Burying the Alliance: Interment,Repatriation and the Politics of the Sacred in Occupied Germany

On the morning of 29 October 1946, Soviet Army Major A.G. Karpov met the team of British Major A.J. Evans on the Soviet side of Berlin. Evans, his translator and driver had come to undertake a sacred mission for their country – to reclaim British war dead. Karpov, a liaison officer in the Soviet Military Administration of Germany (SVAG), had orders to stop the British from doing anything else on the Soviet side. Evans was one of the few British officers let into the Soviet zone and he had traveled with Karpov before. During their first mission, the Soviet officer had shown little enthusiasm for the multi-national effort to recover the allied dead. At its close, he refused to take a photograph with Evans and the British team at the burial site: ‘I generally dislike taking photographs.' It was no surprise that on the second trip Karpov guarded the British closely in a Chemnitz hotel, warding off drunken Soviet officers and evading questions about the zone and himself. Over three days of grisly work, the team identified the graves of several British flight crews. But nearby one of the sites, Karpov stumbled upon a mass grave with 265 unidentified bodies. Who would claim these dead and for what purpose? ¹

An estimated 36.5 million Europeans had died in the Second World War, their remains often buried in foreign lands alongside other strangers from abroad. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where millions from occupied countries had arrived as slave laborers or prisoners. ² As many as eight million people survived this experience and the question of their return or resettlement presented an enormous logistical problem, as well as a moral and political dilemma. ³ But as the allies pondered the fate of the living, they considered another question that would reveal the cleavages in postwar politics and attitudes – what would become of the war dead?

In virtually all societies, the dead carry a significance that extends beyond the burden of their disposal. However, how regimes and societies treat their dead is a construction that varies depending on a constellation of cultural, political and economic factors. ⁴ A number of scholars show that while the dead cease to have agency, their remains continue to act as mediums for social and political conflict. ⁵ Anthropologist Katherine Verdery argues that ‘the aura of sanctity' of a corpse ‘(re)sacralizes the political order represented by those who carry it [reburial] out.' ⁶ In times of political flux such as the period after major wars, the dead become particularly important for establishing the righteousness of contending world orders. The commemoration of the wartime fallen thus becomes tied to citizens’ views of the conflict or even the state itself.

As allied officials navigated the fluid postwar situation, the interment of the dead in Germany highlighted their varying priorities and philosophies. SVAG and the western allies allowed only limited commemorative activities of the German war dead, denying the German war effort potential sympathy. ⁷ However, the western occupiers and SVAG agreed upon little else. In memorializing their own fallen soldiers, Soviet authorities viewed the dead as a collective. Its monumental commemoration would legitimate the USSR’s postwar claims to hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast, the western allies generally agreed upon individual burial – a practice they had developed during the First World War. ⁸ Through extensive commemoration, western officials sought validation among a domestic audience, where families expected individual burial as the conclusion of a successful war.

In Germany the shared burden of the fallen became a point of contact, conflict and contrast that provides a window into the relationship of the occupying forces. Scholarship on the occupation of Germany has generally stressed the divisions that led to the partitioning of the country. In this view, the western allies engaged in a zero-sum game with the Soviet occupation. In 1944, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom and USA agreed to occupy the country jointly in three zones and later created a fourth zone of occupation for France after the end of the war. With the important exception of the trials of major Nazi figures, cooperation between the powers broke down as soon they finalized the zones in July 1945. ⁹ The split was due to fundamentally differing visions about the future of Germany. As SVAG laid the foundation for Soviet-style socialism in East Germany, the western allies created a social market economy in the west. ¹⁰ Moreover, the USSR and its allies competed for various German resources. The allies vied to enlist German scientists as a form of reparation. ¹¹ Orphaned and abandoned children became ‘pawns in a Cold War struggle between East and West.' ¹² From 1945 onward, the western occupiers and SVAG created increasingly larger obstacles to movement between their zones, culminating in the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948–9 and the division of Germany in the next year.

Nonetheless, each of the allies had interests in Germany that lay beyond their own zone of occupation and that demanded inter-zonal cooperation. There were thousands of allied dead spread throughout the country. Their fate lay in the hands of occupation officials in the zone where they had fallen. Meanwhile, Soviet authorities claimed hundreds of thousands of ‘displaced persons' living in the western zones as citizens of the USSR. They had come to Germany as forced laborers, POWs or refugees – often from areas the Soviet Union had annexed in 1939–40 – and many refused to go to the USSR. Soviet officials believed the repatriation of non-returners would reunify the Soviet collective, validating the USSR’s claims to moral authority at home and in the world. Unlike the dead, non-returners had some agency in deciding whether they would be repatriated. However, their fate, too, largely depended on the interactions of the allies in postwar Germany. The politics of the sacred surrounding the dead and the living necessitated that each of the four allies engage one another. Even as animosity grew in the emerging Cold War, occupation officials made uneasy compromises across the iron curtain.

Two discourses about the sacred mixed in Germany. As the western allies sought to return their dead aircrews and prisoners from the Soviet zone, they expected SVAG’s support for the sacred duty of honoring the fallen. Soviet officials interpreted these efforts as a plot to spy in the Soviet zone. Yet SVAG’s own sacred mission to return living Soviet people to the motherland met with similar skepticism from the western allies. Ultimately, SVAG and the western occupation authorities came to an arrangement: the repatriation of western allied dead for access to the Soviet living. Although the two sides found an agreement, the compromise only reinforced mutual perceptions about the otherness of their one-time ally.

