The new EHRI Document Blogpost “Wartime Paperwork: How Citizens Navigated Soviet Bureaucracy During and After World War II”, written by Tobias Wals, shows how Jewish Soviet citizens used flaws and loopholes in postwar bureaucracy to negotiate their position in society and even managed to sometimes change their identities. Tobias Wals, PhD candidate at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, analyses personal documents such as passports, military IDs, diplomas, marriage certificates of Jews from the Soviet Union, and the role these “scraps of paper”, now in the Yad Vashem archives, played in the Soviet Union during and directly after the war.

This post is part of the special thematic series “The Holocaust in Ukraine”. 

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Image: Domestic passport of Vol’ka Fridman, with a message for a girl named Emma, 7 March 1941, YVA O.32/451.