Universiteit van Amsterdam
MA Holocaust and Genocide Studies Laura Lopez Mras
Student Number: 12560111 July 1, 2020
Coping with Experiences of Extreme Violence
–
The Oral Accounts of Former Soviet Eastern Workers
Supervisor: Dr. Karel Berkhoff Second Reader: Prof. Dr. Nanci Adler
Abstract
Former Soviet forced labourers, so-called Ostarbeiter, are one of the most neglected groups of the Second World War. An Oral History project of the Russian civil rights organisation Memorial, however, allows for the analysis of narratives of former “Eastern Workers” and, thus, makes it possible to gain greater insights into their experiences. This thesis provides an overview over the experiences of Eastern Workers by drawing on 20 interviews conducted in the scope of several Oral History projects. Based on the interviews, the thesis explores various questions, revolving around issues such as survival, identity, speaking and silences. It thereby outlines how the past and present interacted and affected the way the respondents recalled their lives, how they perceived different groups of people, such as other Soviet citizens, Poles or Germans, the role of enforced silences, coping and survival strategies, taboos, as well as the role of their past in the respondents’ lives.
1 Table of Contents I. Introduction 2 a. Historiography 4 b. Sources 9 c. Methodology 13
II. Historical Background: Eastern Workers 19
a. The German Decision to Use Eastern Workers 19
b. Deportation to Germany 22
c. The Eastern Workers’ Experiences in Germany 24
d. The End of the War & “Repatriation” 25
e. Reintegration into Soviet Society 27
f. Eastern Workers after the Collapse of the Soviet Union 28
III. Survival & Identity – Encountering the ”Self” and the “Other” 30
a. The Respondents: Background Information 30
b. Coping & Survival as Forced Labourers 35
c. Belonging: Perceptions of “Ours” 39
d. Perceptions of “Others” 50
IV. Manners of Speaking or Staying Silent 58
a. Ways of Retelling 58
b. Silences & Taboos 68
c. Enforced & Voluntary Silences 76
d. The Issue of Trauma 81
V. Conclusion 87
VI. Sources & Bibliography 90
2 I. Introduction
Viktor Stepanovich Zhabskii1 was only 14 years old when – in the morning of October 13, 1942 – he was forcefully taken from the Russian fields where he had been searching for food and sent to Kisterbach, Germany, as a so-called Ostarbeiter, an “Eastern Worker”.2 After working in various locations in Germany over the next three years, Viktor returned to his native Novocherkassk in August 1945, without ever telling anyone about these experiences.3
The history between Germany and Russia, and Germany and the Soviet Union, has always been very tumultuous and complex. Particularly the period of the Second World War,4 or Velikaia Otechestvennaia Voina (“Great Patriotic War”) has had a lasting impact on the relationship between the two countries, with many chapters still not having been properly dealt with. One aspect of German-Soviet history is the history of the Eastern Workers, overwhelmingly young women and men, brought into Germany from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union from 1942 onwards.5 Their deportation, situation as forced labourers, repatriation and often continuing discrimination in the Soviet Union is one of the most neglected topics of the Second World War. Thanks to the Oral History project tastorona of the Russian civil rights society Memorial, however, it is possible to gain some insights into the life stories and experiences of former Eastern Workers.
This master thesis explores the experiences of Soviet, particularly Russian, Eastern Workers in more detail. Since the interviews conducted with former Soviet slave labourers took
1 The transliteration system used for this thesis is a simplified version of the ALA-LC. The respondents will usually be referred to by their first and last name, the patronymic name is provided in the bibliography. In case of Russian or Ukrainian authors and researchers who have published in English or German the names will not be adjusted to the ALA-LC system in the bibliography and footnotes.
2 The term Ostarbeiter is the one officially employed by the NS regime and was first used in early 1942. The term derived from the colloquial expression that referred to Russian-Polish workers during the First World War. From here on, the text will refer to them as Eastern Workers, without quotation marks. Cf. end note 132 in Ulrich Herbert,
Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des “Ausländer-Einsatzes“ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches
(Berlin/Bonn: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz, 1985), 400; Gelinda Grinchenko, “The Ostarbeiter of Nazi Germany in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukrainian Historical Memory,” Canadian Slavonic Papers LIV, no. 3-4 (September-December 2012): 401.
3 His wife and daughter eventually found out about his past. Viktor Stepanovich Zhabskii, interview by Alëna Kozlova, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, July 20, 2005, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/55ce00398522190a00019aaf#.
4 While the Second World War already started in September 1939, the main focus of the thesis will be the period between the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 until the end of the Second World War in Europe on May 8/9, 1945. While thereby taking a Eurocentric approach, the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, though globally significant, is not relevant for this analysis.
5 In autumn 1944, 2.8 million Soviet citizens were “im Arbeitseinsatz befindlich” (assigned to work): 2.2 million of them civilians, while the other 600.000 were Prisoners of War (POW). The reason why only 600.000 Soviet POWs were assigned to work is that more than half of the captured Soviet POWs died, either as a result of malnutrition or disease. Ulrich Herbert, “Ostarbeiter,” in Für immer gezeichnet. Die Geschichte der «Ostarbeiter», ed. Memorial Moskau and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Berlin: Christian Links Verlag, 2019), 9.
3
place more than 50 years after the end of the Second World War the thesis will not try to simply recreate the events but engage in an analysis of how the people who have experienced such extreme violence in their youth reflect upon it years later. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the Eastern Workers were “repatriated” and reintegrated into a non-democratic state system, in which a central narrative about the past, present and future was imposed on almost all spheres of public life. Alternative narratives of the past were actively supressed, and only came to light in the last few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.6
The thesis will explore questions of how the former Eastern Workers recollected their experiences and how they incorporated them into their life stories. Moreover, it will examine recurring topics, such as the perception of one’s “own” people and the German perpetrators, particularly analysing how the experiences of individuals after their return as well as the cultural, economic and political turmoil they experienced following the USSR’s dissolution has impacted said recollection. How did the stigma attached to having been in Germany during the war impact the perception not only of the “own” people but also the German perpetrators? And which coping mechanisms and survival strategies were employed by the former Eastern Workers in order to deal with the German occupation, during and after their time in Germany? Another topic to be explored is the question of how the enforced silences influenced the recollection and to what extent those silences were perceived as a form of repression. Overall, it will examine the interaction of the present and the past and the long-term impact of extreme violence on individual lives.