Official commemoration of the Soviet war dead had roots in revolutionary practices that placed an emphasis on collective remembrance. Individual memorials in the USSR were limited to significant figures; the most prominent case was the enshrinement of Vladimir Lenin’s corpse in the mausoleum on Red Square. ¹³ Before Lenin, though, pro-Bolshevik forces buried 500 worker-soldiers in Red Square who had died in the fight for Moscow in October 1917. John Reed, who himself would later be buried in the Kremlin Wall, described their collective burial in the ‘brotherhood grave' – imbuing the literal translation from Russian of ‘mass grave' with notions of revolutionary fraternity. ¹⁴ After winning Moscow by force, the Bolsheviks sanctified their victory with the burial of the revolutionary fighters in the heart of the city. Although interwar Soviet official culture favored collective commemoration, mass death also made traditional forms of individual and familial mourning impossible in many cases. ¹⁵ Various campaigns of repression sent Soviet citizens far from their homes, where the remains of those who perished would stay.

Mourning in society continued in spite of the official emphasis on collective remembrance. ¹⁶ During the war, leaders in the Soviet Komsomol (Young Communist League) noted a spike in religious activity among young people who experienced ‘soulful trials' at the prospect of their parent’s death. ¹⁷ The archive of the Soviet repatriation administration contains hundreds of files with letters seeking information about the fate of family members. ¹⁸ At the same time, it also seems that many Soviet people entertained few expectations that they might find out more about their relatives’ deaths. Teenager Pavel Belov received an army notice that his father, a private, died near Krivoi Rog, Ukraine on 25 February 1944. He searched Pravda for news about battles in that area but found only vague information. Afterward he wrote his father’s field office but received no reply. He justified the silence: ‘They had no time for answers – they were barely able to send new, endless death notices.' ¹⁹

The enormity of wartime losses presented a major challenge to authorities charged with managing the burial and remembrance of the dead. An estimated 27 million Soviet people perished during the Second World War, including 8.7 million military personnel. The magnitude of death reinforced interwar practices of collective burial. On the Eastern Front, mass interment was common and later identification of individual remains was difficult. The Red Army’s equivalent of the dog tag was a pill-shaped metal ‘capsule.' Inside was a blank identification form that soldiers themselves completed. However, superstition prevented many from filling in the form. A veteran interviewed later described the capsules as ‘death passports.' He threw his away and was probably not alone in doing so. ²⁰ Among the 172 Red Army dead reburied near the village of Kukuevka in Orel province in 2014, only five had capsules. ²¹

Inside the USSR, authorities spent minimal energy commemorating fallen soldiers. During the war, Soviet architects had planned massive memorials to the war dead within the Soviet Union. However, no major domestic memorials were realized until after Stalin’s death. ²² Ad hoc gravesites in the USSR persisted until February 1946, when the Soviet government ordered the consolidation of graves into larger cemeteries clustered around population centers. In Kiev province, military leaders found 108,309 distinguishable remains. District authorities in the province received instructions to consolidate the graves at the ‘height of summer field work.' The timing pitted commemoration against food production on the eve of famine, ensuring that the war dead would receive only token attention. ²³ Stalinist leaders recognized the role that cemeteries and other commemorative sites could play in solidifying state authority. Moreover, they were intensely interested in using elections and other political rituals to bolster citizens’ support for the regime. ²⁴ However, Stalin’s regime allotted few resources to commemorating the war. Historian Nina Tumarkin suggests that Stalin quashed the cult of the war, including commemoration of the dead, fearing that the popularity of the military in society might present a threat to his personal authority. ²⁵ Additionally, the commemoration of many millions was a labor intensive, expensive process. In a country devastated by war, regime leaders may have been reluctant to expend energy and resources on the dead.

Outside the USSR, Soviet authorities were interested in the dead as a means of generating support with foreign audiences. Internal calculations from 1952 claimed 945,184 Soviet remains were buried outside the USSR’s borders, a figure that likely underestimated losses. ²⁶ As the war neared its close in the winter of 1944, Soviet diplomats had learned of the magnitude of losses among Soviet prisoners and forced laborers in Western Europe. The Soviet Ambassador to Great Britain, Fedor Gusev, knew as much about these losses as any Soviet official. He received information on specific gravesites from members of the Free French forces. Gusev wrote to Minister of Foreign Affairs Viacheslav Molotov with a proposal to found a graves bureau that would administer foreign cemeteries for the Soviet Union. ²⁷ When this proposal apparently fell upon deaf ears, Filipp Golikov, the head of the state repatriation administration, appealed at length to Molotov on behalf of a potential graves administration, ‘We have never had an organization that would collect information about the dead and would take care of the burial places of Soviet people. Such an organization… would fully comport with the scale of the war and its consequences.' Because of the novelty of this proposed administration, the general cited British cemeteries established in the nineteenth century in Crimea as a model. Golikov insisted that its creation was a matter of the ‘prestige of the Soviet state.' He added, ‘Extensive [commemorative] activities abroad will bear witness to the care of the Soviet Union for its people and will popularize the heroic and self-sacrificing war of the Soviet people.' Perhaps most important, Golikov asserted that the development of a graves bureau would ‘awaken sympathy and gratitude among the peoples of other nations.' ²⁸ Tellingly, Golikov’s letter only argued that the graves service was necessary for the USSR’s standing with foreign powers but made no mention of the meaning of the cemeteries for the Soviet people.

