State Archives of Kyiv Oblast

Scope and content

The collection contains pre-war, wartime, and postwar documents of former forced laborers and prisoners of war from the Kyyiv (Kiev) Oblast, as well as people who were identified as Soviet citizens by the Soviet authorities and were forced to perform their work in the occupied territories, in the German Reich, and in Austria. After the end of the war before returning to the Soviet Union, these people were to undergo a screening process called filtration in Soviet usage. In the process of screening from 1945–1970, by the representatives of NKVD (Narodnyy kommissariat vnutrennikh del – People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), later MVD (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del – Ministry of Internal Affairs), NKGB (Narodnyy Komissariat Gossudarstvennoy Besopasnosti – People's Commissariat for State Security) and SMERsh (an acronym from SMERt Shpionam, engl. "Death to Spies"), later MGB (Ministerstvo Gossudarstvennoy Besopasnosti – the Ministry for State Security) the so-called filtration documents were generated. During the screening process, repatriates were deprived of all documents that could prove their identity, the fact that they had been abroad, or that they had worked in the German Reich. Personal Documents from the pre-war and wartime periods together with the filtration documents formed personal files (filtration files).
There is also a collection of letters from Soviet citizens who were deported to Germany, to their families in the Kyyiv Oblast. Most likely, this collection was also a product of the work of the NKVD (later MVD), NKGB and SMERsch (later MGB).

More information on the documents is available in our e-Guide: https://eguide.arolsen-archives.org/en/

Existence and location of originals

State Archives of Kyyiv (Kiev) Oblast