In order to explore the aforementioned questions, I will first provide an overview over the historiography, sources and methodology used in this thesis. In a second step, the context will be outlined, illustrating how the group of Eastern Workers was defined, how and why they were deported, and how their so-called “repatriation” was organised. The main part will be concerned with the analysis of the oral testimonies.7
6 While this thesis does not want to compare suffering under the National Socialist regime with the one caused by the Soviet state, it is important to keep in mind the impact of having spent almost the entire life in an authoritarian system.
7 In the thesis, the testimonies will usually be referred to as “accounts” or “interviews”. As pointed out by psychologist and oral historian Henry Greenspan, terms like “accounts”, “recounting” or “retelling” rather than “testimony”, make “room for the complex dialogue in which survivors’ accounts most typically emerge”. Henry Greenspan, “From Testimony to Recounting. Reflections from Forty Years of Listening to Holocaust Survivors,” in Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, ed. Steven High (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015), 141-2.
4 a. Historiography
The history of forced labour, such as the one of Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs), is one that had been, and to a certain extent still is, neglected for a long time – in Germany as well as in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
In the scope of the Nuremberg Trials and the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, the National Socialist Sklavenarbeitsprogramm (“Programme of Slave Labour”), was one of the focal points in the cases against leading politicians and industrialists, such as Fritz Sauckel, Albert Speer and Friedrich Flick, as well as representatives of for example the Friedrich Krupp AG and I.G.-Farben.8 However, while almost everyone in Germany at that time who had lived through the Second World War in the German Reich had been in contact with forced labourers in one way or another, the topic did not play a role in the subsequent years – neither in academic research nor in public consciousness.9 The forced labourers were remembered “als eher beiläufige
Selbstverständlichkeit”10 – as an incidental matter of fact – categorised as a “private“ memory
rather than something directly related to the war, National Socialism or German crimes.11
According to West German historian Ulrich Herbert, this was partly because not only the Nazi leadership had been responsible, but also industrial companies, agricultural organisations, local, regional and national authorities as well as ten thousands of Germans, who had impacted the well-being of the forced labourers, POWs and concentration camp prisoners.12 Moreover, the Nuremberg Trials had not differentiated between slave labourers and concentration camp prisoners, which made it easier for the general population not to draw a link between their private interactions with foreign labourers and the crimes of National Socialism.13 On a political level, the West German government had been able to negotiate that all claims related to forced
8 Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 11-2; Ulrich Herbert, Europa und der «Reichseinsatz». Ausländische Zivilarbeiter,
Kriegsgefangene und KZ-Häftlinge in Deutschland 1938-1945 (Essen: Klartext, 1991), 14.
9 Herbert states that in the West German city of Essen, for example, approximately 300 “Ausländerlager” existed in 1943. Germans and foreign labourers worked together for several years. German historian Klaus Gestwa similarly outlines the extent of forced labour, illustrating that in the West German city of Hamm almost 30% of the population consisted of Soviet citizens (forced labourers as well as POWs). Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 11; Klaus Gestwa, “‘Es lebe Stalin‘. Sowjetische Zwangsarbeiter nach Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Das Beispiel der Stadt Hamm in Westfalen,“ Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 44, no. 2 (1993): 74.
10 Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 11.
11 Herbert also points out that already during the war many people were not concerned with the fate of forced labourers as the population had been concerned with their own fears. Herbert, Europa und der «Reichseinsatz», 14.
12 Herbert notes that the German population had impacted the “Wohl und Wehe der ausländischen Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangenen und […] KZ-Häftlinge”. According to Herbert, it had not been in the interest of many people to pay too much attention to this issue. Herbert, Europa und der «Reichseinsatz», 14-5.
5
labour would be postponed until the establishment of a peace treaty between Germany and the Allied powers, which, in the end, was not concluded.14
The topic of forced labour was equally neglected in West German historiography, with an almost complete lack of nuanced and in-depth research.15 Works published in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to exculpate German industrialists, arguing that they had been exposed to immense governmental pressure and did not bear any responsibility.16 Other published works focussed on economic and more technical aspects, such as lists of salaries and working hours, often neglecting political and moral questions as well as the realities of forced labour.17 The only two major publications concerned with the fate of forced labourers in the 1960s were published by German historian Hans Pfahlmann, and the US-American historian Edward L. Homze.18 However, Homze mainly focused on the fate of Western forced labourers while almost completely neglecting Eastern Workers. The book itself has never been translated into German.19 Other western European publications focussed on forced labourers from specific
countries, such as Benjamin Sijes’ De Arbeidsinzet. De gedwongen arbeid van Nederlanders in Duitsland, 1940-1945, published in 1966, and Jacques Evrard’s La déportation des travailleurs français dans le IIIe Reich in 1972.20
In contrast to the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) already focused on Eastern Workers from the late 1950s onwards, often illustrating their forced deportations, poor living conditions and treatment. The policy towards forced labourers
14 The Two-plus-Four agreement of 1990 is generally regarded as a peace treaty. It also reopened the issue of reparations. Herbert, “Ostarbeiter,“ 15; Mark Spoerer and Jochen Fleischhacker, “The compensation of Nazi Germany’s forced labourers: Demographic findings and political implications,” Population Studies 56, no. 1 (March 2002): 5.
15 Herbert even points out that the most extensive literature on forced labourers was published during the National Socialist period itself, as the large number of foreign workers was understood as a challenge at that time. According to Herbert, 14 doctoral dissertations were published between 1939 and 1944. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 12. 16 Examples are works published by August von Knieriem and Hans-Eckhardt Kannapin, published in 1953 or respectively in 1966. August von Knieriem, Nürnberg: rechtliche und menschliche Probleme (Stuttgart: Klett, 1953); Hans-Eckhardt Kannapin, Wirtschaft unter Zwang (Köln: Deutsche Industrieverlags-GmbH, 1966); Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 13.
17 Another point of criticism voiced by Herbert is that they treated e.g. Danes and Serbs the same way as for example Poles and Russians, thereby giving the impression of a “normal” “Ausländereinsatz”. Herbert,
Fremdarbeiter, 13.
18 Another publication worth mentioning is Martin Broszat who analysed the National Socialist policy towards Poles, including the deportation of polish forced labourers to Germany. Martin Broszat, Nationalsozialistische
Polenpolitik 1939-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961); Hans Pfahlmann, Fremdarbeiter und Kriegsgefangene in der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft 1939-1945 (Darmstadt: Wehr und Wissen, 1965); Edward L.
Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 14.
19 Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 16.
