In less than a month, Russia will celebrate the next anniversary of the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War over the Nazi invaders. The war affected all continents and countries, including Norway, neighboring the USSR.

On the territory of this country, occupied by German troops, the Nazis created a powerful concentration system, which consisted of about 500 prisoner of war camps. It turns out that on average every 800 kilometers there was a zone surrounded by barbed wire - a zone of hunger, cold, exhausting labor and incredible cruelty.

During all the years of the war, about 100 thousand Soviet prisoners of war, mostly soldiers and officers of the Red Army, passed through this system. Of these, 13.7 thousand died. To date, Norwegian researchers have managed to restore the names of seven thousand people, more than half of them in the last five years. And largely thanks to Russian archives.

Doctor of Sciences, curator of the Norwegian Falstad Center Marianne Neerland Suleim is one of those researchers for whom the topic of scientific work at the University of Tromsø 13 years ago turned into a life’s work. Why and for whom she is doing this, Marianne told in an interview with RIA Novosti correspondent Anastasia Yakonyuk during the Nordic Days in Murmansk, one of the main events of which was an exhibition dedicated to the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Norway in 1941-1945.

— Marianne, you are looking for information about people from another country who died in Norway about 70 years ago. Finding and identifying each name is a titanic task. Tell us why you were interested in this part of the story.

— This topic has not received much attention in Norway for a long time. When I started working with her, I became convinced how little our country knows about this page of military history. Meanwhile, in Norway there are families where the memory of Soviet prisoners is carefully preserved: many relatives of current Norwegians helped prisoners of the camps under pain of death and punishment, and witnessed cruelty and inhumanity. That's why it's an important part of history for Norwegians.

© Photo: from the archives of the Falstad center

— What has already been done to date, where can you find information about the dead prisoners?

— I started working with this topic in 2000, collecting material for 13 years. Only in 2009 did the Norwegian authorities begin to create a database that contained information about the names, fates, and burial places of Soviet prisoners of war in Norway. This work continues today.

We work with databases and archives. Now we can talk about more than seven thousand names out of 13 thousand victims restored. Moreover, four thousand names were identified quite recently, thanks to the fact that we had the opportunity to work with information from Russian archives - they were closed to us until recently.

Here the cards of prisoners are of interest to us, but on many of them it is already difficult to make out the inscriptions made in German or Russian, which is why it is so difficult to compare the Norwegian names of the places where these camps were located.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to restore the names of those prisoners who died during transport by sea along the coast of Norway - then two large ships sank, on which in total there were about three thousand people. Their lists have been lost.

The database was open to everyone in 2011, and relatives of former prisoners of war could find publicly available information about their loved ones who died in camps in Norway.

During the war, prisoner of war camps were scattered throughout occupied Norway. Some held up to 50 people, others could barely accommodate thousands. Today, most of them are difficult to find, not to mention the graves of Soviet soldiers.

At the height of the Cold War in 1951, the Norwegian authorities decided to move all Soviet war graves to a special military cemetery on the island of Tjette on the Helgeland coast. The operation, which was carried out secretly and quickly, was called "Asphalt", and it caused outrage among many ordinary Norwegians, who considered it a desecration of graves and an insult to the memory of Soviet soldiers.

— Marianna, what was the need to move the remains? Indeed, during this operation, monuments and crosses in memory of the victims were demolished in many places.

“It was the Cold War period, and it so happened that the history of prisoners of war was even more alienated from national history. The need for the transfer was explained by the fact that at that time the territories of many former camps and burial sites were located in a military zone. The authorities explained that they were afraid of espionage, that people could come there and photograph objects.

From the three northern regions, the remains of approximately four thousand prisoners were moved to the island, where there is a monument. The names of 800 people have been identified, and we are still finding new names. We would like to install another monument on the island with names, so that later we can add to the list if we manage to find someone else.

— Are there other burial places of Soviet prisoners in Norway today, what condition are they in, who takes care of them?

— All over Norway you can find small burials, individual graves - in northern Norway alone there are about 500 of them. Many are in a deplorable state - they are overgrown and destroyed. But we are conducting a dialogue with the authorities in Oslo and hope that we will be heard and something will be done so that history is not forgotten. And so that when people come to where the camps used to be, they know what kind of place this is.

