The Third Reichs Eastern Legions and POWS

BEST BOOKS

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Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Emigré Theories

Catherine Andreyev

Review
"Her main aim is to synthesize and comment on the political ideas of the Russians and others associated with what she properly calls not simply the 'Vlasov movement' but the Russian Liberation Movement....Her book includes a comprehensive and judicious survey of what others have done, full citations to sources, and an extensive bibliography. The writing is clear, graceful, and precise." American Historical Review

"...an elegant, authoritative but highly readable book." The Journal of Soviet Military Studies

"Andreyev's book is likely to become the standard reference work on an important movement whose leading figures were hanged in Moscow in August 1946" Journal of Ukrainian Studies

Every so often a text appears which dispels the conventional wisdom of what we come to accept as history. Catherine Andreyev's "Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement" is such a work. This narrative tells the story of one of the strangest, yet most compelling episodes in the history of the Second World War. In July of 1942, a Soviet Army general, Andrei Vlasov was captured by the invading German Army. He later came to lead a non-existent force known as the ROA, or Russian Liberation Army. Although this force had never existed, he was in fact the ideological leader of an estimated 800 million Russians who were opposed to Stalin and served in various capacities during the war. Throughout the war it was clear that the movement was not, as their opponents had charged, blind collaboration with the Nazi forces but a political movement in its own right. The goal of Vlasov and his group was none other than a free and democratic Russian state. In the course of the movement, it was in fact the Nazis themselves that provided the strongest opposition to the goals of the ROA. They, in fact had desired to use Vlasov only for the purpose of propaganda against the Soviets. Andreyev's story tells the story of the various individuals in the movement and the tragic outcome of this movement. Particular emphasis is placed on different factions involved. In this story we learn about the soldiers themselves who were mostly Russian prisoners of war, as well as the civilian émigré groups who supported the ROA. We also see the internal struggle between the Vlasov's group who sincerely wanted to liberate their homeland and the Nazi hierarchy who considered the Russians as being racially inferior and wanted to use them as puppets. In short this is an excellent story of an idealistic, but doomed group of people and their struggle.

Tom Pierce

Product Description
This book deals with the attempt by Soviet citizens to create an anti-Soviet Liberation Movement during the Second World War. The Movement's ultimate importance lies in its expression of grass-roots opposition to the Soviet regime, the first substantial such efflorescence since 1922. The motivation of its titular leader, Vlasov, is examined in detail, as is its fundamental ideology, analyzed within the context not merely of wartime but of prewar Soviet and Russian emigré society.

Die Geschichte der Wlassow-Armee (Einzelschriften zur militarischen Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges)

Joachim Hoffmann

Publisher: Rombach (1984)

Language: German

ISBN-10: 3793001865

ISBN-13: 978-3793001867

“Die geschichte der Wlassow-Armee" is best on the military history of the ROA.

Against Stalin and Hitler: Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement, 1941-1945

Author: Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt

Publisher: Macmillan
Published in: London
Year: 1970

"It can be argued that it was Hitler's idiotic policy towards Russia and Russians that lost him the war in the East, and, incidentally ensured the survival of the Stalinist regime. By the summer of 1944 when Himmler (of all people) sponsored a change of course it was already too late. In the event the German armies were overwhelmed, and the Russian Liberation Movement under General Vlasov became one of the might-have-beens of history. The Movement, however, has a significance of its own, apart from the moving human story of its leaders and its followers. Here we have an authentic account from the man best qualified to give it..."-----from the Foreword by David Footman.

The author was on the staff of Field Marshall von Bock, commander of the Central Group of Armies in Hitler's invasion of Russia. He kept a full diary from then till the end of the war, and it is on this that he has based this book. An account of the Russian Liberation Movement under the leadership of General Vlasov. The author was closely associated with Vlasov. Hitler failed to exploit the readiness to co-operate among the populations of Russia which greeted his troops when they first advanced into the Soviet Union. This one is good if you want to know the person Andrej Andrejevich Vlasov and his ideals.

Booklist:

Fischer, George: Soviet opposition to Stalin. 1952.

Dwinger, Edwin Erich: General Wlassow, eine tragödie .. 1951.

Steenberg, Sven: General Wlassow, verräter oder patriot. 1968.

English translation Vlasov, traitor or patriot.

Strik-Strikfeldt, Wilfrid: Gegen Stalin und Hitler. 1970.

English translation Against Stalin and Hitler. The John Day Company. 1973.

Thorwald, Jürgen: Die illusion: Rotarmisten in Hitler´s heere. 1974.

English translation The illusion:..1975.

Hoffmann, Joachim: Die Geschichte der Wlassow-Armee. 1984.

Andreyev, Catherine: Vlasvov and the Russian Liberation Movement. Cambridge University Press. 1987. Contains a list of literature, much in Russian.

Drobjasko, S.: Russkaja osvoboditelnaja armija. 1998. Soldat series no. 5.

Okorokov, A.V.: Materialy Po Istorii Russkogo Osvoboditel Nogo Dvizheniya, three parts 1997-99. Moscow.

To read of the repatriation to the Soviet Union:

Tolstoy, Nicolay: Victims of Yalta. Hodder & Stoughton. 1977.

HE WILL SOON LOSE THAT SMILE…

2012-10-31T19:42:00.000+08:00

…whether sharing a joke with his comrade or just happy to have survived…so far…

The war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia (1941–1945) was arguably the largest and most brutal theater of land warfare in the twentieth century. Fueled by bitter ideological antagonism, the enormous cruelty at the front extended directly into the treatment of prisoners of war on both sides. Of 5.7 million captured Red Army soldiers, about 3.3 million died in German captivity—a staggering mortality rate of 57 percent. By comparison, the mortality rate of British and American POWs in German hands lay between 3.5 and 5.1 percent. On the other side, almost one-third of up to 3 million German and Austrian prisoners of war perished in Soviet captivity. And Germany’s allies fared little better: 2 million of their soldiers, mainly Hungarians, Rumanians, Czechs, and Italians, were captured by the Red Army during the war and suffered mortality rates at times comparable to that among the Germans. In Soviet and German POW camps, years of hard labor and almost unbearable living conditions shaped the lives of those who were to survive. Facing this prospect, many soldiers on both sides decided to fight to the bitter end rather than to give up, thus intensifying and prolonging what already was a savage war.

In the early morning hours of 22 June 1941, the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) and its allies invaded the Soviet Union. Taken by surprise, the Red Army initially offered only sporadic resistance. In the first week of July alone, the German army encircled and captured over 320,000 Russian troops at Biasystok and Minsk. Heading further east, it continued to capture huge numbers of Soviet soldiers, most notably at Smolensk, Kiev, and Bryansk. By the time the Wehrmacht’s advance came to its first significant standstill near Moscow in December 1941, over 3.2 million Soviet soldiers had fallen into German captivity. By February 1942, 2 million of them had lost their lives. This mass death had been clearly premeditated. Prior to the German attack, in March 1941, Hitler had relieved his troops from allegiance to the traditional code of military honor: “The Communist is from first to last no comrade. It is a war of extermination.” And despite occasional criticism out of its ranks, the Wehrmacht generally complied with the regime’s genocidal premises.

Thus, for many Soviet soldiers, death came immediately after their capture: according to German orders, political officers (commissars) were to be shot on the spot and others, especially Jewish soldiers, were handed over to SS execution squads. Undernourished and liable to be shot if they were physically unable to carry on, tens of thousand then perished during the seemingly endless marches from the front to camps in Poland and Germany. Prisoners who made it to their permanent camp locations usually found nothing but a barren field surrounded by barbed-wire. For shelter, they were forced to dig holes into the ground. With no sanitary facilities, these “camps” soon became breeding grounds for typhus and dysentery. Then the coming of winter hit the inmates in their makeshift shelters. The most common cause of death among the POWs at that time, however, was starvation. In order to maintain the food supply of their own troops and that of the German civilian population, the leadership of the Third Reich had decided to induce a “natural” decimation of the Russian prisoners, whom they branded “subhumans” and “worthless eaters.” Some Soviet POWs even became the first victims of the gas chambers at a number of concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Clearly, the treatment of the Soviet POWs in 1941–1942 fell into line with Nazi designs of a racist war of conquest and annihilation in which no rules, be they legal or ethical, were recognized.

In early 1942, however, pressure mounted to make use of prisoners of war in industry and agriculture. Following the anticipated victory, the German leadership had initially planned to demobilize large portions of the Wehrmacht in order to create a manpower pool for the defense industry. But with the advance stalled, demobilization became impossible. Instead, a first batch of 400,000 Soviet prisoners in Germany were forced to toil on projects such as highway construction and mining. Requiring a healthy workforce, the labor program led to the gradual betterment of the prisoners’ living conditions. In the spring of 1942, the death rate in the POW camps began to drop, though this was not entirely due to sudden German benevolence: by now, so many prisoners had died that in many cases the meager allotments of food became sufficient for those who remained. Yet, not until July 1944 did the food supply for the working Soviet prisoners reach a level comparable to that of other Allied prisoners in German captivity.

In addition to labor, service in the German army seemed to offer a way of survival for Soviet prisoners. In 1942, the Wehrmacht and the SS began to recruit volunteers among the POWs. Appealing to anticommunist sentiment and the will to survive among the captives, their efforts had some success. Tens of thousands of former Soviet soldiers served in special German-led battalions, in the army of Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov, a former Red Army commander who had switched sides, and in German work battalions. The total number of former Soviet prisoners in the German armed services is unknown, with estimates ranging from 250,000 to about 1 million. The remaining POWs became part of the gigantic slave labor pool that propped up the Third Reich’s industry in the later years of the war. Their living conditions remained harsh, and another 1.3 million perished in German captivity between 1942 and 1945. Furthermore, in spite of Allied victory, the plight of many Soviet prisoners did not end in 1945. Of approximately 1.8 million prisoners eventually repatriated to the USSR, 150,000 were sentenced to six years forced labor for “aiding the enemy,” and almost all others experienced the hostility engendered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s infamous Order 270, which had called all Red Army soldiers who allowed themselves to be captured alive “traitors to the motherland.”

To fall into enemy captivity on the eastern front turned out to be highly perilous for German soldiers as well. Here too, legal considerations made no impact. Even though the USSR had not signed the Geneva Convention, it had indicated that it would observe the Hague Order and the Second Geneva Convention for the protection of the wounded. Nevertheless, retreating Red Army forces more often than not executed their wounded POWs. But during the Wehrmacht’s initial advance in 1941 and 1942, the number of German soldiers in Soviet hands remained relatively low. Until the battle of Stalingrad, which ended in January 1943, the number of German POWs did not exceed 100,000. At Stalingrad, however, another 93,000 fell into Soviet captivity, of whom barely 6,000 were to survive their internment. The mortality rate among German POWs at the time rose to 90 percent, as the majority never made it to permanent prison camps. But unlike their Soviet counterparts in 1941–1942, the German prisoners were not subjected to a policy of systematic mass murder. Instead, they fell victim to the unorganized state of the Soviet POW camp system (GUPVI), to the chaotic conditions of a country ravaged by war, and to individual acts of retaliation. In addition, after months of winter fighting, many German soldiers went into captivity in pitiful physical state, at least one-third of them in need of medical attention, which the Russians generally failed to provide.

Following the defeat at Kursk in the summer of 1943, the German army began its final retreat from Russia. The rising number of POWs now entirely overwhelmed Soviet capacities. The number of base camps in the Soviet Union tripled from 52 to 156 in 1944, yet scarcities remained everywhere, especially in food provision, winter clothing, and medical supplies. At the end of the war in May 1945, another 1.5 million Axis soldiers who had failed to reach American or British front lines flooded into Russian temporary POW camps. Once in camps in the Soviet Union, they were put to work to reconstruct the war-torn country. In fact, the USSR’s first five-year economic plan after the war depended heavily on POW labor. For many years and under often gruesome conditions, German and Austrian prisoners built power plants and railway tracks, the Metro in Moscow, defense industries in the Ural mountains, gold mines in eastern Siberia, and much more. Even the Russian atomic bomb program owed much to the labor and technical expertise of German prisoners of war.

Given their suffering, the German prisoners showed little positive reaction to Soviet propaganda efforts. Attempts to organize them into an opposition to Hitler’s regime largely fell on deaf ears, even though small groups such as the National Committee for a Free Germany served as recruiting grounds for administrative personnel for the Soviet occupied zone of Germany after the war. The majority of the prisoners, however, experienced Soviet political influence as oppressive. Most infamous were the camp hierarchies established by the Antifa, groups of antifascist, mainly communist, German POWs who had been handpicked by Soviet authorities in order to control their fellow inmates. Usually, these selected prisoners occupied privileged positions in the camps and could be easily identified among their undernourished comrades by their healthy, well-fed appearance.

The living conditions in Soviet captivity failed to improve after the war. Constant hunger, slave labor, and a lack of medical care led the prisoners to develop specific strategies of survival. The German prisoners adopted the “plenny-step,” a mode of slow movement designed to conserve the body’s energy that soon turned the camp inhabitants into a mass of bent, crawling figures. The “hunger winter” of 1946–1947, which followed a Russian crop failure, took yet another heavy toll on them. Soviet authorities had to declare a state of emergency for the entire GUPVI camp system in order to battle the dramatically decreasing labor output and the surging mortality rates. And given the importance of prisoner labor, repatriations began only gradually. In mid-1947, when the first mass repatriations of Austrian and Hungarian prisoners commenced, there were still over 1 million German POWs in the Soviet Union whose repatriation did not begin until a year later. By 1950, their number had slowly dropped to 30,000.