20 Thomas Schiller, NS-Propaganda für den "Arbeitseinsatz": Lagerzeitungen für Fremdarbeiter im Zweiten
Weltkrieg. Entstehung, Funktion, Rezeption und Bibliographie (Hamburg: Lit, 1997), 3; Benjamin Aäron Sijes, De Arbeidsinzet. De gedwongen arbeid van Nederlanders in Duitsland, 1940-1945 (‘S-Gravenhage: SDU
6
was viewed as a political-moral problem and was often analysed and understood on the basis of Marxist-Leninist concepts, focussing on representatives of industrial companies rather than the state and the National Socialist Party. East German historian Eva Seeber, for example, illustrated the exploitation of foreign labourers in her book Zwangsarbeiter in der faschistischen
Kriegswirtschaft (1964).21 Moreover, the National Socialist policy was often seen as a continuation from the German Kaiserreich, via the Weimar Republic and Third Reich up until the Federal Republic of Germany.22 However, the University of Rostock’s publication series
Fremdarbeiterpolitik des Imperialismus in the 1970s provided a more differentiated approach,
highlighting specific Nazi aspects, racism as well as the impact and role of the security apparatus.23
The early 1980s saw a significant change in West Germany with a phase of intensive empirical research dealing with the crimes of the Nazi regime. One of the most significant publications dealing with “forgotten victims” was Christian Streit’s Keine Kameraden, published in 1978, analysing the fate of Soviet POWs and illustrating the relationship between the Ausländereinsatz (“use of foreigners”) and the NS policy of mass extermination.24 In the
subsequent years an increased attempt was made to engage with the topics of forced labour (as well as other understudied victim groups).25 One of the most extensive and detailed publications was Ulrich Herbert’s doctoral thesis Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des
„Ausländer-Einsatzes“ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches, which provided an overview over
forced labourers from different countries as well as forced labour in different regions and companies.26 While representing a ground-breaking study, Herbert’s work focussed on the overall context, thereby ignoring individual experiences and perspectives of forced labourers themselves. However, this was most likely a result of the lack of available personal documents (such as letters or diaries) written by former Eastern Workers as well as the limited access to the Soviet Union, and thus the experiences of former slave labourers.
21 Eva Seeber, Zwangsarbeiter in der faschistischen Kriegswirtschaft: Die Deportation und Ausbeutung polnischer
Bürger unter Berücksichtigung der Lage der Arbeiter aus dem sogenannten Generalgouvernement (1939-1945)
(Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1964); Schiller, NS-Propaganda, 3-4; Herbert,
Fremdarbeiter, 14.
22 Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 14.
23 Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 15; Schiller, NS-Propaganda, 4.
24 Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978); Herbert, “Ostarbeiter,“ 15; Herbert, Fremdarbeit, 16.
25 For example, Wolfgang Jacobmeyer on displaced persons or Gisela Bock on forced sterilisation in Nazi Germany. Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum Heimatlosen Ausländer: die Displaced persons in
Westdeutschland 1945-1951 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985); Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986);
Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 18.
7
Public and scholarly interest in forced labourers was further incited by political scandals concerning the Nobel-Feldmühle AG and the question of the restitution of former slave labourers.27 Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, several studies were published which dealt with the topic of forced labour in different companies, such as Daimler-Benz and the Volkswagen AG.28 In 1987, the German Green Party was the first to raise the issue of Eastern Workers in the parliament.29 Associated with the Green Party and in collaboration with the Russian civil rights society Memorial, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung furthered awareness of Eastern Workers as victims of National Socialism.
Several noteworthy analyses have been published in recent years, often on the basis of oral interviews, such as Tanja Penter’s works which focus on forced labourers in Ukraine.30
Overall, however, in German public consciousness as in academic research Eastern Workers and Soviet POWs have remained marginal.
When looking at the Soviet Union and its treatment of the topic of forced labourers and POWs, it becomes apparent that the issue was not publicly talked about. As pointed out by German historian Bernd Bonwetsch, the deportation of the civilian population into Germany slavery was only understood as a crime committed by the German “fascists”. The fate and suffering of the civilian workers, however, was ignored.31 Russian scholar of German language and culture and Memorial activist Irina Shcherbakova, among others, emphasised that the fate of the Eastern Workers did not fit into the broader narrative of the so-called Great Patriotic War.32 While the situation for the Eastern Workers themselves improved slightly after Stalin’s death in 1953, the topic did not play a role in official commemoration – not as victims, nor war participants and particularly not as veterans.33 Novels that dealt with the topic of Eastern Workers, such as Viktor Nekrasov’s V rodnom gorode, were put under scrutiny by censors, and Vitalii Sëmin who described in a published book the life of a 15 year old Eastern Worker in Germany, did not mention the discrimination and stigma he had faced after his return to the
27 Herbert, “Ostarbeiter,“ 16. 28 Ibid, 16.
29 Ibid, 17.
30 For example: Tanja Penter, “Zwangsarbeit: Arbeit für den Feind. Der Donbass unter deutscher Okkupation (1931-1943),” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31, no. 1 (January-March 2005): 68-71.
31 “Das ging so weit, daß über die „Verschleppung“ (ugon) der Zivilbevölkerung in die „deutsche Sklaverei“ (nemeckoe rabstvo oder nemeckaja nevolja) zwar als Schreckenstat der deutschen Faschisten, nicht aber als Leidensschicksal der Verschleppten geschrieben wurde“. Bernd Bonwetsch, “Sowjetische Zwangsarbeiter vor und nach 1945. Ein doppelter Leidensweg,“ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 41, no. 4 (1993): 542
32 Aljona Koslowa, Nikolai Michailow, Irina Ostrowskaja, Arseni Roginski and Irina Scherbakowa, “Schwierige Erinnerung: Vorwort zur russischen Ausgabe,“ in Für immer gezeichnet. Die Geschichte der «Ostarbeiter», ed. Memorial Moskau and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2019), 22.
8
Soviet Union.34 Soviet historiography neglected the fate of Eastern Workers and POWs up until the mid-1980s, when an increased discussion of Stalinism and Stalinist repression became more and more pronounced.35 Most noteworthy was Russian historian and geographer Pavel Polian’s work, such as the publications Zhertvy dvukh diktatur: Sovetskie voennoplennye i ostarbaitery
v Tretʹem reikhe i ikh repatriatsiia (1996), and Ne po svoei vole: istoriia i geografiia prinuditelʹnykh migratsii v SSSR (2001), in which he engaged with and analysed the history of
Soviet forced labourers in quite some detail.36 The opening of archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union certainly furthered an increased interest in the fate of previously forgotten and neglected victims of National Socialism and Stalinism.