© Photo: from the catalog of the exhibition “Soviet prisoners of war in Norway”

© Photo: from the catalog of the exhibition “Soviet prisoners of war in Norway”

But local authorities should also take care of such burials. Unfortunately, they are not coping very well yet, and largely because of that operation.

They thought it was not their business to take care of Soviet graves, but now something is changing, the graves are being put in order, the monuments are being restored.

— A large amount of information passes through you - names, dates, names of camps... Is it possible to learn more about the destinies of people behind dry numbers and facts?

— Yes, there really are a lot of numbers, but every time we find information and place it in the database, we also look for photographs, drawings of the places where the prisoner was, so that relatives learn more about the fate of a loved one. I am always looking for material, collecting bits and pieces.

I met many of those who survived these terrible camps. Some, until old age, did not even tell their families what happened to them during the war. I talked to Norwegians who were on the other side of the barbed wire and tried to help Soviet prisoners. Most of the memories are collected in books that were published in our country.

Many houses in Norway carefully preserve small crafts made of wood or metal, which Soviet prisoners gave to the Norwegians in exchange for food or as a token of gratitude for their help. It is now also an important part of the history of Norwegian culture.

One day, the son of a former prisoner approached me, who had been looking for his father’s grave for many years. It took me two years to find his card.

Imagine, the children of that soldier lived with this uncertainty for 60 years. When we found the burial place, my son and his daughter came to Norway, visited the grave, it made a very strong impression on me.

Even today we receive many letters from the children and grandchildren of former prisoners. They don't come often - it's expensive, but we try to send them photos and all the information we can find.

— The fate of Soviet prisoners of war on Norwegian territory became the topic of your doctoral dissertation and a separate book. An exhibition dedicated to this page of history travels to different countries. What other pages of military history would you like to open?

“There is still a lot of work ahead - with burials and establishing names. In addition, I would like to study in more detail the history of the liberation of eastern Finnmark (a province in northern Norway that was liberated by Soviet troops in the fall of 1944).

And I’m also writing an article about civilian convicts who ended up in camps - about women and children forced to work in the territory of occupied Norway. Little is known about them at all, and this is another tragic page in the history of that war.

Today, of the 13,700 Soviet prisoners who died in Norway, the names of only 2,700 are known. The purpose of the exhibition is to spread knowledge in Russia and Norway about a very important part of our common history, which has been kept silent for a long time.

"In many secluded and remote corners of Norway there are still people who carefully preserve the memory of Soviet prisoners of war and lovingly care for the graves of those who were not destined to live to see the long-awaited victory. Of those who did not live, there are more than 13 thousand people in Norway. On holidays, solemn days, Norwegians come to burial sites with bouquets of flowers or wreaths and place them at the foot of the monuments erected by the prisoners of war themselves after their release from the camps. The construction of the monuments took place mainly in May, June and partly in July 1945, i.e. in the months before repatriation. These tombstones and monuments were mostly built not in cemeteries and not always from durable materials, but from what was at hand. Naturally, structures of this kind could not withstand the changeable Norwegian weather for long, especially in the coastal regions of the country. The creators of these monuments in no way claimed classical beauty, “grandeur and peace” of their buildings, and modestly decorated them, sometimes with a red star, sometimes with an Orthodox cross. On rare occasions these two creeds were placed side by side in close proximity. Those monuments that have not collapsed, been destroyed by vandals or demolished by the Norwegian military authorities remind new generations of Norwegians of the hardships of the German occupation that their fathers and grandfathers endured, and of the harsh ordeals in Nazi captivity that befell Soviet prisoners of war .
In addition, they remind us of human warmth in inhuman conditions, of the solidarity and struggle of ordinary people against the bottomless evil that surfaced from the depths of fascist racial theory. Over time, these monuments turned into a material guarantee of the mutual sympathy and compassion that arose in those distant years between the “humiliated and insulted” representatives of two peoples and many nationalities. In the first post-war months, these feelings resulted in widespread fraternization and sincere friendship. In the unforgettable days of May 1945, as soon as Soviet prisoners of war appeared in any crowded place, the Norwegians surrounded them on all sides, warmly shook their hands, patted them encouragingly on the shoulder and hugged them tightly. The military and members of the Resistance Movement stood at attention, saluting in a friendly manner, and the women stroked their faces, and their eyes slowly filled with tears of genuine compassion, and their hearts with a feeling of boundless joy: “Norway is free again! You are our liberators!”
These feelings, experienced by Norwegians, eyewitnesses and participants in the events of those days, were, to a certain extent and in different ways, passed on to their children and grandchildren, and they, reflecting on the history of their country, come to the conclusion that the stay of Soviet prisoners of war in Norway during the war is just as integral part of its history as the German occupation. And although today's youth do not show much interest in modern history, there is a significant layer among them that has a fairly clear idea of ​​the innumerable sacrifices made in the name of victory by all the peoples of Russia. According to the International Demographic Conference in Moscow in 1994, these victims amount to 26 million people, which is approximately 6 times the current population of Norway. Most Norwegians remember this. Norwegians also remember and preserve the memory of those who died and are buried in their country. They still have a favorable attitude towards Russians, despite the not always favorable Norwegian press..."

