Abstract EN:

The Soviet archives concerning the French prisoners of war captured during WWII, which are now partially available in the Russian Federation for historians, make it possible to discover many useful pieces of information not only about the French prisoners in Tambov but also about : the administrative, military and economical organisation of the USSR before and during the war, the project relating to the creation of the homo sovieticus, the general organisation of the Soviet internment system, the prophylaxis in the camps but also in the whole country, the links between Goulag and Gupvi, a wide range of information about the fate of French POWs during their captivity (transport conditions, diet, organisation of the camp, political work, living conditions and death circumstances, escapes, mortality, liberations), information about the confusion during the transliteration of the POWs’ names. As a nation with over 200 POWs detained in the Soviet Union before the beginning of the operation Barbarossa, some of them since autumn 1940, the historians have at their disposal some archives dating back to a period during which there were no German, no Italian, and no Hungarian POWs detained in the Soviet Union yet. This aspect - but also the fact that the total number of French POWs captured by the Red Army during WWII (30,000) is high enough to provide meaningful information concerning the fate of larger groups of soldiers - makes the fate of the French POWs in the USSR interesting even for other European countries, which had too few (Belgium, Luxembourg) or too many (Germany, Austria, Italy, Romania) POWs to carry out relevant cross-checks and other verifications.