State Archives of Mogilev Region completes an electronic database of Soviet prisoners of war born in Mogilev region

The State Archives of Mogilev Region has completed an electronic database of Soviet prisoners of war born in Mogilev region.

The State Archives of Mogilev Region holds a collection of records from the Administration of the Committee for State Security (UKGB) for Mogilev Region relating to the Soviet citizens repatriated in 1945-1946 from Germany, Austria, Poland and other countries in Western Europe. These are filtration files, filtration file registers, and captured German cards on Soviet POWs.

The fate of many Soviet prisoners of war are so far unknown. According to incomplete data, more than five million Red Army soldiers and officers found themselves in the German captivity. The archival material remained long unknown to the researchers into the Second World War.

As part of the international cooperation between the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Justice Ministry of the Republic of Belarus and the Association Saxon Memorials (Germany) the Archive of the Mogilev Region has become the first of the Belarusian archives to sign an agreement in 2011 with the Center for Documentation at the Association Saxon Memorials (Dresden).

The German side transferred to the Archive the monetary funds, equipment and software needed for the work organization. Schedules for digitization activities were agreed for the years 2011 and 2012.

Presently the work on the project has been completed. 20,544 cards on 10,460 POWs have been scanned. On 22 November the database was handed over to the leading research fellow at the Saxon Memorials Documentation Center, Alexander Kharitonov. After the records are processed in Germany, the disc with the digitized information will be handed over to the Archive to be used in handling social and legal inquiries.

The attempt to combine into a single computer base the archival data from the Russian, Belarusian and German archives has no equals in contemporary historical science. It is even now obvious what a great importance this will have not only for the close relations of the POWs who died or survived but also for the methodology of scholarly research.

The next archive to conduct the scanning of the similar documents is the State Archives of Grodno Region.

On the photo is the Mogilev Archive’s director Pyotr Shevchik handing over the database to Aleksander Kharitonov.