published: 22 June 2024
“This was not our war.”
On the anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, we publish Aren Vanyan's essay on the Zeithain prisoners of war camp (1941-1945) and the family memories of the Soviet soldiers who died there. This text was written as part of the research for the Ehrenhain-Zeithain Memorial site.
1
In February 2023, I came to Dresden thanks to the Memory work scholarship program organized by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the .
On the day of my arrival, when I checked into the dorm, I saw a Russian orthodox church from the window of my room. A couple of months later, having moved into a rented apartment, I was surprised to learn that the public transport stop closest to me was called Alexander Puschkin Platz. After a while, I discovered traces of the hammer and sickle emblem under an intercom dial of our residential building – plaques from the GDR era. The house custodian, an elderly lady from Poland, calls me Malchik ("boy"). Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Sketches" and Prishvin's "Diaries" are prominently displayed in the main bookstore. Waitresses of beer and jazz clubs, having learned that you are from Russia, joyfully announce Dobro pozhalovat ("Welcome").
At that, on one of the central streets of Dresden, Prager Straße, or simply Prague Street, you can meet a local madman in a hat with earflaps and a huge flag of the Soviet Union. One day he tried to talk to me, but I waved him off and quickened my pace.
2
My work in Dresden also turned out to be linked with Russia – rather with the Soviet influence, to be precise. Last year I was busy consulting descendants of Soviet prisoners of war via email, researching biographies of these POWs, and since recently I have been interviewing their relatives and descendants within the framework of a special project of the Ehrenhain-Zeithain Memorial Complex.
Zeithain is a modest East German town with a population of a few thousand people. The modern history of this town is almost continuously connected with war and the armed forces: in 1941, the Wehrmacht organized the prisoner of war camp in Zeithain, in 1945 the Soviet military administration converted this camp into a filtration camp, and then, right until 1992, the Soviet and the Russian armies used the area of the former camp as a tank range. Today, in its place there is a memorial complex and a cemetery for POWs.
During the Second World War, the Wehrmacht regularly violated the protective norms of the international law (the Geneva Convention, the Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land). Inhumane conditions of detention — executions by a firing squad for the slightest violations, malnutrition, epidemics of dysentery and typhus — led to the death of about 25 – 30,000 Soviet and more than 900 foreign prisoners of war in Zeithain.
On April 23, 1945, the Red Army liberated Zeithain camp. The Soviet military administration learned about the mass death of POWs in this camp as a result of having been authorized to get access to the miraculously preserved materials of the former Wehrmacht Information Service by the American Army. The bureaucratic machine of the National Socialist regime worked like clockwork even during the war: information about each soldier who had been captured and had made it to Zeithain alive was recorded in special registration cards – often with a photograph, frequently the only one of this person. After World War II, the Wehrmacht documents were taken to the USSR and stored in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense in Podolsk.
Still, hundreds of thousands of Soviet parents and wives, brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren were not informed of the true fate of their loved ones. They did not learn that these unfortunate soldiers had been captured at the very beginning of the war, that they had been taken to prisoner of war camps in Germany, that they had died there from inhumane conditions of detention or had been subsequently repressed by the Soviet. Instead of the truth, Soviet military units continued to send "pohoronki" to Soviet families — notices that their sons, husbands, brothers, grandfathers or fathers were allegedly "missing in action."
This is where our story begins — the story of how two, and often three, generations of Soviet and post-Soviet families, whose loved ones did not return from the front, were misled first by the Soviet government, and then by the Russian one.
3
40-year-old Tikhon Prokofievich Protsenko worked as a blacksmith, was married, had three children and lived in the village of Bessonovka (modern Belgorod region) when he was drafted into the Red Army in the summer of 1941. In September of the same year, Tikhon was captured and taken to Zeithain. All data about him was recorded by the Wehrmacht Information Service: year and place of birth, height and hair color, date of capture and places of forced labor, date and cause of death, and most importantly, family members and their addresses in the USSR. On May 7, 1942, Tikhon died. He was buried there, on the territory of Zeithain, where the cemetery for Soviet military personnel is now located. In 1945, the documents prepared by the Wehrmacht about Tikhon (for example, a personal card) were reviewed by employees of the Soviet Military Administration (there are Soviet stamps with dates on the documents). Then these documents were taken by Soviet troops to the USSR.
Tikhon's family — a widowed wife and three orphaned children — knew nothing about his fate during the war as well as after it, except for that MIA notice “pohoronka”. The fact that Tikhon was captured, that he was taken to Germany, that he was exploited for forced labor, that he died and was buried there, that all this information was documented and available to the Soviet troops — his relatives were notified about none of the above. The consequences of this silence were often tragic. In 1953, one of Tikhon’s sons was drafted into the Red Army and did military service in Dresden, just 50 kilometers from the cemetery in Zeithain where his father had been buried, all the while his son believed he was “missing in action.” In 2012, he died without ever knowing what exactly had happened to his father.
