Status: an open collection point. Most reporting on Americans in communist hands runs through Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Hanoi and Vientiane. This page is for the rest of it — the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany all had intelligence services inside the same alliance, officers who served in Korea and Vietnam, and archives that outlived the governments that built them. Several of those archives are now more open than Russia’s.
PIP is building this file case by case. What is here is what we can source. Where a country appears with nothing under it, that is an honest gap, not a finding.
Start with the Gulag Study
The single most useful open starting point is the U.S. government’s own. The Gulag Study was compiled by the Joint Commission Support Directorate at the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office and is now in its fifth edition. It is a compilation of reporting — from returned prisoners, defectors, emigres and foreign records — on American citizens seen or reported inside the Soviet camp system.
Two things make it the right place to begin. It is the U.S. government arguing with itself in public: the reports are set out with the government’s own assessments beside them. And the camp system it describes did not stop at the Soviet border. Prisoners moved, and so did the officers who handled them. A name, a camp number or a date that appears in the Gulag Study is a name, a camp number or a date that can be run against a Czech, Polish, Hungarian or Bulgarian archive that will answer a written request.
PIP works the Gulag Study as an index, not as a conclusion. Its reports carry the U.S. government’s own caveats, and we carry them too.
Country by country
Czechoslovakia
The most developed file. A defecting Czechoslovak major general who passed a U.S. polygraph described a Czechoslovak military hospital in North Korea used for experiments on American prisoners, and about 100 Americans sent on to the Soviet Union. A Czech political prisoner says he saw five or six Americans inside the Ministry of National Security in Prague and was told there were about ninety more in Pankrác prison. Read the Czechoslovakia file →
Poland
Polish security-service records are held by the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN), which answers written requests from foreign researchers. PIP has an open request there. We are looking for any Polish reporting on American prisoners in Korea, in the Soviet camp system, or moved through Poland.
Hungary
The Joint Commission’s own work found a Second World War grave site in Hungary where an American airman’s remains were believed to be commingled with Soviet dead, and a trilateral U.S.-Hungarian-Russian agreement authorized an exhumation. That is a demonstration that Hungarian records and Hungarian cooperation can produce an answer. Nothing comparable has been attempted for the Korean or Cold War cases.
Romania
A Romanian source, Şerban Oprică, reported seeing American prisoners in North Korea in October 1979. Romania kept an embassy and a technical presence in Pyongyang throughout the period, and its security-service archive (CNSAS) is open to written request. We are working this thread.
Bulgaria
Bulgarian security-service records sit with COMDOS, which accepts requests from foreign nationals by e-mail — one of the easier archives in the former bloc to reach. PIP has mapped the relevant record groups.
East Germany
In August 2007 a Joint Commission team conducted the first U.S. investigations since the Second World War in the former East German states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Berlin, meeting archivists, historians, officials and private citizens. The Stasi records are among the best-preserved in the former bloc and are administered under German federal law with a public request procedure.
Why this matters
When these countries were invited into NATO, Congress required that the accession process include providing information on American prisoners they had obtained from their old ally the Soviet Union. U.S. investigators found that the State Department intended to move accession through quickly and to minimize revelations that might slow it down. One former Warsaw Pact country offered in the late 1990s to help the United States get answers through its own intelligence channels, and Washington turned the offer down. “A foreign government was ready to do more on behalf of our missing than our own government was,” said Norman Kass, who ran the U.S. side of the Joint Commission.
Request for information
Please contact us if you can help with any of the following.
- Any record from a former Warsaw Pact security service, army, foreign ministry or hospital system that names an American prisoner, or names Americans as a group, from the Korean War onward.
- Anyone who served with a Warsaw Pact mission, hospital, technical team or embassy in North Korea, China, Vietnam or Laos — or their families.
- Officers, archivists or researchers who have worked the POW/MIA question in any of these archives.
- Copies of any U.S. request to these governments, and their replies.