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- Documentary statement: what the previously unknown facts of the history of the Second World War say
Documentary statement: what the previously unknown facts of the history of the Second World War say
In the eight decades since the Victory, the Great Patriotic War has been studied in its most diverse aspects, but it is still not necessary to say that all the questions have been answered, the historians interviewed by Izvestia stated. They have selected interesting facts for our editorial staff that have become known in recent years, new information that has not been noticed for decades, as well as declassified documents. About what has changed in the understanding of the main campaigns, assessments of the preparation for war on all sides, and what kind of ground each new layer of data provides for study, see the Izvestia article.
On the eve of Victory Day, Izvestia has prepared a special project "Two Worlds. One War", dedicated to the history of the confrontation between the USSR and Germany from the mid-30s to the mid-40s of the last century.
Planned famine and genocide
The so-called "color folders" of the Vostok Economic Planning Headquarters, headed by Hermann Goering, became a new breakthrough source that gave the world a more systematic understanding of the Great Patriotic War. Dmitry Surzhik, chief specialist of the expert and analytical Department of the National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation, told Izvestia about this.
"Goering was responsible for the four—year plan to mobilize the German economy and plunder the Soviet Union," the expert said. — These documents appeared at the Nuremberg Tribunal, but all previous decades the attention of historians has been shifted from them to the guilt of the main criminals, the main organizations.
Hermann Wilhelm Goering was a politician, statesman and military figure of Nazi Germany.
And studying these "green" and "yellow" Goering folders in recent years reveals to us that this was not just a planned robbery, but real plans for genocide against the Soviet people, Dmitry Surzhik noted.
— This was, among other things, the robbery of agriculture in order to cause massive famine, unprecedented before. And this famine was supposed to cover 30-35 million people in the occupied territory," he said. — The head of the Nazi Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Herbert Bakke, was involved in the development of this famine plan. This is the man who planned that the occupied Soviet territories should be divided into two parts.
The lands that supply agricultural products had to be fenced off from the forest and from the industrial — that is, the recipient territories, these included Moscow and Leningrad. And food should not be allowed through this border cordon.
— Germany did not need Soviet industry. Germany needed the Soviet territory as a supplier of raw materials. And they intended to kill Soviet industry by creating deliberately unsuitable living conditions for workers, that is, carrying out genocide in the definition in which it was later formulated in the 1948 UN Convention," the expert said. — And this famine plan, which was announced at a meeting of the state secretaries of the Nazi ministries during a meeting of the Vostok economic headquarters on May 23, 1941, was included in the green folder as the main, fundamental principle.
How they prepared for the war
In many ways, the problems of war management remain in the shadows — planning mobilization training and strategic deployment, organization of the military economy and logistics. It is these stories that historians have been paying attention to in recent years, Alexander Vershinin, associate professor at the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University, told Izvestia.
Thus, according to him, 1941 remains the central milestone in the history of the war.
— For decades, the debate about whether it was possible to stop the German invasion on the western borders of the country was reduced to discussing the mistakes of Joseph Stalin, who incorrectly determined the direction of the German strike, doubted the reality of the threat of an attack on June 22, postponed the decision to bring troops to combat readiness. But, as recent work shows, the problem has deeper roots," the expert said.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, statesman, military and party leader.
The construction of the Red Army, which unfolded in the 1930s, proceeded with distortions that negatively affected its combat capability. The training of personnel and the schemes for the use of military equipment had a number of structural disadvantages. Strategic planning in 1938-1941 did not take into account the fact that the enemy had mobilized and ready for immediate use ground forces.
"All these miscalculations were related to the decisions of the country's leadership, but they also had objective grounds: the difficult international situation, the belated start of military construction, and the imbalances of economic development put the USSR in obviously unfavorable conditions," Alexander Vershinin said.
In his opinion, the results of recent research make it possible to close the dispute about alternatives to the military catastrophe of the summer of 1941. The Soviet Union did not have a real opportunity to avoid heavy defeats at the initial stage of the war, the historian is sure.