Today, members of the Protsenko family are again cut off from each other because of the war: Tikhon’s grandson lives in the Belgorod region, and his great-granddaughter named Olga lives in Kharkiv. But thanks to their efforts, the memory of prisoner of war Tikhon Protsenko did not disappear. In the mid-2010s, after another family get-together during which the fate of Tikhon was discussed, Olga Protsenko went on a website with a database of Soviet prisoners of war and found a page there with information about her great-grandfather. In 2019, she traveled to Zeithain and visited her great-grandfather’s grave — 77 years after his tragic death.
"It was March when we arrived," Olga told me in an interview, "it seemed to be warm. But as soon as we entered the territory [of the former camp], there was such crazy wind and it was so cold there. And we were told that my great-grandfather had been right in the front row when he had gotten there, and that at first there hadn’t even been barracks there, they [prisoners of war] had been just in the open air, digging dugouts for themselves with mugs and spoons. There were four of us, and from time to time we — I don’t know, maybe the guys don’t remember, but it comes to me when I feel really badly — I recall this moment and think that everything is fine."
Olga told me about this via video call in the spring of 2024, while in Kharkiv, a city in which almost all the critical energy infrastructure has been destroyed.
"Now our electricity is periodically shut off and the Internet is bad, and we are all, like, grumbling: "It’s bad, there’s no light, sometimes there’s no water." As I say, I remind myself how cold it was there [in the camp], how windy it was there. When a person is far away from home, they don’t understand where they are, what is going on with them and what will happen to them. How can one not go crazy during all this? And you realize that you are doing very well. It’s vital for me".
4
In March 2022, Evgeny Fedoseev, a 42-year-old director of a large chemical plant in Moscow, was forced to leave Russia. After three months, he moved his family out of Russia.
"I left because it was dangerous to stay in the country with my political position," says Evgeniy. "I wasn’t involved in political activities, but I openly spoke out against aggression in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine and other crimes of the Russian government."
Evgeniy believes that the fact that he is politically involved is something that he took after his great-grandfather, Alexei Ovsyannikov, a farming peasant from the village of Baklanovskaya (modern Stavropol region). Alexey was a son of a village ataman, did not support the creation of collective farms in the USSR and was put on the list for dispossession. In the first half of the 1930s, when he was informed that they would "pay him a visit", he went to Armavir, taking his family with him, then to Tbilisi, and then returned to his native village — however, their house had already been dismantled, and the family was forced to live in an earth lodge. In 1941, Alexei was drafted into the Red Army, and in the same year, his family received notice that he was "missing in action." The family and descendants did not receive any other information until 2009, when his great-grandson Evgeniy found the correct information through acquaintances. It turned out that in fact Alexey Ovchinnikov had been captured, taken to the prisoner of war camp in Zeithain and had died there on December 29, 1943. The information about this was kept in the USSR Ministry of Defense in Podolsk, but was withheld from Alexei’s family members.
"By the time I found out about my great-grandfather," said Evgeniy, "I understood what it was. I knew what had happened in our country, why the archives had been classified. <…> I know when the Second World War and not the Great Patriotic War began, who signed it all and in what manner. I know everything".
The difference in political views often led to conflicts between Evgeniy and his relatives. Nevertheless, he stands by his choice, which he made back in the 1990s, at the height of the First Chechen War, when he was a young man of military age and could be sent to the war front:
"From that point on I’ve hated all wars, just all of the wars. And it’s not that I was a straight up pacifist, but I saw how my mother was afraid of losing us [sons]. And I had a negative view of the army, military registration and the enlistment office. I studied the law on conscription."
Evgeniy admitted that, despite the fact that he rejected war, he still had a dislike for everything German. As he grew older, he realized that a negative image of a German had been imprinted in his memory since childhood, when he had been exposed to Soviet propaganda on television. It took him a lot of effort to erase this hatred of Germany from his consciousness. Then, however, he began to worry that his children, two teenage sons and a little daughter, would also be infected with state propaganda of hatred. The fact that he deeply cared for his family prompted Evgeniy to travel with his family to Zeithain in 2017:
"It’s not about me remembering it, I’ve dealt with it. This is an opportunity to show my children these scary photos that we saw there, and explain what this is, at an age when it’s important for kids, and that it’s explained by the people who can do it better than me. I’m an expert in my field, and I understand what can happen when amateurs try their hand in my field, it’s scary. That’s why it was very important for me that professionals showed this to my children. And it turned out to be very effective, they [the children] will remember it for the rest of their lives."
