Dariusz Węgrzyn
Polish territory was a key warfare theatre for the Soviets. Advancing westwards, they headed straight for Berlin. To ensure calm to the rear of the fighting armies, Soviet security organs conducted an operation to detain and then deport to the Soviet Union those who might pose a threat to the Red Army. At the same time, their political opponents were deported to gulags in an effort to aid the new Moscow-dependent communist authorities. Tens of thousands of citizens of the pre-war Polish Republic and ethnic Poles from the German territories were imprisoned in the gulags.
It is worthwhile to trace what the situation looked like in the last year of the Second World War. When the next offensive was launched in January 1945, the Red Army was to occupy the western territories of the Second Republic and cross the pre-war Polish-German border. For Poles, virtually nothing changed. The installation of communist power in the areas of so-called Lublin Poland continued. The agreement signed between the Polish communists and the Soviets on the 26th of July 1944, which stated that ‘in the zone of warfare’ crimes against civilians were under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Commander-in-Chief, was still in force. This meant that the NKVD and the Smersh military counter-intelligence could arrest and deport Poles to gulags without trial. No sentences were passed against those arrested, leaving them without the prospect of serving out their time. They were to remain in Soviet camps for as long as Joseph Stalin wished. To put it bluntly: the Polish Communists agreed that citizens of the country in which they held power should be arrested and detained without trial on the territory of a foreign country. It should be noted that not only saboteurs compromised by their collaboration with the German occupying forces, were subject to arrest, but equally members of the Polish independence underground, i.e. those people who posed a threat to communist power in Poland.
Stalin’s plenipotentiaries
On the 11th of January 1945, Lavrenty Beria issued order No. 0016 ‘On measures for clearing the Red Army’s rear of hostile elements’. This normative defined those categories of people who must be arrested in order for peace and order to be achieved to the rear of the fighting troops. The document listed spies, saboteurs, terrorists, cadres of the German police, courts, military tribunals, prisons, concentration camps, the NSDAP and Nazi organisations, but also ‘members of hostile organisations, bandit groups, regardless of nationality and citizenship’, or, to put it in plain language, members of the Polish independence underground. NKVD rear-guard plenipotentiaries were appointed on each Red Army front. Every one of them was responsible for carrying out Beria’s order within his own section of the war effort. They were afforded a great deal of independence due to the orders they carried out being very generalised. By way of example, in one area all NSDAP functionaries down to the lowest level were arrested, while in another they were spared. That the plenipotentiaries had a free hand is evidenced by the last point of the normative, which allowed for the arrest of ‘all other hostile elements’. Thus, it was up to an NKVD officer, on the basis of his own intuition, whether to deprive someone of his freedom simply because of that person appearing to him to be ‘hostile’. Beria was preparing for the army to cross the pre-war Polish-German border and expected widespread civilian resistance, sabotage, diversion and active German partisan activity. None of this happened, but the NKVD and Smiersz were ready for battle and invested with broad powers of attorney. Stalin, who was after all, behind the changes, knew his oprychnikov (torturers). He knew that the plenipotentiaries would be keen to prove themselves, and that the measure of their ‘effectiveness’ would be the number of people arrested. And he was hardly wrong. Particularly evident was the rivalry between the NKVD plenipotentiary for the First Belarusian Front, Ivan Serov, and his counterpart for the Third Belarusian Front, Viktor Abakumov, who shared a deep mutual hatred. This conflict was compounded by the fact that it was Serov and not Abakumov, who entered Berlin with units of the front he was protecting.
‘Cleansing’ of Gdansk Pomerania
The areas of pre-war Poland occupied after the beginning of the January offensive where larger-scale ‘clearing of the rear’ was carried out were Gdansk Pomerania and the Silesian Voivodeship, areas that had been incorporated into the Third Reich in 1939. Contrary to the provisions of the Fourth Hague Convention, the population there was forced by the occupying forces to register on the German Nationality List (Deutsche Volksliste – DVL), something that occurred on a mass scale. The Soviets were well aware of the local specificities of these areas. In order to determine the scale of arrests in Gdansk Pomerania, we must rely on Soviet data, which did not take into account the pre-war administrative division, i.e. the Pomeranian Voivodeship. For the Soviets, the hinterland of the various fronts was important. Gdansk Pomerania in the north was occupied mainly by the armies of the Second Byelorussian Front, and a total of over 18,000 Poles had been arrested there by March 1945, although Prof. Mirosław Golon, a researcher on this topic, gives a slightly lower figure: 15,500-16,000. Additionally, some 45,000 were arrested whom the Soviets considered to be Germans (including residents of East Prussia, Powisle, Sztum or Elbląg, who fled westwards and were captured by Soviet armoured units on their way). Along with them, several thousand German inhabitants of Gdańsk also fell into Soviet hands. The region to the south was captured by the First Ukrainian Front and a further 18,000 people there were deprived of their freedom.
