It is encouraging that our press finally started to publish articles about the labour army. This subject is a very important one, after all, and it has to be made public in all details. I was in the labour army from the very beginning of its existence. I was an eye-witness of how, under which conditions the labour armists were forced to live, which humiliations they had to go through …
In September 1941, after the compulsory transfer of the Germans from the Volga Region, I, like many others, happened to get to Kansk together with my pregnant wife and two minor children. They had taken us there on freight cars under escort. From Kansk the whole family was sent to the village of Kalinikovo – about 150 kms away from Kansk. There the locals received us, as if we were to be blamed for the war … Later, however, the village people had the opportunity to convince themselves that we were not the kind of people the guards had made us out to be. Nevertheless, in spite of this improvement of our situation, there was nothing else to be done about our hard lot at that time.
On the 25 January 1942 I was mobilized by the Kansk military registration and enlistment office. Upon my arrival in Kansk I was informed that I would not be sent to the front, but to the labour army. I had to hand over all my personal documents to some official and was then ordered to wait for our leave. On the third or forth day, when they had made up a group of 400 to 500 men, we were escorted to the station in rank and file. There we had to board a train, which took us to a place called Reshoty. There workers of the Kraslag and commissioners of the USSR NKVD GULAG were already waiting for us. We had to line up. They checked everybody’s presence by means of lists and then informed us that we would have to work for the timber industry from now on and that some of us would be assigned to work as lumber-jacks, others to lay sleepers for the new railroad line to be built. They explained that we would all live in barracks – behind barbed wire fences, under the permanent escort of armed guards. To leave the zone would only be possible under escort, too. It was not allowed to write letters to one’s relatives or receive letters or parcels from them. Afterwards they took our fingerprints, as if we were dangerous criminals.
There were many communists andmembers of the Young People’s Communist League among the labour armists. Almost all of us were from the capital of the Volga-German ASSR – from the city of Engels and its surrounding cantons (this is how the rural districts were called at that time). The only personal documents we were allowed to keep with us in the camp were our party membership books and membership cards of the Komsomol. We were not registered with the district committee; only later we learned that we were registered and kept under the supervision of the political department of the NKVD Kraslag (the head of the political department was Sherbakov). Much later it turned out that our registration cards were not available at all – they had dissappeared. At our repeated request to clear this matter up with the other labour army zones, which were called “detachments” or “units”, finally arrived representatives of the political department. We were visited by captain Boltunov, who had earlier helped us to organize a party and comsomol cell in the camp. But these people were prisoners behind barbed-wire fences, too.
The absences of the most elementary rights and liberties every human being is usually provided with, frightened us to death. We worked in shifts and were closely guarded all the time. Having finished their daily slave work, which often lasted 16 hours, the guards drove the prisoners, who were weakened by permanent hunger and hard labour, back to the camp. Before entering the closed camp zone, they were counted over. It would happen that, if the count did not match the list of names, the whole procedure would start once again, until the exhausted prisoners were finally accepted by the camp guards. Many prisoners died during work. We had to pull and drag them back to the camp in the evening, where we left them by the gate.
In spite of these inhuman conditions we tried hard to give all our working power for the sake of our fatherland and the victory on our enemy. Our enthusiasm did not only cause confusion among the representatives of the camp authorities; it also thwarted their plans to cause trouble among the Germans, who had been monilized to the labour army, in order to confirm and prove that the pretentions made in the 1941 ukase about the “existence of ten-thousands of spies and saboteurs among the Soviet Germans” were perfectly true and that the ukase as a whole was completely justified. But however much Beriya’s people and other stalinists were trying to call any of them a “spy” or “saboteur” – they did not find a single one. Nevertheless they left nothing undone to prove the lawfulness of this mendacious ukase.
In this utterly problematic situation the communists were unable to remain indifferent. First of all the party committees of all departments decided to submit a written application to the USSR NKVD GULAG administration, in which they demanded immediate steps to stop all illegal acts and in the following refrain from any humiliations on the Germans mobilized to the labour army. The party committees appealed to all Germans to get influenced in no way by any events provoked by the camp administration, but continue their work in the usual self-sacrificing, consequent and persisting way, always keeping in mind the motto: “Everything for the front, everybody is to work for our country’s victory over the fascists”.
Soonafter, some general arrived in the camp. After having summoned the secretary of the party committee of the 1st department; P.I. Wechter (Wächter), he insisted that all communists of the department reached out their party membership books. This was obviously the order he had received from Moscow. The party committee, which I was a member of as well, decidedly rejected this insolent and shameless demand. Within short, many communists of our unit – Ruppel, Rudi, Behr (Beer? Bär?), Elsesser (Elsässer?), Gaas (Haas?) and others – were removed from the Kraslag and taken to other NKVD camps, some to the Viatlag, others to the Usollag or Karlag. At first one could only speculate upon the reasons of this transfer, but in the course of time it became evident that the prisoners had been despatched to other camps against their will, as they were said to have been members of a counter-revolutionary, rebellious organization, which were to be arrested without delay. What a wonderfully well-contrived operation!
Some time later, once again “guests from Moscow” arrived in the Kraslag. They were from the NKVD GULAG administration: Roshchin, Semenov, Genkin and others. And immediately appeared on the scene staff members of the operational State security department of the Kraslag (NKVD): Dogadin, Yankovskiy, Merzlikin and others, who were all dealing with “preliminary proceedings”. All these fakers seemed to have completely gone crazy; they would stop at nothing. Soonafter, every inch of the German communists was surrounded by malicious defamations, and in the camp zones the began to take repressive measures against them. What is even more – the party organizations themselves were declared illegal. A real witches sabbath took place. Now the NKVD was finally able to “show” all those spies and saboteurs, who were the object of that memorable ukase!
The Special Board (Troyka) inflicted penalty on entirely innocent people without mercy and with utmost severity. They sentences us, the labour armists and convinced communists, to a 10, 15 and even 25 years’ detention. We were forced to serve our sentence in the regime camps of the far North. The decision of the Special Board was final; there was no way to appeal against the sentence.
The following individuals were arrested and sentenced illegitimately together with me:
Only in 1954, when we succeeded to transmit our complaints to Moscow by the aid of reliable contact persons, came the instruction to “check and revise the cases of the Soviet-German Communists, who had become victims of reprisals in the NKVD Kraslag”. Ion the cause of this revision process they foundnout that the whole file had been “fabricated” and was based on lies, and that the communists were suffering in regime camps, although the were completely innocent. Due to the lack of a corpus delicti the case was finally dismissed, the sentences declared null and void and the victims of reprisals received their rehabilitation – unfortunately, many of them were only rehabilitated posthumously. It was not granted to all of them to live to see their release and return to their families.
Again and again I recall my comrades, who did not live to see their own rehabilitation, just as little as the rehabilitations of the whole Soviet-German people and the restoration of the Volga-German ASSR. One would very much like to have confidence in the possibility that the time of perestorika will lead to the restoration of historical justice, that this tormenting problem, which moves the people’s hearts, will finally be solved.
A. GAUS, member of the communist
party since 1940, veteran of labour,
former member of the party committee
of the 1st detachment of the NKVD
Kraslag, former prisoner of the Workutlag
“Krasnoyarsk rabochiy”, 10.02.1990