Pavel Mikhaylovich Nikitin
December 28, 1901 – August 17, 1944
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Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Nikitin, his wife and his two sons, Luzk 1940 (private collection)
A Father Disappears without a Trace
Pavel Mikhaylovich Nikitin came from the city of Yuriev-Polsky, northeast of Moscow. As a civilian, he worked as a locksmith. He had a wife and two sons. In the Red Army, the staunch Communist rose to the rank of colonel, heading the Reconnaissance Division in the 27th Infantry Corps.
On September 27, 1941, two months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Wehrmacht units took him prisoner in northern Ukraine. Nikitin was first deported to the prisoner of war camp in Vladimir-Volinskiy on the Polish-Ukrainian border. On July 5, 1942, the Wehrmacht transferred him to the Hammelburg officers’ camp. At Hammelburg, he was issued the identity disk number 8060.
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Personal file of the prisoner of war Pavel Nikitin, 1942 (Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Podolsk)
One year later, Nikitin was deployed as a forced laborer in Nuremberg. On the orders of the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht delivered him to a police prison. On July 14, 1943, he was registered at the Flossenbürg concentration camp under the prisoner number 3425. Pavel Nikitin died one year later, on August 17, 1944. His family first learned of his fate in 2002.