U.S. turns over historic documents to Ukrainian Embassy officials

WASHINGTON - Copies of the Ukrainian-language documents from the Smolensk Oblast Committee of the All-Union Communist Party archive, which came into possession of the United States at the end of the World War II, were handed over to Ukraine at a ceremony that took place at the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington on December 20, 2002.

In the fall 1941, the German army captured these documents on the territory of Smolensk Oblast. During their retreat in 1943, the Nazis brought the archive at first to Lithuania and then to Poland. The Germans took one part of the archive to Bavaria, where it came into possession of the Americans, while the Soviet Army returned another part from Poland to the USSR. In 1947 that part of the archive captured by the U.S. Army was brought to the United States, where it has been held for many years at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md.

For more than half a century American historians, Sovietologists, sociologists and diplomats studied the documents from the Smolensk Party Archive, which contains documents about the forms and methods of work of the Communist Party.

On December 13, 2002, the United States returned the originals of part of the Smolensk Party archive to the Russian Federation. This was one of the practical results of the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, where 44 countries agreed to an international effort to help research and uncover cultural assets seized by the Nazis, and to return those assets to their pre-war owners or heirs.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 9, 2003, No. 6, Vol. LXXI

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