Data on Hungarian WW2 POWs found in Russia confirmed as significant

Budapest, March 5 (MTI) – Files found recently by a Hungarian expert in Russia on some 420,000 Hungarian WW2 soldiers who fell into captivity in the Soviet Union but managed to return to their homeland have been confirmed as historically significant, Vilmos Kovács, the head of the Hungarian Museum of Military History told MTI on Saturday.

The announcement about the discovery of files by a Hungarian archivist in a Russian state archive was made by the human resources minister on Feb. 18. Zoltán Balog told reporters after a session of the Gulag Memorial Committee in Budapest that the data will be digitised to make them more easily accessible to historians for research. State Secretary of Defence Tamas Vargha said at the time that there were altogether about half a million Hungarian POWs in the Soviet Union during World War Two. Data on the 48,000 POWs who died in captivity have been available in the archives of the Institute and Museum of Military History in Budapest but data on those who returned was hitherto missing.