The camp personnel were recruited from reserve units of the Red Army. Officers from the Soviet secret service, the NKVD, occupied the leadership positions. The camp staff was continuously increased between 1945 and 1950, from 70 posts to over 230. However, the actual occupancy rate fell far short of this.
The individual departments of the camp staff often consisted of fewer than ten people. One exception was the department tasked with protection and organisational duties, which had almost 180 employees.
With a few exceptions, the inmates of Special Camp No. 2 were given hardly any insight into the staff and organisational structure of the camp. Only in recent years has it become possible to expand our knowledge of the camp staff through archival research in the successor states of the Soviet Union.
This is the only surviving photo of Soviet camp personnel. The text above the gate reads: “Hand in your weapons.” For security reasons, the guards were not supposed to carry weapons inside the camp. The soldier Vladimir J. Bryuchkovsky (1925-20XX) can be seen on the left. Bryuchkovsky was deported to Germany for forced labor in 1943. After his liberation in 1945, he had to serve as a guard soldier in the special camps in Buchenwald and Torgau. Later, Bryuchkovsky was sentenced by a military tribunal for having a relationship with an internee, and imprisoned in Soviet camps for several years.
Fyodor Matuskov
Fyodor Matuskov was born in 1906 in the Rostov region (Russian Empire). During the Second World War, he worked as a captain in counter-espionage. In the spring of 1945, he was in charge of a transit camp for Soviet forced laborers. After the end of the war, he became deputy head of Special Camp No. 6 in Frankfurt (Oder).
In August 1945, Matuskow was seconded to Thuringia. His task was to find a suitable location for a planned special camp. He rejected the Buchenwald site due to the poor condition of its security facilities. However, his concerns were ignored, and he was ordered to repair parts of the camp. In the fall of 1945, Matuskow became the first head of Special Camp No. 2, a position in which he behaved very unremarkably. Some inmates thus considered his deputy, Captain Ipatij J. Pastuschenko, to be the real camp director. After his dismissal, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1947. Matuskov worked there as a camp leader until 1956. Nothing is known about his later life.
Major Konstantin P. Andreyev
Konstantin P. Andreyev was born in Pskov (Russian Empire) in 1907. After an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, he worked in various professions. He served in the Soviet border troops from 1929. In 1933, he attended a course at the secret service academy in New Peterhof. During the Second World War, he worked in counterintelligence, among other things. He was promoted to major in 1944. After the war, he was in charge of Special Camp No. 5 in Ketschendorf from 1945 to 1947. In 1947, he replaced Fyodor Matuskov as head of Special Camp No. 2 in Buchenwald.
Some internees report direct conversations with the camp director. The morale of the guards fell drastically under him, and offenses committed by camp personnel became more frequent. After the dissolution of Special Camp No. 2 Buchenwald in 1950, Andreyev returned to the Soviet Union. For a short time, he took on various management functions in Soviet labor camps. He retired in 1954 for health reasons.