In spite of these appeals, regime leaders were also unwilling to allot significant means to maintain cemeteries abroad. Golikov asked Molotov for a graves bureau staff of 100 permanent workers, a shadow of the 6000 workers the American Graves Registration Service planned to employ after the war. ²⁹ Molotov apparently ignored this proposal. Instead, the state and military repatriation administrations, charged with returning living Soviet citizens to the USSR, reluctantly took responsibility for monitoring the cemeteries. In the Soviet zone, local commandants’ offices and German institutions were supposed to supervise unpaid German laborers in establishing and maintaining cemeteries near prominent sites. However, it was only in 1949 that systematic monitoring of gravesites began, and then only for a few months. ³⁰

In the western zones, SVAG could not rely on unpaid German labor – a factor that made commemoration work difficult. A repatriation officer operating in the British territory in 1945–6, Major Iukhno, learned that hundreds of thousands of Soviet bodies were haphazardly buried in that zone. The major’s primary mission was the return of Soviet citizens rather than the reburial of the dead. However, he employed 60 repatriates (hired or coerced is unclear) to rebury bodies in 22 locations, outfitting the mass graves with memorials. The number of dead was overwhelming, though. Data from the two provinces he serviced alone suggested there were 230,000 bodies spread across 536 burial sites. A site at the Arnoldsweiler camp in North Rhine-Westphalia had 3500 remains with no markings at all. When Iukhno’s laborers returned to the Soviet Union in March 1946, his work with the cemeteries stalled. As relations with the western occupiers soured, Iukhno blamed the British for intentionally creating obstacles to commemoration. Undoubtedly, his accusations reflected the official Soviet line that charged the western allies with intransigence in Germany. In some cases, though, Iukhno’s claims were accurate. Individual British authorities in German districts forbade SVAG from setting up monuments. Other British officials were receptive to Soviet commemoration projects but only with Soviet resources. It seems likely that SVAG was not willing to expend the political capital or resources to rebury the dead in the western zones. ³¹

Nonetheless, Soviet officials were eager to commission large cemetery-memorials in Germany that would impress non-Soviet audiences. Indeed, the first significant Soviet war monuments appeared outside the USSR rather than within its borders. The most famous of these monuments was the Treptow memorial to Soviet war dead in Berlin, completed in 1949. ³² Earlier, in November 1945, authorities unveiled the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park in the western zone of Berlin. SVAG also rushed to build monuments in the western occupied zones of the country. In October 1946, SVAG reported the completion of two large memorials on the Ruhr in Bochum and Dortmund, both roughly 30 feet high. A Soviet officer in the British zone even asked for a TASS team to report on the unveiling. ³³

These commemorative efforts emphasized the key Soviet claim about the war: the USSR was a liberating force in the world. ³⁴ At the outset of the Cold War, however, many argued that that Soviet ‘liberation' was in fact a new occupation. As officials consolidated the dead into huge mass graves underneath memorials in Germany, they made an argument on behalf of the Soviet Union. The presence of significant dead lends symbolic capital to the sites they inhabit, legitimizing the views of the parties responsible for their memorialization. ³⁵ Soviet memorials in Germany reminded the allies and the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe of the collective sacrifice of the USSR’s soldiers. In the case of the Soviet dead, their symbolic capital paid for the USSR’s claim to Europe’s gratitude.

Soviet official attitudes toward commemoration differed considerably inside the USSR and abroad. For lack of resources or perhaps because Stalinist leaders wanted to prevent a cult of the military dead, domestic commemoration was minimal. While material considerations also played a role in commemoration outside the USSR, Soviet leaders sought to employ the dead buried abroad as their missionaries of liberation. Through the dead, they staked their right to dominance in the postwar order that had taken so many lives to create.

Western graves registration services shared some aims with their Soviet counterparts. Both western and Soviet military cemeteries abroad made statements about the political geography of postwar Europe. In the case of the US military, after both world wars the burial of the dead in Western Europe signified the new US commitment to greater intervention in the world. ³⁶ And by refusing to establish cemeteries in Germany, French and US officials asserted that the defeated enemy was unworthy of holding a sacred place for their nations.

Unlike their Soviet counterparts, though, western graves officials’ main goal was to allow individual remembrance in families. This emphasis was a product of the commemoration culture that rose out of the First World War. In previous conflicts, US and European militaries had generally buried their soldiers in mass graves. ³⁷ However, during the Great War, the militaries of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America all provided concessions to populations that wanted to honor the dead individually and as a community. ³⁸ These policies largely continued in the Second World War. The USA offered to repatriate the remains of soldier dead or to bury them in military cemeteries abroad based on the wishes of the next of kin. France also offered to repatriate the dead. Even the United Kingdom, which established cemeteries near battle sites in the western zones of Germany, refused to bury its dead in the Soviet-occupied zone. With tensions rising immediately after the zonal split of Germany in July 1945, British access to First World War graves in the east was effectively cut off. ³⁹ Perhaps with this issue in mind, the UK military buried remains from the Soviet zone in West Berlin. There British officials simultaneously made a spiritual claim to the city and were able to offer assurances that relatives would be able to visit the graves. These policies of individual commemoration were directed toward a domestic audience that would partially measure the war’s success based on the treatment of the dead.

