Since 2004, the project has been researching the biographies of around 1000 Germans who were sentenced to death by the Supreme Military Tribunal of the Soviet occupying forces in the GDR between 1950 and 1953 and shot in Moscow.
Previously unknown or closed files in Russian and German archives have been viewed and analyzed for the first time.

Supplemented by detailed background texts, the biographies were published in a Book of the Dead in the fall of 2005. In addition, the results of the research are presented in a traveling exhibition that uses examples to illustrate the fates of the victims.

The names of 927 German victims from the GDR as well as from West Berlin and West Germany who were sentenced to death in secret trials for “espionage”, “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” or “illegal possession of weapons” in accordance with § 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code are now known. After their trials, the convicts were taken to the Berlin-Lichtenberg prison and then deported by the Soviet secret service in camouflaged railroad cars to Moscow, where they were shot in the basement of the Butyrka prison. That same night, the Soviet secret service had the dead cremated in the city’s only crematorium at the Donskoye cemetery. Their ashes were buried in mass graves in the vicinity of the crematorium. Memorial estimates the number of NKVD/MGB victims buried in the Donskoye cemetery at more than 7,000.

On November 3, 2006, a workshop entitled “Soviet military justice in the Soviet Occupation Zone and early GDR” took place at the ROTER OCHSE memorial in Halle (Saale). The program can be found here: hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=6260. The contributions to the workshop were published in 2007. The completely revised 3rd edition of the book was published in October 2008. It included two new essays and a whole series of new photos. The fourth edition was published in November 2020.

A traveling exhibition was created for the research project, which was shown at 24 locations in Germany and Austria between 2006 and 2016.