The story of those last 30,000 German prisoners constitutes the final chapter of the sad history of POW internment on what had been the eastern front. Stripped of their status as prisoners of war and instead considered as convicted war criminals, these internees became a lever used by the Soviets in the Cold War, particularly with respect to the newly established Federal Republic of Germany. While some of these former German soldiers had undoubtedly committed war crimes, many others had received their original sentences—25 years of hard labor—for petty offenses or simply out of bad luck. For another five years, German prisoners toiled in the Soviet Union until that country finally repatriated them in 1955–1956 in exchange for the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic. The last German POW did not return home until 1956, more than 10 years after the end of the war.

Glossary

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BARBAROSSA, OPERATION

Hitler’s code name for his invasion of the Soviet Union, launched on 22 June 1941. It was the greatest military conflict of the modern era and the greatest land invasion in the history of modern warfare. It was also one of the greatest betrayals of history, since Stalin had obviously believed that Hitler’s commitment to the Hitler- Stalin Pact was genuine. Placed under the aegis of the great German medieval emperor Frederick Barbarossa, it was intended to signal Hitler’s determination to assert German imperium over Slavdom. It was also meant to demonstrate the superiority of the Germans, members of the master race, over the Slavs, considered in Nazi racial theory to be Untermenschen—“subhumans.” Special orders were given as to the treatment of captured Russians and Russian civilians, for whom the normal rules of war were not to apply.

References

Glantz, David. 2003. Before Stalingrad: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941. Stroud: Tempus.

Overy, Richard. 1999. Russia’s War. London: Penguin.

DRANG NACH OSTEN (“DRIVE TO THE EAST”)

Hitler’s expression for the Reich policy of conquering Slav territories to the East of Germany in order to satisfy Germany’s supposed need for more Lebensraum— “living space.” In Mein Kampf, whose fourteenth chapter is dedicated to “Eastward orientation,” Hitler argued that an increase in her living space was essential if Germany were to rise to the status of world power; the only place where “new territories” could be found was in Russia, so Ostpolitik (“Eastern policy”) actually meant “the acquisition of the necessary soil for the German people.” This acquisition of territory in the East, which Hitler saw as his “historic mission,” along with the annihilation of the Jews, formed a favorite theme of his speeches and monologues. He associated a racist ideology of the “inferiority” of the Slavs with the economic concept of a ruthless exploitation of the resources of Eastern Europe. The peoples of the East must be set to work: “Slavdom is a born mass of slaves that cry for a master”; since the Slavs “were not destined to a life of their own,” they must be “Germanized.” In the context of his “European territorial ordering,” the brutal achievement of which he entrusted to Himmler and the SS in 1942, Hitler planned the settlement of 100 million persons of German origin in the East. According to the plans made by Hitler and Himmler, the “persons of German origin” settling in Russia were to “organize” the native Slav populace into an army of slaves and servants.

References

Leitz, C. 2004. Nazi Foreign Policy, 1933–1941: The Road to Global War. London: Routledge.

Meyer, Henry Cord. 1996. Drang nach osten: Fortunes of a Slogan-concept in German-Slavic Relations, 1849–1990. Berne: Peter Lang.

THE SLAVS, (and Germany)

Denotes a variety of ethnicities and nations in Central, Eastern, and South-East Europe whose tongues belong to the Slavic language group: “the Slavs” were seen by the Nazis as inferior peoples. In comparison to the Jews however, they occupied an indeterminate position in the Nazi racial hierarchy. They were collectively or separately characterized as fremdvölkische (“nationally alien”), Untermenschen, or “Asiatic,” and constituted the majority of victims of Nazi annihilation, deportation, and exploitation policies from 1938 to 1945. Nevertheless, representatives of all three Slavic subgroups—Western, Southern, and Eastern—were, at one point or another, accepted as German allies. A number of Nazi publications considered parts (and some all) of the Slavs as belonging to the original “Nordic” or “Indogermanic” peoples. The Third Reich’s attack on Eastern Europe may have been primarily determined by motives other than anti-Slavism, such as anti-Bolshevism and the quest for new Lebensraum. Yet implementation of the latter aims accounts only partly for the deaths of the millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and other Slavs who perished not only in combat against, but primarily under the occupation of, the Wehrmacht and the SS during World War II.

Nineteenth-century German public opinion and research on Eastern Europe and Russia showed, along with certain russophile tendencies, strong currents of anti-Slavism that continued earlier negative stereotypes about Poles and Russians. Views of Slavs as “unhistorical,” “cultureless,” or “barbaric” were voiced by representatives of both Right and Left—including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In the völkisch discourse of late Imperial Germany, Slavs were described as “racially mixed” or “mongolized.” A significant minority of nationalist and racist publicists with influence on the Nazi movement, including Houston Stuart Chamberlain, did, however, write positively about the Slavs. The Slavs played a relatively minor role in interwar German racist discourse in general and Nazi racial thinking in particular. Both official statements and unofficial procedures of the Third Reich regarding Slavic people continued to be marked by contradictions and shifts right down to 1945.

Although the Czechs were viewed by Hitler in the 1920s more negatively than the Poles, German occupation policies in the Reichsprotektorat of Czechoslovakia were more permissive and less violent than those in the Generalgouvernement and other annexed Polish territories. Whereas “only” 40,000 or so Czechs perished during Nazi occupation, the overwhelming majority of the 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilian victims of World War II were killed by Germans. In spite of manifest SS anti-Polonism, Himmler’s Generalplan Ost of 1942 made a distinction between eindeutschungsfähige Poles (“those who can be Germanized”) and Poles who were to be deported to Siberia within the next decades. Earlier, the greater part of the Czech population had become regarded as assimilable by the Nazis, while the Slovaks had been allowed to form their own satellite state.

Whereas in the Balkans Orthodox Serbs were among the nations least respected by Hitler, Orthodox Bulgarians (seen as being of Turkic origin) occupied a relatively high position in the Nazi racial hierarchy and were referred to by Joseph Goebbels as “friends.” Bulgaria was permitted to abstain from participation in the attack on the Soviet Union and to pursue an independent policy with regard to its Jews. The Soviet people were labeled “beasts,” “animals,” “half-monkeys,” “hordes,” and the like. Among the approximately 10 million Soviet civilians who perished under the Nazis, there were 3.3 million POWs, most of them Eastern Slavs. Yet, as the German advance into Russia halted, the Waffen-SS recruited, among other soldiers from the USSR, a specifically Ukrainian division (“Galicia”) and a Byelorussian unit. Impressed by the phenotype of the Ukrainians, Hitler, in August 1942, proposed the assimilation of Ukrainian women. Toward the end of the war, German troops were assisted by General Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Popular Army of Liberation, consisting of tens of thousands of Russian POWs and emigres. The Cossacks— though being Eastern Slavs—were even seen as “Germanic.” Shortly before his suicide, Hitler described the “Slavic race” as stronger than the Germanic one— whose destiny it was to succumb.

References

Connelly, John. 1999. “Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice.” Central European History 32, no. 1: 1–33.

Laffin, John. 1995. Hitler Warned Us: The Nazis’ Master Plan for a Master Race. Dulles, VA: Brassey’s.

Schaller, Helmut. 2002. Der Nationalsozialismus und die slawische Welt. Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet.

Volkmann, Hans-Erich, ed. 1994. Das Russlandbild im Dritten Reich. Köln: Böhlau.

Wippermann, Wolfgang. 1996. “Antislavismus.” Pp. 512–524 in Handbuch zur “Völkischen Bewegung” 1871–1918, edited by Uwe Puschner. München: Saur.

LEBENSRAUM

Roughly translates from German as “living space”; particularly associated with the imperialistic ideology and population policies of Nazism, although there was an equivalent expression in Italian Fascism (spazio vitale). In policy and prosecution, the Nazi pursuit of Lebensraum involved the massive transfer—and violent uprooting— of indigenous populations in Central Eastern Europe. Forming a significant aspect of Hitler’s Weltanschauung as illustrated in Mein Kampf, and put into violent practice during World War II, the quest for Lebensraum can be seen to underpin a number of actions undertaken by the Third Reich: the invasions of Poland and Soviet Russia, massive population resettlements and “evacuations,” and the Holocaust. All were defended as a means to secure Germanic hegemony in Europe by control of natural resources (such as grain and oil) as well as forcible depopulation of vast territories— including some 50 million Eastern Europeans— construed as indispensable to the resettlement and functioning of a European “New Order,” or “thousand year Reich,” dreamed of by Nazi planners.

On the eve of World War I, völkisch Pangermanism, military expansionism, and increasingly explicit racism became more closely associated with the doctrine of the established idea of Lebensraum, which had generally been used to cover colonial expansionism such as was practiced by all the major European powers in the nineteenth century. Friedrich von Bernhardi in particular explicitly advocated territorial seizures to the east of Germany, and the issue of the progression from Bernhardi via German militarism in World War I to Nazi conceptions of Lebensraum has been hotly debated, especially after the so-called Fischer Controversy in the 1960s concerning the continuity (or otherwise) of postunification German expansionism. Although the Third Reich’s expansionist policies between 1933 and 1939 in areas such as Czechoslovakia and Austria may be viewed as the first shots in the battle for Lebensraum, that battle is generally considered to have begun with the onset of World War II in Europe. Following the conquest of Poland, massive population transfers of ethnic Germans and “non-Aryans” alike were prioritized by Nazi functionaries, and following the invasion of the Soviet Union efforts were made to depopulate vast areas through murdering millions in Central Eastern Europe.

References

Burleigh, Michael. 2000. The Third Reich. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Fischer, Fritz. 1986. From Kaisserreich to Third Reich: Elements of Continuity in German History, 1871–1945. London: Unwin Hyman.

Housden, Martyn. 2003. Hans Frank: Lebensraum and the Holocaust. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Secret archive reveals how Russia showed huge support for 'Christian crusader' Nazi invaders who had come to fight 'godless communists'

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A group of Russians captured by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa: Documents from secret archives have revealed how some Soviets believed the Germans were Christian crusaders come to throw of the yoke of communism.

By Allan Hall
An extraordinary secret archive has revealed for the first time how thousands of Soviet citizens collaborated with Nazi invaders during World War II.

The cache of documents, some retrieved from the files of the KGB, shows how many viewed the Germans as Christian liberators – and their own masters as godless Communists.

This view was reinforced when the soldiers of the Third Reich opened up 470 churches in north-western Russia alone and reinstated priests driven from their pulpits by Stalin.

In turn, the clergy co-operated closely with S.S. death squads in betraying Communist officials, Jews and partisan resistance groups.

Perhaps most astonishingly, the Germans even shipped numerous mayors, journalists, policeman and teachers back to the Reich to show them the ‘German way of life.’

Russia has always portrayed the war against the Germans as a historic struggle which cost 27million lives but ultimately defeated the Nazis forever.

Until now, there has been little examination of the extent of collaboration by Soviet citizens with the invaders.

And there is no doubt that there many Russians detested the Nazis who inflicted mass atrocities on the civilian population.

But the archive, assembled by Professor Boris Kovalyov of the University of Novgorod, undermines the one-dimensional nationalist view of Soviet history.

Unsurprisingly, the research has already triggered a huge debate in Russia about attitudes to the Nazis.

‘The files give an extraordinary glimpse into a country that was deeply divided and not at all as heroic as Stalin made out,’ Prof Kovalyov, who teaches historical jurisprudence, said.

‘They show how local journalists strove under S.S. supervision to present to their compatriots the Nazis as friends of the Russians.

‘There was even praise in newspapers edited by former Communists for Alfred Rosenberg, the chief racial theorist for the Nazis who had made speeches in the past talking of the “sub-humanity of the Russians.”

‘Of course these newspapers were all collected and burned, or locked away, when the tide of war turned. And those who wrote the articles were executed.’

The Nazis marched on Russia in summer 1941 after Hitler put plans for the invasion of Britain on hold.

He had met heavy resistance and had become increasingly paranoid about the Soviets grabbing valuable natural resources as they expanded their empire.

The campaign was code-named Operation Barbarossa and plunged the Third Reich into a catastrophic situation of war on all fronts.

Troops were given stark rules of engagement. They were to press ahead with a ‘war without rules’ that would see the merciless execution of millions.

But the freshly rediscovered archives reveal a far more complex situation.

In many instances, the Nazi commanders attempted a 'hearts and minds' campaign to win over civilians already oppressed by Communist dictates which included a ban on religious worship.

The propaganda war had considerable success, with newspapers and collaborators praising the Germans.

‘We pray to the all-powerful that he gives Adolf Hitler further strength and power for the final victory over the Bolsheviks!’ ran one article in the newspaper 'For the Homeland!' that was printed in Pskow in December 1942.

Clandestine tours of Germany were also hugely effective for provincials who had never travelled ten miles beyond their birthplace, never seen indoor plumbing or central heating, such trips worked wonders.

When they returned to the Soviet Union, said Professor Kovalyov, they were ‘deeply impressed"’ and worked hard to undermine the stiffening Soviet resistance to the Nazi armies.

Even in January 1943, as the fate of the German Sixth Army was being sealed at Stalingrad - and with it the war - many Russians still enthused about the charms of Nazism.

Ian Borodin, a village mayor from Piskowitschi, wrote that month: ‘Germany is a country of gardens, first class steelworks and autobahns. It has exemplary order. We should fight for it!’

In the end it was the Nazis themselves who squandered the opportunity to rally an entire people to its cause.

As news of German atrocities spread and the Soviet Red Army began pushing the invader back, the population that had been initially so enthusiastic for Hitler now began to turn against him.

The Nazis were eventually driven out of Russia and the Red Army pressed on to Berlin, routing Hitler's forces on the way.

For those tens of thousands who had shown disloyalty to Stalin during the occupation there was only death awaiting them or long years in the gulag.

Professor Kovalyov intends to publish a book based on his research next year.

