As part of the memorial year dedicated to Hungarian political prisoners and
forced labourers in the Soviet Union, the Committee of National Remembrance, the
Research Centre for Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the
Pécs-Baranya Ethnic Circle of Germans in Hungary organised an international
conference on the memorial day for the victims on 25 November, 2015 in Budapest.
The lectures given by scholars from ten countries gave a broad picture of the
deportations of the inhabitants, soldiers or civilians, sometimeseven whole
ethnic groups of Eastern and Central European countries getting under Soviet
occupation during the Second World War, who became convicts of the Gulag or
Gupvi camps. They also revealed the reasons for and the circumstances of their
captivity, the conditions they lived in and finally, the- quite dubious - way
they were set free, since having come home they were often treated as second
class citizens. The main underlying reason for these deportations were, on one
hand, the immense lack of manpower, which was crucial for an economy based on
slave labour, and on the other hand, the Soviet Unions efforts in order to
establish its rule over the territories it had conquered, which often lead to
political and ethnic cleansings or even to genocide.