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Art and culture took on a variety of forms in the forced labor camps of the Gulag system that existed across the Soviet Union during the first half of the twentieth century. [1] Theater, music, visual art, and literature played a role in camp life for many of the millions of prisoners who passed through the Gulag system.
The NKVD Main Camp Administration (GULAG) controlled the special camps from Moscow. All of the camp commanders were senior Soviet military officers and the camps were laid out to GULAG camp specifications just as in Siberia or Central Asia. The camps, however, were not slave labor camps attached to factories or collective farms.
Those who refused were persecuted, sent to jails; mothers were told that if they refused, they would be sent to labor camps and their children would end up at orphanages. Altogether, 257,660 citizens of the Second Polish Republic (190,942 adults and 66,718 kids) received the passports; 1,583 refused and were sent either to prisons or gulag.
By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million. [12] The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or died soon ...
The mother of a prisoner thanks Konrad Adenauer upon his return from Moscow, September 14, 1955. Adenauer had succeeded in concluding negotiations about the release to Germany, by the end of the year, of 15,000 German civilians and prisoners of war, more than a decade after the war with Germany had ended on May 8, 1945.
A list of Gulag penal labor camps in the USSR was created in Poland from the personal accounts of labor camp detainees of Polish citizenship. It was compiled by the government of Poland for the purpose of regulation and future financial compensation for World War II victims, and published in a decree of the Council of Ministers of Poland .
Because of Germany's initial strides in the war, the Soviet Union's major coal supplier was Ukraine. By the end of 1941, the Nazi army had occupied virtually all of Ukraine, cutting Soviet coal production in half. [15] In 1943 the Vorkutlag's prisoner population exploded, as did the rate of coal extraction.
Elbe Day, April 25, 1945, is the day Soviet and American troops met at the Elbe River, near Torgau in Germany, marking an important step toward the end of World War II in Europe. This contact between the Soviets, advancing from the east, and the Americans, advancing from the west, meant that the two powers had effectively cut Germany in two.