In the last two decades, particularly regional studies have engaged with the topic of forced labourers. However, in many other works the particular case of Eastern Workers remains only one among many forced labourers, or represents merely a part of the analysis of a certain region, such as Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld’s collection Hitler’s
Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe, Gelinada Grinchenko’s
research on Eastern Workers in Ukrainian historical memory, or Tanja Penter’s work, which focussed on both Ukrainian Eastern Workers and people that had been forced to work in the occupied Ukraine.37
While many studies emphasise specific aspects, such as the perspective of Eastern Workers on Germany and Germans, they rarely provide a comprehensive overview. Questions regarding how and why certain experiences are remembered as well as the interplay between enforced silences and the recollection of the past, for example, are often neglected. In other instances, the interviews of the Eastern Workers are collected and used to present an overall narrative, thus neglecting the narratives of the respondents themselves.
34 Bonwetsch, “Sowjetische Zwangsarbeiter,“ 542; Viktor Nekrasov, V rodnom gorode (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1955); Vitalii Sëmin, Nagrudnyi znak »OST«, (Moscow: AST, 1976).
35 Bonwetsch, “Sowjetische Zwangsarbeiter,” 542.
36 The latter one was published in English in 2004 and in German in 2001. Pavel Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur:
Sovetskie voennoplennye i ostarbaitery v Tretʹem reikhe i ikh repatriatsiia (Moscow: Vash Vybor Tsirz, 1996);
Pavel Polian, Ne po svoei vole: istoriia i geografiia prinuditelʹnykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: OGI, 2001). Cf. also Pavel Markovič Poljan and Žanna Antonovna Zajončkovskaja, “Ostarbeiter in Deutschland und daheim. Ergebnisse einer Fragebogenanalyse,“ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropa 41, no. 4 (1993): 547-61.
37Alexander von Plato, Christoph Thonfeld and Almut Leh, Hitler’s Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in
Nazi-Occupied Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Gelinada Grinchenko, “Ostarbeiters of the Third
Reich in Ukrainian and European Public Discourses: Restitution, Recognition, Commemoration,” in War and
Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, ed. Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila and Tatiana
Zhurzhenko (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 281-304; Grinchenko, “Ostarbeiter of Nazi Germany;” Tanja Penter and Dmitrii Titarenko, “Local Memory on War, German Occupation and Postwar Years: An oral history project in the Donbass,” Cahiers du Monde russe 52, no. 2/3 (April-September 2011): 475-97.
9 b. Sources
The thesis will be based on interviews, conducted by the Russian international historical and human rights society Memorial, which was founded in 1992, with the aim of shedding light on the political repression of totalitarian regimes, particularly the Soviet state, and preserving the memory of its victims.38 Its web archive tastorona (“the other side”) provides access to interviews of former Eastern Workers, Soviet POWs and prisoner of German concentration camps, in the scope of larger research projects such as Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii
rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda v natsional-sotsialisticheskoi Germanii, Kollektsiia №. 1 and
Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene.39 The Russian audio recordings of the interviews as well as the written transcripts are available online. In some instances, a video recording of the interview is available on the website, which enables the analysis of the body language of the respondent.40
As the name already suggests, the online archive focuses on “the other side” of the story and is interested not in the narratives of “official festivities” or “textbook pages”, but in “the life of ordinary people [zhiznʹ obychnykh liudei] who found themselves in the orbit of the most tragic event of the world history”.41 Tastorona is based on the Memorial archive, and contains over
300 interviews, which often last several hours, as well as approximately 400.000 letters of former Soviet slave labourers.42 In addition, the archive provides other material, such as photographs. However, the main source of the thesis will be the interviews conducted with former Eastern Workers.
Particularly noteworthy about the tastorona archive is its clear structure. Certain keywords, people and locations are tagged in the transcripts, providing relevant background information and creating various indices and glossaries. An overview over the topics touched upon is provided for each interview, and the system leads directly to the fragments of interest in the interview transcript. This makes it easier to gain an overview of the structure as well as
38 Its predecessor was already founded in Moscow in 1987 and gave rise to the foundation of similar groups in other regions. They first united in 1989, before international Memorial in its current form was brought to life in 1992. Other aims and activities Memorial engages in can be found in their statute. “What is International Memorial,” Memorial, accessed February 24, 2020, https://www.memo.ru/en-us/memorial/mission-and-statute/. 39 “O proekte,” Tastorona, accessed February 24, 2020, http://tastorona.su/info/page/1.
40 However, it is important to be aware of the fact that we only see what the cameraman wanted us to see. And even interviews with only an audio recording enable us to analyse the silences, tone of voice, emotions and breaks. Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews. Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 203.
41 “Ostarbeiter oral history archive,“ Memorial, accessed February 24, 2020, https://www.memo.ru/en-us/projects/tastorona.
42 After the establishment of Memorial, the society started collecting letters, postcards and other documents. Bonwetsch, “Sowjetische Zwangsarbeiter,” 543; Memorial, “Ostarbeiter oral history archive“; Herbert, "Ostarbeiter,“ 17.
10
aspects most talked about in each interview. The often fragmented, or contradictory stories, are thereby turned into a “united database of the memory of the whole generation of people”.43
Since the interviews not only cover the period of deportation and the experiences in Germany, but also the interviewees’ pre-war lives, their experiences of return and post-war experiences, the indices prove particularly useful in structuring the accounts. Moreover, details regarding the location where the interview took place as well as a short biographical overview are provided.
In some instances, however, the date provided on the transcript does not actually correspond to the date when the interview took place.44 Factual errors or inaccuracies made by the respondents are highlighted, slips of the tongue preserved, and background information and translation for e.g. German words or regional expressions are illustrated.45 In some cases, the impressions of the interviewer are stated, for example, how detailed or emotional the accounts of the respondents were. The transcripts also indicate when tapes were changed, breaks, emotional reactions, such as laughing, sighing, coughing or smiling, or when the respondent thought for a little while about how to reply to the questions. In general, the respondents first provided an overview over their lives before, during and after the war, in their own words, with few interruptions or questions by the interviewer. In the second part of the interview, the interviewers ask questions in order to clarify certain issues they were particularly interested in. The interviews were conducted by Russian speakers, familiar with not only Soviet history, language and culture but also German history. In some instances, the operator of the recording was also provided, and in some cases, family of the respondents was present.46 The quality of the audio and video recordings is very good, with only a few exceptions.47
43 Memorial, “Ostarbeiter oral history archive”.
44 Galina Vasil’evna Shalankova, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia. Project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii
rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, February 9, 2006, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/559d5a8d4e7056525d42866b#.