...They unloaded us at some station and drove us on foot to a camp in the city of Thorn, in Poland. We were placed in separate barracks, fenced off from another area with barbed wire. Old-timers of this camp told us that the camp is divided into zones, in each zone there are prisoners from one state, the Russians are fed the worst of all, and the Americans and French are better than everyone else. Recently the Italians were brought here, and the Germans are already putting their allies in camps. A week later we were loaded into carriages again and sent on our way. After two nights and one day we were unloaded and marched back to the camp on foot. It took us a long time to get to Stargard. We stayed in this camp for about a month. We were taken to work, and one by one, in groups, we were left in the camp, recorded in some books and photographed. They gave us a stencil with a new camp number, which we had to hold at chest level. They didn't give us any photographs. Experienced men advised me to contort my face when taking photographs, so that in case of escape, it would be more difficult to identify me from the photograph, so I did so...
Ilchenko Mikhail Alekseevich,former prisoner of war.

Personal cards of Soviet prisoners of war. Simple, dear Russian faces...

Soviet prisoners of war behind barbed wire.

More personal cards:

Camp hell of soldier prisoners:

Slave labor on Norwegian soil:

Sisters Olya, Nina and Katya:

Stand-personal card under the ceiling. Part of the personal file of prisoner of war Arkady Korneychuk (1907-1942), who died in a concentration camp in Norway:

Liberation.

A Soviet prisoner of war, freed from camp imprisonment during the operation. 1945

Remains of Soviet prisoners of war and barracks of a German camp in northern Norway.

At the time of liberation in 1945, there were about 84 thousand Soviet prisoners of war on Norwegian soil. On June 13, 1945, the sending home, or repatriation, of Soviet citizens began. During the Cold War, Norway carried out the so-called Operation Asphalt in 1951, during which the remains of Soviet prisoners of war were transferred from the cemeteries of Northern Norway to the Tjette war grave on the Helgeland coast. Many monuments were destroyed during reburial.

Released prisoners:

A Norwegian soldier and a Soviet child (possibly a little girl). A photograph worthy of becoming symbolic.

From the memoirs of an eyewitness-translator:

Home, in the USSR.

...At dawn we were stopped at some station, where we stood for more than an hour. Petlin went to find out what was going on and returned to report that the train was being transferred, since the next station was already on the territory of the Soviet Union. We all crowded around the windows and doors so as not to miss the moment of crossing the border. And now, finally, it’s happened! We saw border posts and border guards in green caps. Our joy knew no bounds! Finally at home! Suddenly one of the soldiers shouted: “This is the Luzhaika station! I served here and took part in the first battle with the Germans and Finns”...
Ilchenko Mikhail Alekseevich.

Items made in the camp by Soviet prisoners of war.

Historian Mikhail Goldenberg “reads” archival photographs of Soviet prisoners of war in Norway and retells his random but very important conversation with a man who managed to survive both during captivity and, most importantly, after it.