The western allies began the repatriation of the dead from Germany in the summer of 1945. The American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) had made extensive plans early in the war to recover the dead. Most US remains were in temporary gravesites that quartermaster units had established after combat. However, the AGRS also faced the problem of recovering the bodies of those who had died across Germany as prisoners or air combat casualties. Field units with some forensic training began by undertaking mass sweeps of the US zone of occupation. The US military also established laboratories to identify individual remains. ⁴⁰ The AGRS quickly came to mutual agreements with authorities in the French and British zones, where teams conducted similar sweeps at the end of 1945 and in the first half of 1946. In total, US teams combed 73,113 of the approximately 96,000 square miles of the western zones of Germany. They identified 6220 US soldiers among 215,584 other remains – presumably a great number of them Soviet. By June 1946, US field teams had found most of the remains in the western zones. ⁴¹

In the meantime, western allied graves services realized that the quick agreements they had reached with one another would not occur with SVAG. AGRS Lieutenant Colonel Harry Messec, who would organize US recovery teams in the Soviet zone, unsuccessfully attempted to interface with Soviet repatriation officials as soon as the zonal divisions were finalized in July 1945. ⁴² Days later, his colleague in the AGRS, Lieutenant Colonel J.R. Wilbraham, noted that entering the Soviet zone on an informal basis would be impossible ‘without considerable negotiation.' ⁴³ By the fall of 1945, US military officials had become desperate to reclaim the bodies in the Soviet zone. An AGRS officer noted the rise in the number of requests the service was receiving through various political and military channels. As he argued, ‘A continuing lack of information [about the dead in the Soviet zone]…may have serious repercussions.' ⁴⁴ In bilateral talks and quadrilateral summits between the allies, Soviet representatives made the unsatisfactory claim that they themselves would undertake any necessary work to identify and return bodies. ⁴⁵ As a final measure, deputy military governor General Lucius Clay wrote to deputy commander (and future commander) of SVAG, Vasilii Sokolovskii on 17 November 1945. He asked for the right to conduct Soviet-escorted search missions to reclaim the dead. This issue, Clay wrote, ‘is close to the hearts of the American people.' ⁴⁶ By the end of the year, SVAG authorized search teams to work in the Soviet zone. However, Soviet authorities would not yet grant permission for disinterment.

For US occupation officials and diplomats, the appearance of Soviet indifference to the allied dead was infuriating. In December 1945, the US embassy in Moscow approached Soviet leaders from the ‘humanitarian point of view' about disinterment but faced consistent rejection. Loyd Steere, acting director of the US occupation government’s office of political affairs, paraphrased the embassy’s findings: Soviet authorities generally feared the presence of foreigners in Soviet-held territory. But the more important factor was that ‘our intent in giving such meticulous attention to these details is beyond their comprehension since they are quite indifferent regarding disposal of remains of their deceased soldiers. Our attitude merely strengthens their suspicions that we have hidden designs.' For US embassy workers, this difference reflected fundamental contrasts in US and Soviet Marxist-Leninist values. Diplomat George Kennan asserted soon after in the ‘Long Telegram' that Soviet leaders desired that ‘our traditional way of life be destroyed.' ⁴⁷ Stalin could not be a partner for negotiation, only containment. Nonetheless, embassy officials believed that US occupation forces might negotiate successfully for the remains with SVAG in Berlin. Underlying this notion was the correct belief that SVAG officials could pursue some initiatives with a degree of independence from Moscow. Moreover, the western allies could offer Soviet officers something they wanted – the potential to return living Soviet people from the western zones of Germany. ⁴⁸

Even before the war ended, the presence of millions of Soviet ‘displaced persons' in occupied Europe had become a major issue in negotiations between the allies. In October 1944, information reached Viacheslav Molotov about the large numbers of Soviet POWs and forced laborers that the Red Army and its allies were overrunning on both fronts in Europe. ⁴⁹ Soviet leaders grew concerned that their allies might withhold people they claimed as Soviet – with good reason. Voices in the British government argued not to return unwilling Soviet citizens; returnees, they said, would face harsh repression from Stalin’s regime. For various reasons (primarily fear of retribution against British POWs and loyalty to a wartime ally), British officials in favor of repatriation eventually prevailed. ⁵⁰ After months of tension over the issue, the three powers came to an agreement at Yalta in February 1945. Regardless of individual wishes, all captured allied citizens would be given to their country of origin following the war.

