MOBILIZATION OF FORMER PRISONERS OF WAR OF THE RED ARMY AFTER LIBERATION FROM A GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMP IN 1943 (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF THE WESTERN DISTRICT MILITARY ENLISTMENT OFFICE OF THE KALMYK ASSR)

Abstract

The study is devoted to a prosopographical analysis of a group of former Red Army prisoners of war, liberated from a German concentration camp in the city of Sal’sk and re-conscripted by the Western District Military Commissariat of the Kalmyk ASSR in February-March 1943. For the first time, a rare practice for wartime has been identified and analyzed: the re-conscription of liberated prisoners of war through a territorial district military commissariat just a few weeks after their liberation. Based on archival data introduced for the first time, the article investigates the following issues: the geography and chronology of the capture of military personnel; analysis by place of birth and military rank, affiliation with specific military units and formations, the mechanism for the temporary placement of former prisoners of war in the Western and Yashalta uluses (districts) and their subsequent dispatch to the active army via the army assembly point in the city of Sal’sk. The study revealed that 379 of the soldiers (mostly privates and sergeants) were from the southern regions of the RSFSR, including the Rostov Region, the Ordzhonikidze Territory, and the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Most of them were captured during the Voronezh-Voroshilovgrad Operation and the initial phase of the Battle of the Caucasus, which resulted in severe defeats for the Red Army on the Don and the Manych Rivers in July and August 1942. On the other hand, among the prisoners of the camp were military personnel who had been captured near Stalingrad, in Sevastopol, during the subsequent phases of the Battle of the Caucasus, and even during the Kiev «cauldron» in 1941. After their release, the exhausted prisoners were sent to the Western and Yashaltinsky uluses for medical treatment, and then they were conscripted through the Western Military Commissariat and assigned to the 28th Army. There is no evidence of any repressions against the prisoners of the Salsky camp due to their time in captivity. This source not only fills gaps in the fates of hundreds of soldiers (whose data are absent from the «Memorial» and «Memory of the People» databases) but also shows how the mechanisms of state policy towards former prisoners of war were adjusted in practice under conditions of an acute shortage of human resources at the front.