In September 2012, as part of the Russian-Norwegian cultural forum, the exhibition “Soviet prisoners of war in Norway” was opened at the National Museum of the Republic of Karelia.

Soviet prisoners of war in Norway

These photographs shown at the exhibition speak for themselves.

I looked for a person I knew in them and looked at them with special care. And some faces seemed to me similar to Ivan Ivanovich Dolotov.

We met in the compartment of the St. Petersburg-Brest train on June 20, 2001. Both were traveling to Brest: I was attending a conference dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the start of the war, and Ivan Ivanovich, a participant in the defense of the Brest Fortress, was invited to commemorative events.

Such meetings are a gift of fate. Ivan Dolotov is mentioned in the famous book by Sergei Smirnov “Brest Fortress”. And here is a multi-hour carriage conversation, conducive to special frankness.

Ivan Ivanovich told me in detail what happened in the fortress on the eve of June 22, 1941, in the first days of the war. And on June 29 he was captured.

“Were you the one who fought?!” A week later you surrendered!” — these were the words the young special lieutenant shouted to him when Ivan Dolotov walked from the Norwegian camp to his own people. For him, the journey home took a month. But before that there were a long 3.5 years of fascist captivity, three of which he spent in Norway.

The story of senior sergeant platoon commander of the 33rd engineering regiment Ivan Dolotov about the first days of the defense of the Brest Fortress completely changed my ideas about this heroic epic. This topic and the fate of S.S. Smirnov’s book require a special story.

Ivan Ivanovich also told in detail how he ended up in captivity:

“I was terribly thirsty. It's hot, everything is burning. There are wounded all around. And not a drop of water. The fortress is surrounded by water. Right next to our casemates was the Mukhovets River. Near each exit there are tanks and German machine gunners, guns are aimed. You can only run out when the bombing starts. Of course, there is little chance of running 15 meters there and back. And then the guys found a pump with a hose. Let's throw it into the river and pump water. My friend and I, my fellow countryman from Leningrad, ran under heavy fire, but there wasn’t enough hose. How I pulled it! There was a table missing,” he pointed to the width of the table in the compartment.

“Then a mine exploded behind me. I felt pain in my shoulder. He fell and lost consciousness. I woke up. I'm lying near the wall. My comrade is nearby. Near us are a German sergeant major and two soldiers. My friend and I agreed that when they ask us where we are from, we will say that we are from Mariupol. I didn’t want to disgrace Lenin’s city... Then we were taken to the neighboring Polish city of Bialy Podlaski. We stayed there in the potato field until October. They fed us roach and gave us some bread. Every evening the Germans shot the weakened. The officer applied his hand, checked the pulse and rejected him. The shooting was done by soldiers, probably unprofessionals. Then they came to us drunk, crying... And then they took us to Norway.”

There were 100 thousand Soviet prisoners of war in almost five hundred camps located in Norway. 13,700 of them died. They also contained 9,000 Soviet civilians, of which 1,400 were women and 400 children. Recently a book by the Norwegian researcher M.N. Soleim “Soviet prisoners of war in Norway” was published in Moscow. Number. Organization and repatriation." This book describes in detail humiliation, inhuman labor, illness, hunger and death - all the faces of the life of Soviet prisoners.

Ivan Ivanovich Dolotov recalled: “I worked in quarries. Before 1944, conditions were unbearable. In the last year, the guards were changed - Germans to Czechs. They tolerated the fact that the population threw food at us behind the thorn. In October 1944, the guards disappeared. We walked to our people in Kirkenes. We stopped along the way with Norwegians. Ordinary people helped us."

Count Folke Bernadotte visits a Soviet prisoner of war camp.

The Norwegians admit that some of the facilities built by Soviet prisoners of war, such as railways, are still in operation today. The memory of them remains. Although in 1951, at the height of the Cold War, Operation Asphalt was carried out: the Norwegian authorities ordered that all burial sites of Soviet prisoners of war be moved to the island of Tjötta. During the transfer, many graves were simply destroyed. Now the common monument and mass grave are well-groomed and maintained in order.

