Vspomogatelnaja komanda

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Wspomogatelnaja komanda ( Cyrillic : в спомогателнaя к оманда , German : "auxiliary command") abbreviated ВК or latin WK (including VK transcribed), were prisoners commands, which in Soviet POW camps after the end of World War II are compiled from prisoners of war and guarding other prisoners served.

The members of the WK wore a light patch the size of a postcard with the abbreviation ВК (instead of the ВП of the other prisoners of war) on one arm of their clothing .

Occasionally they were used to a limited extent in the camp for order and supervision tasks and served mainly under the supervision of Red Army soldiers on the way to and at the workplaces outside the camp as guarding the “zone”, an area in which the prisoners of war were allowed to move freely. The setup around the zone was done in such a way that the individual posts had a mutual line of sight to control entry and exit.

Since there was a great shortage of labor in the Soviet Union after the war, many Red Army soldiers were demobilized after the end of the fighting, including those from the guards for prisoners of war. In order to compensate for this loss, the WK were put together from supposedly reliable prisoners of war or prisoners of war who had become partially able to work after illness or the like, who were supposed to regain their strength in the physically less strenuous activity. WK members enjoyed certain advantages, such as better clothing and food.

For reasons of reliable monitoring of the camps, which were numerically far more populated with German prisoners of war, mainly Romanians (including Moldovans ) and Hungarians were initially called in to WK, so that German work details were only accompanied by WK people of other nationalities. After the WK had proven itself as such, this mutual monitoring was abandoned and the WK accompaniment was put together without considering nationalities.

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