Pittsburgh World History Center. Grunewald received her Ph.D. in History from Carnegie Mellon University.
She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book discusses the importance of the coal industry, especially that in Ukraine, to postwar reconstruction in the Soviet Union. It explains a map on a nearby book page that shows the relationship between German POW camp locations in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and major coal basins. The page also describes information contained in a nearby table that illustrates when the POW camps opened and closed in Ukraine, which was related to the advancement of the Red Army and the liberation of Ukraine from Nazi forces as well as the targets of the Fourth Five-Year Pan, which emphasized the restoration of the Soviet economy to pre-war levels.Visit Susan C. I. Grunewald's website.
The Page 99 Test works for my book. The central argument of the book is that Soviet authorities detained able-bodied German prisoners of war after World War II to participate in postwar reconstruction, at least until 1949, after which the prisoners became important bargaining chips in the burgeoning Cold War. The sample on page 99 is a very detailed analysis of POW contributions to a key economic sector, coal, in one of territories that saw extreme destruction due to the war, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This might not be the best page to capture the total essence of the book and the argument, but the reader can glean the central themes of my work from this page. The reader can also gather from this pagee Page 99 Test have done a lot of digital mapping analysis as a key component of my research to compliment scattered archival documents, even from Stalin himself, and former prisoner memoir literature to present a fuller analysis of the fate of the POWs in the USSR.
This book seeks to understand why Soviet authorities kept 1.5 million German prisoners of war after the end of WWII until 1956, which was eleven years after the war’s end and seven years longer than the other Allied victor nations held onto their German captives. It argues that Soviet leaders consciously chose to keep able-bodied POWs to participate in postwar reconstruction, at least until 1949, after which the remaining captives became more useful for Soviet-German political affairs. Unlike most existing studies on the topic, it combines Soviet and German archival sources with newspapers and returnee memoirs to present a fuller story of German captivity in the USSR. It is also the only source in English on this topic that connects the treatment of the POWs to precedent from World War I, the conditions caused by the war on the Eastern Front, and the Soviet economy’s reliance on forced labor under Stalin.
--Marshal Zeringue
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