Good Comment
After Hitler came to power in 1933 the order was given to demolish a rundown part of Berlin that had been notoriously 'Red' and an area the Nazis never had any serious support in. The residents thought they were being punished, but instead their flats were rebuilt with central heating and other improvements - how to win hearts and minds..... By 1939 living standards had increased to the point where Russian civilians visiting Nazi Germany would have been greatly impressed. It's said that when US troops entered Germany in 1945 towards the war's end it was the first time many of them had come across bathrooms with showers and indoor flushing toilets since leaving the USA, and yes that included those who had been stationed in 1940's England! Good article - and illustrates how the German's lost the opportunity to bring the critical mass of Soviet citizenry 'on side'. Had they done so I don't doubt they would have defeated Stalin and forced the Western powers to accept a negotiated peace.

- A Richards, London

Brotherhood of Veterans of the 1st-Division of the Ukrainian National Army

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STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

The purpose of this Web page is to present the factual and true information concerning the Galician Division, which fought against the Soviet Union within the framework of the German Army, during the Second World War. Since the end of the war the information media has been repeatedly maligning this military unit, accusing it of misdeeds and war crimes, without giving it a forum for the presentation of the true account of its activities. The information on this Web page is offered as a means to set the record straight.

The Division was established in Western Ukraine in the spring of 1943. During the course of its existence, its name was changed several times. Known at first as the 14th SS Riflemen Division Galizien, it later became Waffengrenadier Division Galizien, der SS Ukr. #1, and finally, First Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army.

The idea of creating a distinctly Ukrainian military force came to fruition soon after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war and was widely supported by the Ukrainian population in Western Ukraine. In the spring of 1943 it was reinforced by the viewpoint that the Ukrainians urgently needed to establish a nucleus of Ukrainian power, and to build it up by whatever means possible, before the Nazi collapse. It was argued that only if and when Ukrainians become a power factor, could they expect recognition from the Western powers.

Much as they abhorred the Nazis, the Ukrainians hated and feared the Communists even more. Following the Stalingrad debacle, it became apparent that the prospect of a German victory was extremely remote. Many Ukrainian leaders envisioned a protracted struggle in which both totalitarian powers would be so weakened, that they would be forced to surrender their domination in Eastern Europe. The Ukrainians were also convinced that in accordance with either the dictum of the Atlantic Charter, or the elementary principles of the balance of power, Great Britain and the United States would prevent the Soviet Union from completely occupying Eastern Europe. They anticipated a period of power vacuum, like that of 1918, during which it could be possible for a nation possessing a strong, organized military force, to assert itself.

The recruitment campaign to form a Ukrainian military division attracted mostly young people who had been raised cherishing the ideals of a sovereign and independent Ukraine. The campaign also attracted veterans of Ukrainian military units from the First World War. The process of organizing the unit and the training of the recruits took a full year. In July 1944 the Division was ready for combat.
It first encountered the Red Army, with its overwhelming superiority in manpower, armor, and air power during the Soviet's most successful offensive against the Germans. Near the town of Brody, in Western Ukraine, the Division together with the German XIII Army Corps was encircled and decimated. Only 3,000 Division troops were able to escape. Eventually they formed the nucleus of the new, reorganized Division. Following retraining, the Division again faced the Red Army in Austria, near Feldbach.

Before the end of the war the Division separated itself from the German Armed Forces, and was renamed the First Division of Ukrainian National Army. Its officers and soldiers swore allegiance to Ukraine, thus becoming a truly Ukrainian national military unit.

The Division was a par excellence combat unit. It only engaged in military action against the Soviet forces -- never against the Western Allies. This was a condition demanded by Ukrainians prior to the creation of the Division. During the course of its existence the Division was never engaged in any police action or in any actions against the civilian population. During its first year the Division's troops spent their time in various training camps, mostly in Germany. Then came the fateful battle of Brody, which was followed by a period of replenishment in Germany, Slovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the final battles in Austria.

The accusations, which contend that the Division participated in the extermination of the Jewish population are baseless. In Ukraine, by the summer of 1943 the activities promoted by the extermination policies had run their course before the Division even existed. Also baseless is the accusation that the Division took part in the suppression of the Warsaw uprising in 1944. At that time the Division was undergoing a replenishment and restoration in Germany, after fateful battle of Brody and no soldier of the Division ever set foot in Warsaw at that or any other time.

After the war, the Division troops who surrendered to the British forces were interned by them in POW camps in Italy, where they were screened by the British and Soviet authorities alike. No charges of war crimes were levied against them. In 1947 they were transferred to England and freed, and in 1950 some of them immigrated to Canada. The Division soldiers who surrendered to the Americans were freed in Germany. Following thorough screening and full disclosure of their war-time activities, some were allowed to immigrate to the United States.

Today, it is unfortunate that quite often rumors as well as slanderous and false information about the Division are being made public through various vehicles of the media, including through the Internet. Mainly, these false allegations stem from the legacy of the recently defunct Soviet Union and its powerful KGB. This infamous secret police was known to have effectively spread all kinds of disinformation, poisoning public opinion with the aim of discrediting their enemies and achieving political goals. There are countless examples of their tactics. During the Cold War period even the Western Powers were repeatedly victimized in this manner. (See, for example: KGB, John Barron, Readers Digest Press, 1974).

The Division Galicia was the only Ukrainian military unit fighting the Soviet Union during the Second World War with the ultimate aim of freeing the Ukrainian people from communism and achieving independence for Ukraine. Therefore, the Division, understandably became a target of the false and vicious attacks launched by the Soviets, who hurled accusations of various misdeeds and crimes designed to defame the Division and its veterans in the post war period. In a similar manner, the Ukrainian émigré community and its efforts aimed towards liberation from communism, were also targeted for disinformation and slander. It must be unequivocally stated that these libelous assaults are baseless and have no historical proof. There are no credible sources of information to back up these false allegations, except the Soviet archives, which are generally considered as sources of disinformation.

This falsehood was greedily picked up by the enemies of the Ukrainian people and by those who are against Ukraine as an independent and sovereign country. We, therefore challenge all those, who are spreading these lies, to provide any credible evidence substantiating their assertions.

Latest News, November 1998:

Justice Minister Hon. Anne Mclellan clears the Ukrainian Galicia Division of any wrongdoing in war and confirms the conclusions reached by the Commission of Hon. Justice Jules Deschenes in December 1986. For further information please read the following press releases of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association:
Judge's remarks praised by Ukrainian Community -- November 16th 1998.

Justice minister clears Ukrainian division of any wrongdoing in war -- November 19th 1998.

Soviet prisoners-of-war

2012-02-15T20:47:00.000+08:00

“Next to the Jews in Europe,” wrote Alexander Werth, “the biggest single German crime was undoubtedly the extermination by hunger, exposure and in other ways of . . . Russian war prisoners.” Yet the murder of at least 3.3 million Soviet POWs is one of the least-known of modern genocides; there is still no full-length book on the subject in English. It also stands as one of the most intensive genocides of all time. The large majority of POWs, some 2.8 million, were killed in just eight months of 1941–42, a rate of slaughter matched (to my knowledge) only by the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

The Soviet men were captured in massive encirclement operations in the early months of the German invasion, and in gender-selective round-ups that occurred in the newly occupied territories. All men between the ages of 15 and 65 were deemed to be prisoners-of-war, and liable to be “sent to the rear.” Given that the Germans, though predicting victory by such epic encirclements, had deliberately avoided making provisions for sheltering and feeding millions of prisoners, “sent to the rear” became a euphemism for mass murder.

“Testimony is eloquent and prolific on the abandonment of entire divisions under the open sky,” writes Alexander Dallin:
Epidemics and epidemic diseases decimated the camps. Beatings and abuse by the guards were commonplace. Millions spent weeks without food or shelter. Carloads of prisoners were dead when they arrived at their destination. Casualty figures varied considerably but almost nowhere amounted to less than 30 percent in the winter of 1941–42, and sometimes went as high as 95 percent.

Hungarian tank officer who visited one POW enclosure described “tens of thousands of Russian prisoners. Many were on the point of expiring. Few could stand on their feet. Their faces were dried up and their eyes sunk deep into their sockets. Hundreds were dying every day, and those who had any strength left dumped them in a vast pit.” Cannibalism was common. Nazi leader Hermann Goering joked that “in the camps for Russian prisoners of war, after having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots, they have begun to eat each other, and what is more serious, have also eaten a German sentry.”

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners were sent to Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, which was originally built to house and exploit them. Thousands died in the first tests of the gas chamber complex at Birkenau. Like the handicapped and Roma, then, Soviet POWs were guinea-pigs and stepping-stones in the evolution of genocide against the Jews. The overall estimate for POW fatalities – 3.3 million – is probably low. An important additional group of victims comprises Soviet soldiers, probably hundreds of thousands of them, who were killed shortly after surrendering.

In one of the twentieth century’s most tragic ironies, the two million or so POWs who survived German incarceration were arrested upon repatriation to the USSR, on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans. Most were sentenced to long terms in the Soviet concentration camps, where tens of thousands died in the final years of the Gulag. Most were sentenced to long terms in the Gulag, with hundreds of thousands consigned to mine uranium for the Soviet atomic bomb; “few survived the experience.” As Solzhenitsyn noted sardonically: “In Russian captivity, as in German captivity, the worst lot of all was reserved for the Russians.”

Collaboration with the Axis Powers

2012-02-15T20:45:00.000+08:00

The Soviet Union
Nazi Germany terminated the Non-Aggression Pact signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov with its invasion of the Soviet Union at 3:15 am on June 22, 1941. Large areas of the European part of the Soviet Union would be placed under German occupation between 1941 and 1944. Soviet collaborators included numerous Russians and members of other ethnic groups.

The Germans attempted to recruit Soviet citizens (and to a lesser extent other Eastern Europeans) voluntarily for the OST-Arbeiter or Eastern worker program; originally this worked, but the news of the terrible conditions they faced dried up the volunteers and the program became forcible.

Ukraine
Before World War II, Ukraine was divided primarily between the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union and the Second Polish Republic. Smaller regions were administered by Romania and Czechoslovakia. Only the Soviet Union recognised Ukrainian autonomy, and large numbers of Ukrainians, particularly from the East, fought in the Red Army.

The negative impact of Soviet denationalisation policies implemented in the 1930s were still fresh in the memory of Ukrainians. These included the Holodomor of 1933, the Great Terror, the persecution of intellectuals during the Great Purge of 1937-38, the massacre of Ukrainian intellectuals after the annexation of Western Ukraine from Poland in 1939, the introduction and implementation of Collectivisation.

As a result, the population of whole towns, cities and villages, greeted the Germans as liberators which helps explain the unprecedented rapid progress of the German forces in the occupation of Ukraine.

Even before the German invasion, the Nachtigall and Roland battalions were set up and trained as Ukrainian battalions in the Wehrmacht, and were part of the initial invading force.

With the change in regime ethnic, Ukrainians were allowed and encouraged to work in administrative positions. These included and the auxiliary police, post office, and other government structures; taking the place of Poles, Russians and Jews.

Ostlegionen (literally "Eastern Legions") or Osttruppen ("Eastern Troops") were conscripts and volunteers from the occupied eastern territories recruited into the German Army of the Third Reich during the Second World War.

The staff of the disbanded 162nd Infantry Division in Poland was charged with the raising and training of the six Eastern Legions. It eventually raised and trained 82 battalions. A total of 98 battalions were raised with 80 serving on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans. 12 were later transferred to France and Italy in 1943

BARBAROSSA POWS

2012-02-15T20:42:00.002+08:00

Yugoslavs, Greeks, and other minor Allies suffered harm commensurate with their ethnic ranking in the perverse Nazi racial view of Europe, and with the degree of resistance offered to Nazi occupation of their home countries. The worst treatment of enemy prisoners, by far, was reserved for enemies of Germany wearing the uniform of the Red Army. BARBAROSSA saw the capture of millions of Red Army prisoners, then their deliberate starvation, massive ill-treatment, and malign neglect by the Wehrmacht. Out of 5.7 million Red Army men taken prisoner during the war about 3.3 million died in German captivity, most in the first eight months of the war in the east: 2.8 million of the first 3.5 million captured died, or 10,000 per day over the first seven months of the German–Soviet war. Some 250,000 were shot outright. Many of the executed were Jews and Communists pulled out of primitive enclosures for immediate murder. Ukrainian and Belorussian peasant conscripts were encouraged by German guards to point out politruks and identify Jews. The selection process led to several hundred thousand executions by the end of 1941. The rest were left to huddle together against killing-cold temperatures in barbed-wire enclosures left open to winter elements, to sleep on frozen ground without shelter beyond hard-packed snow, and to perish en masse from hunger and virulent camp epidemics. Starvation was so extensive in the eastern Dulags and Stalags —POW transit and holding camps, respectively—that there were outbreaks of cannibalism in some. Non-Slavic prisoners fared somewhat better than Slavs, mainly because of spurious Nazi race theories that saw non-Slavs as a higher class of humans. In addition, the Germans pursued a policy of deliberate extermination through starvation of most of the Slavic population of occupied territories. The mass deaths of Soviet military prisoners in its care was the single greatest war crime of the Wehrmacht, and perhaps the gravest war crime in all military history: total deaths of helpless soldiers in German hands was exceeded only by the mass murder of unarmed Jews.

