About international cooperation activities conducted by the State Archives of Mogilev Region
About international cooperation activities conducted by the State Archives of Mogilev Region
Beginning from 1993 the State Archives of Mogilev Region has received a great number of applications from citizens to confirm the staying in captivity and forced labour in Germany or to give information of their relatives who were lost in the Second World War.
The State Archives of Mogilev Region holds a collection of records created by the Committee for State Security Administration (UKGB) for Mogilev Region relating to the Soviet citizens repatriated in 1945-1946 from Germany, Austria, Poland and other countries in Western Europe, filtration files registers, and captured German cards on Soviet POWs.
In 1993-2003 these records were most intensively used by the archivists in their activity. Nearly 50,000 archival certificates were issued to the citizens in this period. Presently these documents are in high demand too.
The fate of many Soviet prisoners of war are so far unknown. The archival filtration records 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 Mogilev Archives signed an agreement in 2011 with the Center for Documentation at the Association Saxon Memorials (Dresden) for creating an electronic database on Soviet POWs born in Mogilev Region.
The German side passed to the Archives the required money funds, equipment and software needed for the work organization. Presently the work on the project has been completed. 20,544 cards on 10,460 POWs have been scanned. It is even now obvious what a great importance this will have not only for the close relatives of the POWs who died or survived but also for the methodology of the scholarly research. Besides, until the present moment the attempt to combine into a single computer base the archival data from the Russian, Belarusian and German archives has no equals in the contemporary historical science.
In September 2012 the archive staff conducted the identification of the names of the POWs born in Mogilev region, inmates of the Mauthausen concentration camp (Austria) who were born in Mogilev region. At the request of the Austrian side, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus submitted to the Mogilev Regional Executive Committee a list of 14,146 camp prisoners written as the citizens of the USSR. In this list the archive staff found 51 people born in Mogilev region, with their full names and place of residence.
This work was done as part of the Austrian project the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, which aims to personify the memory of the individual nazi victims and to give a more interactive character to the memorial while safeguarding the historical authenticity.
Presently, under the agreement with the Yad Vashem National Holocaust (Shoah) and Heroism Memorial (Israel), the Mogilev Archives conduct the identification and copying of records which contain data on the fate of the Jewish people in World War II in Belarus. They review the records of the Mogilev city administration, residence cards of citizens in Mogilev and Bobruisk, documents of the Extraordinary State Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Mogilev Region etc.
In the nearest time all the materials will be transferred to the Embassy of Israel in the Republic of Belarus for subsequent transference to the Museum in Jerusalem, which for more than fifty years collects the names of the victims, documents and testimonies connected with the Holocaust, conduct the research and educational work.