresden, the NKVD also picked up an American citizen, John Noble, who had been stranded in Nazi Germany and kept under house arrest during the war, along with his German-born father, a naturalized American. Noble finally returned to the United States more than nine years later, having spent much of the interim in Vorkuta, where his fellow prisoners nicknamed him “Amerikanets.” ⁵¹

The vast majority of those swept up in the melee eventually found their way into camps, either in the POW labor camps or the Gulag itself. The distinction between the two types of camps was never clear. Although they technically belonged to different bureaucracies, the administration of the prisoner-of-war camps soon came to approximate that of the forced-labor camps—so much so that in tracing the history of the POW camps and the history of the Gulag, it becomes difficult to keep the two separate. Sometimes, Gulag camps set up special lagpunkts just for POWs, and the two types of prisoner worked side by side.⁵² For no clearly discernible reason, the NKVD also sometimes sent POWs directly into the Gulag system.⁵³