Author Interview with Susan C. I. Grunewald
Susan Grunewald’s recently published book From Incarceration to Repatriation (Cornell University Press, 2024) is the first English language monograph about German prisoners of war (POWs) in the Soviet Union. In this interview with fellow Peripheral Histories? Editor Hanna Matt, Susan discusses some of the main factors that shaped POWs’ experiences and provides insights into her methodology.
What inspired you to write a book about German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union?
In 2011-2012, I received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant grant to Ulyanovsk, Russia, where I was assigned to the Applied Linguistics Department at Ulyanovsk State Technical University (UlGTU). The migration paperwork office for UlGTU was in the center of the city, away from the regular university campus. I went there to complete my registration paperwork one day and an employee asked what I thought about the building. It did not seem remarkable to me, but she told me that it had been built by German prisoners of war and she was proud of the high quality of the building. I was very confused as to why a building in the center of Ulyanovsk had been built by German captives, especially since Ulyanovsk was fairly far from the frontlines of the war. This one interaction led me to start to research the topic. I quickly discovered that it was understudied and would make for an excellent research project.
Later, I was able to do some research for the project in Ulyanovsk as I had connections in the city from when I taught English who knew people who ran the former Party Archive. I’m lucky that I was granted some access to a regional archive to add a more personal and local touch to a project that spanned the vast geography of the Soviet Union. I’m also a bit of a car fanatic, so it was a personal treat to get to combine my interests with the case study of the POWs and the Ulyanovsk Automobile Factory (UAZ).
Your book is based on an innovative methodology that draws on underutilised sources and digital history techniques. Could you tell our readers a little more about the process of arriving at your methodology?
My project has utilized digital humanities research techniques such as geographic information system (GIS) mapping and text analysis. I turned to these methodologies to help work around a major limitation in the accessible sources in former Soviet archives. The Soviet Union was a centrally planned economy, but there is not an accessible central accounting of POW labor contributions. I believe based on scattered archival sources that these types of records likely exist. I was able to find fractured statistics from individual camps or regional camp leadership. Stalin and other members of the Politburo assessed POW labor contributions at times as well, leading me to believe that they received reports discussing labor contributions. Without having centralized documents, though, it made it hard to fully support a thesis of captivity being motivated by the economic needs of the Soviet Union. I used digital mapping, then, as a way to scale up from the fractured archival source basis. By mapping the whereabouts of close to four thousand camps and branch camps, I was able to support my thesis in a different means through the geography of the camp system and its concentration in key sites for reconstruction, important extractive industries, and industrial centers across the Soviet Union. Digital research methods are really good for looking at large datasets that humans cannot easily process. I could layer the thousands of points of camp data with the close reading of Soviet archival sources and POW memoir testimonies to essentially triangulate the story of POW labor contribution to the wartime and postwar Soviet economy.
You argue that POW labour played a vital role in the wartime economy and post-war reconstruction in the USSR. What were the main ways in which POWs contributed and how were they integrated into the Soviet economy?
POWs participated across a wide variety of economic commissariats (renamed ministries shortly after the war). They contributed in large numbers to major tasks such as road, railroad, and housing construction across much of the Soviet Union or for key building block resource extraction industries such as coal mining and timber felling. POWs also helped to contribute to hundreds, if not thousands, of local enterprises based on the labor needs of the economy around their assigned camps. Some POWs worked on loan from camps to nearby textile or automotive factories, for example. The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) ran the POW camps and assigned prisoners to camps across the USSR. Local camp leadership then determined labor assignments in coordination with NKVD labor tasks and the local economy. At times, Stalin himself even intervened to send groups of prisoners to particular coal basins or cities. The local camp administration was tasked with caring for the POWs, who at times could be assigned to work alongside free Soviet citizens on jobsites. Overall, much like the GULAG system on which the POW camps were modeled, captivity revolved around contributing to the growth of the Soviet economy. Rations, medical, and recreational activities all revolved first and foremost around mandates for contributing to work tasks.
