In the fall of 1943, the Red Army advanced on Kyiv. Ahead of it, Stalin's secret police studied the population about to come under their control. At the end of September, Sergei Savchenko, the head of the Ukrainian People's Commissariat of State Security (NKGB), wrote to his counterpart in the Ukrainian NKVD, Vasilii Riasnoi, about the Nazis’ arrests of Soviet citizens in Kyiv as well as their preparations to evacuate ethnic Germans. Two weeks later, Savchenko reported that the evacuation had begun. The Germans were sending whole enterprises and their workers out of Kyiv, and the roads to Zhytomyr and points west were jammed with cars and trucks. Then, a few days later, he reported, “Based on a message from the operative group of the Fourth Directorate of the Ukrainian NKGB ‘Eagle’ now active in the enemy's rear … Kyiv's population is being led away to the west. In the city, only German military units remain.”

Later that winter, high-school teacher Viktor Tverskii explained to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ “Commission on the History of the Patriotic War in Ukraine” how he had avoided the evacuation:

Another person told neither of fleeing from nor evacuating with the Germans.