45 One example can be found in the interview with Zhabskii, for example when he claimed that Ukrainians did not have to wear a “OST” badge, indicating their status as Ostarbeiter. Zhabskii, interview, 01:38:28-01:39:53. The additional information provided regarding regional expressions is particularly helpful as most respondents grew up in places bordering Ukraine or Belarus. Background information on German cities or towns proved also helpful as in some instances the towns were incorrectly recollected by the respondents.
46 For example, Viktor Turniak and his wife Anna, and Vladimir Rudakov with his daughters Ol’ga and Tat’iana. In the case of Sergei Botkarëv a German man was present during the interview, which is why the interviewer Irina Shcherbakova simultaneously translated Botkarëv’s story into German. Sergei Vladimirovich Botkarëv, interview by Irina Shcherbakova, project Kollektsiia № 1, Tastorona, accessed May 4, 2020. http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/58b016b014160a0c0185b56c#; Viktor Ivanovich Turniak, interview by Kirill Vasilenko, project Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene, Tastorona, accessed April 2, 2020, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/8a6fb919158387c6b6b4f83b89881ea1#; Vladimir Petrovich Rudakov, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia, project Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene, Tastorona, June 16, 2002, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/58ed29f1eeee531b00495281#.
47 Pëtr Spiridonovich Timofeev, interview by Liudmila Kabanova, project Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene, Tastorona, September 14, 2002, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/ad47149b7da469b0ea754f212edd1f6b#; Anna
11
The thesis will focus on the region of Rostov-on-Don, located in the south-western region of Russia, and the south-eastern part of the East European plain on the Don river and near the Sea of Azov. One reason for a focus on this region is the large number of available interviews with former Eastern Workers connected to the region. Moreover, the region’s tumultuous history during the Second World War is particularly interesting, as the German troops first occupied the city of Rostov-on-Don for one week in November 1941 but were only able to capture it in July 1942.48 The fact that the region borders with Eastern Ukraine, adds the aspect of relationships with people from other Soviet Republics and ethnicities already prior to their capture to the analysis. Still, a few other interviews of former Eastern Workers from other regions in Russia were included in order to gain a broader overview over the experience of former Russian slave labourers. One such respondent came from a Tatar family, adding the valuable aspect of a minority ethnic identity among Soviet Eastern Workers.49
Overall, the thesis will draw on 20 interviews, each of them lasting from approximately 1.5 to 4 hours. All but two interviews were conducted in places familiar to the respondents, such as their own homes.50 The two interviews that did not take place at the respondent’s own
or a relative’s home were most likely conducted at the Memorial office in Moscow. Both of them were part of the earliest collection of interviews Kollektsiia № 1.51 The other 18 interviews were part of the projects Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo
Gal’iatdinova Miftakhutdinova, interview by Alëna Kozlova, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii
rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, December 25, 2005, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/559d43ce3076f66b4a5718f0#entityId=554a837026ee98fc056076da. 48 Christina Winkler, “Rostov-on-Don 1942: A Little-Known Chapter of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide
Studies 30, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 106.
49 Namely, Anna Miftakhutdinova. Miftakhutdinova, interview.
50 In one case, the interview was conducted in the flat Anna Miftakhutdinova’s grandson, which, however, was also most likely familiar to the respondent. The two exceptions are the case of Sergei Botkarëv and Boris Alekseevich, whose interviews are both part of the project Kollektsiia № 1 and were conducted at the Memorial Office in Moscow. Miftakhutdinova, interview; Botkarëv, interview; Boris Alekseevich, interview by Irina Shcherbakova, project Kollektsiia № 1, Tastorona, November 24, 1993. http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/57ee36c449b9091000f9a9d9#.
51 Boris Alekseevich’s interview was conducted on November 24, 1993. For Sergei Botkarëv no exact date is provided, however, it is very likely that it was conducted in the first half of the 1990s. Botkarëv, interview; Alekseevich, interview.
12
truda v natsional-sotsialisticheskoi Germanii,52 and Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene.53 The interview of Anna Guliaeva, however, was part of the project Poslednii svidetelʹ.54 While the
Kollektsiia № 1 interviews were conducted in the early 1990s, the other interviews took place between 2002 and 2011. Details on the respondents’ age, sex, background, circumstances of
abduction and industries they were forced to work in will be provided in Chapter III in order to gain more background information on the respondents themselves.
52 The interviews of Anna Kirilenko, Antonina Maksina, Lidiia Beketova, Viktor Zhabskii, Vadim Novgorodov, Georgii Tkachëv, Nikolai Guliaev, Larisa Shvydchenko, Galina Shalankova and Anna Miftakhutdinova. Anna Ivanovna Kirilenko, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii rabskogo i
prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, July 15, 2005,
http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/559d182084cf57d3254a8728#entityId=554a837026ee98fc0560762f; Antonina Prokhorovna Maksina, interview by Alëna Kozlova, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii
rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, July 18, 2005, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/559d3fc38eedfe2a4750d3e1#; Lidiia Nikolaevna Beketova, interview by Alëna Kozlova, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, July 16, 2005, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/55b55c0ffb0c190c00f9009c#; Zhabskii, interview; Vadim Leonidovich Novgorodov, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii
rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, July 1, 2005, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/559faa7de9be49111dd84880#; Georgii Gavriilovich Tkachëv, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, July 20, 2005, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/558999d1293a700a00a5d6ce#; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Guliaev, interview by Alëna Kozlova, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda,
Tastorona, July 17, 2005, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/efd4a992b5766b06798227b1d7401183#; Larisa
Mikhailovna Shvydchenko, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia, project Mezhdunarodnyi proekt dokumentatsii
rabskogo i prinuditelʹnogo truda, Tastorona, August 8, 2006. http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/cd8fbb13a3a85e5aee3ac9f1ae307a54#; Miftakhutdinova, interview; Shalankova, interview.