Like wartime British officials, postwar writers incorrectly treated repatriation as a betrayal of unwilling Soviet people. These commentators assumed repatriates were arrested, if not executed, immediately upon return. ⁵¹ Of course, a significant minority of returnees did face repression. Those who had joined pro-German auxiliary units were particularly likely to experience some form of punishment. However, recent archival findings show that just a minority, 6.5 per cent of returnees, was incarcerated in the Gulag. The majority of these prisoners consisted of former POWs. ⁵²

Reactions to repatriates who were not arrested was mixed. Returnees were undoubtedly the objects of official contempt. ⁵³ By state regulations (although not in practice), all repatriates had to pass through a ‘filtration' camp, where their political loyalty would be tested. ⁵⁴ Once they passed through filtration, homecomings meant encounters with hostile neighbors and endless police surveillance. Nonetheless, similar to the Gulag administration’s attempts to ‘reforge' prisoners, the repatriation administration hoped to redeem repatriates, giving them a chance ‘to atone for their guilt' by becoming productive citizens. ⁵⁵ Moreover, although repatriation was compulsory, many Soviet ‘displaced persons' wanted to return to the USSR. ⁵⁶ After months or years of living as a prisoner in a foreign land, coming home to one’s family could be an attractive proposition. Repatriates even had reasons to believe that Stalin’s regime would welcome them. An official pamphlet under production in 1944 declared to repatriates that ‘the motherland knows about your suffering.' ⁵⁷ Roughly five million Soviet citizens returned from displacement in occupied Europe, the vast majority coming by the end of 1945. ⁵⁸

Although most potential returnees were repatriated quickly, many refused to return and sought refuge in the western zones of Germany. Their fates became dependent upon the western allies. Those whom the allies refused to repatriate were primarily from the Baltic states and other territories that the USSR had annexed as a result of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. ⁵⁹ Because they had not been citizens of the pre-war USSR, the western allies refused to acknowledge these ‘displaced persons' as Soviet citizens. ⁶⁰ Soviet officials estimated at various times that they numbered between 100,000 and 200,000 in Germany alone. ⁶¹ By the middle of 1946, they recognized that the western allies would not send the disputed population to the USSR by force.

The Soviet claim to these ‘displaced persons' and their apparent refusal to return discredited Soviet assertions of righteousness in the postwar world. In the backyard of Soviet-dominated Europe, what could be more damning than thousands of people who had voted with their feet against the USSR? Within the Soviet Union, too, relatives and neighbors noted the absence of non-returners. ⁶² Rather than present repatriation as an issue of legitimacy or sovereignty, though, Soviet officers argued that it was a sacred mission to reunite the USSR. Aleksei Briukhanov, the head of the Soviet repatriation mission in the British zone, later wrote about repatriation as a crucial element of reconstructing postwar Soviet lives:

We knew that buildings would be rebuilt… but how could you rebuild a family that lost loved ones? You can’t bring back the dead, of course. But many of those who were thought lost were actually in camps for displaced persons in the west. ⁶³

For nearly a decade, until from 1944 until 1952, Stalin’s regime maintained a large repatriation administration in the hopes of unifying the Soviet people and resolving the embarrassing issue of non-returners.

To fulfill their mission, repatriation officers were forced to rely upon western officials whom they simultaneously accused of obstructionism. After the end of mass repatriation in 1945, Soviet officers shifted from organizing the return of millions to convincing individuals to come to the USSR. They spoke with ‘displaced persons' in United Nations camps and with ‘free-living' non-returners, assuring them that there would be no punishment upon return. Officers delivered letters from relatives in the USSR and organized various cultural activities like film screenings. Although Soviet officials asserted that these services were popular among camp-dwellers, many of the non-returners despised Stalin’s regime and feared its claim over them. ⁶⁴ Animosity spilled over in violent clashes between SVAG repatriation officers and hostile non-returners. ⁶⁵ Already ill-disposed to the Soviet mission, US officials reacted to the violence by obliging Soviet officers to visit camps in the US zone under the protection and surveillance of the US military. ⁶⁶ Soviet movement was also limited in the British zone but was notably freer in the French zone. By 1947, repatriation officers acknowledged that although the government was making ‘great expenditures' for their mission, they were recruiting fewer than a hundred repatriates each month. ⁶⁷ The officers primarily blamed western occupation officials for these small numbers. Briukhanov wrote, ‘We could only use our words to persuade [non-returners] but…our pleas could not make British authorities return [our] kidnapped people.' ⁶⁸ In spite of the apparent reality that few non-returners would consider repatriation, SVAG officials believed they could convince the majority if only they had unencumbered contact with them. ⁶⁹ However, access to the camps depended on the willingness of the western allies to grant entry to Soviet repatriation teams.

Repatriation and contact with non-returners became the main demands of the Soviet officers negotiating with western graves officials. On 27 February 1946, Colonel Anatolii Evseev, the deputy head of SVAG’s repatriation office, met with General Stanley Mickelsen and Colonel Messec from the US army. According to documents from the US occupation, the Soviet officer proposed access to the dead for ‘forcible repatriation' of the remaining non-returnees. The US command would not consider this offer, although Mickelsen mentioned that the US Army had recently repatriated 1600 Soviet people who had served in German uniform. ⁷⁰ More than a year later, in August 1947, the War Department pushed for the expulsion of the Soviet repatriation mission. However, General Clarence Huebner successfully pleaded for ‘milder action' in a letter to Clay: ‘It is recognized that the above… may result in cancelling or further complicating arrangements for the US Grave Registration Teams to operate in Soviet Zone Germany.' ⁷¹ Similarly, the British and the French allowed Soviet repatriation officials into their zones in exchange for the dead.