The economy of the rear
Another question that has long interested historians is how and by what means the country managed to quickly and effectively overcome the consequences of the first defeats, Alexander Vershinin recalled.
— The history of the Soviet rear during the Great Patriotic War has not been studied in depth for a long time. And a detailed analysis of archival documents showed that the organization of the economy in the interests of the front, labor mobilization required the state not only to create a complex system of resource allocation, but also a certain political flexibility, he said.
At the moment of mortal danger, the Stalinist power vertical, abandoning the usual tool of pressure and repression, managed to establish explanatory work with the population. Stalin had to give his closest associates real power, without which effective management of the country and the army in a situation of military overload proved impossible.
The previously dominant view that the evacuation of industry and people to the east was carried out as part of a top-down operation has also been revised. Now historians are coming to the conclusion that it was in many ways a process that developed from below.
By reconstructing the real state of the rear, historians gain a more complete understanding of the enormous trials that befell the Soviet people. By 1944, the rear was at the limit of its mobilization capabilities: There were not enough workers, and the physical resources of those who continued to stand at the machine were close to exhaustion.
— In this regard, the results of recent studies of the mechanism of financing the war are indicative. They show that its main source was the withdrawal of a significant part of the population's income through higher taxes and prices, which led to a sharp decline in living standards," said Alexander Vershinin.
He recalled that until now, the discussion about the mechanism of Allied assistance, Lend-Lease, revolved around assessments of the real contribution of foreign aid to the overall military production of the Soviet Union.
— At the initial stage of the war, the importance of Lend-Lease was small, but it grew with the expansion of transport corridors and the growth of opportunities for the American and British economies, — said the expert. — The most important thing in the end was not the supply of weapons and strategic raw materials, but thousands of tons of food, which allowed the Soviet Union to mobilize millions of soldiers and form armies that destroyed the military power of Germany.
Declassified FSB data
On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Victory, the Federal Security Service declassified and published a lot of archival materials. They have yet to be deeply studied by historians.
The FSB's Public Relations Center noted that the state security agencies began work on identifying those responsible for atrocities against Soviet citizens and documenting their crimes already in the first year of the Great Patriotic War, with the liberation of the first occupied districts of the Moscow Region. On December 12, 1941, the order of the NKVD of the USSR was issued, it regulated the search for enemy agents, traitors and accomplices of the occupation authorities.
On May 6, 2025, the FSB published documents according to which, during the Second World War, the USSR state security agencies recorded 54 thousand people. facts of Nazi crimes, as well as archival materials on the search for Nazi criminals who fled to the West.
"In 1941-1943, the Soviet People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs sent four notes on the atrocities of the occupation authorities against the civilian population to embassies and missions accredited in Moscow. In a memo to Vyacheslav Molotov, his deputy at the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, Solomon Lozovsky, wrote on May 15, 1943: "Not a single envoy from our allied countries has spoken publicly on this issue," the ministry said.
And on the same day, the FSB directorate for the Rostov Region, as part of the No Statute of Limitations project, declassified data on the hijacking of almost 12,000 civilians to Germany. These apartment—by-apartment lists of Taganrog residents were compiled in 1943, after the liberation of the city. In total, the Nazis abducted almost 181,000 people from the Rostov region during the war.
On May 5, the FSB released documents according to which members of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) carried out subversive activities and helped nationalist underground fighters in the USSR after the end of the Great Patriotic War. It follows from the documents that a significant part of the clergy and monks of the UGCC maintained contact with the underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, an extremist organization banned in Russia. — Ed.) and provided material support to its fighters. At that time, 78 Uniate priests associated with the nationalist underground and ten hiding members of the OUN were detained.
On May 3, the FSB published data on Britain's sinking of Reich ships with Soviet prisoners. In 1945, British aircraft bombed German ships with Soviet prisoners of war during the Neustadt offensive. No more than 300 people survived.