5
To date, I have interviewed ten relatives and descendants of Soviet prisoners of war who sought counseling at the Ehrenhain-Zeithain Memorial Site. These people live in different parts of the world: in the USA and Ukraine, in Germany and Kazakhstan. My last conversation took place with Sergei Volochai, a Ukrainian psychologist and human rights activist who has been forced to live with his family in Bulgaria for the third year in a row.
"To me, Victory Day," says Sergei, "is the loss of two grandfathers and the miserable life of my mother, parents and grandmother. This is what Victory Day is to me. It's all there. I’m not happy about this holiday."
Our conversation was dedicated to Sergei’s maternal grandfather, Andrei Solobay, who was born in 1899 in the Poltava region of Ukraine. Andrei was a wealthy peasant, had seven children, but since the 1930s his life was ruined by the state: first, during the Holodomor, four of his children died of hunger, then he was imprisoned twice for refusing to work for the collective farm, and in the end he was deported to the Zaporizhya region, where he became a shepherd in a wild field. In 1941, World War II came to the USSR, Ukraine was occupied by German troops, and Andrei, an elderly peasant who was deaf in one ear, was conscripted into the Red Army. In 1942, the family was notified that Andrei Solobai had gone "MIA."
"We had absolutely no use for this war," continues Sergei, "it wasn’t our war, and our grandfather was taken away for a war that was not ours, and we lost our grandfather."
In 2014, when Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine began, Sergei voluntarily came to the military registration and enlistment office and requested to be drafted into the army in a written form. None of his relatives knew about this. But Sergei remains confident that his grandfathers would have acted in the same way if they had had to defend their land, their families, their freedom and independence. He first took interest in their fates in the 1970s, when he was studying at school in Kremenchug (modern Poltava region). He had two history teachers, both veterans. The first was a front-line soldier who glorified the party, while the second one was an intellectual with a manner who never joked about the war. Under their influence, Sergei for the first time asked his parents what had happened to his grandfathers, whom he had never met. In response, he received insufficient information: his parents, who survived the Stalin era, were still afraid to discuss both the fate of the "missing in action" Andrei Salabai and the second grandfather.
Sergei learned the truth only 30 years later, in the 2000s, when a distant relative from Belarus, who worked at the military registration and enlistment office, accidentally saw their last name in one of the . It turned out that it was grandfather Andrei, and in fact he had died as a prisoner of war in Zeithain.
"It wasn’t good news," recalls Sergei. "Well, another echo of the grief that we had growing up without a grandfather. It reflected on our mom that we lived without a grandfather, without a dad, we lived without a tata [father], that we lived without a loved one, and we endured it, and now it all shook up, that so many losses and hardships befell mom and the children."
I asked Sergei if he had visited Zeithain. He admitted that he had planned to go there with his wife several years ago, but for various reasons it had not worked out. Now that they have lost the opportunity to return to Ukraine because of the war, he is not at all sure that he will go.
"Well, yes, it would be nice [to go to Zeithain], it’s a rite of passage, but what will it change? Mom is gone; if mom were alive, she would find it somehow reassuring. Grandma would definitely need this. But we, grandchildren, needed a grandfather. If we take into consideration the pros and cons, then all these [funeral] ceremonies and rituals are nothing. I only wish my grandfather were alive.
Now I can’t imagine how my life would have turned out if I had had a grandfather. I look at myself, what kind of grandfather I am to my granddaughters. Damn, what have I lost, gosh darn it! How would this have changed me, how would it have affected my attitude towards my children, myself being married and a father, a husband! It’s normal for children to have a father, mother, grandfather and grandmother.
And yet here I am, having grown up without a grandfather, and in such conditions that nothing could have been told to me about my grandfather by my parents. It’s like living without a hand; you were born without a hand and have to live with it, and you don’t know what it’s like to have a second hand."
6
How did Olga, Evgeniy and Sergei gain access to information about their ancestors who had died in Zeithain during the Second World War?
The GDR ceased to exist in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the partial dismantling of archival safeguards began. The problem of prisoners of war — both German ones in the USSR and Soviet ones in Germany — again became the subject of historical research, public debate and discussions around . In 1996, German and Russian researchers managed to find documents from camps of the former Wehrmacht information service in the German archives, and in 1997 — in the aforementioned Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense in Podolsk. The German Ministry of Culture took the initiative upon itself to publish this data. In 2000, an intergovernmental project by the name "Soviet and German Prisoners of War and Internees. Issues while Studying the History of the Second World War and the Post-war Period." was launched by Germany and the Russian Federation. On the German side, the , or rather its subordinate Documentation Center in Dresden, was appointed head of this project. Fruitful long-term work of German organizations began, with institutions and archives of Russia (since 2000), Belarus (since 2002) and Ukraine (since 2004), with the aim of searching, systematizing and digitizing documents relating to German prisoners of war and internees in the USSR and Soviet prisoners of war in Germany during and after World War II.