This exchange permitted the western allies to send a handful of teams into the Soviet zone under the strict supervision of Soviet liaison officers. Prior to each trip, foreign teams received permission from the head of the Soviet repatriation department (General Sergei Vershinin until May 1947 and General Mikhail Iurkin thereafter). The petition had to indicate the fine details of the mission – its staff, itinerary and vehicle make and registration number. After the trip was approved, often a week or more in advance, the team and its minder left Berlin for the provinces. At the conclusion of each trip, sometimes lasting several days, liaison officers wrote detailed reports for their commander about the encounter with the allied team.

In their accounts, SVAG liaisons never acknowledged that the foreign officers might have a real investment in the dead. Instead, the uniform Soviet opinion was that the foreign teams were hiding their real aim – espionage. This focus was typical in the context of spy mania in the Soviet Union. Before and after the war, Soviet police suspected any foreign contact was evidence of a masked spy conspiracy. Similarly, liaison officers assumed that any communication allied teams made outside of the strictures of their trip’s plan was for intelligence purposes. Their reports used a dry, bureaucratic language and usually included an annotated itinerary with occasional commentary. They were more likely to offer assessments of the foreigners’ motivations at the beginning of disinterment in 1946 than later, perhaps because work with the search teams had become more familiar. Reports from 1949 often included just a list of locations and numbers of dead with a formulaic conclusion that nothing extraordinary had happened.

During the trips, officers watched for signs of espionage and isolated the foreigners as much as possible. Senior Lieutenant N.F. Shamov was perhaps the most vigilant of the Soviet officers and was one of the most frequent chaperones of allied teams. On 23 October 1946, he accompanied a US team as they searched for bodies in Saxony-Anhalt province. In several towns, they learned that US teams had already disinterred the graves, making Shamov suspicious. In Hecklingen, on the second day of the trip, a boy tried to give the foreigners a note and photograph to send to his aunt in the United States of America. Shamov summoned local authorities to detain the boy and confiscate the letter. Shamov reported, ‘The goal of this trip, it is clear, was something else.' ⁷² When British Major Evans took ill on his team’s second multi-day trip with Major Karpov, the Soviet liaison officer refused to let the two crew members leave to go to a movie. Karpov insisted, ‘I won’t go to a German film and our [Soviet] theater is playing a very old film. You won’t be interested.' As the officer reported later, he feared a ruse that would take him away from the hotel where he effectively served as guard over the British team. ⁷³ With most teams confined to the hotel, liaison officers reported that the foreigners often drank at the hotel restaurant and engaged in desperate attempts to sleep with German women. ⁷⁴

Interactions related to the securing of bodies also came under suspicion. Lieutenant Shamov supervised a British disinterment trip where a German Red Cross worker approached the team with a map of Germany and marked graves. She gave them an address to contact her. After she left, Shamov demanded that the team ‘stop all of this investigating… and focus on disinterment alone.' He concluded that the group’s real purpose had been to learn the location of Soviet detachments and that the Red Cross sister had been part of this scheme. ⁷⁵ Senior Lieutenant Biakin noted on a trip with Americans in January 1949 that the soldiers attempted to question the daughter of the former mayor ‘supposedly to learn how the pilot was buried – in clothes or without.' ⁷⁶ Most interaction occurred through translators and perhaps the question was misunderstood. It is possible the team was trying to find information for inclusion in a letter to relatives. However, Soviet liaison officers were predisposed to suspect the disinterment teams. It seems likely that their experiences with death on the Eastern Front made them incredulous about efforts to ship bodies of soldiers hundreds or thousands of miles.

Attempted socialization with the liaison officers also created doubts about the foreigners’ motives and perhaps provoked fear. Forced by duty into contact with the western commands, Soviet officials were surely aware that the appearance of unnecessary contact with foreigners could be understood as a prelude to spying. In late 1946, Shamov went on a three-day trip with a British team to the outskirts of Berlin, renting the top floor of a cozy German house one night. Shamov was perplexed that the British tried to converse with him over dinner. He described their conversation:

It seemed that both officers were trying… to find my weak points and dull my vigilance, that is, to become friends. They asked me… about the size of the [Soviet] army during the war – was it thirteen million? I answered: I don’t know the number but the war was our patriotic war and the entire nation participated.' ⁷⁷

Lieutenant L.A. Mantashev found it necessary to report the questions the British had asked him on a trip in November 1946: ‘What kinds of different insignia are there for different types of forces in the Red Army?' ‘Are you a staff officer?' ‘Do you write reports [about these trips]?' In answer to the last question, Mantashev lied, ‘The report we write with your officer is our report too.' ⁷⁸ Although they received little information in response, the questions the British officers asked suggest they were equally wary of their Soviet minders.