FIGURE A.1Population Density of German POW Camps in the USSR 1941 to 1956 and Coal Basins https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/1137c5a4-5b33-4164-8450-84323728c144/full
You show that there were considerable overlaps between POW camps (GUPVI) and the GULAG, for example in their administration. Could you tell our readers about some of the similarities and differences between the two camp systems?
The NKVD ran both the GULAG and the POW camp system, the GUPVI. When the NKVD created the GUPVI, they had been running the GULAG already for roughly a decade. NKVD officials took what they already knew, often via trial and error, about housing, feeding, giving medical care to, assigning labor tasks, and reeducating prisoners from the GULAG and applied in in very similar ways to the GUPVI. As my work shows, though, there were some major differences between these two systems. In brief, the German captives in the GUPVI were supposed to receive better treatment than Soviet GULAG. GUPVI camps were not located in the harshest, most remote, and most inhospitable regionals of the USSR as were many GULAG camps. Certain aspects of POW captivity relating to working conditions and ration standards were also influenced by international standards such as the Hague and Geneva Conventions, even though the USSR did not ratify those treaties. Soviet officials attempted to meet international baselines in some ways out of fears of retaliation or bad international relations, though the material conditions of the USSR during and after the Second World War meant that reality did not often reflect the leadership’s directives. German POWs were also eventually supposed to return home. Reeducation in the GUPVI was about anti-fascist transformation. These men had to be reconditioned to have a positive attitude towards socialism and the Soviet Union in the hopes of them returning to all sectors of Germany to advance socialism there and promote good relations with the USSR.
Similarly, there were parallels to the internment of foreign prisoners during the First World War. How did this practical experience impact Soviet treatment of German POWs during the Second World War?
A question about the First World War and interwar years from a scholar of the First World War and interwar years? I’m positively shocked!
The use of POW labor was not novel to the Second World War. Most of the combatants in the First World War deployed their prisoners for a variety of labor tasks. The Hague Convention, from before the start of the First World War, identified what was deemed the acceptable use of POW labor at the time. Modifications were made after the First World War experience and codified into the Geneva Convention, which the USSR did not sign, but used as a model for their Provision on Prisoners of War. Tsarist officials had figured out somewhat how to house and deploy Germans for labor with their First World War experience, as had many of the major powers involved in the conflict. Given that they already had this experience, which they then better protected in some sense with another series of international agreements, officials were able to build upon the First World War experience and use it more effectively during the Second World War, especially with insights gained from running the GULAG system.
The final chapter explores the place of POWs in the cult of the Second World War in the USSR and Russia. How did their depiction change over time and why?
I have answered this question in a bit of detail in an older blog post for Peripheral Histories? that may be of interest to readers of this interview. Briefly, though, the image of POWs in the memory and commemoration of the Second World War has existed in the Soviet Union and Russia almost from the outset of major national public commemoration efforts. One of the first examples of this is the major commemorative push for the 20th anniversary of the Soviet victory. The Germans are carved into the side of perhaps the USSR’s most iconic Second World War memorials, the Mamaev Kurgan Memorial Complex, which features the Motherland Calls statue. In this initial display, the cold and weary Germans are seen as physical representative of the Red Army’s victory. In the late 1980s, though, Soviet officials needed to be more careful discussing the memory of Germans during the war due to their alliance with East Germany. In 1985, Soviet and German officials created the Memorial Museum of German Anti-Fascists just outside Moscow. It championed the work of exiled German communists and socialists, many of whom went on to run the German Democratic Republic after the war, as well as captured German soldiers that denounced Hitlerism and worked to create German language wartime psychological propaganda materials. Thus, some Germans were reimagined into allies during the war. Finally, after the Soviet collapse, Germans were allowed by the Russian Federation to create graveside memorials, seeing their relatives as fallen men. The right for Germans to commemorate their dead on Russian soil was the result of the Russian government being granted the right to continue to maintain their gravesites for Soviet soldiers across Germany.
Susan Grunewald is an Assistant Professor of 20th Century European History at Louisiana State University. Her research interests include the Soviet Union, Germany, military history, history and memory, and digital humanities. She tweets from @susangrunewald1.