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Deportations of "repatriates"

Introduction

In this summary we will distinguish between eastern workers (i.e. civilians whom the Nazis had sent from the occupied territories by force or fraud, either to Germany or to Austria, France and Poland, in order perform certain tasks, or others, who had been simply put into camps, where there was no work at all) and prisoners of war, although their fates after the war (or after their release from war captivity) on the whole were extremely similar: all Soviet citizens who had fallen into the hands of the Soviet power outside the USSR passed through a so-called "filtration" (control) in special camps (PFLs = vetting forced labor camp, where the state securiry apparatus checked their loyalty), partly in Germany, Austria and Poland, partly on USSR territory, as well.

Some of the "checked" were released from the PFL and allowed to go home, some who were fit enough for active service were called up to the army, others were either sent into exile for a period of six years or written out a paper saying that they had to serve a sentence in a camp.

The point is that lots of young men, who had been deported for forced labor (or prisoners of war), were assigned to different military construction units in order to build military fortifications, like the so-called "Atlantic Wall" on the Northern coast of France, for example. Some of them succeeded to escape from there and ran off to the French partisans.

By the way, some of these people took part in the liberation of Paris and marched into the town in the very front lines of "France Libre". Later, they were decorated with medals of the Legion of Honour. And the USSR (and nowadays the Russian Federation) point-black con-sidered them as "war veterans" (!).

On the other hand, a considerable number of Ukraina-Germans in Germany actually belonged to the category of "Easterners" (Eastern Workers), as well. However, we do not know about any case of a German having been sentenced to a six years' internal exile: having passed through the filtration camps they were all sent into exile for an unlimited period of time, for reasons of their nationality.


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