Despite regulations that demanded Soviet liaison officers keep a strictly professional relationship with the teams they monitored, some clearly managed to have personal interactions with them. The military commandant of Bernau informed General Iurkin that Lieutenant Grigorii Dikan had gotten drunk with the US team at an overnight stop near the city in January 1949. Worse, the liaison officer had spoken with the Americans about prices in the Soviet Union and allowed members of the mission to speak with ordinary Soviet soldiers. One of the Americans had supposedly mentioned incidents where Red Army soldiers had deserted to the USA. Iurkin demanded that the Soviet secret police in Germany investigate Dikan and, in the meantime, removed him from missions. Dikan’s own report about the trip, written before the commandant’s denunciation, was difficult to differentiate from any other that claimed no extraordinary incidents had occurred. ⁷⁹

It is unlikely that many of the other liaison officers wrote perfunctory reports but secretly interacted with the foreign teams. The relationship between the Soviet officers and the teams was filled with mutual apprehension that prevented camaraderie. Besides the cultural divide between them, Soviet officers could lose their jobs or freedom if they became involved with the suspected spies. Nonetheless, incidents did occur unbeknown to the liaison officers. US Sergeant Herb Hackett claimed that his disinterment team had managed to smuggle two would-be repatriates from the Soviet zone hidden in cases for the soldiers’ remains. ⁸⁰ However, available documentation shows that Dikan was the only officer removed for befriending the foreign team.

It would be incorrect to ascribe liaison officers’ suspicions to a generic Soviet hyper-paranoia. The stakes involved for Soviet authorities in Germany were tangible. Above all, SVAG officers were afraid that the foreign teams would uncover information about the Wismut enterprise that operated German uranium mines for the Soviet nuclear program. Until 1949, foreign teams were banned entirely from Thuringia and Saxony provinces, where Wismut operated. ⁸¹ Even within the SVAG-approved itineraries, Soviet liaison officers coordinated with garrison commandants to ensure there were no ongoing military operations before entering the localities. When a team’s itinerary contained a site where sensitive work was occurring, Vershinin instructed the liaison officers to inform the foreign teams that there was ‘an epidemic in the area, damaged bridges and so on.' ⁸²

The first rule for liaison officers was not to deviate from the SVAG-approved itinerary. They almost always forbade search teams from pursuing leads in nearby locations that were not in the program or where other information contradicted the teams’ data. An exception occurred on one trip with a British team near Merseburg in late 1946, when Major Karpov showed a moment of uncharacteristic lenience. The team claimed that a plane had crashed in the area but the local mayor insisted that no British remains were in the town cemetery. Although the Soviet liaison officer could have refused to go, team leader Armstrong prevailed upon Karpov to search the cemetery because a crew member had been the son of ‘an important British politician.' Armstrong’s persistence paid off and the team found the crew’s remains. However, Karpov’s indulgence drew the ire of Colonel Evseev. Handwritten instructions on the trip report demanded that the strict Lieutenant Shamov receive more assignments to monitor the foreigners. ⁸³ Karpov's indulgence had contravened the principle that no unplanned actions could occur that might enable espionage.

SVAG’s strict rules also drew out the disinterment process. Soviet officials never suggested that this effect was intentional, but it is likely they wanted allied remains to serve as leverage in the western zones as long as possible. At the height of the western allies’ efforts, 16 foreign teams were authorized to work in the Soviet zone – six British, six American and four French. However, the number of teams meant little because Vershinin and Iurkin regularly cancelled missions with little notice and for seemingly no reason. On 31 March 1947, American deputy military governor General Frank Keating wrote to General Mikhail Dratvin, SVAG’s chief of staff, that the AGRS had requested 16 trips in the first three months of that year but received permission to send just four. Keating concluded with an appeal to Dratvin’s ‘cooperative spirit' because soldiers’ ‘families expect me to furnish final news of their loved ones.' ⁸⁴ Dratvin apparently did not reply to the letter.

Examining the documents of the western allies and SVAG about the dead reveals two different moral registers. In his letter, Keating evoked the suffering of American families and his own sense of duty. The western allies all used these motifs when speaking about the repatriation of the dead. SVAG officials replied in the language of bureaucratic indignation – that the trips were poorly organized at best and pretexts for espionage at worst. Discussions surrounding the western allies’ dead mirrored the discourse about Soviet non-returners. Soviet officers spoke of the anguish Soviet families faced when their loved ones did not return from occupied Europe. In contrast, their western counterparts saw the repatriation missions as a cheap propaganda ploy. A US official summarized in a cable from 1949, ‘Sovs carefully keeping DP repatriation issue alive, steadily building up case, probably for future use UN or elsewhere.' ⁸⁵ However, repatriation officers insisted that only the machinations of western occupying forces and ‘war criminals' in ‘displaced persons' camps were stopping the return of Soviet citizens. Retaining repatriation missions in the western zones was worth the threat of espionage that the graves teams posed.

