Russlandheimkehrer: Die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen im Gedächtnis der Deutschen ed. by Elke Scherstjanoi (review)

The study of World War II prisoners of war (POWs) has been a cottage industry over the past decade. The comparative treatment of POWs on all fronts has been the main focus. Many diaries and other documents of POWs have been published, and exhibits have been staged (an exhibit on U.S. POWs in Nazi Germany, "Guest of the Third Reich," enjoyed large audiences in the first half of 2013 at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans). Now comes this richly illustrated volume of essays on "representations" (visual, film, literature, exhibitions) and the historical memory of returned German POWs in the Soviet Union after World War II. The German case offers complexity because circumstances for returning POWs in the two Germanys (the Federal Republic of Germany and the Communist German Democratic of Germany) differed so markedly. The reception of the "Heimkehrer" and the production of public memories clashed. As Frank Biess has already shown in Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (2006), West Germany pampered its returning POWs as "victims" of Stalinism, whereas East Germany eschewed any mention of their traumatization in the Soviet camps. The horrific tales of the returned POWs helped form the core anti-Communist identity in the FRG, but similar accounts had to be suppressed in the GDR to demonstrate solidarity with the Soviet ally. What later became known as post-traumatic stress disorder was treated among returnees to the FRG, but it had to be glossed over in the GDR and thus must have continued to weigh heavily on the returned POWs.

The essays in the volume under review add considerable depth to this tale of POW returnees to the two postwar German states. The volume is based on papers written for a 2008 conference organized by the German Historical Museum and the Institute of Contemporary History in Berlin. The essays blend together unusually well for an edited volume. Elke Scherstjanoi's introduction on all kinds of "pictures" (Bilder) under discussion here—"constructs" of visual, acoustic, and both self-experienced and mediated impressions (p. 2)—is tight; her historiographical grounding of the growing field of POWs studies anemic. Scherstjanoi adds two more essays to the volume—one on the images of POWs proliferating individual and (the formerly two) Germanys' cultural memories, the other on Soviet female doctors. Based on more than ten years of collecting oral histories of voennoplennye (Russian for POWs), most of them living in the former East Germany, she constructs a multiplicity of competing images of German POWs kept in Soviet captivity. They are associated with the principal stations of their captivity (capture, transport in cattle cars, being robbed of all possessions, work and life behind barbed wire, tensions between regular and privileged Antifa POWs, helpful Russian female doctors). These "images" are also the principal topoi recurring in all the representations in film and literature discussed by the contributors to this book. They are richly illustrated by Günter Agde's documentation of images from the best-known West German postwar POW movies and Soviet documentaries about World War II.

Both Birgit Schwelling's and Andrea von Hengel's contributions deal with the little-known Verband der Heimkehrer, Kriegsgefangenen und Vermisstenangehörigen (VdH), a powerful West German organization started in 1950 to lobby for the return of some 30,000 German POWs still held in Soviet captivity years after the war ended. They had been put on trial in 1947-1949 and convicted as "war criminals," often in show trials. The VdR lobbied with the West German public to keep alive the memory of the suffering German "victims" held in Soviet camps, some of them until 1956. In addition, the VdH lobbied in the political arena to give the returnees compensation for their suffering. Von Hegel analyzes the traveling exhibit the VdH put together in 1951 and sent to 138 German cities until the 1970s—with changing content over time. Some 2.15 million Germans...