The fate of more than 80 thousand who returned from Norwegian captivity is also tragic. Many of them ended up in the Gulag, and almost all of them were in the position of lepers for many years. In total, 5.7 million Soviet people were captured by fascists, 3.8 million of whom died in captivity. Those who returned faced camps or a shameful stigma. Major Gavrilov, one of the leaders of the defense of the Brest Fortress, spent more than 10 years in Soviet camps after German captivity.

“The apartment of Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov was turned into a rooming house. When I first came to him in 1956, about ten former defenders of Brest, who had recently returned from places not so distant, lived with him. That’s how he wrote his book,” Ivan Ivanovich Dolotov told me.

In this drawing, the artist depicted Ivan Dolotov in a naval uniform. He worked for many years in the Leningrad port, repairing navigation instruments.

Of course, I remembered him while looking at the photographs of this Norwegian exhibition. Ironically, in August I visited the Polish city of Bialy Podlaski. He kept looking around in search of that potato field. The next morning our bus drove into Brest and I saw the Terespol Gate of the fortress. Yes, memories are like the wind - sometimes they return...

And the theme of captivity and its victims finds a worthy rethinking in our country. The attitude: “We have no prisoners, we have traitors” is, hopefully, gone forever.

I like the name of the project that created this Norwegian exhibition – “Painful Inheritance”.

All photographs are from the collection of the exhibition “Soviet prisoners of war in Norway”

The wind is blowing and it is raining at the Gerdla cemetery. Just over half an hour by car northwest of Bergen stands a monument to Ivan Vasilyevich Rodichev. Someone came here with a wreath and a candle.

This is the still unknown story of how a young man from a village in the southern Soviet Union ended up on a tiny Norwegian island with only one house. And how he died.

The story tells about the terrible everyday life of 3% of the population of Norway in the mid-forties and about Soviet prisoners of war.

More than 70 years after World War II, more bricks are falling into place. Who was this Ivan? And almost 100 thousand other Soviet prisoners of war who built the northern railway, the E6 highway and the new German airfield in western Norway?

The Nazis called them "Untermenschen" (subhumans). They had no human rights and were barely fit to be slaves.

Only the strongest survived the transport from the Eastern Front to slave labor in Norwegian towns and villages.

13.7 thousand Soviet prisoners of war died on Norwegian soil or during shipwrecks off the Norwegian coast during World War II. Almost 6 thousand of them are still not identified.

For comparison: more than 10.2 thousand Norwegians died on land and at sea.

The prisoners of war were killed by hard work and inadequate nutrition. The story of Ivan, who was in his early 20s, is somewhat different.

Camps on the Eastern Front

On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. This became the largest military conflict in world history. And longer than Adolf Hitler expected.

In the first months after June 1941, the Germans captured more than two million Soviet people, but the Germans had no plans for these prisoners.

The prisoners were kept in the open behind barbed wire in large fields near the front line. Thousands of those who were not killed as Jews and communists died of disease and starvation. By the end of 1941, approximately 5 thousand Soviet prisoners of war were dying every day.

Hitler planned to use the entire Soviet Union. Communism was Germany's main enemy in the thirties. Now it was necessary to displace the civilian population, and the Germans had to come in their place.

The story of Ivan Vasilyevich Rodichev began with his birth in the Soviet Union in 1920. In civilian life, he worked as a driver. He was Orthodox. His father's name was Vasily. This information is contained in his prisoner of war card on a page with Russian text.

Apart from this, we have almost no information left about Ivan. The prisoner of war card is the only document that can tell something about his short life, which ended on Norwegian soil.

Hitler thought that the war in the east would end in a few months, but this did not happen. The dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, was not prepared for war, and he did not have enough weapons. But Stalin had enough people. When the Germans killed or captured someone, new Soviet soldiers constantly took their place on the battlefield.

Germany soon had problems. She needed labor for factories and agricultural harvesting, but young Germans had to continue the war on the Eastern Front.

Therefore, Hitler decided that prisoners of war should be used as workers.

Transporting prisoners of war to Norway

In the central archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in 1946, some information about Ivan Vasilyevich Rodichev was recorded. He was born in the village of M. Bykovka, Balakovo district, Saratov region. His mother's name was Ekaterina Andreevna Rodicheva.