"Eighty years ago, a terrible tragedy occurred, during which from 7,000 to 12,000 people died. On this day, in the Lubeck Bay in the Baltic Sea, aircraft of the Royal Air Force of Great Britain shot down three German ships with prisoners of Nazi concentration camps in cold blood," the ministry said in a statement.
And at the end of April, documents about the medical experiments of Nazi doctors on Soviet prisoners and civilians in Crimea were declassified.
And these are just a few examples of the new data released in recent months.
Material evidence
Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky complained that he had once entered one of the rooms of the General Staff, where there was information about various military operations, about the logic of making certain decisions, and found that these documents were not in demand after the end of the war, said military historian Dmitry Boltenkov.
"A detailed study of how our ancestors solved problems during the war with the deadliest military machine in history, which was also supported by the economic and technological might of the whole of Western Europe, will help us in modern times, in which we are essentially solving the same tasks as our grandfathers and great—grandfathers," he said. Him. — It is worth looking at how military problems were solved at all levels from the very top to the battlefield, how the technological tasks of increasing the production of military equipment were solved while reducing its cost and improving its characteristics, how personnel problems were solved at all levels, how the military structures of the Soviet Union were improved, how problems with fraud and lies were solved, how was the assessment of combat experience and its implementation in the army?
As an example, the historian cited the situation with the sunk German submarine U-639. In 1943, she laid mines in the Gulf of Ob, after which she was sunk by the Soviet submarine S-101.
— As a result, the documents of the mine installations were lost. And nowadays, there is active economic activity in this bay, in particular, there is the port of Sabetta, and the command of the Northern Fleet had to conduct expensive studies of the bay to search for German bottom mines," he said.
Dmitry Boltenkov called the discovery of the wreck site of the steamship Armenia and the clarification of the circumstances of its death one of the interesting and important facts.
— Previously it was believed that it was sunk by torpedo planes, but now it has become clear that the cause of death was aerial bombs. "Armenia died on November 7, 1941," the expert said. — In the spring of 2020, the ship's hull was finally found. His examination, in particular the absence of boats, cast doubt on the canonical version of the disaster.
He added that in recent years, many Soviet submarines that died during the Great Patriotic War and during the First World War have been found.
"This made it possible to assess the reasons why they died, as well as to inform the descendants where the exact graves of their ancestors are located," Dmitry Boltenkov said.
Sergei Kudryashov, head of the Center for the History of the Great Patriotic War at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recalled that only in the last 20 years all documents on Soviet-German relations during the interwar period had been declassified.
— This is especially important when studying the non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939 and the two pre-war years before the Nazi aggression on June 22, 1941. The new materials prove that it was Germany that made every effort to convince the Soviet leadership to sign a non—aggression pact," the historian recalled.— Western literature traditionally refers only to the role of Stalin, who supposedly always sought to appease Hitler. That's not so. Stalin agreed to sign the treaty only after he became convinced that the British and French did not want to cooperate with the USSR.
All documents are available on the Rosarchive website, the expert emphasized.
In addition, captured German documents have been digitized in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation over the past ten years.
— Historians have never had the opportunity to work with them before. This is almost 40 thousand cases, almost 3 million sheets," said Sergey Kudryashov. — It would take about eight years for a historian to simply read these materials in the archive's reading room. Currently, any researcher can work with these documents while sitting at home and turning on a computer. They are presented in color and in very good quality on the website of the Russian-German Project for the Digitization of German documents in the Archives of the Russian Federation.
Sergey Kudryashov noted that thanks to access to the new archives, it is possible to study the topic more deeply, for example, using military maps.
— They were declassified only recently. Many of them were made in a single copy. By comparing the maps of the Soviet General Staff with German maps, we are able to take a fresh look at the war," the expert said.
This made it possible to better understand the planning processes, the role of intelligence, and the importance of headquarters in achieving victory. The maps have been digitized with high resolution and are available on the Presidential Library's website.
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