Forced Labor of Hungarians in The Soviet Union - POW and Civilians

POW and Civilians

In Hungary and among the Hungarian minority of Transcarpathia the phenomenon has been referred to as málenkij robot, a corrupted form of the Russian malenkaya rabota (маленькая работа), meaning "little work". The expression originated during the first wave of deportations of Hungarian civilians: after an occupation of a Hungarian town, civilians were rounded up for "little work" regarding the removal of ruins. The largest single deportation during the first wave occurred in Budapest. Allegedly Marshal Rodion Malinovsky overestimated in his reports the number of POW taken after the Battle of Budapest, and to make the numbers some 100,000 civilians were gathered in Budapest and its neighborhood. The first wave took place mainly in north-western Hungary, on the path of the advancing Soviet Army.

The second, more organized wave happened 1–2 months later, in January 1945, covering the whole of Hungary. According to the USSR State Defence Committee Order 7161, ethnic Germans were to be deported for forced labor from the occupied territories, including Hungary. Soviet authorities had deportation quotas for each region, and when the target was missed, it was filled up with ethnic Hungarians. In addition, Hungarian POW were deported during this period.

POW and civilians were handled by the Main Department for the Affairs of POWs and Internees of the NKVD (Russian abbreviation: GUPVI), with its own system of labor camps, similar to Gulag.

The deported people were transported in cargo wagons to transit camps in Romania and Western Ukraine. Survivor testimony suggests a high death rate in the camps and in transit from various causes, including epidemic dysentery, bad weather, and malnutrition.

In the Soviet Union, the Hungarians were placed into approximately 2000 camps. A large number of them were subsequently identified: 44 camps in Azerbaijan, 158 in the Baltic States, 131 in Belarus, 119 in Northern Russia, 53 in the vicinity of Leningrad, 627 in Central Russia, 276 in Ural Mountains and 64 in Siberia.