As the Red Army moved into Central Europe in 1944-45, Soviet commands seized civilians for labour in the USSR, a practice remembered in Hungary and Transcarpathia by the phrase malenkij robot, a garbling of the Russian for 'a little work' used when men were rounded up ostensibly to clear rubble. Deportees were held by the NKVD's directorate for prisoners of war and internees, GUPVI, in a camp network parallel to the Gulag, and worked in mines, quarries and reconstruction across the Donbas, the Urals, Siberia and the Caucasus. A second, more organised wave in January 1945 followed State Defence Committee Order 7161, which directed the deportation of working-age ethnic Germans from the occupied territories; where regional quotas for Germans could not be met, ethnic Hungarians were taken instead. Hungarian sources estimate that 330,000-380,000 forced labourers returned, most between 1946 and 1948, with a final group of about 3,000 released only in 1953-1955, leaving an estimated 200,000 dead in transit or captivity. The episode was not researched or publicly commemorated until the fall of communism, and remains distinct from the westward expulsions of ethnic Germans recorded separately in this atlas.
Soviet forces and the NKVD rounded up civilians in Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and the occupied German lands and deported them to labour camps in the USSR
No coherent denominator exists. The round-ups took ethnic Germans (the Danube Swabians and Transylvanian Saxons, some 1.5-2 million across the three states), Hungarians seized in street sweeps in Budapest and the countryside, and civilians in the Soviet occupation zone, under different criteria in each country and with no common register. Soviet NKVD records indicate several hundred thousand deported, with mortality in the camps often put near a fifth.
Hungarian estimates put around 200,000 deaths among those deported, from epidemic dysentery, cold and malnutrition in transit and in the GUPVI camps; the range reflects the uncertainty in the underlying deportation totals rather than a dispute between named authorities. Mortality among deported Romanian and Yugoslav Germans is usually estimated at 10-15 per cent.
Round-ups without charge, camp labour and death from hunger and epidemic disease are documented in post-1991 Hungarian, Romanian and German archival research and in survivor testimony collected by associations such as Szorakesz.
Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Russia