53 To be included into this master thesis, all of the respondents who were interviewed in the scope of the project
Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene, had been former Eastern Workers before their arrest and time in the Mauthausen
concentration camp. While the majority of Eastern Workers was never imprisoned in concentration camps the perspectives of the respondents adds an interesting aspect regarding what exactly is remembered from their time in Germany. Nevertheless, most respondents were imprisoned after an unsuccessful escape attempt, which is why this experience is overrepresented in this thesis. The respondents interviewed in this project were Viktor Turniak, Vasilii Voronin, Nikolai Zubkov, Aleksandra Mikhailova, Nikolai Kovalëv, Vladimir Rudakov, Pëtr Timofeev. Nikolai Ivanovich Zubkov, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia, project Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene, Tastorona, October 24, 2002, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/559d0a24bab0775a1b45ac89#; Vasilii Gavrilovich Voronin, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia, project Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene, Tastorona, August 31, 2002, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/55914ab9293a700a00a5d72e#; Aleksandra Ivanovna Mikhailova, interview by Alëna Kozlova, project Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene, Tastorona, April 21, 2002, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/557dd3bb8e213f0d0014a7c7#entityId=554a837026ee98fc056075b8; Nikolai Mikhailovich Kovalëv, interview by Tat’iana Askeri, project Vyzhivshie v Mautkhauzene, Tastorona, September 15, 2002, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/57559dcf73ca461300d5da00#; Turniak, interview; Rudakov, interview; Timofeev, interview.
54 Anna Konstantinovna Guliaeva, interview by Irina Ostrovskaia and Alëna Kozlova, project Poslednii svidetelʹ, October 8, 2011, http://archive.tastorona.su/documents/55857dd01e7a830c00c3f064#.
13 c. Methodology: Oral History
As mentioned, the analysis is based on oral interviews, conducted over more than 50 or 60 years after the events took place. While testimonies of survivors offer benefits, they also bear risks, which have to be taken into account, when analysing them. Moreover, oral testimonies raise several questions, for example in regard to their reliability and the “right” number of interviews.
Oral History gained in popularity in the 1960s, connected with the desire, to tell stories of so-called “ordinary” people, and write a “history from below”.55 Sociologist Paul Thompson as an ardent defender of the Oral History approach, argued that Oral History “was transforming both the content of history […] and the processes of writing history”,56 by “shifting the focus
and opening new areas of inquiry, by challenging some of the assumptions and accepted judgments of historians, by bringing recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored”,57 and by breaking “through the boundaries between the educational institution and
the world, between the professional and the ordinary public”.58
Among the benefits of oral testimonies in cases of mass violence is the opportunity to analyse “people’s experiences, behavior, and decisions under conditions of mass violence”,59
as pointed out by political scientist Evgeny Finkel, and to examine “such diverse topics as trauma, narrative construction, and collective memory”,60 as outlined by historian Christopher
Browning. In contrast to, for example, surveys, in which the options are already predetermined, people have the opportunity to tell their story in their own words. Testimonies also offer the opportunity to conduct micro- and meso-level analyses of historical events.61 They can shed light on events and dynamics often neglected in broader narratives, and, in cases of mass violence with few survivors, for instance, might be the only option to gain at least some knowledge about events, which we would otherwise not know much about.62 Moreover, oral
55 However, Paul Thompson illustrates that oral history is in fact not a new invention but is “as old as history itself”. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past. Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8-12; 25; 25-80; Alistair Thomson, “Memory and Remembering in Oral History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, ed. Donald A. Ritchie, 78-9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
56 Thomson, “Memory and Remembering,” 79; Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 8-12. 57 Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 8-9.
58 Thomson, “Memory and Remembering,” 79, Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 8-12. 59 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 200-1.
60 Browning here talks about Holocaust survivor testimony, however, this can also be applied to testimonies of victims of other instances of mass violence. Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi
Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), introduction, Kindle.
61 Finkel himself focuses on the Holocaust and Holocaust testimonies, however, his findings are certainly applicable to historical testimonies in general. Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 201.
62 Cf. for example Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
14
interviews offer the opportunity to pay attention to the sound and pace of the voice as well as body language of the interviewees. In the case of videotaped interviews, however, it is important to be aware of the fact that we only see what the cameraman wanted us to see.63 Most of the interviews studied for this thesis were not videotaped but only audio recorded, which is why the body language could be observed only rarely. Nevertheless, listening to the interviews allowed for the analysis of silences, the tone of voice, emotions, and breaks in the narrative thread.64
One frequently voiced issue is the question of reliability of oral testimonies, often connected with the allegation that “memory was distorted by physical deterioration and nostalgia in old age, by the personal bias of both interviewer and interviewee, and by the influence of collective and retrospective versions of the past”.65 The argument of memory
distortion is particularly common when interviews took place long after the events. However, as pointed out by psychologist and oral historian Henry Greenspan, testimonies of survivors are relatively stable and early and late testimonies display a remarkable amount of conformity.66
This observation is confirmed by other historians, such as Christopher Browning or Jan Grabowski, as well as political scientist Evgeny Finkel.67 Finkel even emphasises that he found a high consistency between multiple recollections of individuals who had told their stories in different countries or languages.68 Daniel Schacter, an US-American psychologist, noted that “emotionally charged incidents are better remembered than nonemotional events”.69 Thus,
while it is important to keep potential memory lapses in mind, they seem to pose less of an issue than has often been assumed.
Moreover, later testimonies even offer some benefits, as topics that were a taboo at the time of the incidents or shortly after, can be discussed more openly.70 Browning summarises that “the usual assumption that earlier testimonies are to be preferred as inherently more reliable and valuable than later ones is not always valid”.71
63 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 203.
64 In the case of the interviews used, the transcript indicated when the tapes were changed for example 65 Thomson, “Memory and Remembering”, 79.
66 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 204; Henry Greenspan, “The Awakening of Memory,” Monna and Otto Weinmann
Lecture Series, May 17, 2000; Browning, Remembering Survival, introduction.
67 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 204; Browning, Remembering Survival, introduction; Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews:
Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 14.
68 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 204.
69 Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 163; Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 204.
70 Controversial issues could be for example sexual violence, such as rape, or the issue of revenge killings. Browning, Remembering Survival, introduction; Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 204.