She lived in this village when her son was sent to war.

On December 8, 1943, Ivan, a senior sergeant of the 2nd Motorized Rifle Battalion of the 3rd Motorized Rifle Infantry Guards Division, was captured in Malin, Poland.

Soviet prisoners of war had two serious problems that made their lives unbearable and hopeless.

The Geneva Convention of 1929 established international rules for holding prisoners of war, but the Soviet Union did not sign the convention. The Nazis took advantage of this. They believed that these prisoners of war had no rights, they were mistreated, they were starved.

In addition, Staley introduced a law making captivity punishable. Stalin's order stated that the last bullet in the rifle was intended for the soldier himself.

Largest number of prisoners of war in Norway

Ivan was 174 centimeters tall and had dark hair. He was healthy when he was captured. There are fingerprints on the POW card, but no photograph.

On the second page of this card it is written that he was sent to the Stalag VIII-C prisoner of war camp. He was located in Zagan in Germany (in Żagań in Poland). There he was given the prisoner of war number 81999. On February 12, 1944, he was sent to the Stalag II-B assembly camp near Stettin in Germany. Now this city is called Szczecin and is located in Poland.

Gradually, the number of prisoners of war in Norway became the largest in Europe in relation to the population. At this time, the population of Norway was approximately three million, of which more than 95 thousand were Soviet prisoners of war. The Nazis sent not only prisoners of war, but also civilians from many other countries to hard labor in Norway.

All Soviet prisoners of war arrived in Norway on cargo ships from Stettin along the Baltic Sea. The healthiest men were herded on board like cattle, they were stuffed to capacity in cargo holds without toilets. Not everyone survived to the final delivery point.

“If someone died, it didn’t bother the Nazis much. There were so many prisoners,” says historian Michael Stokke.

A researcher from Narviksenteret is trying to collect as much information as possible about every prisoner of war in Norway.

Currently, approximately 8 thousand people out of 13.7 thousand Soviet prisoners of war have been identified.

Most of the prisoners of war from the Eastern Front were brought to Norway in August 1941. This was before Hitler ordered the use of soldiers as convict laborers. Each of the first four transports carried 800 people. The Germans really needed labor to clear snow in Northern Norway. This hard manual work was performed by prisoners.

Gradually, prisoners of war began to build defense facilities, airfields, railways and highways on Norwegian soil. One of the highways was Highway 50, now called E6. Prisoners were a very important labor force for the Germans, but at the same time they were considered “subhumans” who had no value.

Two thirds of all Soviet people in Norway were in Northern Norway. The construction of the northern railway alone required 25 thousand Soviet prisoners.

Airfield "Girdla Fortress"

On March 22, 1944, Ivan Vasilyevich Rodichev arrived at Stalag 303 on Jørstadmoen near Lillehammer. All prisoners of war in Southern Norway belonged to this main camp. Here they were distributed and sent further to hard slave labor.

A few weeks later he was sent to POW Work Battalion 188, located in Bergen. Three days later he began working on Girdle's POW work team.

“Just two months later he died. It was a short stay in captivity,” says Michael Stokke.

Nobody knows what kind of work Ivan did because Gerdla Island was a closed military zone. Here the Germans had units from all three of their military branches: the Luftwaffe had its own airfield, the Wehrmacht (ground forces) had a coastal fort, and the Kriegsmarine (navy) maintained a torpedo battery.

“Everywhere you turn here on the island, you can see signs of war almost everywhere. These are huge structures, positions, dugouts, quarries and tunnels,” says Gunnar Furre.

He heads the Gerdla Museum and tells how the Nazis raced to turn the flat areas on Gerdla into the main airfield for eastern Norway. They knew how to plan quickly.

At this time there were no airfields in Norway between Stavanger and Trondheim. It was urgent to build an airfield to protect shipping along the coast from Allied attacks, monitor the arrival of ships in Bergen, and protect the coast itself.

“Gerdla was completely closed to civilians, so we don’t know what the prisoners were doing there. There were approximately 1.5-2 thousand people on Gerdla, including prisoners of war, but we don’t know for sure,” says Gunnar Furre.

