Soviet Extraordinary Commission

Holocaust · Victims · Soviet Union

This database includes over 60,000 records from the Soviet Extraordinary Commission.  Records include surname, forename, patronymic, birth year, gender and notes fields as well as information to assist in locating names on the microfilm.  The notes field often contains further location and fate information as described in the translation notes below.

Created by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II to document German crimes during the occupation, the Soviet Extraordinary Commission compiled testimonial information gathered from the evidence of neighbors, eyewitnesses, and survivors.  Regional commissions contributed their reports to a centralized commission in Moscow.

These records are from Fond 7021 of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), formerly known as the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR), in Moscow.  Microfilmed copies are located in the Archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG-22.002M (27 reels).

• A finding aid to this collection can be found at ushmm.org.
• A town index can be found in a JewishGen InfoFile.
• A microfilm inventory can be found in a JewishGen InfoFile.

This name index was created by the Registry of Holocaust Survivors.   Because of the testimonial nature of these documents, this list should not be considered a comprehensive record of Jewish victims in the former Soviet Union.

Other databases extracted from this collection can be found on JewishGen, for Riga (2,000 names, in the JewishGen Latvia Database), and Pinsk (11,700 names, in the JewishGen Belarus Database).  All are also searchable via JewishGen's Holocaust Database.

Data from the following reels of microfilm are covered in this database.  Additional data from the collection will be made available as possible.

Opis (Op) and Folder information refer to the organizational scheme used in the archival documents.  Reel numbers are for the microfilm held by the USHMM archives.  Page and line number refer to the individual documents within the collection.

Researchers should not look at the original microfilm unless they can read Cyrillic.  The amount of information available on the original records varies drastically from list to list.  Sometime town, district, region information will be available.  Sometimes further information about the family or fate.  Often, no additional information will be available.

Gender:

Professions:

Nationality Abbreviations:

Notes - Words commonly found in Notes field.
These are transliterated from Russian:

For more information, see:

• "More Resources in Israel", by Sallyann Amdur Sack, in Avotaynu VII:2 (Summer 1991).
• "New Sources at the U.S. Holocaust Museum Archives", by Vadim Altskan with Karl Modig, in Avotaynu IX:3 (Fall 1993).
• Town Index to the Soviet Extraordinary Commission microfilms.
• Inventory of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission microfilms.
• USHMM's Finding Aid for Extraordinary State Commission microfilms.
• Questions should be addressed to the USHMM's Registry of Survivors.

This database is searchable via both JewishGen's Holocaust Database and the search interface directly below.