The Germans generally respected the Geneva Conventions with regard to Western prisoners, but refused to honor its provisions concerning Soviet POWs. Among the first experiments using poison gases to “exterminate” large populations were those carried out on Red Army prisoners of war. Some German officers worried that such gross mistreatment of prisoners in the east would have negative military consequences. And so it did: Red Army men fought increasingly desperately, often to the death, once they learned what surrender and German captivity really meant. By mid-1942 the Germans also realized that Soviet prisoners represented a huge pool of potential forced laborers. Therefore, even after the worst excesses of malign neglect over the winter of 1941–1942 stopped, more prisoners were worked to death as slaves. Altogether, about 55 percent of all krasnoarmeets taken prisoner from 1941 to 1945 died in German hands. As German casualties mounted in the east through 1943 the Wehrmacht looked to recruit low-grade military replacements and frontline workers among anti-Soviet prisoners. Men agreed to serve as “ Hiwi ” (Hilfswilliger) in return for food and shelter, or to join so-called “legions” of Baltic, Cossack, Georgian, or Turkmen fighters as Osttruppen, or to serve with the Waffen-SS. Until the great military reverses of 1943, Red Army prisoners were kept near the German front lines. By the end of the war, over half were no longer crammed into Stalags but worked on German farms, in mines or factories, or served as Hiwis with Wehrmacht units. During 1944–1945 German treatment of POWs improved as larger numbers of Landser were captured by the Red Army, and fear of reprisal mounted within the Wehrmacht as defeat clearly loomed in the east.

VLASOV ARMIES.

2012-02-15T20:41:00.000+08:00

Strictly speaking, the Vlasov armies were those World War II Soviet troops who switched sides while German prisoners to join former Soviet general Andrei Vlasov in the war against the Soviet Union, thereby serving as a German propaganda weapon to undermine support for the regime of Joseph Stalin. More broadly, the term applies to Soviet citizens, numbering perhaps in the millions, who served Germany in some capacity during World War II.

ORIGINS
From the first months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the German army had relied on Soviet auxiliaries for manual labor and personal service. These ‘‘volunteer helpers’’ (Hilfswillige, or Hiwis), while not officially sanctioned, were vitally necessary to hard-pressed German units. As casualties mounted, the German military relied more heavily on Osttruppen, Soviets under arms in German service. Because of Adolf Hitler’s adamant opposition on racial and ideological grounds to arming Slavs, they served on an ad hoc basis under German officers, as individuals or units of battalion- size or smaller. Primarily intended for security and antipartisan warfare, some did see frontline combat.

By 1942, a growing number of German officers and officials believed that victory might be more easily won by moderating German occupation policy and making the war, either in propaganda or reality, a struggle not to conquer Russia but to end the tyranny of Stalin and Bolshevism. The undoubted usefulness of Soviet manpower, together with the support of Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), Hitler’s minister for occupied territories in the east, and Joseph Goebbels (1897– 1945), his propagandist, meant Soviet-manned units became more widespread and officially approved in late 1941 and 1942. Many served garrison duty in the west, freeing German troops for the eastern front.

These included a variety of national legions for Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and Tatars, and still others for Baltic nationalities. Slavs presented greater difficulties, as Nazi racial theories consigned them to subhuman status. As a result, the German military and later the SS (Schutzstaffel) strove to avoid calling Slavic units by Slavic names. Russians and Ukrainians, for example, were enrolled in large numbers into ‘‘Cossack’’ units.

What drove so many Soviets to support the German war aimed at enslaving or exterminating their own people? For most rank-and-file, the goal was escaping starvation in a German prisoner-of-war camp. By contrast to British and American prisoners, generally treated by Nazi Germany in accord with international law, Soviet prisoners suffered appalling treatment that killed them by the millions and encouraged many to join the Germans merely to survive. Others saw German service as a means to get close enough to Soviet lines to escape to their homeland. They had little idea that returned Soviet prisoners of any sort were treated as traitors by Stalin’s regime. For still others, including Vlasov, the chief motivation was genuine anticommunism.

A fundamental contradiction lay at the heart of German policy in the east. Germans wishing to enlist Soviet support found more humane occupation policies and political concessions were utterly at odds with the ravenous territorial aggression that led Hitler to launch the war. Recruiting laborers from prisoner-of-war camps did little to solve the German propaganda problem of winning Soviet support for a German war of conquest and extermination. By 1942, German officials were already wishing for a ‘‘Russian de Gaulle’’ to unify and inspire anti-Stalin Soviets. They found their de Gaulle in Andrei Vlasov.

VLASOV
Born a peasant, Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov (1900– 1946) joined the new Red Army in 1919. Serving with skill and distinction, he enjoyed a successful career, and spent 1938–1939 as a Soviet military advisor in China. He returned to the Soviet Union and developed a reputation as a master at turning bad units into showpieces of discipline and training.

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Vlasov commanded the 4th Mechanized Corps, part of the Soviet southwestern front. In the first disastrous weeks, Vlasov was one of the few relatively successful Soviet commanders, and repeatedly fought his way out of German encirclement. Promoted to command of the 37th Army, Vlasov was caught in the great German encirclement of Kiev, which cost the Soviets six hundred thousand men. Vlasov again escaped the trap. Based on this success, he was transferred to command the Soviet 20th Army outside Moscow, where he joined the massive December 1941 counterattack that drove German troops away from Moscow and saved the Soviet Union.

Now one of Stalin’s top commanders, Vlasov was sent north and in April 1942 given command of the 2nd Shock Army, one hundred thousand Soviet troops fighting behind German lines to break the siege of Leningrad. After two months of desperate combat without adequate support, reinforcements, or supplies, Vlasov’s embattled forces collapsed. Vlasov himself was captured by the Germans in July 1942.

Imprisoned in a special camp in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, Vlasov soon wrote a memorandum with Colonel Vladimir Boyarsky proposing a Russian national movement to fight alongside the Germans against Stalin. German sympathizers made Vlasov the centerpiece of propaganda to encourage Soviet desertion to the Germans. Leaflets in Vlasov’s name, falsely denying German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners and aggressive intent toward the Soviet Union, were scattered among Soviet troops.

On 27 December 1942, as chairman of the ‘‘Russian Committee,’’ Vlasov signed the ‘‘Smolensk Declaration,’’ calling on Russians and other nations of the Soviet Union to abandon the Stalinist dictatorship in favor of Germany’s Europe ‘‘without Bolsheviks and capitalists.’’ The declaration mixed outright falsehood—claiming Hitler’s Germany had no designs on Russia—with a platform to redress the worst grievances of the Soviet people, a platform that remained remarkably consistent over time. It called for eliminating collective farms and forced labor while restoring private enterprise and freedoms of speech and religion. It promised broad guarantees of social justice and security for working people. The declaration announced its own Russian Liberation Army (RLA). The German military believed that Vlasov’s appeals increased desertion, and the Soviet government saw his message as a danger. In its condemnation of Vlasov, during the war and for fifty years after, it never revealed Vlasov’s platform to the Soviet people.

Vlasov’s message was powerful; his new Russian Liberation Army was fictitious. Hitler’s adamant opposition to a Russian army meant the RLA was only an idea to rally Soviet troops entirely subordinate to German control. Nonetheless, it remained a powerful symbol, and many Soviets in German service wore its insignia.

Change in steadfast Nazi opposition to any genuine anti-Stalin Russian movement came in 1944. With Allied forces in France, and especially the destruction of Germany’s Army Group Center in Belarus, Germany’s position was desperate. As a result, on 16 September 1944, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) met with Vlasov and made a series of landmark concessions. Himmler agreed to a new Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia as a provisional government for Russia, should Germany ever regain control of any Russian territory. Himmler also allowed, in principle, Russian troops under Vlasov’s command, though he quickly limited their numbers.

As Nazi Germany’s collapse accelerated, the Committee’s first meeting in Prague on 14 November 1944 maintained Vlasov’s line of a democratic and socialist Russia without Bolsheviks. Military units under Vlasov were also forming. Germany was, however, hard-pressed to equip its own soldiers, let alone Soviet troops. By spring 1945, though, Vlasov had two divisions and perhaps fifty thousand soldiers nominally under his command, the strongest the 1st Division under Sergei Bunyachenko.

In April 1945, Vlasov’s troops went into action for the first time. Bunyachenko’s 1st Division was mauled in a failed assault on a Soviet stronghold on the Oder River. Deciding there was little point to sacrificing his soldiers in a losing cause, Bunyachenko disregarded German orders and marched his troops south through war-torn Germany toward relative calm in Czech lands. By the end of April 1945, Vlasov and Bunyachenko’s 1st Division were both outside Prague. Hoping to reach an accommodation with the western Allies, Vlasov’s forces were in close contact with the Czech resistance.

Czech plans for a last-minute revolt against the Germans were disrupted by a spontaneous, premature uprising by the population of Prague on 5 May 1945. As the German military began reprisals, Vlasov and Bunyachenko intervened on the Czech side in an episode that remains quite mysterious. After two days of confused fighting that expelled the Germans, Vlasov’s troops headed out of Prague, hoping to reach American lines. When American permission to cross over was denied, Vlasov’s forces disintegrated, most (including Vlasov) falling immediately into Soviet hands. Vlasov and his associates were tried secretly and executed in summer 1946. His soldiers, like the many Soviet prisoners who had suffered loyally in German captivity, were dispatched into Stalin’s network of prison camps.

Official Soviet historiography always portrayed Vlasov as a cynical opportunist, a traitor motivated solely by personal ambition. Many Soviet dissidents and émigré’s viewed him more sympathetically, as a man caught between and betrayed by two totalitarian dictatorships. Russia in the early twenty-first century is no nearer a consensus on the man and his movement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Andreyev, Catherine. Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and E´ émigré´ Theories. Cambridge, U.K., 1987. Dallin, Alexander. German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies. 2nd ed. London, 1981. Fischer, George. Soviet Opposition to Stalin: A Case Study in World War II. Cambridge, Mass., 1952. Strik-Strikfeldt, Wilfried. Against Stalin and Hitler: Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement, 1941–5. Translated from the German with a foreword by David Footman. London, 1970.

KEELHAUL

2012-02-15T20:39:00.003+08:00

In February 1945, Major Denis Hills, an officer of the British Eighth Army in Italy, was given command of a POW camp at Taranto containing 8,000 men of the 162 Turkoman Infantry Division, classified as ‘repatriates’. His charges had been conscripted into the Red Army, been captured on the Eastern Front by the Germans, and had endured starvation and cannibalism under arrest before volunteering for service with the Wehrmacht. Having sailed with them to Odessa, whither they were transported under the terms of the Yalta Agreement, he had no doubts that all such Soviet repatriates were being sent home to be killed.

In subsequent assignments, Hills repeatedly faced the age-old dilemma of a soldier whose conscience did not match his order. In the case of the SS Fede, which was trying to leave La Spezia for Palestine with an illegal shipload of Jewish emigrants, he advised his superiors that regulations should be waived to let them sail—which they did. ‘I had wished to extinguish a small glow of hatred before it grew into a flame.’

During Operation Keelhaul (1946–7), Hills was given 498 ex-Soviet prisoners for screening in a camp at Riccione. His orders were to repatriate to the USSR (1) all persons captured in German uniforms, (2) all former Red Army soldiers, and (3) all persons who had aided the enemy. By inventing spurious categories such as ‘paramilitaries’ and by privately urging people to flee, he whittled down the number of repatriates to 180. When they left, the Russian leader of the group told him: ‘So you are sending us to our deaths … Democracy has failed us.’ ‘You are the sacrifice’, Hills replied; ‘the others will now be safe.’

In the case of Ukrainians from the Waffen-SS Galicia Division held at Rimini, Major Hills was one of several British officers who personally rebuffed the demands of the Soviet Repatriation Commission. When the Division was reprieved, he was sent a letter from the division’s CO, thanking him ‘for your highly humane work … defending the principles in the name of which the Second World War has been started’. According to international law, the Galicians were Polish, not Soviet citizens.

Hills admitted that he ‘bent the rules’. Shortly afterwards, he was court-martialled and demoted on a charge of unseemly conduct, having been caught doing cartwheels and handsprings at dawn in the city square of Trieste.

The Allied policy of forcibly repatriating large numbers of men, women, and children for killing by Stalin and Tito has been called a war crime. In the Drau Valley in Austria, where in June 1945 British troops used violence to round up the so-called Cossack Brigade and their dependants, it provoked mass suicides. But it was well hidden until a report written by Major Hills came to light in the USA in 1973, and the opening of British archives. Solzhenitsyn called it ‘The Last Secret’. It only reached the wider public through books published thirty and forty years after the event.

More recently, an unusual libel trial in London awarded £1.5 million damages against Count Nikolai Tolstoy, author of The Minister and the Massacres, who had written of an official British conspiracy and cover-up. The plaintiff was not the minister accused of ordering the handover of the Cossacks, but a British officer who, faced with the same problem as Hills, had pursued a different policy. He did not receive a penny of his award, as the defendants fought on in the European courts.

POWs – A Comparison of Treatment

2012-02-15T20:38:00.002+08:00

The Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS took 232,000 British, Commonwealth, and American prisoners during the war, most in the course of the last year of fighting in Italy and France. The short duration in captivity of most, along with the prospect of pending Allied victory in the west, meant they enjoyed relatively decent conditions in the Stalags in 1944–1945. That permitted most Western prisoners to survive captivity, though there were individual cases of brutality and murder of Westerners by German or other Axis guards. The Germans shackled over 1,000 Canadian POWs after the failed Dieppe raid, during which the Germans discovered British orders to bind the hands of prisoners to prevent destruction of documents. The British and Canadians retaliated immediately by chaining German prisoners, leading to a riot by several hundred Germans in Canadian POW camps. Mutual shackling lasted for a year before everyone backed down. More deadly abuse of British prisoners by the Germans followed a commando raid on the Channel Islands. That led to Hitler’s issuance of the commando order of October 18, 1942, to shoot all commandos taken prisoner. Still, only about 3.6 percent of Western prisoners died while in Axis captivity, a rate that was highly favorable compared to other classes of Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS prisoners and which included captured wounded.