The division of the operating fronts of the Red Army also affected the subsequent fate of those arrested. Those from the hinterland of the Second Byelorussian Front (the northern and central regions of Gdansk Pomerania), en route to Soviet Russia, passed through prisons in Ciechanów, Działdów and Grudziądz. From Ciechanów, between February and March 1945, 20,000 detainees, a third of whom were Poles (the remainder being Germans and prisoners of war), travelled to the East in 13 goods trains, the so-called ‘deportation trains’. The destination of those who were transported were the camps of Stalinogorsk, Tula, Shatura, Kharkiv, Karpinsk, Chelyabinsk and Prokopievsk. More than 15,000 detainees began their journey to the East at Dzialdowo and were sent to camps in Karpinsk, Kemerovo, Chelyabinsk, Korkino and the Bashkirian area. Lastly, already from Grudziądz, a further 7.5 thousand detainees were deported to the area of Gdansk Pomerania. Those arrestees went on to the Moscow region, the Urals and Siberia. A small number of detainees from Gdansk Pomerania, from the south of the region, were ‘taken care of’ by the Red Army’s rear formations, being sent to Poznan.
The division into the operating fronts of the Red Army also affected the further fate of those arrested. Those from the hinterland of the Second Byelorussian Front (the northern and central regions of Gdansk Pomerania), on their way to Soviet Russia, passed through prisons in Ciechanów, Działdów and Grudziądz. From Ciechanów, between February and March 1945, 20,000 detainees, a third of whom were Poles (the remainder were Germans and prisoners of war), travelled to the East in 13 goods trains, the so-called ‘eszelons’. The destination of those transported became the camps of Stalinogorsk, Tula, Shatura, Kharkiv, Karpinsk, Chelyabinsk and Prokopievsk. More than 15,000 detainees began their journey to the East at Dzialdowo and were sent to camps in Karpinsk, Kemerovo, Chelyabinsk, Korkino and the Bashkirian area. At the latest, already from Grudziądz, a further 7.5 thousand detainees were deported to the area of Gdansk Pomerania. These people went to the Moscow region, the Urals and Siberia. A small number of detainees from Gdansk Pomerania, from the south of the region, were ‘taken care of’ by the Red Army’s rear formations, and these were sent to Poznan.
Importantly, those arrested from Pomerania did not end up in the notorious gulags of the Gulag, but in the camps of its ‘twin brother’, the Main Board for Prisoners of War and Internees of the NKVD, which was established after the Soviet aggression against Poland on 17 September 1939 to take custody of Polish prisoners of war, and at the end of the Second World War civilians arrested in Central and Eastern Europe fell under its jurisdiction. In concluding the description of this issue, it should be noted that, in the light of Prof. Mirosław Golon’s research, out of these approximately 15,000 Poles, only 200 could be linked to activities in Polish underground organisations. As can be seen, Stalin’s idea of introducing competition between the NKVD plenipotentiaries in their activities at the various fronts, had the desired effect. What ultimately mattered was the number of people deprived of their liberty, which was evident from the statistics, and not the question of whether these people could be a threat to the stability behind the front line of the Soviet troops.
Deportations from Upper Silesia
In parallel, similar measures were taken in areas of the pre-war Silesian Voivodship. Among the people arrested there, there were no significant ‘collaborators’, representatives of the German Nazi administration or Nazi organisations. There were practically no soldiers of the Polish independence conspiracy among them either. The answer to the question: why? is quite simple. Those who were associated in some form with the Nazi apparatus were the first to pack their bags and flee Westwards. The Polish underground, on the other hand, was particularly weak here at the time of the Soviet encroachment, decimated by Gestapo arrests, and had a cadre character, with deep and effectively conspiratorial structures. In 1945, not a single officer or non-commissioned officer on the staff of the Silesian District of the Home Army was arrested by the Soviets. Another interesting fact is that when arresting civilians in pre-war Polish Upper Silesia, some semblance of legality was attempted. As a rule, the Soviets were accompanied by a Polish militiaman, and it even happened that the detention was ordered by MO officers themselves. Of course, the latter had no idea why they were taking civilians from their homes. They were supposed to detain them and take them to an NKVD post. Those arrested were gathered together in various cellars, NKVD detention centres and then gradually transferred to Bytom prison, where they were then loaded onto broad gauge railway wagons and sent to the Soviet Union and Kazakhstan.