15
However, other potential pitfalls exist. Browning illustrates the issue of repressed, often “traumatic and potentially debilitating” memories, which “have never been recovered”, as well as secret memories that sometimes come to light.72 A third pitfall are so-called “communal” memories, shared and discussed only among survivors from, for example, the same location or camps. As some of the memories and behaviour might not be understandable to “outsiders” and could potentially be “embarrassing or hurtful to certain members of the community”, as Browning argues, the community of survivors does not share the memories with the outside world. The last pitfall Browning outlines is so-called “public” memory, which bears the risk of being influenced by “iconic” tropes or topics, such as – in the case of the Holocaust – being selected by Josef Mengele.73 While testimonies might be influenced by culture, events and symbols, one way to reduce the issue is using testimonies from different countries, time periods or archives.74
Collective and retrospective versions of the past, disseminated through public media or official narratives, can shape survivors’ testimonies, and while the issue might be reduced by using a variety of testimonies from different sources, countries and time periods, this thesis will be mainly based on interviews conducted by the same institution, in a similar time frame and the same region. However, for most of their lives, the recollections and testimonies of Eastern Workers did not become part of popular culture, and even among themselves they rarely shared their experiences.
To what extent can we trust testimonies, particularly if factual errors are found? Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, the aim of analysing oral testimonies is not necessarily the exact and accurate recollection of historic events but rather the perception or way of retelling of their individual experiences and ways of dealing with it.75 As pointed out by Lee Ann Fujii, rumours, inventions, denial, evasions, nonverbal communication and silences, are equally important, and Finkel stresses that incorrect dates or places did “not affect the overall reliability of the survivor’s description”, particularly when the aim was not to precisely reconstruct past
72 Browning also refers to them as “confessional moments”, in which survivors reveal secrets, like the theft of a bunkmate’s bread or the abandonment of a family member or a friend. Browning, Remembering Survival, introduction.
73 Browning, Remembering Survival, introduction. 74 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 204.
75 “In addition, a scholar’s goal in working with survivors’ testimonies should be to assemble a coherent, overarching representation of socio-political processes, rather than to ferret out colourful quotations and “smoking guns”. Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 207. Tanja Penter and Dmitrii Titarenko emphasise that individual memory is formed, confirmed and constructed by social interaction and communication, such as exchange with other human beings as well as cultural interactions with symbolic practise, material representations and media. Therefore, interviews would only in a very limited sense help to reconstruct historic events but rather illustrate the changes of individual and collective memory narratives over time. Penter and Titarenko, “Local Memory on War,” 480.
16
events.76 In recent years, the “mythologies created within individual life stories” have even become increasingly seen as their greatest strength, as the retelling of a story not only provides insights about the person’s past but also their present, and play a significant role in the creation of identity.77 While Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue that factual inaccuracies were not significant, Kushner emphasises to avoid a naïve and patronising attitude towards survivors.78 However, even in cases where factual accuracy matters much more for the analysis, such as in Browning’s book Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp, testimonies should not be dismissed as historical source.79
This also leads to the question of how many testimonies are sufficient in order to make reliable statements about the past. Browning argues for a “critical mass of testimonies that can be tested against one another”, himself using 292 testimonies.80 Similarly, Finkel argues for a
large number of testimonies from the same location, ideally more than 30 from one locality.81
Kushner, however, states that “testimony forces us to think qualitatively” and that “to do it justice may require working with smaller rather than larger numbers of individuals”.82 Working
with a smaller sample of testimonies enables, according to Kushner, “through the greater self-reflectivity of those collecting and utilizing the material, the richness of testimony, including its contradictions and mythologies, to come to the fore”.83 In other cases, only a small number of testimonies is available at all. An ideal number of testimonies does not exist but often depends on the availability and research question. While using a large sample of recollections from different locations, countries and archives might decrease the impact of official narratives or popular culture, it might not always be useful to answer specific research questions.
Moreover, the way interviews are conducted often differs. While some interviews are completely free, without any guidance or interruption, others are more or less guided by questions, topics or the interviewer. Some include the whole life span; others only focus on the specific events or immediate aftermath of the disruptive episode in the respondents’ lives.84
76 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 203, 206; Lee Ann Fujii, “Shades of truth and lies: Interpreting testimonies of war and violence,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 2 (2010): 239-40.
77 Tony Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 282.
78 Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony,“ 285; Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 59-63; Thomson, “Memory and
Remembering,” 90.
79 Browning, Remembering Survival, introduction.
80 Based on this critical mass of testimony, a core memory can emerge, based on which “some reasonable judgements about plausibility can be made”. Browning, Remembering Survival, introduction.
81 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 205.
82 Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony,” 291. 83 Ibid, 291-2
84 Christopher Browning illustrates the benefits of free-form interviews, which “allow us to see how they [the interviewees] constructed their stories and narrated their memories without an intermediary.” In other instances,
17
What has to be kept in mind when approaching and dealing with oral testimonies of survivors of extreme violence? First of all, it is important to have the adequate background knowledge of the subject, as well as its historiography.85 Moreover, one should be aware of the context in which the testimonies were produced, such as whether they took place in a location (un)familiar to the interviewee, the data collection and interviewing rules and priorities, as well as the reasons for their collection and preservation.86 As pointed out by Alistair Thomson, oral testimonies have to be treated and critically examined like other historical sources. Moreover, it is imperative to understand “the ways in which memory stories have been shaped by the particular circumstances of the event and the complex processes of remembering”.87 In addition,
it is significant to pay attention to silences, be aware of the limitations, and to avoid only using interviews to support a pre-existing narrative rather than paying attention to the own structure and narrative provided.88 Rather than expecting smooth narratives, ruptures or chaos in the
testimonies might offer additional and particularly valuable insights.89
While a lot of the work on oral testimonies is based on the experiences of working with testimonies of Holocaust survivors and also holds true for other victim testimonies, narratives of former Eastern Workers constitute a special category. Remembering has “its own special social and historical context in each country”.90 For a long time, the Soviet Union had been a
society where remembering could be dangerous, which is why much of the memory “lived” underground.91 According to Khubova, Ivankiev and Sharova, the “cumulative effect of fear of public remembering, together with the fact that so many families had members who were politically oppressed”, has had a political impact as well as a “dramatic long-term effect on personal remembering”, something that was difficult to understand for Western historians.92
the interviews were more structured and adhered to a prescribed format. This, according to Browning, sometimes had a positive impact as some survivors “could not construct a narrative on their own” and without the “continued questioning of the interviewer, there simply would have been no testimony”. However, using a more structured interview conducted by another interviewer than oneself of course also carries the disadvantage of not being able to dig deeper into issues that would benefit one own’s research. Browning, Remembering Survival, introduction. 85 Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 205.
86 Therefore, they also have their own biases, like other historiographical works do. Finkel, Ordinary Jews, 201-3; 205.
87 Thomson, “Memory and Remembering,” 91. 88 Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony,” 279-81. 89 Ibid, 292.