It is noteworthy that Jews in the armies of the Western Allies, in particular captives from the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, were not singled out or killed, not even after the Schutzstaffel ( SS) took over the Stalags. That was not the case for Jews in the Red Army, who along with Communist political officers ( politruks and Commissars ) were pulled out and murdered from the first days of the war in the east. The main reason for the discrepancy was that the Germans were desperate to arrange a prisoner exchange with the Western powers for several thousand Wehrmacht medics and doctors held by the British and Americans, whom they needed to treat mounting numbers of German wounded. Four large prisoner exchanges occurred between the Western Allies and the Germans during the war. They were carried out using the Swedish passenger liner “Gripsholm,” with the physical exchanges made in Lisbon and Goteborg. Germany proposed a still larger exchange, looking to recover men for combat on the Eastern Front. The British were interested in helping long-term captives in German camps, but the Americans rejected the offer: they had few prisoners in German hands before June 1944. The worst experiences of these Western prisoners came in 1945, when they were force marched westward to prevent their liberation by the Red Army.

Yugoslavs, Greeks, and other minor Allies suffered harm commensurate with their ethnic ranking in the perverse Nazi racial view of Europe, and with the degree of resistance offered to Nazi occupation of their home countries. The worst treatment of enemy prisoners, by far, was reserved for enemies of Germany wearing the uniform of the Red Army. BARBAROSSA saw the capture of millions of Red Army prisoners, then their deliberate starvation, massive ill-treatment, and malign neglect by the Wehrmacht. Out of 5.7 million Red Army men taken prisoner during the war about 3.3 million died in German captivity, most in the first eight months of the war in the east: 2.8 million of the first 3.5 million captured died, or 10,000 per day over the first seven months of the German–Soviet war. Some 250,000 were shot outright. Many of the executed were Jews and Communists pulled out of primitive enclosures for immediate murder. Ukrainian and Belorussian peasant conscripts were encouraged by German guards to point out politruks and identify Jews. The selection process led to several hundred thousand executions by the end of 1941. The rest were left to huddle together against killing-cold temperatures in barbed-wire enclosures left open to winter elements, to sleep on frozen ground without shelter beyond hard-packed snow, and to perish en masse from hunger and virulent camp epidemics. Starvation was so extensive in the eastern Dulags and Stalags —POW transit and holding camps, respectively—that there were outbreaks of cannibalism in some. Non-Slavic prisoners fared somewhat better than Slavs, mainly because of spurious Nazi race theories that saw non-Slavs as a higher class of humans. In addition, the Germans pursued a policy of deliberate extermination through starvation of most of the Slavic population of occupied territories. The mass deaths of Soviet military prisoners in its care was the single greatest war crime of the Wehrmacht, and perhaps the gravest war crime in all military history: total deaths of helpless soldiers in German hands was exceeded only by the mass murder of unarmed Jews.

The Germans generally respected the Geneva Conventions with regard to Western prisoners, but refused to honor its provisions concerning Soviet POWs. Among the first experiments using poison gases to “exterminate” large populations were those carried out on Red Army prisoners of war. Some German officers worried that such gross mistreatment of prisoners in the east would have negative military consequences. And so it did: Red Army men fought increasingly desperately, often to the death, once they learned what surrender and German captivity really meant. By mid-1942 the Germans also realized that Soviet prisoners represented a huge pool of potential forced laborers. Therefore, even after the worst excesses of malign neglect over the winter of 1941–1942 stopped, more prisoners were worked to death as slaves. Altogether, about 55 percent of all krasnoarmeets taken prisoner from 1941 to 1945 died in German hands. As German casualties mounted in the east through 1943 the Wehrmacht looked to recruit low-grade military replacements and frontline workers among anti-Soviet prisoners. Men agreed to serve as “ Hiwi ” (Hilfswilliger) in return for food and shelter, or to join so-called “legions” of Baltic, Cossack, Georgian, or Turkmen fighters as Osttruppen, or to serve with the Waffen-SS. Until the great military reverses of 1943, Red Army prisoners were kept near the German front lines. By the end of the war, over half were no longer crammed into Stalags but worked on German farms, in mines or factories, or served as Hiwis with Wehrmacht units. During 1944–1945 German treatment of POWs improved as larger numbers of Landser were captured by the Red Army, and fear of reprisal mounted within the Wehrmacht as defeat clearly loomed in the east.

After the Soviet Union invaded Poland on Sept 17, 1939, the NKVD murdered many thousands of captured Polish Army officers at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver. From the start of the German–Soviet war in mid-1941 the Red Army and NKVD also murdered or badly mistreated many German POWs, usually spontaneously and quickly in hot blood, before they got to rear area camps. Official Russian figures thus record that only 17,000 German prisoners were in Red Army hands in June 1942, a figure reflecting a low survival rate in captivity. Killing and mistreatment was more selective from the end of 1942 through 1945, a period in which the Red Army took ever larger numbers of German and other Axis prisoners. By mid- 1943 there were nearly 540,000 German and Axis prisoners in Soviet POW camps. By mid-1944 another 340,000 were added, with 950,000 more taken prisoner in the second half of 1944. German historians have calculated that of the 3,155,000 Germans taken prisoner by the Soviets, about 1,186,000 died in captivity. Most of those died of cold, disease, and hunger, for a death rate of about 38 percent. Prisoners from the lesser Axis states fared no better: of 49,000 Italians taken by the Red Army, 28,000 died in some NKVD camp. Unlike the Germans, who recruited prisoners for combat or combat-support units, the Soviets recruited among Axis prisoners primarily for propaganda purposes. An exception was the “Tudor Vladimirescu Division,” which was formed from Rumanian POWs and saw extensive fighting against Germans and Hungarians. The Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland (NKFD) served a mainly propaganda function, with some late-war air drops of small espionage and guerrilla units into East Prussia. The NKFD comprised hundreds of captured Wehrmacht officers, including many generals and Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus.

Hundreds of thousands of German POWs, and some Allied prisoners and civilians liberated from the Germans, were detained in the Soviet Union for many years after the war; in some cases for the rest of their natural lives. German prisoners were kept as a form of unilateral reparations, put to forced labor beyond the Urals or in reconstruction work in the western Soviet Union. Winston Churchill predicted this would happen in a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt in November 1944: “[Stalin] certainly contemplates demanding two or three million Nazi youth, Gestapo men, etc. doing prolonged reparation work.” He added: “and it is hard to say that he is wrong.” Many Germans died in postwar captivity in Soviet work camps. Most were not allowed to return to Germany for upwards of 10 years, until after Stalin died in 1953. Others married local women and settled down somewhere in the Soviet Union, lost to earlier lives and families. Stalin’s treatment of his own returned men was not much better. Having suffered severe torments in German captivity, liberated krasnoarmeets faced draconian punishment at the hands of the NKVD upon going home. Some Americans and Western civilians were kept by Moscow for narrower reasons pertaining to Soviet policy in Poland and the Baltic States, and refusal to recognize a legal right of expatriation and foreign naturalization. Those questions related to the start of the Cold War rather than to animosity from World War II. The Western Allies also retained Germans for forced labor. The Americans released most fairly quickly. The British and French retained German prisoners to clear up the vast disorder left by the war, to de-mine and perform other necessary, dirty postwar tasks.

The greatest travesty to befall World War II prisoners was suffered by Soviets returning home upon liberation in 1945. In the desperate days of massive losses and surrenders by Red Army men in August 1941, Stalin issued Order #270 decreeing that surrender was treason. As he later put it: “There are no Russian prisoners of war, there are only traitors.” Neither time nor looming victory tempered the brute in the Kremlin’s lust for vengeance on those who dared surrender during the vast Kesselschlacht (“cauldron battles”) of 1941–1942. The Soviet constitution was even rewritten during the war to make surrender a capital crime, although the men of the NKVD hardly required legal justification for their many summary executions. On May 11, 1945, two days after the German surrender to the Red Army, Stalin issued a decree establishing 74 clearing camps for former prisoners of war liberated in what became Soviet-occupied eastern Europe, with a further 69 camps ordered erected inside the Soviet Union. These camps and others were used to detain liberated Red Army POWs until Smersh and the NKVD could vet them (“filter” was the official term) for anti-Communist or anti-Russian nationalist views, and for other suspect categories of political or social “crimes” defined by the Soviet state. About 1.8 million returning POWs (“repatriant”) were being processed in Smersh “filtration camps” (“filtratsionnyy lager”). Out of five million surviving Soviet prisoners repatriated from Nazi captivity after the war, including hundreds of thousands liberated by the Western Allies and forcibly returned to Stalin’s grasp at gunpoint, some 1.1 million were either executed or sent directly to forced labor camps in Siberia. Others were sent back into the Army. Only 18 percent were allowed to go home. All suffered social and economic discrimination for decades, as did their families, until they were finally and officially “rehabilitated” in 1994, three years after the state they served and saved had itself expired.

Barbarossa – German Arrogance

2012-02-15T20:37:00.003+08:00

On 22 June 1941, at 0330 hours, mechanised Wehrmacht divisions, supported by Luftwaffe fighter-bombers, poured across the Niemen River into Russia. The date had been carefully chosen for its historical significance. Exactly 129 years before, on 22 June 1812, an apparently invincible Napoleon Bonaparte had also crossed the Niemen to attack Russia. However, Hitler should have studied his history a little more closely; Napoleon was forced to begin his disastrous retreat only six months after invading, eventually losing 95 per cent of his troops to combat and the Russian winter. Although it would take longer, and cost even more lives, a similar fate would befall the German invaders.

Despite its having started late - the original launch date was May - 'Operation Barbarossa' initially made fantastic progress, raising expectations of a repeat of the Blitzkrieg against Poland. Hitler's plan, which he had been formulating since shortly after the signing of the Russo-German Pact, called for 120 German divisions to annihilate Russia within five months, before the onset of the winter. Hitler wasn't the only one so confident of a German victory. In July, the American General Staff had issued 'confidential' memoranda to US journalists that the collapse of the Soviet Union could be expected within weeks.

But Russia, a vast country tremendously rich in natural resources, manpower, and a fierce patriotism, was far from finished. If unprepared for the precise moment of the German attack, the Red Army was neither as small, as ill-equipped, nor as lacking in fighting spirit as the Nazis' ideology proclaimed it to be. A month and a half into the campaign, on 11 August, the Chief of the German General Staff, Franz Halder, wrote in his diary:
'It is becoming ever clearer that we underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military. At the beginning we reckoned with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already identified 360. When a dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw in another dozen. On this broad expanse our front is too thin. It has no depth. As a result, the repeated enemy attacks often meet with some success.'
Not only had the Germans underestimated the sheer number of forces available to the Red Army, they had also underestimated how well equipped it was. Many of the Wehrmacht's best generals reported with astonishment and a large amount of fear on the appearance of the Russian T-34 tank, the existence of which German intelligence had not an inkling. So well-constructed and armoured that German anti-tank shells bounced off it, the T-34 instilled in the German soldier what General Blumentritt later called 'tank terror'. These kinds of intelligence miscalculations would plague the Germans throughout the rest of the war.

But possibly the Germans' greatest miscalculation was their ideologically driven belief that Slavic soldiers would be no match for the 'Aryan' Germans and that the Soviet Union, once attacked, would disintegrate into chaos and revolution. 'We have only to kick in the door,' Hitler assured his generals, 'and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.' Instead, the German invasion - launching what the Russians still call 'the Great Patriotic War' - loosed among the peoples of the Soviet Union a tremendous surge in patriotism, both Soviet patriotism and Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and other national patriotisms. At this point, nearly a quarter century after the revolution, and just after the terrible purge years of 1934 and 1940, there could have been little naiveté about the nature of the Communist regime. Despite a tremendous amount of resentment and antipathy towards the Communist leaders, the peoples of the Soviet Union remained, for the most part, passionately committed to the sovereignty of the state, as well as to the individual nations of which it was made up. This was a fact which westerners have never properly understood, and the Germans were to pay dearly for their misunderstanding.

RESISTANCE...

2012-02-15T20:35:00.003+08:00

A generic term for partisans and intelligence agents actively opposed to Axis occupation. Winston Churchill initially placed great hopes in local resistance to Nazi occupation, but this rarely materialized in the West. For instance, in Belgium the main emphasis was on providing intelligence to the Western Allies and aiding downed pilots and crews, not on occasional shootings of Wehrmacht or Schutzstaffel (SS) personnel—that only brought swift Gestapo reprisals. In Norway, Italy, and the south of France armed resistance was marginally more than an minor irritant to the Wehrmacht or to local fascists, though it had psychological and political importance postwar as a vehicle of restoration of collective dignity and national pride. That was true decades later even in Germany, where individual and isolated acts of resistance came to be seen by some as salvaging a glimmer of national conscience about the events of the war and the daily and active collaboration of so many Germans with evil. Everywhere in Western Europe, damage done by active resisters was strategically minor and paled when compared to the price the Gestapo or SS exacted in savage and often indiscriminate reprisals.

Resistance was more extensive but still largely ineffective for most of the war in Yugoslavia. In that ethnically torn country massacre, reprisal, and active armed resistance was hardly distinguishable from civil war. The only strategically significant resistance in the German rear occurred along the Eastern Front, where large partisan units formed locally or were joined by thousands of former Red Army troops, cut-off by the Germans during earlier campaigns. . The Polish Home Army and Ukrainian nationalist resistance groups also carried out many acts of military sabotage and ambush. The Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS retaliated everywhere in the most savage manner they could imagine, making German rear areas a world unto themselves, places shorn of pity or mercy on either side, with only torture, mutilation, and abundant death.

OSTTRUPPEN
Soviet subjects in German-occupied territory recruited into the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS, mostly from among prisoners of war but some directly from the civilian population. Most of the Soviet citizens who served in the German armed forces in some capacity were non-Russian: Cossacks, Tatars, Turkmen, Armenians, Georgians, and men from several Muslim communities from the Caucasus; along with Balts, Belorussians, Poles, and Ukrainians. Perhaps 800,000 served the Germans in some military capacity. Most were formed into battalions and assigned to German divisions, although some division-sized units fought in the Waffen-SS. Some Osttruppen battalions fought partisans in Italy and Yugoslavia. Sixty battalions faced the Western Allies in Normandy. Most were used by the Germans as cannon fodder on the Eastern Front.