The Germans also built a coastal fort on Havelen north of Gerdl with four artillery positions. At the end of the war, the construction of the Jeltne torpedo battery, located in the same area, was completed.

150 Soviet prisoners of war lived in Gerdlevogen on the island of Gerdla itself. Ivan was placed in a barracks along with about 80 other prisoners on the small nearby island of Midtei.

Context

Norway: they want a thaw in the north

Find forgotten heroes

Russia regrets the film "Occupied"

There lived a woman who still remembers the rumors about Hitler. She also remembers the chaos that ensued. And also when Ivan was taken away.

Inhumane conditions in the camps

When the POWs arrived at Gerdla, the airfield had by and large already been built by the Organization Todt (OT). This paramilitary construction organization entered into contracts with private construction companies, in addition, it was assigned construction battalions of prisoners of war numbering up to 3 thousand people.

There were 15-20 such construction battalions in Norway. And 103 camps. The Wehrmacht determined how much food the prisoners should receive, how much clothing they needed, and the OT was responsible for housing in barracks and for construction projects.

Responsibility was scattered. When prisoners died, these organizations shifted responsibility onto each other. Who was to blame for their deaths? Was this due to poor conditions in the barracks or did they lack food?

“The Germans had special concepts in the POW cards, they had something called ‘general physical weakness’. It’s not a diagnosis, it just meant that the body was worn out. POWs died from exhaustion,” says Michael Stokke.

Soviet prisoners of war in Norway wore the clothes in which they were captured, and they wore them throughout their captivity. When working hard in any weather, clothes quickly became unusable. In winter, it happened that their shoes were taken away so that they would not run away. Then they only had wooden shoes, which the Germans gave them. To prevent them from falling off their feet, they were tied to their feet with cement bags and wire.

“The prisoners worked all day long, shoveling heavy pebbles and sand. They had no way to warm up and dry their clothes at night after a long rainy day. Usually there were 30 people in a room with one stove. The next day they again had to go to work in wet clothes.

The ten-hour working day lasted from 07.00 to 17.00. The prisoners had a half-hour break without food in the middle of the day.

Food was given in the evening. Typically it was cabbage soup, some potatoes and maybe some meat. In some camps the soup was called flower soup, in others it was called barbed wire soup. This soup had many different names and little nutritional value.

They were also given some bread, which they tried to save for the next morning. German soldiers often took the butter that came with the bread, and if you don’t have something as important as butter, you become seriously malnourished,” Stokke says.

Barracks life on Midtay Island

Every morning at seven o'clock from Monday to Saturday, Ivan Vasilyevich Rodichev, along with everyone else, was taken by boat from Midtey to work in Gerdla.

Sunday was a day off.

“Then a beautiful Russian song rushed from the highest hills of the island of Midtay. It was so beautiful,” says one of the residents, Midtay, who has lived here for more than 70 years.

The elderly woman does not want her name used, but her story suggests that the 80 or so prisoners on the island fared slightly better than prisoners of war elsewhere.

The young people in the barracks at the pier made a great impression on the Norwegian family who lived on the island in a house on a hill. The youngest prisoner was only 17 years old.

“He showed us a photo of his sister, but he didn’t know whether she was alive or not. And then he started crying. His parents died. I felt sorry for the sweet boy.”

The prisoners at Midtai had a fairly free regime. Some helped carry water while the Norwegians washed clothes. And prisoners who worked in the kitchen could come to the family who lived upstairs on Midtai to sharpen their kitchen knives.

The family on Midtay lived by fishing, and the men were at sea almost all the time.

“The prisoners were normal people, but we never went down to the pier alone. We always went in twos,” says the woman.

“I remember how they sent us potatoes on the boat. We were unable to carry everything from the pier at once, and the next day there was nothing there. They hid the potatoes under their clothes, but basically nothing bad ever happened.”

The prisoners found crabs in coastal rocks and boiled them in small tin cans. “They never complained,” the woman says.

But they were hungry. And here their daily diet also consisted of soup and bread.

“They had one extra shirt, which they often wore in their free time. The shoes were bad, but many prisoners received knitted socks from us. It was a great joy for them."

