Special camps of the NKVD during the Great Patriotic War
The article examines the history of the creation and operation of special camps of the NKVD, which performed the function of filtering soviet military personnel and civilians who passed through enemy captivity or encirclement. On the basis of archival documents the features of the regime and security, food supply and medical care, labor use and ideological processing of former encircled people and prisoners of war are shown. The author concluded that, in parallel with the function of a special check, these camps played the role of suppliers of labor for the soviet military economy, which was experiencing an acute shortage of personnel. Imprisonment and forced labor, in fact, meant the transformation of the former encircled people and prisoners of war into one of the categories of the penitentiary contingent, which is clearly demonstrated by the transfer of special camps to the GULAG system. At the same time the labor of prisoners of special camps was considered as a way of atonement for being in captivity and occupation.