After the Deportation: The Labor Army

Below is a translation of the first part of the decree ordering the first mass mobilization of Russian-Germans into the forced labor detachments of the labor army during World War II.

Resolution GKO USSR No. 1123 ss

10 January 1942

On the Orderly Use of German-Resettlers Between the Ages of 17 and 50

1. All Germans - Men the ages 17 to 50, capable of physical labor, exiled to Novosibirsk and Omsk oblasts, Krasnoiarsk and Altai Krais and the Kazakh SSR, are to be mobilized in the amount of up to 120 thousand into work columns for the entire time of the war and handed over in the following numbers:

a) NKVD USSR - For lumber preparation 45000 people. NKVD USSR - For construction of Bakal and Bogoslov factories 35,000 men;

b) NKPS USSR - For construction of the rail roads Stalinsk - Abakan, Stalinsk - Barnaul, Akmolinsk - Kartaly, Akmolinsk - Pavlodar, Sos'va - Alapaevsk, Orsk - Kandagach, Magnitogorsk - Sara 40,000 men.

The carrying out of the mobilization is to be entrusted to the NKO (c. Shchadenko), together with the NKVD and NKPS.

The mobilization is to commence immediately and finish 30 January 1942.

Document reproduced in A.A. German, T.S. Ilarinova, I.R., Pleve, Istoriia nemtsev Rossii: Khrestomatiia (Moscow: "MSNK - press", 2005), p. 272. Translated from Russian to English by J. Otto Pohl.