Senior Personnel of the NKVD/MVD Special Camps in East Germany (1945-1950): Experience in Creating and Analyzing a Relational Database

The subject of this article is the specifics of staffing the leadership of the special camps of the NKVD/MVD, which existed on the territory of East Germany in 1945-1950. The indicators obtained as a result of the creation and processing of the database of the leadership of the special camps are analyzed. The information potential of the created database accumulating information from the studied array of documentary sources is characterized. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the following characteristics of the senior staff of special camps, reflecting the career trajectories of employees: departmental origin; previous service experience; promotion in the system of special camps; partisanship and party seniority. In addition, through the analysis of identified archival sources, general changes in the staffing of special camps and their personnel structure are considered. Based on the queries constructed to the database and the analysis of the information structured in it, the general and specific essential characteristics of the senior staff of special camps in their dynamics are revealed. The research is based on database methods and technologies closely related to the tradition of using quantitative methods in historical research. By its type, the created database is a datalogical relational model consisting of tables connected to each other. The database was created in the Microsoft Access database management system program. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that for the first time, on the basis of a wide range of archival sources, using database methods and technologies, such a little-studied problem in historiography as staffing of NKVD/MVD special camps in East Germany is considered comprehensively. A relational database created as part of the study, containing information about 80 senior employees of the special camps system, made it possible to identify the principles of filling the senior staff. It is shown that the staffing was heterogeneous. Its sources were both directly the structures of the NKVD/Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, as well as the SMERSH counterintelligence units and purely army structures. It is noted that non-core personnel were actively involved due to the constant shortage of personnel in the system of special camps, which became a characteristic feature of their functioning outside the USSR, in the occupied territory.

special camps in Germany, SVAG, SBZ, source analysis, database, statistical analysis, NKVD, MVD, archival sources, Stalin's repressions