Extraordinary State Commission - Soviet Trophy Brigades

Soviet Trophy Brigades

The Russians instituted special Red Army “Trophy Brigades,” which were formed in 1942 as the “Extraordinary State Commission on the Registration and Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascists Occupiers and their Accomplices and the Damage done by Them to the Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR,” and who were responsible for removing valuables from Germany back to the Soviet Union. The organization responsible for receiving and cataloging these items was “The Commission on Reception and Registration of Trophy Valuables,” and was established in April 1945. The commission was soon disbanded as it was overwhelmed by the number of objects being sent back to Russia by the troops. The early part of 1946 saw some 12,500 crates of books and documents, along with other valuables from German libraries, which were allocated to the State Historical Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad, and as far a field as Turkmenia and Tajikistan. These items were nationalized by the Russian Duma in April 1998 under Boris Yeltsin, which also relieved any claims made on all Russian property still remaining in foreign lands.

A part of the Trophy Brigade concept was to dismantle anything of usefulness in Germany, and use it to rebuild the Soviet economy as retributions. “…The most important dismantling action, however, was carried out beginning in March 1946. Leuna deployed 30,732 of its workers and 7,376 other plant personnel to assist 400 Soviet officers and 1,000 to 1,200 soldiers from the Red Army to remove 120,000 tons of machines and structural iron and steel from the works. Included in a long list of affected installations were eight working compressors for synthetic gas, large scale installations for methanol synthesis, and various machines, apparatus, and installations for synthetic gasoline production. What is more, the Soviets seized 117 journals and 514 books from the works library, in all a total of 1,067 volumes.”

Vladimir Shabinsky, a Russian officer who later defected to the West, gave his personal account as a member of a Soviet Trophy Brigade: “At that time, I was a lieutenant colonel in the Red Army. I was working in Berlin for the “Special Committee” of the Soviet Government. Formed in late 1944 and headed by Georgi Malenkov, the committee was charged with removing factories, manufactured goods, raw materials, livestock, farm machinery, fertilizer, crops, laboratories, libraries, museums, scientific archives, engineers and scientists from all of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union, after years of devastating war, was in desperate need of such items and experts. It also wanted to make sure that Germany would never again be a military and industrial power. When the Americans left Saxony and Thuringia, the Berlin staff of the Special Committee ordered me to evacuate a cement plant from the city of Nordhausen. Since the committee had 70,000 greedy agents operating in East Germany, I moved fast to claim this plant for my branch, the Ministry of Building Materials...”

The library section of the Russian Trophy Brigades was known as “the State Agency for Literature,” or, “Gosfond.” The Soviet government had created this agency to allocate the confiscated literature to Soviet libraries and cultural institutions. The plan was that Gosfond would allocate the materials to enhance existing collection in Russia and to acquire meaningful additions. They were, instead, overwhelmed with the numbers of books sent from Germany. Eventually, it degenerated into a mechanical process of distribution, and the beneficiary libraries were unable to absorb the works, or in some cases, to even store them. “In a meeting of March 14, 1946, a committee distributed 1,857 crates from some thirty institutional and private libraries (including those of top Nazis as von Ribbentrop and Goebbels) among five Soviet libraries: the National Lenin Library of the U.S.S.R., the National Historical Library, the National Polytechnical Library, the National Library for Foreign Literature and the National Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library.”

Lieutenant Colonel Margarita Rudomino, director of the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow, and an associate on the staff of the Plenipotentiary State Special Defense Committee, and part of the Soviet Trophy Brigade, argued that the German Library (Deutsche Bibliothek-Deutsche Bücherei) in Leipzig was needed for re-building Germany and restoring their cultural identity. Thus, over two million volumes were evacuated to Thuringia, but they were then returned to the Leipzig library. However, she also argued for the return of the books from the Sächische Landesbibliothek (Saxon State Library) in Dresden, but they were sent to Russia by mistake, and they were returned, in part, in 1957.

Not all endings of captured documents went well. Many of the books sent to the Soviet Union by the Gosfond and the various Trophy Brigades did not benefit either the Soviets or anyone else. With the overwhelming numbers of materials received, they were often parceled out to smaller libraries and insitutes, who often received materials wholly inappropriate for their missions. As a result, many of the items were stored haphazardly, seldom cataloged or inventories, and often were destroyed by neglect and inattention. Items which were needed at large research insitutes were sent to smaller public libraries and agricultural stations, where the books were never cataloged and could not be recalled for inter-library loan or other useful activities.