U.S. - Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs

Joint Commission Support Directorate (JCSD)

The World War II Working Group of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs is co-chaired on the American side by Dr. Timothy K. Nenninger, Chief of Modern Military Records at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. The position of the Russian co-chair has been vacant since the Russian side began a thorough reorganization in June 2004. The Working Group has exchanged and examined thousands of documents dealing with the fates of American and Soviet POWs during and after World War II.

In its work within the bilateral Commission, JCSD investigators have developed important cooperative relations with governmental, non-governmental, and professional research entities in the Russian Federation. One result of this successful cooperation was a joint mission led by General Roland Lajoie, then-U.S. Chairman, and Russian General-Major Konstantin Golumbovskiy in August 2000. They traveled to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East to investigate a crash site that was reported to the U.S. side’s Moscow office by a Russian historian from Kamchatka.

Wreckage of a U.S. Navy PV1 bomber found on Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. The seven crewmembers of this aircraft were accounted for after the Commission sponsored a JPAC recovery operation at this site in August 2001.

The wreckage they found was identified as that of a U.S. Navy PV1 bomber that crashed on Kamchatka in March 1944 with seven men on board. A full recovery operation was conducted in 2001. All seven crew members were accounted for as a result of this mission.

JCSD continues its important research efforts within Russia to uncover new information that could help clarify the fates of missing Americans. In an effort to make its search more efficient and to broaden the possible sources of information available to it, the Working Group seeks to initiate research contracts with Russian archives that are believed to contain promising World War II records. These efforts are temporarily stymied, however, by the current lack of Russian cooperation within the Joint Commission. Through its investigative efforts, the World War II Working Group has confirmed that there were about 28,000 American Prisoners of War held by the Germans and their allies in camps on the Eastern Front at the close of World War II. These prisoners came under Soviet control in the war’s final days, when the Red Army liberated the camps and occupied this territory. U.S. records show that about 25,000 of these POWs returned directly across the lines to U.S. military control. More than 2,800 others were returned to U.S. military control through the Soviet Black Sea port of Odessa (now Ukraine).

The World War II Working Group is investigating the possibility that some American POWs who remain unaccounted for from the Eastern Front camps may have been transferred to Soviet labor camps and were never repatriated.

The working group also has helped the Russians clarify the fates of more than 300,000 former Soviet POWs and displaced persons.

In an initiative undertaken to support the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission, the World War II Working Group continues to spearhead U.S. accounting efforts in areas that were occupied by Soviet or Soviet-allied forces during WWII. Since 1996, the Working Group has worked on the cases of missing-in-action American servicemen in Central and Eastern Europe.