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Germany puts names of 700,000 captured Soviets online

Nov 16, 2009 7:47 PM | By Sapa-dpa

German authorities put online Monday the names of 700,000 captured Soviet soldiers, most of whom died in horrific Nazi prison camps during the Second World War.


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The lists had previously been kept by German authorities who help people in former Soviet nations to discover how their menfolk died.

"Now people will be able to do the research all by themselves," said Klaus-Dieter Mueller, chief librarian of the State of Saxony Memorials Foundation in Dresden, which manages several state-run concentration-camp memorials that expose Nazi crimes.

The twin websites, www.dokst.de and www.dokst.ru, contain the full alphabetical list of men in German and in Russian, starting with the vital data of Erich Aawik, an Estonian born in 1919 who died in German captivity on November 24, 1943.

The German library has been digitizing the data since 2000 with help from the Russian, Ukraine and Belarus authorities. Officials said more names would be added as new information came to light.

Nazi Germany breached the Geneva conventions on prisoners of war in its treatment of Red Army captives, using them as slaves and confining them in near starvation and disease. Relatives often still do not know how the men disappeared of where their remains are. Internet: www.dokst.de www.dokst.ru

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Nov 21 2009 11:35:09 PM
michael-obrien
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The following may be a surprise to many but Germany was not obligated to apply the Geneva Conventions to it's treatment of captured Soviet forces. As Soviet Russia was not a signatory to the conventions, Germany was therefore not obligated to apply the Conventions to it's treatment of these communist prisoners. In talking of the dead Soviets, it must be remembered that millions of Germans, both soldiers and innocent civilians (from the former eastern German lands which now lie in both Poland (Breslau/Wroclaw etc) & Russia (Konigsberg / Kaliningrad etc)) died in Soviet Communist captivity between 1941 & 1955.


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