On the night before 15 August 1943, Private Väino Kaldma from Southern Estonia, who served in the Narva Estonian SS Volunteer Armoured Grenadier Battalion, was taken prisoner in Ukraine by Red Army soldiers. He claimed to be a Baltic German who had left Estonia in 1939. Kaldma reckoned that as an Estonian prisoner, the Soviet authorities would consider him a traitor of the homeland, while as a Baltic German he would be considered a soldier who had been mobilised according to ordinary procedures.

In the Soviet justice system, prisoners of war were divided into two categories, ‘foreign prisoners of war’ and ‘domestic prisoners of war, in other words the special contingent’.

Prisoners were ordinarily taken to distribution camps, where Soviet citizens were sent to special camps. There the thorough investigation of ‘betrayal of the homeland’ began.

The special camps were under the jurisdiction of the USSR NKVD Department of Special Camps. Other prisoners were sent to prisoner of war camps, where prisoners ended up in camps that were under the jurisdiction of the NKVD Department of Prisoners of War.

Väino Kaldma succeeded in concealing his ethnic origin and the trajectory of his military career. He was in Soviet prison camps for over two years, from where he was released in the autumn of 1945. Kaldma made it to Germany, headed onward to Belgium in 1947, and went from there to Canada.

He wrote his memoirs at the end of 1946 and the start of 1947 at the DP (displaced persons) camp in Kassel-Oberzwehren, Germany. The manuscript of his memoirs is located at the Lakewood Archive in the United States of America.