From late 1941 until 1946 a camp for Soviet German forced labourers was organised in and around the Turinsk Mines (from 1944 onwards, Krasnoturinsk) as part of Bogoslovlag. They were employed building the aluminium works in Karpinsk, the power station and other town infrastructure. The camp cemetery bordered on the town cemetery and those who died in the central camp infirmary and other camp outposts were buried there in 1941-1944. The total number buried here is unknown (the files of Bogoslovlag prisoners has not been fully preserved).
In the 1970s, the cemetery was destroyed and replaced by Boulevard Mir and Chkalov Street. A section 60 x 50 metres of the old cemetery survives. For a long while the cemetery of forced labourers remained a wasteland. In 1996, a “Memorial to deceased wartime conscripts” was erected here.
The electronic Book of Remembrance (Gedenkbuch) of Russian Germans contains biographical entries on more than 100,000 Soviet Germans variously sentenced under Article 58, deported as forced settlers, or mobilised in camps of forced labourers.
The Memorial online database (2025) names 38,697 victims in the Sverdlovsk Region. See Yekaterinburg memorial.
Over 2,000 transient Germans (born and resident elsewhere) figure among these victims: more than 600 were shot, during the Great Terror and the war; most of the rest were sent to the camps.
Drawing on other sources, but especially the Krasnodar Krai police records, the database lists families and individuals (total 13,162) deported to the Sverdlovsk Region. 6,276 were “dekulakised” or born in special settlements. More than half of the 589, later deported by reason of their “nationality”, were Germans: families and individuals (total 233) were sent there directly in 1941 or 1942, or transferred via Novosibirsk Region or Kazakhstan.
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
Have not survived
|
not determined
|
not delineated
|
[ Original texts & hyperlinks ]
Materials of an expedition to the Sverdlovsk Region (2008) – Memorial RIC Archive (St Petersburg)
N. Paegle, Behind the barbed wire in the Urals, Yekaterinburg, 2008