On this small island there existed closer relations between prisoners of war and Norwegians than was usual elsewhere. Historian Michael Stokke believes that this was because it was difficult to escape from island to island, and that the German guards generally did not touch the prisoners.

“Many German guards did not want to go to the Eastern Front. Those who were sent to guard the prisoners in Norway did their job and treated the prisoners quite well. But not too good, because in this case they could be punished and sent to the Eastern Front. It was necessary to maintain a medium distance,” explains Stokke.

Myths about those who survived

Many of the 84 thousand Soviet prisoners of war who survived the war in Norway were afraid to return home. They were afraid of Stalin's punishment.

Cold War myths said that most were executed after returning home, but this was later proven to be untrue.

The Cold War between East and West began in 1947, basically cutting off all contacts until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After 1990, it became easier to access Russian archives.

“Actually, fewer people ended up in these terrible Soviet prison camps than was commonly believed. Those who ended up there were those who were somehow in the service of the Germans. As translators or actively helping the Germans. Many prisoners of war could immediately return home. Some continued to serve in the army, others had to serve two years to rebuild society before heading home. That is, their situation was much better than we thought. Everyone was not shot, as some said. They did much better after the war than we thought,” says Stokke.

Rumors of Hitler's death

By the evening of Saturday, July 22, 1944, Midday was lightly cloudy and there was almost no wind.

The temperature was almost 20 degrees Celsius when the boat of German officer Hans Richard Küster and his crew moored to the pier. Küster was the commander of the 2nd company, 18th battalion of the Wehrmacht in Bergen.

A commotion immediately began on the island. By order, all prisoners were taken out of the barracks. From the attic window of the main house, the women of the family on Midtai watched the drama unfold. The Germans living on the island ordered that the children not leave the house. They couldn't see it.

“A terrible cry arose. These big men who arrived on the boat gave orders, shouted and threatened to shoot us.”

Ivan Vasilievich Rodichev left Midday in his business shirt

He sat on Küster's boat with his hands on his head. A German soldier stood in front of him with a bayonet pointed at Ivan's chest. Four other prisoners were taken away in exactly the same way. This was the last day of Ivan Vasilyevich Rodichev.

Two days earlier, Wehrmacht officers in Germany attempted a coup against Hitler. A bomb exploded in one of the main headquarters of the German leadership, but Hitler was only slightly injured.

However, rumors of Hitler's death nevertheless spread. And they reached Midtey and Gerdla.

“Rumors spread everywhere among the Norwegians and among the prisoners, because they knew nothing. They just heard something and it was completely distorted. Troops supposedly entered here or there, peace came, and then the Nazis had to surrender. The rumors were completely wild,” says Stokke.

Prisoners refused to work because Hitler died

“The ones who didn’t return were probably the two who campaigned the most,” says Michael Stokke.

No one knows exactly where the dead Ivan Vasilyevich Rodichev and Pyotr Grigorievich Nikolaev lie. We know little about Nikolaev - only that he was a private, born in 1916, probably from Novosibirsk.

"I won't rest until I find his POW card," Stokke says.

A historian and researcher, he still receives calls from descendants and family members who want to know where their loved ones are buried in Norway.

“A few weeks ago I was contacted by a Russian who was looking for his grandfather, who had gone missing.”

After the war, there were rumors that Ivan and Peter were shot by a German team of guards in Gerdla near the church wall.

After liberation, the prisoners demanded to find the corpses in order to bury them properly, and the Germans were sent to excavation and search. To no avail.

On the memorial stone installed on Gerdla by fellow Soviet prisoners, it is written: “Here lie two Russian soldiers shot by the German Nazis on June 22, 1944.” (INCORRECT DATE: The date on the memorial stone - June 22 - is incorrect. The archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation confirm that both were shot on July 22, 1944. The name on the monument is "Petr", although the correct spelling of the Russian name is "Pjotr" - approx. author of the article).

The memorial stone was first placed outside the church cemetery, but was later moved to the cemetery. At the entrance to the church.

Hans Richard Küster and nine others were accused of executions at Gerdl after the war. Küster died in captivity in East Germany in 1946.

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.