French negotiators, who had by far the most dead to return from the Soviet zone, were particularly aggressive in pursuing the exchange of the living for the dead. When Iurkin met French repatriation head L. de Rosen in late 1947, the latter stated that Soviet officers in the French zone ‘effectively circulate with full freedom' and demanded ‘be as liberal with us as we are with you.' ⁸⁶ Soon after, French occupation officials insisted that their own liaison officers accompany Soviet repatriation officers in the French zone. ⁸⁷ In January 1948, Iurkin’s temporary replacement wrote to SVAG’s leadership acknowledging that the repatriation of Soviet citizens ‘is entirely dependent on the ability of American, English and French search groups to work in our zone.' ⁸⁸

Even as the deteriorating relationship between the former allies led to the final division of Germany, the disinterment-repatriation exchange only strengthened. East-west relations worsened in 1948 following the communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the introduction of a new currency for the western zones of Germany and Berlin. On 18 June, Soviet forces cut the western allies’ ground transport into Berlin, hoping to force the removal of West German currency. US and British forces responded to the blockade with their famous airlift of supplies to the city. However, disinterment missions continued even without ground transport. Marshall Sokolovskii cut the number of British and US teams at the beginning of the blockade to one and two respectively. However, French threats to curtail the Soviet repatriation mission had an apparent effect. The French maintained their four teams in the zone. ⁸⁹ On 1 March 1949, the US occupation government withdrew authorization for Soviet repatriation officers to operate in the US zone. When the Soviet mission left (after several days of a ‘blockade' without electricity or water in its headquarters), General Dratvin responded by expelling the AGRS from the Soviet zone. ⁹⁰

In the wake of the Soviet mission’s expulsion from the US zone, Iurkin placed an increasing importance on accommodating the remaining disinterment missions in exchange for the continuing presence of repatriation teams in western zones. In December 1948, Iurkin lobbied SVAG’s leadership for disinterment teams to receive access to Thuringia and Saxony, even to sites near ‘special regime' areas of Wismut. Against the wishes of local commandants, Iurkin received permission in May 1949 to send French and British teams to parts of Saxony. ⁹¹ Even after the division of the country, through 1952 at least, repatriation officers continued to operate in the French zone while the French searched for the remains of their people in East Germany. ⁹²

On the surface, western occupation authorities and SVAG had different aims in the trade of the dead for access to the living; however, each side sought to make its nation whole again. Western graves commissions attempted to retrieve all their countries’ fallen so that families could mourn their dead. The return of the dead, or their burial in individual graves in military cemeteries, validated the war effort, showing that the state valued the sacrifices of the fallen. For repatriation officials, each returnee they recruited from the western zones was a vote of confidence in the Soviet postwar order. Every Soviet family that was reunited conferred legitimacy on the big Soviet family of Stalin’s regime.

The case of the allied dead in Germany demonstrates how the fallen can serve significantly different audiences and goals. Soviet commemoration occurred primarily outside of the USSR. By burying the war dead under monuments in Germany, Soviet authorities placed a moral claim on the hegemony of the USSR in Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast, the western allies directed their efforts primarily toward a domestic audience that expected individual commemoration as the close of a successful war.

Despite these differences and the east-west divide that only grew from 1945, the exchange of western allies’ dead in the Soviet zone for access to potential repatriates in the western zones highlights one way that the occupation of Germany continued to be a shared endeavor. The allies were forced into contact and compromise to complete their sacred tasks. Yet the exchange also exacerbated mutual suspicions. SVAG officers saw the foreign search teams as Trojan hearses, anti-Soviet espionage in the implausible form of commemoration. The Soviet repatriation missions were met with skepticism from the western allies, who believed these attempts were a lost cause that was only kept alive for propaganda purposes. Neither side understood why the other’s vital task mattered or why the other side would not aid them willingly. Nonetheless, each country repatriated thousands of dead and living citizens. But all came away more convinced of the moral failings on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The politics of the sacred lived on in the USSR after the division of Germany. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet non-returners migrated to countries throughout the world, forming a postwar diaspora. After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev’s government hoped to legitimize Soviet socialism in the Cold War world by aggressively pursuing the ‘return to the Motherland' of the non-returners. ⁹³ In commemorating the dead, Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s governments marked a shift from Stalinist policies, using the memory of the war extensively to gain support among the domestic public. Although they built monuments throughout the country to the war dead, officials silenced incidents where Komsomol-organized search groups found large numbers of unburied and poorly buried war dead. In a period of increased transparency during Perestroika, however, the state faced popular demands to identify and rebury the war dead. The perception that the Soviet state had not taken care of its dead discredited the official cult of the war that was a major pillar of its legitimacy. ⁹⁴

The post-Soviet Russian state has used the commemoration of war dead to cement its connection to the useable past of the Second World War. One of its largest state historical campaigns is the website OBD Memorial (General Databank Memorial), a database founded in 2007 that contains millions of burial records of soldier dead. Volunteers in a Russian group called Exploration are still searching for the remains of approximately four million missing Soviet war dead. ⁹⁵ Much like the dead in other post-socialist states, reburying Soviet remains has allowed various state and civil actors to claim moral authority in the fluid post-1989 political environment. ⁹⁶ Yet almost no post-Soviet commentators suggest repatriating the Soviet dead from Central and Eastern Europe.

Among the most interesting phenomena in contemporary Russian commemoration are the ‘Immortal Regiments.' On Victory Day, thousands of people in the regiments march through major cities carrying photographs of their relatives who died in the war. ⁹⁷ Even as the ghosts march with their descendants, their bodies remain far away, many underneath the Stalin-era monuments abroad. For post-Soviet people, especially Russians, these cemeteries continue to symbolize the USSR as the salvation of Europe. What embodies this narrative of the war – what gives it its weight and inviolability – are the remains that rest below. The soldiers and civilians who stayed where they fell continue to serve on behalf of the Soviet victory.