Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Arkhangelsk and the Labor Army

One of the topics that Suprun was doing research on that upset the Russian authorities enough to arrest him and put him on trial was the fate of Russian-German prisoners and labor army conscripts in Arkhangelsk. There was a corrective labor camp in Arkhangelsk during World War II devoted to the construction of a cellulose-paper complex. The camp was open from October 1940 until November 1944 except for a brief period from February to December 1942. The Soviet government employed a number of Russian-German labor army conscripts, almost all of them women, in the construction of the cellulose-paper combine as well as in other work such as lumber preparation. The first column is the total number of prisoners at the camp. The second column is the number of Russian-German women conscripted into the labor army and sent to the region to work.

Date                     Number of Prisoners  Labor Army Conscripts
January 1943        2,282                                       ----
July 1943              unknown                                  744
January 1944        1,649                                       722
November 1944    1,902                                      711
January 1945        ------                                        372

Source: A.A. German, "Sovetskie nemtsy v lageriakh NKVD v gody Velikoi Otchestvennoi: Vklad v pobedy," Voenno-istoricheskie issledovaniia v Povolzh'e, Sb. Nauch. (Saratov: Izd-Vo: "Nauchnaia kniga," 2006), Issue no. 7, p. 293.

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