This edition contains the life stories of 708 Soviet citizens who lived under Nazi occupation and were interviewed by Soviet historians shortly after the withdrawal of the Germans and their Axis allies. (A further 38 witnesses left their memoirs to the historians, and 5 provided their diaries). The edition shows these documents in three different forms:
All interviews contain a German and an English abstract and can be searched using German and English search terms.
To help users in their work across the documents, the project team has created thematic search terms. Alphabetically, these range from agriculture and arrest to rape and trading (see screenshot).
The location of the respective interview as well as the profession and ethnicity of the interviewee are also systematically recorded.
All of the documents are suitable for researching the Holocaust and the Second World War in the highschool or college classroom. The following four interviews illustrate how to work with the life stories of Soviet survivors using the search parameters that are provided.
Maria Vinokurova from Moscow, a nurse in the Red Army, who following her capture was deported as a forced laborer to Berlin. She was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo and then transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She worked in an armaments factory in Neubrandenburg until the end of the war and was interviewed there in June 1945.
Search topics for this interview are: POWs = prisoners of war; POW camp = prisoners of war camp; forced labor in Germany; Gestapo; prison; corporal punishment; torture; concentration camp; Ravensbrück concentration camp
The search term forced labor in Germany leads to 11 further documents; Gestapo appars in 24 documents, including 4 in German translation; corporal punishment is mentioned in 18 documents. The use of these search terms allows researchers to contextualize the interview with Maria Vinokurova in different ways.
Max Sankshtein’s story describes the dramatic struggle for survival of a Jew from the Belorussian-Polish border town of Brest, who had to hide under a bed for many weeks to elude capture.
Search topics for this interview are: urban occupation; persecution of Jews; annihilation of Jews; ghetto; rescue of Jews.
The search term urban occupation leads to 15 documents, persecution of Jews to 36 documents, and ghetto to 36 documents. The rescue of Jews is discussed in 5 other interviews.
Sofia Neriiavskaia worked as a doctor in Stalino (Donetsk) under German occupation. She tells of the victims of German sexual predators who visited her clinic, of German brothels, of the spread of venereal diseases in the city, and of the conditions in prisoner-of-war camps.
Search topics for this interview are: urban occupation, labor recruitment to Germany, corporal punishment, medicine, POWs = prisoners of war, annihilation of Jews, persecution of communists, rape, gender relations
The search term gender relations leads to 5 further interviews in English, in which the relationship between German (and Romanian) occupiers and local women is described in detail.
The persecution of communists is discussed in 15 further interviews.
Maria Lapkovskaia, a collective farmer from the Belarussian region of Vitebsk, which the Germans considered to be “infested” by partisans. Lapkovskaya experienced the extreme violence of the Germans first hand: she was forcibly separated from her children and taken to the death camps of Majdanek and Ravensbrück. Like Maria Vinokurova, she worked in an armaments factory in Neubrandenburg until the end of the war and was interviewed there in June 1945.
Search topics for this interview are: rural occupation, kolkhoz , burning, POWs = prisoners of war, concentration camp, partisans, children at war
The search term partisans leads to 75 documents, including 13 in English translation; kolkhoz results in 4 English translations.
Beyond these search terms, the interviews can also be explored in other ways. For example, the interviews of villagers can be compared with those of city dwellers; or the fate of Ukrainians be contrasted with that of Russians.
Such searches reveal how the fate of a given person was determined by the degree of danger s/he posed for the occupying power: Jews faced immediate death; the same was true for many Communists and for anyone associated with Soviet partisans. Ethnic distinctions made by the occupants – e.g. the question of whether they considered someone Russian, Ukrainian or Belorussian – also often had serious consequences for local inhabitants.
The work with the interviews also shows how the living conditions of people who worked in the occupied Soviet territories differed from those who were sent to Germany for forced labor.
Those with knowledge from other countries under Nazi rule may also want to explore how the stories of Soviet survivors compare with the experiences of people from other European countries. Were patterns of resistance or defiance uniform in all occupied territories or were there substantial differences? To what extent did membership in the communist party or adherence to communist ideals correlate with the willingness to resist?