Documents about Great Patriotic War, from the German "trophy" collections and the collections of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs troops, are presented on the portal of the Presidential Library.

On June 4, 2024, the Presidential Library added documents from the Russian State Military Archives to the World War II in Archival Documents collection on its portal. These documents include operational reports from the internal troops of the Soviet Union's People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) on the activities of Ukrainian nationalist armed formations, their collaboration with the German Wehrmacht, and documents from German occupation authorities regarding punitive actions against Soviet partisans in Belarus and Ukraine, as well as mass killings of Soviet civilians and forced labor in Germany.

The collection contains documents in German and Russian from the so-called "trophy" collections: "Commissioner for the Nazi Four-Year Plan - Goering, Berlin", "General Directorate of State Security of Germany, Berlin", "United Archive Holdings: Military and Construction Institutions of Germany", "Imperial Archive Collection (Potsdam)", and others.

Among these, there is a letter from the German minister of the occupied eastern territories, A. Rosenberg, to Reichsmarshall G. Goering regarding the fight against partisan activity in the General Commissariat of Belarus (December 23, 1942). There is also information from the economic headquarters "Vostok" regarding the use of labor in occupied Soviet territories (February 12, 1943). What also included is a circular from the Reich Commissioner for Ukraine, E. Koch, regarding the need to ensure spring sowing and the new forced shipment of workers to Germany (February 20, 1943). Finally, there is a report to Reichsmarshal G. Goering's speech on Germany's reliance on food supplies from occupied Ukraine (September 2, 1943) and the order from the command of Wehrmacht units in the Reichskommissariat Ostland to conscript Latvians into the Latvian SS Legion (June 21, 1944).

The order of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) of Belarus is significant. The SD, which stands for Sicherheitsdienst in German, was founded by E. Strauch and was responsible for the "resettlement" of Jews in the city of Slutsk. This operation involved employees of the SD, as well as 110 members of a Latvian volunteer unit.

The order begins by stating that on February 8th and 9th, 1943, the SD carried out the resettlement of the Jews living in Slutsk. However, in the section titled "Territory of Resettlement," it states that there were two pits in the area where the resettlements took place. Each pit had a group of 10 officers and soldiers who worked there for two hours, after which they were replaced.

At the end of the document, it is stated that this operation was known as "Hornung". Operation Hornung was an anti-partisan operation carried out by German forces in February 1943 on the occupied territory of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. As a result of this operation, approximately 12,000 Soviet citizens lost their lives. The start of Operation Hornung marked the destruction of the Slutsk ghetto, where over three thousand people perished.

Documents from the holdings of various departments of the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) of the USSR, including the Secretariat of the Deputy People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, the Department of Internal Troops, the NKVD District Department, the Border Troops Department of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the NKVD Troops for the Protection of the Rear of the 1st Ukrainian Front, among others, contain materials about the guerrilla struggles that took place in the occupied territories of Ukraine and Belarus, as well as about operations conducted by the internal troops against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) gangs.According to the SMERSH counterintelligence of the 47th Army, as well as the NKVD and NKGB of the USSR, three counterrevolutionary armies were organized in the Rivne region of the Ukrainian SSR. These armies included the Polesie Army, the Northern Army, and the Bulbov Army.

All these bandit groups were instructed by their leaders not to carry out open protests against the Red Army, but to attack citizens who supported or were friendly with the Soviet government. They were also instructed to exterminate military personnel and attack vehicles, as well as small garrisons located in populated areas.

On July 27, 1944, the NKGB department of the Volyn region reported that the Germans were training and equipping a group of Bandera fighters, numbering up to 100 people, with the intention of carrying out terrorist acts against the Red Army in the rear.

In the testimony of captured militant V. Marchenko, there is direct evidence of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army's (UPA) ties and cooperation with Nazi and Vlasov forces. During the interrogation, he stated: "On April 25, 1944, three parachutists were dropped near the villages of Selishche and Chabel. Four days later, one of the parachutists went west, attempting to cross the front lines to join the Germans. I am not sure what the purpose of the paratroopers was, or what instructions the Germans had given to the groups, including 'Pashchenko', but after the paratrooper left, 'Pashchenko' said that the groups would soon receive support from the German side."From later reports of the NKGB Directorate for the Volyn region, we learn about the atrocities committed by UPA bandits against civilians and representatives of the Soviet government. On the night of August 7, 1944, in the village of Rusnov, Vladimir-Volynsky district, Ms. Golovenko Yukhimiya was murdered. The murder was carried out by a group of up to 15 mounted bandits who emerged from the Rusnov forests. Golovenko was stabbed 24 times and her right arm was broken.

On the night of August 14, in the villages of Lutsk district, several UPA gangs, each numbering 12 to 20 people, presumably transferred from Demidovsky district in Rivne region, committed brutal murders. In the village of Lavrov, Burulevchuk Ivan, an accountant for the village, and Eschuk Vasily and his mother and four-year-old child were killed. In Mstyshin, the family of Kmet Solomiya consisting of four people, and in S. Rodomyshl, the deacon of a village church, were also killed.

All these documents provide authentic evidence of the bandit and terrorist activities of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) against the civilian population in the liberated territories of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR).

Photographic materials documenting the course of the Great Patriotic War from 1942 to 1944 are housed in the "Anti-Fascist Department" collection at the Political Department of the Main Directorate for the Protection of Public Order (GUPVI) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) of the USSR (F. 4p). These holdings include pictures of destroyed German tanks in Stalingrad, groups of captured German and Romanian officers and soldiers, and Red Army soldiers on the liberated streets of cities such as Rzhev, Novocherkassk, Minsk, and Kharkov.

In accordance with the List of instructions for the implementation of the Address of the President of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation dated January 15, 2020, the organizers of the Collection of Digitized Archival Documents, Film and Photo Materials "World War II in Archival Documents" are the Federal Archival Agency (Rosarkhiv), the Administration of the President of the Russian Federations and the Presidential Library.

The Collection content is carried out by the Federal Archives and federal state archives with the participation of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the state archives of Belarus and others.

To date, the volume of the Collection exceeds 12.6 thousand materials: maps, diagrams, periodicals, photographs, newsreels for the period from January 1933 to December 1944.

Archival documents of the Collection World War II in Archival Documents are available from anywhere in the world thanks to the Presidential Library’s portal. Especially for the foreign audience, the titles and annotations to the documents and the texts of the accompanying articles are also published in English.

In addition to digitized archival documents, the Collection contains a list of the main Internet projects, databases, other thematic Internet publications of documents, virtual tours of the history of World War II, developed by government agencies of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and various organizations.