As the result of this international project, numerous books were published and, most importantly, an online database of the Dresden Documentation Center, which contains more than 900,000 personal pages of Soviet prisoners of war who were held captive in Germany in 1941-1945. On the Russian side, the OBD Memorial website was launched, supervised by the Ministry of Defense and dedicated to the Soviet military personnel who were killed, died and went missing during the Second World War and in the post-war period. It is important to emphasize that, despite the massive propaganda of the OBD Memorial website on Russian television and in the media, real consultations with relatives and descendants of Soviet prisoners of war were and are still carried out exclusively by German organizations.
However, in March 2014, immediately after the Russian annexation of Crimea, the official cooperation of the Saxon Memorial Foundation with Russian institutions and archives was suspended. Since then, the foundation has advised only those whose relatives and ancestors were captured in Saxony (a federal state in the southeast of Germany). It is the Bundesarchiv which deals with inquiries about the fate of the remaining Soviet prisoners of war who were held in custody in Germany in 1941–1945. Nevertheless, the intergovernmental cooperation between Germany and Russia centered around prisoners of war on both sides continued until at least 2020.
During this time, new online databases were created in Russia with access to documents of Soviet military personnel who were captured in 1941–1945 (for example, the sites Pamyat’ Naroda ("Memory of the People") or Podvig Naroda ("Feat of the People")). Still, one cannot help but notice the aggressive propaganda of the Soviet-Russian victorious military history while perusing these sites. In addition, all information about intergovernmental cooperation between Germany and the Russian Federation has been removed from the pages of these sites (while the German online database kept this data), and all the information collected by German organizations was copied by the Russian side without indicating sources. As if there has not been a joint project between German and Russian researchers, organizations and governments for at least 20 years.
How can we briefly summarize this story?
Since 1945, the Soviet government, possessing genuine information about the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Germany (at least in the former prisoner of war camp in Zeithain), withheld it from the Soviet population. The cover-up of this information went on until the mid-1990s, when researchers from Germany and Russia gained access to the archives of prisoners of war. Since 2000, projects by German and Russian organizations were launched in order to search, systematize and digitize these archives. Since 2014, Russia's foreign policy has been radically militarized, primarily in relation to Ukraine, and Germany has gradually frozen intergovernmental cooperation with Russia.
These days, the Russian side claims all the credit for publishing the archives of Soviet prisoners of war and the findings are being broadcast by propaganda as an achievement of the Russian Ministry of Defense exclusively. In that, in the twenty-first century the Russian government, inheriting traditions of the Soviet government, continues to mislead the Russian population, at the very least, by hiding true information about the history of the publication of the archive of Soviet prisoners of war who were "missing in action" in 1941-1945.
7
On April 23, 2024, I came to the Ehrenhain-Zeithain Memorial for the annual ceremony commemorating the liberation of the city and the camp by the Red Army. I met my colleagues, got acquainted with new people, and also closely watched a small group of people, men and women of retirement age, dressed in T-shirts and baseball caps with symbols of Russia and the USSR.
We were invited into a tent, and the official speeches began. Two performances got etched in my memory. The first speaker was a middle-aged Ukrainian who grew up in the FRG: his mother was an “eastern worker”, forcibly taken from the USSR to Germany to be exploited for manual labor, and his father was a Soviet prisoner of war, who spent all his life after the war under the fear of deportation from the territory of the FRG to the USSR. The second speaker was a Polish historian who spoke about the fragility of what a family remembers and noted that every fifth Soviet soldier buried in Zeithain was Ukrainian. During these speeches, a group of fans of Russia and the USSR fidgeted in their chairs, looking at each other nervously, as if they could not understand why no one was thanking the Red Army.
At the end of the speeches, a three-piece orchestra performed a Bach suite, applause rang out, and we approached the memorial to Soviet prisoners of war, built back in 1949. Today, this memorial is surrounded by flags of all the republics of the former USSR, as well as other states whose prisoners of war were in Zeithain — the flags of Russia and Great Britain, Serbia and Ukraine, Armenia and Italy, as well as other countries that suffered from the inhumane actions of the German armed forces during the Second World War. The next part of the ceremony began, now with participation of Bundeswehr soldiers, and I looked boredly towards the prisoner of war cemetery. A sharp wind blew, and I remembered, as if on command, the words of Olga from battered Kharkiv, whose father finds himself in the Belgorod region right now, and their ancestor, Tikhon Protsenko, who died 82 years ago and was buried in one of these cemeteries: "How can one not go crazy during all this?"
I do not have an answer to this question.