OSTLEGIONEN
Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Tatars, Turkmen, and others from several small Muslim ethnic groups from the Caucasus who fought in “legions” alongside the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS.

SCHUTZMANNSCHAFTEN
Auxiliary police drawn from the local, non-German population who worked with German occupation authorities in eastern Europe, especially the Sicherheitspolizei.

Book Review: The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years, 1941-1945.

2012-02-15T20:33:00.004+08:00

Klaus Gensicke. The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years, 1941-1945. Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010. 256 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-85303-844-3.
Reviewed by Norman Goda (University of Florida)
Published on H-Judaic (December, 2011)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

The Riddle of the Mufti

The enduring nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the attacks of September 11, and the antisemitic rhetoric of Mahmud Ahmadinejad and other extreme Islamists has produced contemporary interest in the history of antisemitism in the Arab/Muslim world. Specifically, scholars and journalists have asked whether there exists a link between Nazi thinking on the Jewish question and current discourse in the Arab/Muslim world on Jews and on Western modernity. These questions are of great importance. Current “anti-Zionist” rhetoric is said to center on anticolonial narratives, which carry moral authority with many on the political left in Europe and in formerly colonized regions. But this moral authority would vanish should the roots of anti-Israel thinking be shown to have its roots in Nazism.

Scholars have tackled the problem from many angles.[1] But a key piece to the puzzle is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948. In 1941 the mufti, having triggered failed revolts against the British in both Palestine and Iraq, gravitated to Berlin, where for four years he tried to tighten bonds between Nazi Germany and the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East. After Germany’s defeat he fled to Paris, then Cairo, then Beirut, while styling himself as a nationalist and anti-imperialist. Was the mufti’s policy in Berlin simply a question of anti-British pragmatism? Or was he the missing link between the Nazis’ war against the Jews and more extreme forms of Muslim antisemitism today? And whom did the mufti ultimately speak for in the Middle East?
The complex of issues is the subject of Klaus Gensicke’s Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (2007), now translated and updated as The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis. The book is based primarily on German and British records and shows that the mufti’s role in Berlin was multilayered yet telling. On the one hand, he never convinced the Germans to back his geopolitical aim of an independent Middle East under his own leadership. On the other, he endorsed Nazism’s war against the Jews on ideological grounds, and contributed where he could to the Jews’ destruction.

Amin al-Husseini was initially a clan leader and uncompromising political agitator. He worked against the Balfour Declaration from the moment it was issued in 1917 and helped trigger riots against the settlement of European Jews in the 1920s. The British hoped to co-opt him and the Husseini clan by making him the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. The position made Husseini responsible for Islamic holy sites, but Husseini used it to argue that the Jews were trying to control the al-Aqsa Mosque and to augment his political standing. By 1936 he was head of the Arab Higher Committee, a position from which he claimed to speak for all Arabs. The revolt he triggered in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 sought to end British rule and to eliminate the mufti’s more moderate Arab political opponents.

Husseini adopted an uncompromising antisemitism that viewed Jews not just as Western interlopers in Palestine and not just as religious infidels, but as an existential threat as per the modern European antisemitic tradition. He rejected British partition schemes for Palestine in 1937 as well as the 1939 White Paper, which sharply limited Jewish immigration and was accepted by the more moderate Nashishibi faction. Instead the mufti courted Nazi Germany from the moment Hitler came to power in part because Hitler, at least when it came to Jews, spoke his language. Husseini argued to German interlocutors that, “Current Jewish influence on economics and politics is injurious all over and has to be combated” (p. 29). Living in exile in Baghdad after his failure in Palestine, he further demanded the expropriation of the 135,000 Jews there--who were hardly part of the European Zionist movement--and he instigated the pogrom that eventually erupted in Baghdad after the failed anti-British revolt in 1941.

Most crucial is the mufti’s period in Berlin from 1941 to the end of the war. On the one hand, Husseini hoped to win Hitler’s support for an independent Middle East while outflanking his Arab rivals in Berlin, namely Rashid Ali al-Kailani, who led the coup against the British in Iraq and whom the Germans hoped they might return to power there. On the other, he hoped to enlist the Germans to help with the eradication of the Jews in the Middle East. It was one of the mufti’s great disappointments that Hitler, realizing Italian aims in the Middle East and viewing the Arabs as another inferior Asiatic race, refused to back Arab independence openly. Husseini was sure that such a statement would deliver the Arab world to the Axis while cementing his own position in the Arab world. But Hitler and the mufti were in full accord that when Germany defeated the British, the Jews of Palestine would be destroyed. The mufti knew what this meant. When he met personally with Hitler in November 1941, Nazi propaganda on the Jews had been clear for two decades, and the Germans, with local help, had been killing Jews in the Soviet Union for four months.

Here indeed was the crucial link between the mufti and the Nazis. Unable to agree on Middle Eastern geopolitics, they could agree that Jews controlled the governments in Moscow, London, and Washington, and that murder was a desirable policy by which to eradicate Jews from the Middle East. The mufti was pleased to broadcast this message to the Arab world through the use of German radio facilities, and the Germans were pleased to have him do so, particularly after June 1942 when it looked as though the Afrika Korps, with an attached SS murder squad, would break through British defenses. As late as December 1942, with the Allies having taken the offensive in North Africa, Husseini, on the opening of the new Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, proclaimed that “the Holy Koran ... is full of evidence of Jewish lack of character and their insidious lying and deceitful conduct” and that the Jews “will always remain a divisive element in the world ... committed to devising schemes, provoking wars, and playing people off against one another” (p. 108). As scholars have pointed out, the tone and content of Arab propaganda from Berlin, speaking as it did of Jewish global conspiracies, has much in common with extreme Arab narratives today.

Gensicke points out, however, that the mufti was more than a propagandist while in Berlin. He conducted his own diplomacy, acting as a mediator between Berlin and King Farouk of Egypt in 1942. He tried to create an Arab legion with French POWs from North Africa to help the Germans and he also helped with the recruitment of the Bosnian Muslim SS division in 1943 that fought against Josef Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. Berlin’s desire to use him for German ends rather than place him at the head of an Arab independence movement infuriated him. Yet as Gensicke points put, the mufti openly committed himself to the Germans past the point of no return. Besides, the German Foreign Ministry kept him in opulent comfort, providing him with immense sums for his work and living expenses.

And regardless of the mufti’s frustrations with Hitler, the Jews remained his existential enemy. In spring 1943 when gas chambers in Poland murdered Jews from all over Europe, the mufti engaged in quiet diplomacy with the Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian governments, urging them not to allow a few thousand Jewish children to travel to Palestine as was then being discussed in London. The Jews would be better off, the mufti said, in Poland where the Germans could keep an eye on them. Husseini enjoyed a close relationship with Heinrich Himmler and knew what awaited deported Jews. The mufti never drove the Final Solution--Himmler was unwilling to allow Jews to escape in any event--but he worked to ensure that as many Jews were killed as possible. In the meantime he tried to fuse Islam with Nazism, creating seven new “pillars” that included the thesis that, “In the struggle against Jewry, Islam and National Socialism come very close to one another” (p. 149).

Gensicke points out that Husseini could easily have been tried for war crimes, particularly in Yugoslavia where Bosnian Muslims he recruited engaged in various excesses. But following his escape to France in the war’s final days, neither then French nor the British wished to inflame radical Arab opinion by extraditing him. The mufti’s apologists in Palestine and Egypt could thus claim that he tried to use the Germans for anticolonial aims rather than collaborating with them. Moreover, his role in the Final Solution did not come up in postwar trials. The distortion had immediate effects in Cairo, where Arab nationalists launched a pogrom to celebrate his arrival in 1946. It also had effects in Palestine, where as a hero with bona fides he effectively agitated against 1947 UN partition schemes, called for the immediate destruction of the Jews once the British left, and branded Arabs who accepted the partition as traitors. It all backfired. “The Mufti,” concludes Gensicke, “bore much of the blame for the naqba,” by which the attack on Israel in 1948 created throngs of Arab refugees (p. 189).

After 1948 the mufti waned into political insignificance. The new generations of Arab leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser were committed to destroying Israel. So was the new generation of Palestinian students who came of age in the 1960s and formed the PLO. A former clan based-leader Arab leader whose Nazi collaboration sullied an anticolonial narrative and was surely yesterday’s man. Still none openly condemned the connection between Husseini and Hitler. Yassir Arafat was among Husseini’s mourners when he died in exile in 1974, and he referred to Husseini as “our hero” as late as 2002 (p. 203). And as Gensicke shows in this important book, the mufti threw a long shadow as a precursor to the Arab and Muslim factions who reject all compromise with Jews in the Middle East and whose brand of antisemitism borrows much from the Western traditions that they otherwise despise.

Note
[1]. See especially Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos, 2007); Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine (New York: Enigma, 2010); Ian Johnson, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Boston: Hoghton Mifflin, 2010); Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and Jeffrey Herf, ed., Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective: Convergence and Divergence (London: Routledge, 2006).

Himmler and Vlasov

2012-02-15T20:32:00.000+08:00

On 16 September 1944 Himmler, now commander of the Reserve Army, came to an agreement with General Vlasov on the deployment of Russian troops alongside the Wehrmacht. The photograph taken afterwards showing the men shaking hands was purely for show, as in private Himmler had never concealed his contempt for the general.

Prisoners of war were also Himmler’s responsibility as commander of the Reserve Army, though he delegated this area to Berger. Now that Soviet POWs fell within his field of responsibility the Reichsführer-SS was once more confronted with an initiative that he had hitherto rejected vehemently, namely, the recruitment of Soviet POWs as a separate auxiliary force of the Wehrmacht. In his speech in Posen on 6 October the previous year he had called General Vlasov, the main advocate of this idea among the Russians, the ‘Russian swine’. In July 1944 he nevertheless decided to cooperate with Vlasov as a result of mediation on the part of Gunter d’Alquen, the editor-in-chief of Das Schwarze Korps and commander of the SS-Standarte for war reporting. That same month, after his first contact with Vlasov, Berger set up a ‘Russian operations centre’, the head of which acted as Himmler’s liaison officer with Vlasov.

On 16 September Himmler received the Russian general personally for talks. At the very beginning of the interview Vlasov raised the matter of Himmler’s theory of subhumans; the latter was evasive and immediately declared himself willing to have the brochure entitled The Subhuman that he had had circulated withdrawn (and indeed, Himmler did shortly after issue an internal instruction for all propaganda against subhumans to be stopped). Himmler and Vlasov agreed to establish a ‘Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Nations’, and Himmler made Erhard Kroeger, former leader of the ethnic German population in Latvia, who had been in command of an Einsatzkommando in 1941, political appointee responsible for the Vlasov initiative and put Gunter d’Alquen in charge of psychological warfare. He then had himself photographed with Vlasov.

Vlasov, whose activities were supported by Ribbentrop and Goebbels, was given the opportunity on 14 November 1944, in a ‘Prague Manifesto’, of issuing a call to liberate his homeland. Meanwhile Himmler cannily had Vlasov’s troops established under the umbrella of the Wehrmacht, by contrast with the Galician or Ukrainian SS volunteer units; he had not revised his position so radically that he was willing to integrate them into his Waffen-SS. In April 1945 Vlasov, who on 28 January 1945 was officially appointed supreme commander of the Russian forces, would have more than 45,000 men at his disposal. As far as the course of the war was concerned that was no longer of any significance.

Vlasov and the Nazis

2012-02-15T20:31:00.001+08:00

By 1944 defeat stared Germany in the face. Goebbels's propaganda machine did its best to counter the deterioration of morale, especially emphasizing the bleak prospects with which the "unconditional surrender" slogan confronted the German people. On July 20 a few army officers and government officials attempted to kill Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, but the plot miscarried and merely resulted in the liquidation of the chief non-Nazis anywhere near the summit of power.

Opportunely for Goebbels came Allied publication of lists of "war criminals," the mass proscription of the German General Staff, and the approval of the "Morgenthau Plan," which envisaged the destruction of German industry and the conversion of all Germany into "a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character," at the second Quebec conference in September 1944. Goebbels declared, "It hardly matters whether the Bolshevists want to destroy the Reich in one fashion and the Anglo-Saxons propose to do it in another." Doubtless the Morgenthau Plan did much to confuse those Germans who might be thinking of surrendering to the West while holding out against Stalin,, and thus Stalin could only profit by its dissemination by the U.S. and Britain.

At virtually the same moment that the Allies were endorsing the Morgenthau Plan at Quebec, the Nazi regime turned in desperation to a weapon which, if used earlier, might indeed have had great effect on the outcome of the war, but what the Nazis did with it in 1944 was too little and much too late. General Vlasov, who had been captured two years earlier, was to be transformed from a pawn of Nazi propaganda into the leader of a real Soviet anti-Stalinite army and government.

Vlasov, who was born in 1900, the son of a peasant family of Nizhnii Novgorod, had risen in Red Army ranks. A Party member since 1930, he had been Soviet military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in 1938-1939, decorated in 1940, and in the autumn of 1941 one of the chief army commanders in the defense of Moscow. Apparently he possessed great personal magnetism, integrity, and ability. Not at all the opportunist and Nazi hireling he was accused of being, Vlasov "stressed his nationalism and strove to preserve the independence of the Movement," writes the most recent Investigator. Of the most influential men who joined his cause, probably the ablest was the brilliant but mysterious Milenty Zykov, who said he had been on the staff of Izvestiia under Bukharin and for a time had been exiled by Stalin. When captured he claimed to be serving as a battalion commissar, but it was suspected that he was much more.

