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Forced Into Slavery

A new exhibition sheds light on a rarely discussed aspect of World War II.

By Stephen Boykewich
Published: April 8, 2005


Museum of the Contemporary History of Russia

"Slaves of the Third Reich" depicts the lives of ordinary citizens caught in Nazi camps.

Many Europeans -- and Russians are no exception -- scoff at the U.S. system of legal liability that generates $2.9 million damages awards for burns from spilled coffee. But one of the most staggering results of any case to emerge from U.S. courts had Russians among its main beneficiaries -- and nobody dared called it excessive.

In 2000, the governments of Germany and the United States announced the establishment of a $5 billion fund meant to compensate prisoners of the Nazi regime used as slave labor for Hitler's war machine. Nazi Germany conscripted over 8 million such laborers -- the vast majority of whom were from the Soviet Union -- and a series of lawsuits filed in U.S. courts brought the question of how to compensate them into public view. Now an exhibition at the Museum of the Contemporary History of Russia, titled "Slaves of the Third Reich," hopes to do the same with the experience of their suffering.

"Who truly knows what war is?" asked Tatiana Sokolova of the Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation Foundation, one of the exhibition's organizers, in a telephone interview Wednesday. "Those who were there: our veterans, of course, and all those who suffered in these camps. For young people it's a very difficult thing to comprehend. The exhibition gives them a chance not only to see photographs and documents describing what it was like but also to approach people who survived the camps and ask them."

The exhibition is one of dozens of events planned by the State Duma's "Victory" committee to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany on May 9. But according to the organizers of "Slaves of the Third Reich," this exhibition stands out from the crowd in a crucial way.

"During these days it's important that we don't talk only about victory," said Irina Shcherbakova, education director at the human rights organization Memorial, which also helped organize the exhibition, in a phone interview Tuesday. "Before the victory came a very long and bloody war. There was an enormous number of victims, and their experiences are crucial to understanding the human cost of the war."

Sokolova concurred. "In my personal opinion, never before in the history of our discussions about World War II have we considered the experience of those in the camps. The focus is always on the heroism of our soldiers, on the partisans, on the glory of victory." The suffering of millions of Soviet noncombatants during the war, on the other hand, is "one of those things we don't talk about loudly in Russia," she said.

Drawing heavily on materials from the Russian State Archive, the exhibition presents photographs, excerpts from diaries and oral histories, and personal effects of camp prisoners and forced workers, providing "both archival and emotional value," Sokolova said. The materials are divided into three themes: "Work Camps and Stalags: Factories of Death," "The 'New Order' in the Occupied Territories" and "Liberation and Repatriation."

In Sokolova's view, the impact will be dramatic even for those already familiar with the history of the camps. "I know a fair amount about what went on at that time, and I was still shocked by some of the photographs," she said.

Many people will have the opportunity to feel the exhibition's effects even after it closes in Russia. It will travel later this year to Belarus, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany.

The extensive archives that Memorial has amassed while documenting the Soviet Union's atrocities against its own citizens proved useful in creating "Slaves of the Third Reich." But the group's participation in a government-sponsored exhibition is striking, given its often fierce criticism of the Kremlin for its human rights record in Chechnya and for its reluctance to provide full access to documentation of Soviet-era political persecutions.

Shcherbakova acknowledged the clashes but stressed that "the government is large and encompasses many different structures. The department working to identify and compensate victims [of the camps] is doing useful work, and we are happy to use our archival material to further that work."

Still, she said, neither the monetary compensation of the German-U.S. fund -- which many victims cannot access, because they lack the documents to prove that they suffered under Nazi internment -- nor the emotional outlet offered by events such as "Slaves of the Third Reich" can begin to resolve the full horror of the war. And whatever good the present exhibition may do, "there's also the question of how the Soviet Union treated the German citizens it took prisoner, though at the moment this is completely outside the bounds of discussion both in Russia and in Germany."

She summed up the reason for this succinctly. "It's all politics," she said.

"Slaves of the Third Reich" runs from Tues. to May 29 at the Museum of the Contemporary History of Russia, located at 21 Tverskaya Ulitsa. Metro Tverskaya. Tel. 299-6724.

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