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[ILLUSTRATED MANUSCRIPT ALBUM BY POWS IN THE FILTRATION CAMP] V fashistskoi nevole: sbornik rasskazov o perezhitom i vidennom v gitlerovskoi Germanii [i.e. In Fascist Captivity: a Collection of Accounts of Events Seen and Witnessed in Hitler’s Germany]

Item #975

Published by liberated prisoners of war and Soviet citizens in Camp No. 306 [e.g. Götzendorf, Austria], August 1945. Red cloth-bound album, with color drawing affixed to cover, measuring 30,5x21 cm; 318, [5] leaves of manuscript text to rectos. Interleaved with twenty-one full-page single-color drawings in black or blue ink; two full-page watercolor drawings; and sixty-seven smaller drawings in the text. With an index. Boards and hinges worn; joints professionally restored; occasional chipping and tears to leaves and a few old crude repairs without loss to text.
An astonishing discovery, this entirely hand-written and illustrated album contains dozens of first-hand accounts of Soviet fates in German concentration camps, prisons, and on forced labor sites. Compiled a mere month before the end of WWII, the volume likely sought to “redeem” a group of liberated soldiers held at a Soviet filtration camp (most likely camp PFL 306 in Götzendorf, Austria). Such camps were established by Soviet authorities in May of 1945 to debrief and vet war prisoners before returning them home to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a very different attitude than the United States toward its POWs: even after enduring German captivity, they were considered politically unreliable by default: surrender was illegal for Red Army soldiers. Stalin’s dictum that “we don’t have prisoners, we only have traitors” is well known today, but even at the time, soldiers sensed what awaited them back home. Many repatriates, especially former forced laborers in Germany, were deported to Siberia or sent to labor camps; others lived quiet lives in their home villages, but were stigmatized for life. Anyone who had collaborated with Hitler’s Wehrmacht, as in the case of General Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army, would have met harsh prison sentences, if not the death penalty.
Not surprisingly, the album begins with an impassioned outcry against the German aggressor, with numerous citations and exhortations by the “genius Stalin… creator and organizer of the historical victory”. The anthology “is a furious act of indictment against German Fascism, which unmasks its atrociously inhuman politics… exposing all of its vileness… [E]very single account reveals the animalistic visage of the fascist murderers, criminals, and sadists.” However, the compilers also stress the “honor and pride of the Russians who were violently deported to Germany, yet who found within themselves the strength and bravery to continue fighting the hated enemy on his own territory” (p. 8). Citing Aleksandr Nevsky and Stalin, the introduction closes with the conviction that the Red Army saved European civilization and that Fascism would never rise again. The introductory text is signed by Major I. D. Zakharov, deputy political officer of Camp 306. The camp was one of nine vetting camps established in Austria; in total 159 such camps are believed to have existed. The “filtration” procedure could take up to two months.
The album comprises a twelve-page hand-written introduction, an index, and the reports of seventy two individuals whose names and towns of origin are given. The accounts have been copied out legibly in one hand, likely based on earlier manuscripts, and are divided into four sections: “Death camps,” “In the land of terror and barbed wire,” “Factories of destruction,” and “Liberation.” Each section is preceded by a full-page illustrated title (ink drawing); the individual essays feature decorative drawn headers, in one or two colors. The album contains an additional seventeen full-page ink drawings, with captions, depicting gruesome scenes of torture in the camps, as well as two watercolor drawings (one frontis and one in the text). The artists, clearly with a professional background, are not identified, but some illustrations are signed using initials.
Most of the written accounts are short essays, some partly fictionalized with dialog and creative embellishments, and a few are narrative poems. They detail personal experiences at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen (at least three separate accounts), Ebensee, Gusen I and II, and other camps. Others describe the conditions in prisons such as Rossauer Lände in Vienna, forced labor at a factory in Altötting, and various prison camps (Stalags) in Germany and Austria. Virtually all detail harrowing practices such as torture by electroshock, murder by freezing water, savage beatings, maulings by attack dogs, impalement, or death by the gallows for drawing a red star on a prison wall; they often document the tragic deaths of fellow soldiers, whose names and home towns are sometimes given. One of the texts is an essay on songs composed by Russian prisoners. At times, the accounts are overly embellished, even to the point of seeming unlikely. Some of them are surprisingly literary in style or full of details, such as the full names and hometowns of compatriots encountered during the prisoners’ ordeals. A few are based on the experience of acquaintances, or even overtly fictionalized. All of this suggests once more that the album’s aim was not only to document war crimes, but primarily to remove doubts about the authors’ political reliability.
The contributors reflect the diverse origins and backgrounds of Soviet Red Army soldiers. To name but a few, they include: E. Shiskov from Grozny (now Chechnya), Efim Lenchilov from the Belarussian village Dvor-Buda, Artem Etumian from Sukhumi, Abkhazia, Nikolai Zolotomarev from Batumi, Fedor Slavkin from today’s Kazakhstan, and Fedor Bugaev from Khabarovsk. A number of texts appear to be written by Sergei Ivanovich Efremov (1917–1965), who formed an underground resistance movement among POWs in Bavaria and was later liberated from Dachau. He went on to become a writer after his rehabilitation in 1958. The veracity of these narratives and the fate of their authors awaits further research, and a full history of Soviet filtration camps on former enemy territory must also still be written. Documents from Soviet internment camps occasionally come to market, but they usually consist of facts and figures, or simple lists of names. We have not encountered a comparable work in terms of artistic accomplishment and comprehensiveness, nor are we able to trace similar holdings in public institutions.

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