By the end of 1942 Captain Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt of the German army propaganda section was planning to establish a Russian National Committee led by Vlasov at Smolensk. The plan was vetoed from above, but in December the formation of the committee was proclaimed on German soil Instead. Vlasov published a statement of his aims, and he was allowed to tour occupied Soviet areas, meeting a considerable popular response. In April 1943 an anti-Bolshevik conference of Soviet prisoners opposed to Stalin's regime was held in Brest-Litovsk. After Vlasov declared that if successful he would grant Ukraine and the Caucasus self-determination, Rosenberg was persuaded to support the committee. However, in June 1943 Hitler ordered that Vlasov was to be kept out of the occupation zone, and that the movement was to be confined to propaganda—that is, promises which Hitler could ignore later—across the lines to Soviet-held territory.

During 1943 Vlasov's circle, under the protection of Strik-Strikfeldt's section at Dabendorf just outside Berlin, was allowed to carry on remarkably free discussions about a future non-Communist government for Russia and to publish two newspapers in Russian, one for Soviet war prisoners and another for the Osttruppen. The political center of gravity at Dabendorf fluctuated between the more socialist-inclined entourage of Zykov and the more authoritarian-minded group close to the emigre anti-Soviet organization, N.T.S. (Natsionalno-Trudovoi Soiuz or National Tollers' Union). Of course political arguments among Soviet emigres were nothing new; what was new was the hope of imminent action, utilizing the five million Soviet nationals in Germany, to overthrow Stalin—either with Hitler's support or, if he should fall, perhaps in conjunction with the Western Allies. Despite arguments, a fair degree of harmony was maintained among the Russians at Dabendorf. Especially noteworthy was the extent to which Vlasov and his followers succeeded in preventing themselves from being compromised by Nazi Ideology and in maintaining the integrity of their own effort to win Russian freedom.

Until 1944, however, the Vlasov circle was confined to discussion and publication. Although the phrase, "Russian Liberation Army," and Its Russian abbreviation, ROA (for Russkaia Osvoboditel'naia Armiia), were much used in propaganda— with Hitler's approval—there was in fact no such army. "ROA" was only a shoulder patch which the Osttruppen, scattered in small units throughout the Nazi army, were permitted to wear. In the summer of 1944 the ablest Intellectual of the Vlasov group, Zykov, was abducted and almost certainly murdered forthwith by the SS.

Nevertheless it was Himmler, chief of the SS, who not long afterward achieved the reversal of Nazi policy toward Vlasov. In a meeting with Vlasov in mid-September 1944, Himmler agreed to the formation of a Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (Komitet Osvobozhdeniia Narodov Rossii or K.O.N.R.), which would have the potentiality of a government, and an actual army. It appears that Hitler consented to Himmler's new policy chiefly because his suspicion of other Nazi officials who opposed it was by 1944 greater than his fear of arming enemy nationals—a fear which, it must be said, was justified from the Nazi standpoint. The concrete results of Himmler's decision were meager, largely because the Russians could not, amid the disintegration which overtook the Nazi system during the last months of the war, obtain the material aid they needed to implement their plans.

However, in November 1944 in Prague the K.O.N.R. was officially established at a meeting which issued the so-called "Prague Manifesto." This document, declaring that the irruption of the Red armies into Eastern Europe revealed more clearly than ever the Soviet "aim to strengthen still more the mastery of Stalin's tyranny over the peoples of the USSR, and to establish it all over the world," stated the goals of the K.O.N.R. to be the overthrow of the Communist regime and the "creation of a new free People's political system without Bolsheviks and exploiters." It proclaimed recognition of the "equality of all peoples of Russia" and their right of self-determination as well as the intention of ending forced labor and the collective farms and of achieving real civil liberties and social justice. If such a document had been widely disseminated two or three years earlier and given some substance in Nazi occupation policy, the results might have been important or even decisive; coming in 1944, it had no observable effect on the Soviet peoples.

The Prague meeting did stimulate certain Nazi officials to make efforts to put the minorities into the picture with political committees and armies. A year earlier the Nazis had finally organized a Ukrainian SS division which bore the name "Galicia," but although it fought hard and well at the battle of Brody, on the Rovno-Lvov road, in July 1944, when it was finally overrun there, it dispersed to join Ukrainian partisan forces behind Red lines. In October an SS official, Dr. Fritz Arlt, attempted to secure the consent of the Ukrainian nationalist leaders to the formation of a Ukrainian national committee. To avoid being overshadowed by Vlasov, Bandera and Melnyk agreed to the setting up of such a committee, nominally headed by General Paul Shandruk. Melnyk protested the Prague Manifesto, but many Ukrainians nevertheless joined the Vlasov movement, along with representatives of other minorities.

In January 1945 the formation of the Armed Forces of the K.O.N.R. was announced; however, only two divisions were actually activated and mobilized. The First Division, under the command of a Ukrainian, General S. K. Buniachenko, was committed in April on the front near Frankfurt on the Oder, but the unit refused to fight under existing circumstances, and amid the Nazi military collapse moved south toward Czechoslovakia. At the call of the Czech resistance leaders in Prague, the division moved into the city and on May 7, with Czech aid, captured it from the Nazis.

However, in the Europe of the spring of 1945 there was no place for an anti-Soviet Russian army. The generals, including Vlasov, were turned over to the Soviet command by American and British forces, with or without authorization to do so. In February 1946 the remainder of the army was handed over by U.S. authorities without warning to Soviet repatriation officers at Plattling, Bavaria. In August Pravda announced the execution of Vlasov and his fellow officers, describing them as "agents of German intelligence" and failing to inform the Russian people that they had organized a movement to overthrow Stalin.

Forced labour

2012-02-15T20:01:00.002+08:00

The Nazis planned to make the eastern colonies an agrarianappendage of the German empire. They preserved kolkhozes, believing thatagrarian reform could disrupt production, whereas the collective farm systemmight ease the transfer of peasants from Communist to German serfs. GermanMinister of Agriculture Herbert Backe remarked that had the Soviets notestablished collective farms, Germans would have had to invent them. Anagrarian reform announced by the Reichsminister Alfred Rosenberg in February 1942,as Alexander Dallin writes:

… was nullified by procrastination in application and by the impressionof deceit that it evoked. … The very plan for making the East into a giganticcolony, and the corresponding methods and attitudes of the German officialdomdoomed the agrarian policy to failure. … Both by their plans and theirpractices the occupying authorities aroused against themselves the largest segmentof the Soviet society.

Because few kolkhozes existed in the frontier provinces, theGerman failure to eliminate them affected the borderlands less than the oldSoviet territories. However, in western Ukraine and Belorussia, the newinvaders set higher taxes than had the Soviet regime and they engaged inendless requisitions. Erich Koch, Reichskommissar of Ukraine, believed that “ifthis people [Ukrainian] works ten hours daily, it will have to work eight hoursfor us.” In many regions, the Germans doubled the 1941 Soviet quotas of obligatoryagricultural deliveries.

The German administration established a mandatory two-year labourduty in Germany. Initially, it recruited young labourers on a voluntary basis,but as that flow quickly dried up, it resorted to the conscription of whole agegroups. This caused universal resentment and draft evasion. In Ukraine andBelorussia, Germans burned down entire villages if men and women failed toreport. In total, 2,792,669 Soviet labourers were shipped to Germany; including2,196,166 from Ukraine – of those, 400,000 were from its western regions. This draft affected all but the Polish farmers more than the Sovietdeportations of 1940–1941. By July 1944, 75,000 labourers were conscripted inLithuania, four times as many as the Soviets had deported in 1941, and 35,000in Latvia, twice the number of Latvians exiled by the Soviets.

The Germans quickly wasted the amount of the good will theyenjoyed initially. Having found themselves in the midst of a fierce fightbetween two totalitarian states, the people of the borderlands had to choosesides. While most focused on their own survival, a part of the politicallyactive minority collaborated with the Germans, another part attempted to pursuenationalist goals, and some supported the Red partisans who increasinglypenetrated the borderlands beginning in 1942. The proportion of those whocollaborated with the Germans, the Soviets, and the nationalists varied byregion and time and depended on the contrast between Soviet and German regionaloccupation policies, the strength of local nationalism, the social strainaccumulated before World War II, the relative prosperity of the people, and thesituation on the fronts. Despite the disappointment with the Germans, manyUkrainian and Lithuanian nationalists and most Latvian, Estonian, andBelorussian nationalists cooperated with Germany throughout the war. Althoughsome did so wholeheartedly, most simply regarded the Nazis as the lesser evil.

Soviet PoW and Polish and Soviet Civilians – The Holocaust?

2010-07-18T21:08:00.002+08:00

Of the 5,700,000 Soviet soldiers who surrendered to the Germans during World War II, more than 3,000,000 were either shot shortly after capture, starved to death in prisoner of war camps, gassed in extermination camps, or worked to death in concentration camps. They are usually ignored in books about the Holocaust because at the time they were not targeted for total extermination. Those who offer explicit or implicit arguments for including them among the victims of the Holocaust, such as Bohdan Wytwycky in The Other Holocaust and Christian Streit and Jürgen Förster in The Policies of Genocide, point out that the appallingly high losses among Soviet prisoners of war were racially determined. The Germans did not usually mistreat prisoners from other Allied countries, but in the Nazi view Soviet prisoners were Slavic “subhumans” who had no right to live. Moreover, young Slavs of reproductive and fighting age were dangerous obstacles to resettling Eastern Europe with Germans. Hence it is reasonable to conclude that all of them were destined to be killed or else sterilized so that their kind would disappear.

POLISH AND SOVIET CIVILIANS

Slavic civilians, ordinary citizens of Poland and the Soviet Union in particular, were held no higher in Nazi racial ideology. Millions were forced to work for the Germans under frequently murderous conditions. Their natural leaders, such as teachers, professors, lawyers, clergymen, and politicians, were ruthlessly exterminated by the Germans. Others perished in massive German reprisals against various forms of resistance. Three million Poles (10 percent of the population) and 19,000,000 Soviet citizens (11 percent of the population) died at the hands of the Germans. Because these deaths were far more selective than was the case with Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped, it is possible to place them in a different category. Those who would exclude them from the Holocaust emphasize that the Germans did not plan to kill all the Slavs. On the contrary, Germany considered the Slavs of Slovakia and Croatia as valuable allies, not candidates for extermination. Complicating the issue is the difficulty of distinguishing racially motivated killings of Poles and Soviet citizens from those that resulted directly or indirectly from German military actions. Bohdan Wytwycky has estimated that nearly one-fourth of the Soviet civilian deaths were racially motivated, namely, those of 3,000,000 Ukrainians and 1,500,000 Belarusans.

Those who would include Polish and Soviet civilian losses in the Holocaust include Bohdan Wytwycky in The Other Holocaust, Richard C. Lukas in The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Rule, 1939–1944, and Ihor Kamenetsky in Secret Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe. These scholars point out that the deaths were a direct result of Nazi contempt for the “subhuman” Slavs. They note that the “racially valuable” peoples of Western European countries like France and the Netherlands were not treated anywhere near as badly. Moreover, Nazi plans for the ethnic cleansing and German colonization of Poland and parts of the Soviet Union suggest that a victorious Germany might well have raised the level of genocide against the civilian populations of those areas to even more appalling proportions. Slovakia and Croatia did not figure as victims in Hitler’s plans to secure Lebensraum, and their Slavic populations could be spared. In A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II, Gerhard Weinberg suggests that experiments done on concentration camp inmates to perfect methods of mass sterilization probably were chiefly aimed at keeping Slavs alive to perform slave labor in the short term while assuring their long-term disappearance.

Foundation gives voice to Nazi-era forced laborers

2010-07-17T22:55:00.000+08:00

Many forced laborers became pariahs once they returned to their home countries.

The Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation no longer pays out compensation to victims of Nazi forced labor in 2007. But it hasn't stopped working to publicize the former forced workers' suffering.

The Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation (EVZ) began paying compensation to victims of Nazi forced labor in 2000. Funded by the German government and about 6,500 German companies, EVZ paid 4.4 billion euros ($5.7 billion) to 1.7 million former forced workers over seven years.

When payments ended in 2007 - and with them EVZ's original mission - the organization faced the challenge of redefining itself.

Part of a European culture of remembrance

For EVZ board member Guenter Saathoff there was no question that the group should continue to exist.

"Considering the 13 million people who were brought to Germany as forced workers, you have to recognize that forced labor was a European occurrence," Saathoff told Deutsche Welle.

"It must be a permanently anchored and fundamental element of the history of wrongdoing in a European culture of remembrance," he added.

The EZB has holdings of about 400 million euros, which it has used to fund over 2,100 projects, including a program called "Europeans for Peace." So far over 100,000 young people from 28 countries have participated in the program aimed to help victims of anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism.

Labeled traitors to the fatherland

Still of particular importance to the foundation are projects that support former forced laborers and their families through local initiatives. One such project in eastern Europe encourages dialogue about the once-taboo topic of forced labor. The dialogues initiated by the program give long-needed acknowledgement to the "other" victims of Nazism, according to Saathoff.

"Under Stalin many returning forced laborers were seen as traitors to the fatherland," Saathoff said, adding that many of them lived as pariahs within their societies.

"This project attempts to give those people a voice again in their communities, and we also want to encourage the communities to give the victims their attention, so intergenerational dialog and local initiatives are at the center of our efforts," he said.

Jewish Museum exhibition

Berlin's Jewish Museum is set to host a large exhibition on Nazi-era forced labor beginning this September with the EVZ's financial support.

One of the exhibition planners, Jens-Christian Wagner, explained that the exhibition will show "when and how Germans had to decide what position to take on forced labor."