It is difficult to estimate exactly how many Upper Silesians, pre-war Polish citizens, were arrested and deported to the Soviet Union. This is due to the fact that the action did not stop at the pre-war Polish-German border, and there was no separation of these groups in the statistics. By compiling the biographies of the 46,200 arrested, mobilised and deported Upper Silesians, we know that a total of 9,600 to 12,000 people were arrested in the region, 80% of whom were residents of the pre-war Silesian Voivodeship. The rest of this number, 36,000-38,400 people respectively, were mobilised. These were men of working age, citizens of the Third Reich before the war, mainly from the region of the Upper Silesian cities of Bytom – Gliwice – Zabrze, who reported to the Soviet authorities after 12 February 1945 and were mobilized not for military service, but to work in the labour battalions grouped in the region of the Ukrainian Donbas, Belarus and Georgia. It should be pointed out that the fact that someone had German citizenship before the war and lived in the German part of Upper Silesia did not automatically mean that they were German. In this border region, Poles and Germans lived side by side, but so did a large group of autochthons, ‘locals’, who were without a crystallised national outlook.
Heading for Berlin
Between January and April 1945, a total of almost 95,000 detainees were sent to Soviet Russia as part of the ‘clearing of the rear’. These were not only detainees in Gdansk Pomerania or Upper Silesia, but also in Greater Poland, Western Pomerania and Lower Silesia. When the Berlin Operation commenced in April, it seemed that the scale of deportations to the East would accelerate, especially as the Red Army approached Berlin. In fact however, the opposite happened. On 18 April, Stalin modified the order ‘on clearing the rear of the Red Army’. The categories of persons subject to detention were restricted, including the exclusion of privates and low level NSDAP activists. Most importantly, the dispatch of detainees to the East was halted. The mass conscription of men of working age and their return to the working battalions, the aforementioned mobilisation, was also halted. The number of deportees in this category amounted to some 77,000. At the same time, from that group of detainees, Beria ordered the release of elderly people, invalids, women for whom there was no ‘hard evidence of guilt’.
What lay behind the decisions of the Soviet leadership? Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war were then, in the face of the defeat of the Third Reich, taken to POW camps and put to work for the Soviet economy. What, then, was the rationale behind taking on additional civilians? One can also assume that the relaxation of the terror after the crossing of the Oder and Lusatian Neisse lines was due to the fact that it had already served its purpose. After all, upon hearing of the Soviets’ atrocities and deportations to gulags, millions of Germans living there fled the area, which, to put it in brutally honest terms, essentially “cleansed the area” for the impending change of the Polish-German border.
The cessation of deportations to the East did not, of course, mean that the NKVD or Smiersz had completed their task. The arrests continued, but those deprived of freedom were sent to Soviet camps already established in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. There were 10 of these special camps in total (Mühlberg, Buchenwald, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, Bautzen, Ketschendorf k. Fürstenwalde, Jamlitz k. Lieberose, Sachsenhausen, Torgau, Fünfeichen). Some of these names may sound familiar, as the Soviets made use of the infrastructure of German concentration camps. The number of people imprisoned there reached 189,000, of whom some 40,000-43,000, or 23%, died. It is noteworthy that the prisoners in these spec lags did not work but rather sat idle for years, until 1950 even, with the mortality rate being very similar to those deported to the Soviet Union. This highlights that, regardless of external circumstances and location, the mortality rate in Soviet labour camps was the same everywhere – about 25% of deportees died within their confines.
Dariusz Węgrzyn (PhD) – Silesian Freedom and Solidarity Center.
The full article in Polish is here: https://swiatsybiru.pl/pl/sowieckie-deportacje-z-europy-srodkowo-wschodniej-w-1945-r/
This publication is a preview of the next issue of the Sybir Memorial Museum’s magazine ‘Zesłaniec’, which focuses on the Red Army’s conduct in the territories of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe occupied since 1944.