In 2017, a woman from Kryvyi Rih, going through her late grandmother's papers, found a worn German certificate bearing the stamp of a labour exchange and a photograph of a girl of about fifteen — her own grandmother, deported to Germany for forced labour in 1942. The name of the enterprise on the certificate was illegible, and during her life her grandmother had almost never spoken of those years. Through the Arolsen Archives website, the granddaughter found the full registration card: it turned out the girl had been sent to a textile factory in Saxony, where she spent two years, with even the date of her arrival medical examination preserved. The story repeats itself across Ukraine in thousands of variations: the military fate of men was recorded by the Red Army, but the fate of the women, children and elderly left behind in occupied territory followed an entirely different, non-military path of record-keeping — and reconstructing it requires different documents.
Most of the territory of modern-day Ukraine was, from 1941 to 1944, governed by an administrative unit that existed neither before nor after the war: the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, established by Nazi Germany in August 1941 with its capital at Rivne. The eastern and southern regions — Kharkiv, Stalino (today's Donetsk), and Voroshilovgrad oblasts — formally fell under military administration and were not part of the Reichskommissariat at all, while Galicia was attached to a district within the General Government of Poland. This administrative patchwork means that documents concerning the very same event in 1943, in different parts of modern Ukraine, could have been compiled under entirely different rules and may today sit in entirely different archival systems.
Historians' estimates vary, but somewhere between 2.2 and 2.8 million people were deported from Ukrainian territory for forced labour in Germany — one of the largest categories of civilian victims of the occupation, and at the same time one of the best documented, since the German labour system required personal registration of every worker. Before deportation, a person passed through a local labour exchange (Arbeitsamt), where a form was filled in recording name, year of birth, occupation and state of health, followed by a transit camp, where an individual number was assigned and a medical examination carried out.
These registration cards form the core of the Arolsen Archives today — the world's largest collection of documents on the victims of Nazi persecution, established by the Allies in 1943 as the International Tracing Service, and one that has greatly expanded its online access to its holdings over the past decade. An Ostarbeiter's card typically names the specific enterprise or farm a person was sent to, making it possible to reconstruct not just the bare fact of deportation but the actual years and place of forced labour.
On 29–30 September 1941, at Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, German occupation authorities and their collaborators shot more than 33,000 Jews of Kyiv over the course of two days — one of the single largest mass killings of the Holocaust. Similar shootings took place in hundreds of localities across Ukraine, and for most of them no parish death record and no military report exists at all — the victims were civilians, killed entirely outside any loss-recording system that applied to servicemen.
The main source of information on Holocaust victims in Ukraine today is the Yad Vashem database in Jerusalem — the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, which gathers witness testimony, post-war lists, and Pages of Testimony that relatives of the dead have been filling in since the 1950s. For families researching the pre-war Jewish residents of Ukrainian shtetls, this database often turns out to be the only source recording even the bare fact and approximate place of death for a person who left behind no other documents.
The Ukrainian Partisan Staff (UShPD) was set up in 1942, separately from the central staff in Moscow, and coordinated partisan units operating directly within Ukrainian territory — the largest of them led by Sydir Kovpak and Oleksii Fedorov. UShPD's documents, including the personnel rosters of partisan units, award recommendations and operational reports, are held today at the Central State Archive of Public Organisations of Ukraine (TsDAHO) in Kyiv, and overlap only partially with the holdings of Russia's TsAMO, since the partisan movement in Ukraine was formally subordinate to Ukrainian rather than unified Soviet command.
Paradoxically, some civilian record-keeping in occupied territory did not stop but continued under German oversight: town councils registered births and deaths, issued certificates of family composition, and kept household registers. These 1941–1944 documents are held today in Ukraine's regional state archives, and formally belong to the holdings of the relevant city or district rather than to any single republic-wide system — meaning a search must go directly to the archive of the specific oblast in question, rather than to a central Ukrainian archive.
Ostarbeiters returning home after 1945 faced the same suspicion as former prisoners of war: Soviet authorities checked whether a person had voluntarily collaborated with the occupation administration, and for decades the bare fact of having worked in Germany was treated by society as a blot on one's record, not something one spoke of with children and grandchildren. This explains why so many families today know only fragments — or nothing at all — about an ancestor who was an Ostarbeiter, and why an archival document often turns out to be the only source able to recover this part of a family's history.
Since 1994, independent Ukraine has published a multi-volume Book of Sorrow of Ukraine — a regional printed register of civilian war victims: people shot, those who died of starvation under occupation, and those killed in bombings and punitive operations. Unlike Russia's Books of Memory, which mainly record military losses, the Ukrainian publication focuses specifically on the civilian population, and was compiled from regional archives, the records of 1944–1945 war-crimes investigation commissions, and the testimony of local residents. For families seeking information about relatives who died not at the front but in their own village during a raid or a punitive operation, this publication is often the only printed source available — each volume covers a single oblast, so it's the specific volume for the pre-war place of residence that needs to be checked.
War-crimes investigation commissions, which worked immediately after a territory's liberation in 1944–1945, compiled records of witness testimony about shootings and punitive operations — these records underpinned both the Book of Sorrow and the materials of the Nuremberg trials, and are held today in regional archives alongside other documents of the occupation period.
Category
Where to search
What to know
Ostarbeiters deported for forced labour
arolsen-archives.org
Free online search; a large share of the holdings is digitised
Holocaust victims
yvng.yadvashem.org (Central Database of Names)
Includes Pages of Testimony filled in by relatives
UShPD partisans
TsDAHO (Kyiv)
Overlaps only partly with Russia's TsAMO; requires a separate request
Civilian records from the occupation period
Ukraine's regional state archives
Send the request to the place where the event occurred, not a central archive
The fate of occupied Ukraine's civilian population doesn't fit into a single archival system: it splits into several parallel streams of documentation — labour registration, religious and municipal records, victim lists, and partisan archives — and each requires its own separate inquiry. But it's precisely this fragmentation that explains why so many family stories remain untold to this day: the documents exist, they simply sit somewhere other than where instinct says to look.
Reichskommissariat Ukraine — a Nazi German administrative unit covering part of occupied Ukrainian territory, existing from 1941 to 1944 with its capital at Rivne.
Ostarbeiter — the German administration's term for civilians from the occupied eastern territories deported for forced labour in Germany.
Arbeitsamt — the German labour exchange through which civilians were registered before being sent to forced labour.
Arolsen Archives — the world's largest collection of documents on the victims of Nazi persecution, formerly the International Tracing Service, founded by the Allies in 1943.
Babyn Yar — the site near Kyiv of the mass shooting of Kyiv's Jews on 29–30 September 1941, one of the single largest killings of the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem — a memorial institute in Jerusalem maintaining the Central Database of Holocaust Victims' Names, which includes Pages of Testimony.
UShPD — the Ukrainian Partisan Staff, established in 1942 to coordinate partisan units operating in Ukraine.
TsDAHO — the Central State Archive of Public Organisations of Ukraine in Kyiv, which holds the documents of the partisan movement.
Book of Sorrow of Ukraine — a multi-volume regional printed register of civilian war victims, published in Ukraine since 1994.