NKVD special camps in Germany 1945–1950

00315 of 18 April 1945, ordering the internment without prior investigation by the Soviet military of "spies, saboteurs, terrorists and active NSDAP members", heads of Nazi organizations, people maintaining "illegal" print and broadcasting devices or weapon deposits, members of the civil administration, and journalists.

[10] A decree[11] issued by the Allied Control Council on 30 October 1946 made a trial prior to internment obligatory, yet in November 1946 only 10% of the inmates were "sentenced", this proportion rose to 55% in early 1950.

[7] Among the alleged Nazis were also boys suspected to be Werwolf members:[12] About 10,000 internees were youths and children, half of whom did not return.

[13] Among the inmates were many supporters or members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which the Soviet authorities sought to suppress, particularly from 1946.

[14] Also, people were interned as "spies" because they were suspected of opposing the authoritarian regime, e.g. for having contacts with organizations based in the Western occupation zones, on the basis of Article 58 of the Soviet penal code dealing with "anti-Soviet activities".

A decree of 27 July 1945 reads: "The primary purpose of the special camp is the total isolation of the contingent therein and the prevention of flights", and prohibits all mail and visitors.

[15] Another decree of 25 July 1946 confirmed the "total isolation from the outside world" as a primary purpose, and further reads: [Inmates of special camps] are to be isolated from the society by special measures, they are not to be legally charged, and in contrast to the usual procedure in legal cases, their cases are not to be documented.

[17] In late 1947 the inmates were allowed limited access to Communist newspapers, which represented their first contact with the outside world since their arrests.

[2] Among the released were primarily people whose arrest was based on a suspected Nazi background, which was found to be of low significance by the commission.

In 1990 the Soviet Ministry for the Interior released numbers, which were based upon a collection of data compiled after the dissolution of the camps by the last head of its administration in 1950.

[19] A critical examination of the data by Natalja Jeske concluded that approximately 30,000 more Germans were detained in the special camps than officially acknowledged.

[10] Numerous prisons and filtration camps were set prior to May 1945, in an area that is today Poland and Russia, Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Some were sent for Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union and others transferred to the NKVD special camps in occupied Germany after May 1945.

[24] Almost the complete male German population remaining east of Oder and Neisse, numbering several tens of thousands, was arrested as "Hitlerites" by the NKVD.

[25] According to records from the Soviet archives by early May 1945 215,540 persons were interned by the Red Army on the territory of present-day Poland: 138,200 Germans, 36,660 Poles, 27,880 USSR citizens and 10,800 from other countries.

[28] Already on 15 December 1944, Beria had reported to Stalin and Molotov that These were all the people holding German citizenship remaining in these countries.

The Waldheim trials introduced the vigorous use of the judicial system as an instrument of political repression of all dissident elements in the GDR.

Some 1,100 metal steles mark the small mass graves where 7,000 of the dead from the Buchenwald NKVD special camp Nr. 2 were buried.