Embassy publishes names of Kazakh soldiers buried in Norway

The Kazakh Embassy in Oslo has begun publishing a list of Soviet Kazakhstani soldiers buried in Norway in 1941-45.

During the Second World War, about 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war were in labor camps in occupied Norway. About 15,500 of them died in jail. The occupation authorities buried the dead prisoners, mainly in areas directly adjacent to the camps.

The largest military graveyard is located on the island of Tjøtta in the west of the country. It, in turn, consists of two mass graves. The first is the Soviet Military Cemetery (Tjøtta sovjetiske krigskirkegård), on which about 8,000 Soviet citizens rest. Their remains were reburied from different parts of Norway during the so-called operation Asphalt in 1952. The second cemetery has remains of about 2,500 people who died as a result of the sinking of the German ship Rigel in 1944. Most of the dead are Soviet prisoners of war.

In recent years, research on the identification of foreign military and civilians who died in Nazi concentration camps has intensified significantly in Norway. The work is carried out by the Falstad Center. To date, the digital database in the public domain (www.krigsgraver.no) has more than 9,000 names of buried foreign prisoners.

Information on a large number of prisoners of war is limited to the name, surname, and country of origin of the soldier ("Soviet Union"), which requires additional search work. To date, the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Norway has identified the names of 74 Soviet soldiers, with a high degree of probability being Kazakhstanis. In their documents, the origin is indicated as “Kazakhstan”, “Kazakh SSR” or Kazakh cities - “Semipalatinsk”, “Jetikara”, “Talgar” and others. Most of the identified soldiers are reported missing in the Kazakh database Memorial or are not listed at all. There are also many difficulties associated with incomplete information about the soldiers and typos in the documents.

The Embassy hopes the list will help relatives of the missing soldiers and boost further research. The file contains the currently available information from the Falstad Center, the Kazakh and Russian Memorial databases. Information and spellings in the list are given in the form in which they were documented.

74 identified Kazakhstani soldiers rest in three military cemeteries - on the island of Tjøtta, in the villages of Jørstadmoen near Lillehammer, Vinjeøra in the west of the country, Trondheim, and Bergen. They come from almost all regions of Kazakhstan.

Earlier, the Embassy identified and published a list of 65 Kazakhstani soldiers who died during the liberation of northern Norway during the Petsamo-Kirkenes operation in October-November 1944.

The list is available here (in the Russian language).