An online archive containing information about Soviet prisoners of the Second World War will be created in Russia. It will be based on documents, copies of which will be transferred to Russia by the German Federal Archives. They will clarify the fate of about half a million Soviet citizens who participated in the Great Patriotic War. This will be possible thanks to the cooperation agreement between the Russian State Military Archive (RSMA) and the German Federal Archive, which was signed in Berlin, the Kommersant newspaper reports.
The Russian Ministry of Defense, the German Union for the Care of War Graves and other organizations and departments of the two countries also participate in this project, called "Soviet and German prisoners of war and internees". Digitized copies of documents will be transferred to the Russian military archive, and a search base will also be created during the implementation of the project.
According to Russian sources, during the years of World War II, 4 to 6 million Soviet citizens became prisoners of war. In the post-war times, it turned out to be impossible to establish the fate of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war; they were considered missing. Over the past twenty years, Russian and German researchers have been actively working and collected data on 700 thousand prisoners from the USSR. According to the Russian side, the fate of about two million Soviet citizens remains unclear.
Russkiy Mir reported that the project was launched in 2016 during a meeting of the Russian and German foreign ministers.
Russkiy Mir