90 Daria Khubova, Andrei Ivankiev and Tonia Sharova, “After Glasnost. Oral History in the Soviet Union,” in
Memory and Totalitarianism, ed. Luisa Passerini (New York: Routledge, 2017), 89.
91 Irina Shcherbakova emphasises that for the Soviet regime, memory had been intrinsically a serious threat as the entire history of the past had been rewritten and mythologised. The time span of several decades thereby influenced and shaped “the character of memory and recollection”. Irina Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” in Memory
and Totalitarianism, ed. Luisa Passerini (New York: Routledge, 2017), 103-4.
92 This point is also stressed by Robert Perks who emphasises the emotional, cultural and historical difficulties for oral historians from the West working in countries of the former Soviet Union. Understanding what life was like in a totalitarian society and asking the right questions was, according to Perks, impossible to understand. Khubova,
18
The special role of family history in authoritarian societies is emphasised by Tanja Penter and Dmitrii Titarenko who outline how memories, conflicting with official memory, “are often confined to the privacy of family”.93 This unofficial memory proved to be very resilient.94 Still,
when remembering became easier after the onset of glasnost’ in 1986, the prior long period of enforced silence continues to shape public and even personal remembering.95 The collapse of the accepted historical view also impacted personal remembering, as it became more difficult to make sense of one’s own memory without an overall public history to relate it to. The collapse of the Soviet Union was accompanied by a collapse of the past.96 As a result, many people were trying to make sense of their own lives, often grasping for stories, and incorporating them into their own accounts.97
This master thesis will focus on the ways of coping with cases of extreme violence in the case of former Soviet, specifically Russian, Eastern Workers, asking how they recall their past experiences, how they perceive their own group, other nationalities as well as the “Germans”, what impact the enforced silence had on their recollections, how the past and present interact and influence each other, and which topics are not or only briefly touched upon by the respondents. In order to gain some understanding of the historical context and to be able to contextualise the oral testimonies, an overview over the circumstances will be provided in the next chapter, including why and how the decision was made by the Nazi regime to exploit Soviet forced labourers, their “recruitment”, general living conditions in the German Reich, organisation of filtration and “reintegration” after the war, as well as developments after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ivankiev, and Sharova, “Oral History in the Soviet Union,” 89; Robert Perks, “Ukraine’s Forbidden History: Memory and Nationalism,” Oral History 21, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 52.
93 Penter and Titarenko, “Local Memory on War,” 483. 94 Ibid, 483.
95 However, already before glasnost’ there had been “clandestine attempts to collect memories”. Khubova, Ivankiev, and Sharova, “Oral History in the Soviet Union,” 89. Psychiatrist Dori Laub argued that “the “not telling” of [a] story” even served as a “perpetuation of its tyranny”. Laub and Felman, Testimony, 79.
96 Khubova, Ivankiev, and Sharova point out: “the past was just a set of pieces, and nobody could quite understand the whole”. Khubova, Ivankiev, and Sharova, “Oral History in the Soviet Union,” 96.
97 This aspect of incorporating, for example, iconic images, narratives or cultural and pop-cultural references was already mentioned earlier. Ibid. 96. In the case of Gulag memories, Shcherbakova also points out the confusion that becomes apparent in contemporary memories about the past. Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” 104.
19
II. Historical Background: Eastern Workers
a. The German Decision to Use Eastern Workers
Prior to the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the potential use of Soviet labour had not been taken into account by the National Socialist leadership.98 While the
use of “Russian” labour was initially rejected by the Nazi leadership their attitude changed over the course of the second half of 1941, after a few individual factories in the Ruhrgebiet had already suggested the use of Soviet labour in July 1941.99 One of the reasons for the changing attitude was the situation at the eastern front. While the economic considerations in the German Reich had initially been based on the expectation of a quick return of soldiers and the expansion of resources in the newly occupied territories, by autumn 1941 it became clear that a swift victory was not feasible anymore – the Blitzkrieg strategy had failed.100 This, in turn, increased the need for labour in order to keep the German economy running, a fact that could not even be ignored by Heinrich Himmler or Martin Bormann who both had most severely opposed the suggestion to use labourers from “the East”.101 In October 1941 Hitler altered his position towards the use of Soviet POWs.102 While they should initially mainly be exploited in order to build roads, by October 31, 1941, Hitler decreed to exploit the workforce of Soviet POWs “für die Bedürfnisse der Kriegswirtschaft” – for the needs for the war economy.103 The decree,
however, did not outline a clear hierarchy nor competences among the Wehrmacht, the
98 Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 253; Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941-1945: A
Study of Occupation Policies (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1981), 428.
99 Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 135; 137-43; 154.
100 Herbert also points out that already by September 1941, approximately 2.6 million positions in the industry, agriculture, mining etc. were vacant. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 137; Rolf Keller, “Racism versus Pragmatism: Forced Labor of Soviet Prisoners of War in Germany (1941-1942),” in Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated
Europe: Symposium Presentations (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, 2004), 114.
101 Himmler still opposed the use of civilian Soviet workers at the end of September 1941. However, after the changing instructions of Hitler and Göring in October and November, respectively, he had to modify his attitude. Nevertheless, he remained highly sceptical. Another factor that influenced the shortage of labour was the reluctance to employ German women. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 142; 154; Panikos Panayi, “Exploitation, Criminality, Resistance. The Everyday Life of Foreign Workers and Prisoners of War in the German Town of Osnabrück, 1939-49,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 3 (2005): 483.
102 However, already before Hitler officially sanctioned the use of Soviet POWs, some Soviet POWs had been used forced to work. In June 1941, Soviet POWs already worked in mining, and by early October 1941 the
Volkswagenwerk employed 650 Soviet POWs from the Stalag XI B Fallingsbostel. Manfred Grieger,
“Zwangsarbeit in einem Industrieunternehmen der Deutschen Arbeitsfront (DAF): Die Beschäftigung ausländischer Arbeitskräfte bei der Volkswagenwerk GmbH, 1938-1945,“ in Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung
und Deportation, ed. Dittmar Dahlmann, and Gerhard Hirschfeld (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1999), 395-6.
103 The prerequisite for the work performance would be adequate food supplies. However, the treatment of Soviet POW, especially in regard to food, only slightly improved in spring 1942, and then continued to worsen until the end of the war. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 141; Keller, “Racism versus Pragmatism,” 119-20.
