“What happened to my uncle?”
Nikolai Mishchenko asked more than fifteen years ago.

In the spring of 2021, I was preparing a lecture for an event commemorating the anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. For this lecture, I also conducted research into crimes against Red Army soldiers who were interred in German concentration camps. Almost one thousand of these soldiers were murdered in Flossenbürg during the Second World War.

During my research, I came across Nikolaj Mishchenko’s question from 2005. At the time, no definitive answer was possible.

I wondered whether the new capabilities of our digital archives now made it possible to be certain of his fate. Was Grygorii Grygorovytsch Mishchenko among those who were murdered?

In early July 1941, somewhere near Lutsk in north-western Ukraine, Grygorii Mishchenko was captured and became a prisoner of war.

Since then he has been lost without a trace, and his brother Stefan agonizes over not knowing his fate.

In 2005, Stefan’s son Nikolai Mishchenko traveled to Germany to find out what happened to his uncle. I tried to retrace Nikolai’s steps and his research. At the same time, I wanted to know whether the progress in digital research networks over the past fifteen years can bring us any closer to solving this case.

In one section of the Memorial Archives, we collect documents pertaining to Soviet prisoners of war. As part of this work, archival documents are being digitalized in the post-Soviet countries. To this end we also work in close cooperation with other institutions: the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission), the German Historical Institute Moscow (DHIM), and the German Federal Archives.

In the Memorial Archives, we process this information and make the sources publicly accessible. One of the most important results of this work is that it sometimes becomes possible to find out what happened to victims of the war.

My first step is to search for the name “Grygorii Mishchenko” in our database. Since the transliteration of Cyrillic names can vary, multiple possibilities have to be tried. Often Slavic and Central Asian names were also written incorrectly in Nazi documents.

I do find a data set for a “Grygorij Mischtschenko,” the German transliteration of his name. But sadly, there are no documents about him in the database. However, according to the data set he was one of the Soviet soldiers executed in Flossenbürg.

It is not yet clear where this information comes from.

Nikolai had already found a trace of his uncle in the local archives in Stavropol—a Personalkarte (personnel card). He received a copy of the card and corresponding documents.

For those of us conducting research today, these file cards are very important sources of information about Soviet soldiers who were German prisoners of war.

The file card states where the Germans brought his uncle, from his registration on July 4, 1941 to his transfer to a forced labor commando on October 19, 1941.

Seven hundred men were in the Arbeitskommando 306 (Labor Commando 306) Regensburg. They were forced to work under miserable conditions in a Wehrmacht supply depot.

In the Second World War, the Wehrmacht created these file cards for the soldiers they captured. After the war, the Soviet occupation administration seized these and other German documents. They were moved to Soviet archives.

As long as the Soviet Union existed, this information was kept confidential. Family members were not told what had happened to missing soldiers. For Grygorii Mishchenko’s relatives, this state of uncertainty lasted over fifty years.

Encouraged by a place name on the file card, in 2005, Nikolai’s father wrote to the city of Regensburg.

The municipal administration however did not hold any records on the prisoner of war camp. In the Nazi period, these were under the authority of other institutions: the Wehrmacht and the Criminal Police (Gestapo).

Nevertheless, Nikolai was able to obtain important leads and contacts.

The local chapter of the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (VVN) aided him during his visit to Germany in October 2005 and called his attention to the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial.

Back then, colleagues from the memorial had worked with Nikolai to interpret the documents he brought with him. But in and of themselves, they did not provide much information. Only in combination with another document from our archives known as the Kuhn list was it possible to draw conclusions about Grygorii’s fate.

The Kuhn list was used as evidence by the prosecution in the Nuremberg Trials. It is central to understanding how Wehrmacht, Gestapo, and SS collaborated in crimes against Soviet prisoners of war.

Starting with the papers that Nikolai brought with him and the documents in our archives, I take a new look at the results of the original research.

In 2005, a copy of the personnel card was made for our archives. Since then, new sources have become available that could not be accessed at the time. I therefore look through our database on Soviet prisoners of war, which is continually expanding.

In the meantime, new documents from the Stavropol archives have in fact been entered into the Memorial Archives —but not the documents about Grygorii. This means that without Nikolai’s old paper copy, even with our modern database I would not have gotten any further!

There is a stamp on the back of the Personalkarte (personnel card): “12/10/41 Gestapo Regensburg.” That does not bode well.

Like my colleagues before me, I compare the information with the Kuhn list.

In the fall of 1941, systematic evaluations were conducted of the labor commandos for Soviet prisoners of war. Men who were considered to be agitators or “political commissioners” were selected for deportation.

Luitpold Kuhn was responsible for the region under the authority of the Stapo Regensburg (Regensburg state police). As a civil servant in the Criminal Police, he also had to have been a member of the SS. His list documents “unusable elements,” which he “weeded out” (ausgesondert). In the euphemistic language of the Nazi period, this meant that the men were deported to concentration camps and murdered.

In Flossenbürg, they were usually shot on the very day they arrived.

The stamp on Grygorii’s Personalkarte (personnel card): “12/10/1942 Gestapo Regensburg.” According to the Kuhn list, one day later, on December 11, 1941, fourteen prisoners were sent from Regensburg to Flossenbürg. Was Grygorii among them?

The victims’ names are not recorded on the Kuhn list. The Germans wanted to keep their killing operations under wraps. But they were not always able to do so. Fifty-two prisoners who had been sent from Regensburg to Flossenbürg to be executed two-and-a-half months earlier are known by name because of another document, a rare case. Those men were prisoners from Grygorii’s forced labor commando.

It is therefore highly probable that Grygorii, too, was shot in Flossenbürg.

Information on Nazi crimes against Soviet prisoners of war are usually found in different holdings. Often, it is documents from the Gestapo or the Wehrmacht that bring our research a step further. Not until we evaluate sources that are scattered, but nonetheless connected, can we find what we are looking for.

Thanks to the digitalization of archival holdings and to online databases, it is now easier to conduct research in various archives. It is therefore not unlikely that today we may be able to find out what happened to people for whom documents were previously missing or in closed archives.