Wagner, who is also the director of the Dora-Mittelbau Concentration Camp Memorial, added that the exhibition will "use the frame of forced labor to tell the social history of Nazism, the history of a social order that was ideologically anchored in extreme racism."

He said the exhibition is not simply a "commission" by the EVZ but will critically examine both at forced labor and at compensation paid to victims by the EVZ.

To that end, Wagner said the exhibition will also "consider the Italian military detainee or the Soviet prisoner of war, who were denied compensation and humanitarian aid, but who, of course - in the eyes of historians - were also forced workers."

An injury to justice

Wagner said it would have been impossible to make the distribution of compensation absolutely fair. He said this "injury to justice" is yet another result of Germany's coming to terms with Nazi forced labor.

The exhibition will move to Warsaw in 2011, with further stations planned in Russia to mark the 70th anniversary of Germany's 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.

Author: Marcel Fürstenau (dl)

Editor: Sean Sinico

The Cossacks

2010-06-19T10:58:00.002+08:00

The Cossacks were probably the most militarily skilled and loyal foreign volunteers of the Wehrmacht.
In September 1942 the German cavalry General von Pannwitz started raising a complete division with Cossacks, by absorption of previous regiment-sized units like Kampfgruppen von Jungschultz, Lehman, Konomow and Wolff, fresh recruitments, and by implanting a ‘stan’ or Cossack settlement in Poland, and later in Northern Italy. In September 1943 this 1. Kossacken Division was ordered to Yugoslavia, to fight the partisans of Tito.

The Cossacks fought bitterly against the partisans, and proved to be more successful in this kind of operations than the German units, their horses giving them a useful tactical flexibility in the wild terrain of the Balkan mountains. At the end of 1943, with a new 2. Division, von Pannwitz formed the XIV Kossacken Korps. General von Pannwitz was so popular amongst his Cossacks that they granted him the title of ‘Feldataman’, the highest rank in the Cossack hierarchy, traditionally reserved for the Tsar alone.

The Cossacks continued fighting against the partisans and later the Red Army until the end, when the majority of them managed to surrender to the British Army. However, Stalin demanded them to be handed over, and the British acceded. General von Pannwitz, who refused leaving his men, was hanged. The Cossacks were shot at once or sent to the Siberian gulags.

Vlassov’s Army

2010-06-19T10:56:00.000+08:00

Russia was far from a monolithic structure. It contained numerous diverse ethnic groups, many of which had long histories of resenting Russian suzerainty and domination. Combined with the long standing hatred of Russia, the new Soviet regime was often even more hated, even by the Russians, so when the Germans invaded, their initial reception was often one of liberator than one of conqueror. Deserters appeared in the hundreds before German units offering their services in any capacity and they were taken in gladly. They were given the names "Hilfsfreiwilliger" (Volunteer Helpers) or Hiwis for short. Initially, their functions were the various menial tasks such as cooking, digging latrines, officers' batmen, etc., but more than once they jumped into combat roles when the opportunity arose. Hundreds of the Hiwis were gradually sucked into the role of combatant, despite the lack of orders and the German ethnic attitudes of the period.

The 134th Infantry Division began openly enlisting Russians in July 1941. Other divisions refrained from such overt violation of Hitler's orders, but more than willingly took the Russians on an unofficial basis. During the winter of 1941/42 the first Osttruppen or Eastern Troops were formed. By early 1942 six battalions of Ostruppen were formed in Army Group Center under Oberst von Tresckow. These units were given territorial designations, like Volga, Berezina, and Pripet. Initially they were used in the rear on anti-partisan operations with the security divisions, but slowly they were brought forward into the front lines.

In early 1942 racist elements of the German hierarchy brought this to Hitler's attention. He responded to the movement by prohibiting the use of Russian "sub humans" as soldiers and on 2/10/42 issued a Fuhrer Order that limited their use of those existent units to rear area operations only. Despite his obvious displeasure, the Osttruppen continued to expand. The OKH was to authorize the use of Hiwis up to 10% to 15% of divisional strength and by August 1942 official regulations were issued governing uniforms pay, decoration, and insignia. By early 1943 an estimated 80,000 Russians were serving the Wehrmacht in Ostbataillonen.

The formation of Russian units in the German army would have been quite limited had not the Soviet General Vlassov been captured in July 1942. He had been a prominent general after the war erupted, but in March 1942 he was ordered to liberate Leningrad with the 2nd Soviet Assault Army. His attack failed and his army of nine infantry divisions, six infantry brigades, and an armored brigade were surrounded, abandoned by Stalin, and crushed, leaving the Germans with 32,000 prisoners. Amongst the German High Command there had always some hope of forming a Russian army to assist them in the conquest of Soviet Russia. As time progressed, it became apparent that Vlassov was the ideal man to form this army.

As the war progressed and the German effort in Russia began failing, Hitler was eventually persuaded to permit the formation of the army. The first steps occurred in August 1942 when General Koestring formed an Inspectorate which was to organize Caucasian troops. Koestring, however, ignored this limitation and took all volunteers possible. When Koestring retired in January 1943 the post of General der Ostruppen was created and given to General Hellmich, who had no previous experience with the Russians. Fortunately, Hellmich and Koestring's service overlapped and the two men agreed on Koestring's earlier decisions.

The Osttruppen was absorbing not only Caucasians, but Ukrainians, Russians, Azberjainis, and Turkistanis. In January 1944 Koestring, now apparently out of retirement, took over from Hellmich with the new title General der Freiwilligen Verbaende (General of Volunteer Units). In the meantime, Hitler had authorized the formation of a Russian army under Vlassov. In November 1942 a Russian National Committee was established in Berlin with Vlassov serving as Chairman. It then issued the Smolensk Manifesto, calling for the destruction of Stalinism, the conclusion of an honorable peace with Germany, and Russian participation in the "New Europe."

The German Army intelligence then proceeded to drop copies of leaflets over the Russian lines, as well as a carefully planned accident which resulted in their being dropped over German lines as well. It appears that Hitler had forbidden any release of this in the German press. During the winter of 1942/43, faced with the destruction of the 6th Army in Stalingrad and Rommel's expulsion from North Africa, Hitler began to reconsider the role he had allocated to Vlassov's Russkaia Osvoboditelnaia Armiia or ROA.

The desertion rate from the Soviet army rose to 6,500 in July 1943, compared to 2,500 the previous year, as a result of ROA propaganda and the future looked bright. However, in September 1943 Hitler announced that the ROA was to be dissolved. The German generals pleaded with him, pointing out that the Russian front would collapse, as there were currently 78 Ost battalions, 122 companies, one regiment and innumerable supply, security, and other units then serving with the German army, not to mention the thousands of Hiwis in the German units. Certainly there were 750,000 Russians then serving in the German army and some estimates go so far as to suggest that 25% of the German army on the Russian front was made up of ethnic Russians.

A screaming and raging Hitler was eventually brought to compromise and only those units whose loyalty was suspect were to be disbanded and the rest would be transferred to the West. This, being left in Wehrmacht hands, the disbandings were limited to 5,000 men and serious procrastination prevented many transfers westwards. However, by October 1943 large numbers of Ostruppen did begin moving west. This was accomplished by exchanging Ost Battalions for German battalions in the west. These Ost battalions were then formally incorporated into the German divisions where they were assigned.

The morale of the Osttruppen began to collapse. Vlassov was persuaded to write them an open letter announcing these transfers were only a temporary expediency and hinted at bigger and better things. When the allies invaded Normandy they were startled to find that many of their German prisoners were, in fact, Russians and soon had 20,000 ROA prisoners in custody. Though Himmler refused to believe Koestring's reports, at that time there were 100,000 eastern volunteers in the Luftwaffe and Navy and another 800,000 in the German Army.

The continuing reversal of German military hopes was slowly bringing even the SS around to reconsidering the desirability of Russian troops. In the east the SS was, by late 1943, regularly rounding up 15-20 year olds to serve as Flak helpers. There was discussion of the creation of an Eastern Moslem SS Division and several Slavic legions were forming in the SS. Himmler soon began considering himself as the leader of the "Army of Europe" and began taking any non-German human material he could find into his hands. It was not long before he saw Vlassov's ROA as another force that could be added.

Himmler approached Vlassov and proposed the formation of a Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (Komitet Osvobozhdeniia Narodov Rossi or K.O.N.R.) It was to be allowed to raise an army of five divisions, two of which were to be raised immediately. The personnel would be drawn from the existing ROA units and from among the Ostarbeiter then in Germany. The first two units formed were placed under Vlassov's command on 1/28/45, the 600th and 650th Russian Divisions. In Neuren an airforce or air division, was organized that consisted of an air transport squadron, a reconnaissance squadron, a flak regiment, a paratrooper battalion, and a flying training unit. This force of some 4,000 men was assigned to General V.I. Maltsev. On 2/1/45 Goering formally handed this division over to Vlassov's command.

By March 1945 the KONR numbered some 50,000 men. The Cossack Cavalry Corps was promised to Vlassov by Himmler, as was the Russian Guard Corps in Serbia, but in fact neither was ever placed under his command. The KONR fought its first battle in February 1945 when a force of the 600th Division attacked in Pommerania and its engagement was a complete success. Hundreds of Soviet soldiers changed sides and joined it. In March it moved to the Oder front and was ordered to attack the Soviet army near Frankfurt. However, it was so pounded by the Soviets that it withdrew to the south and back into Czechoslovakia. On 5/5/45 the Czech communists began a revolt in Prague and Buniachenko ordered the 600th Division to assist them. Their assistance was refused by the Czechs and, as the war ended the next day, the division was taken prisoner by the Americans. The 650th Division, except for one regiment, were captured by the Russians and either executed or sent into the Russian Gulag. Vlassov was snatched from American hands by the Russians, suffered through a short show trial, and was quickly executed along with the major leaders of the KONR.

599TH RUSSIAN BRIGADE: Formed in April 1945 in Aalborg, Denmark, as part of the Liberation Russian Army under Vlassov. It contained:

1/,2/,3/1604th Grenadier Regiment (from 714th (Russian) Grenadier Regiment) 1/,2/,3/1605th Grenadier Regiment 1/,2/,3/1606th Grenadier Regiment

The division was intended to be expanded to form the 3rd Vlassov Division.

600TH (RUSSIAN) INFANTRY DIVISION Formed on 12/1/44 as part of the Russian Liberation Army under Vlassov with what was to have become the 29th Waffen SS Grenadier Division (1st Russian). On 2/28/45 it contained:

1/,2/1601st Grenadier Regiment 1/,2/1602nd Grenadier Regiment 1/,2/1603rd Grenadier Regiment 1/,2/,3/,4/1600th Artillery Regiment 1600th Division Support Units

650TH (RUSSIAN) DIVISION Formed in March 1945 as part of Vlassov's Russian Liberation Army. The division was organized with prisoners of war and contained, on 4/5/45:

1/,2/1651st Grenadier Regiment 1/,2/1652nd Grenadier Regiment 1/,2/1653rd Grenadier Regiment 1/,2/,3/,4/1650th Artillery Regiment 1650th Divisional Support Units

The division was not fully formed and remained in Munsingen until overrun. On 17 January 1945 the organization of the 650th Infantry (Russian) Division was established as follows:

DIVISION STAFF: Division Staff (2 LMGs) 1650th (mot) Mapping Detachment 1650th (mot) Military Police Detachment (3 LMGs)

1651ST INFANTRY REGIMENT: REGIMENTAL STAFF Staff Staff Company (3 LMGs) 1 Signals Platoon 1 Engineer Platoon (6 LMGs) 1 Reconnaissance Platoon (3 LMGs) 1 Signals Platoon 2 BATTALIONS, each with 3 Infantry Companies (9 LMGs ea) 1 Heavy Company (8 HMGs, 4 75mm infantry support guns, 1 LMG & 6 80mm mortars)

13TH INFANTRY SUPPORT COMPANY: (2 150mm leIG, 1 LMG, 8 120mm mortars & 4 LMGs)

14TH PANZERJAGER COMPANY (54 Panzerschreck, 18 Reserve Panzerschreck & 4 LMGs)

1652ND INFANTRY REGIMENT: same as 1651st 1653RD INFANTRY REGIMENT: same as 1651st

1650TH (MOUNTED) RECONNAISSANCE BATTALION: 4 Squadrons, each with (9 LMGs, 2 80mm mortars)

1650TH PANZERJAGER BATTALION: 1 Staff 1 (mot) Staff Company (1 LMG) 1st Company (12 75mm PAK & 12 LMGs) 2nd (armored) Company 14 Assault Guns (sturmgeschutz) & 16 LMGs Detachment captured Russian tanks 3rd (mot) Flak Company (9 37mm Flak guns & 5 LMGs)

1650TH ARTILLERY BATTALION: 1 Staff 1 Staff Battery (1 LMG) 1ST, 2ND & 3RD BATTALIONS, each with: 1 Staff 1 Staff Battery (1 LMG) 2 105mm leFH Batteries (4 105mm leFH & 4 LMGs ea) 1 75mm Battery (6-75mm guns & 3 LMGs) 4TH BATTALION: 1 Staff 1 Staff Battery (1 LMG) 2 150mm sFH Batteries (6-150mm howitzers & 4 LMGs ea)

1650TH (BICYCLE) PIONEER BATTALION 2 (bicycle) Pioneer Companies, each with: (2 HMGs, 9 LMGs, 6 flame throwers & 2 80mm mortars) 1 Pioneer Company (2 HMGs, 9 LMGs, 6 flame throwers & 2 80mm mortars)

1650TH SIGNALS BATTALION: 1 (mixed mobility) Telephone Company (4 LMGs) 1 (mixed mobility) Radio Company (2 LMGs) 1 (mixed mobility) Signals Supply Detachment (2 LMGs)

1650TH FELDERSATZ BATTALION: 1 Supply Detachment 5 Replacement Companies, with a total of: (50 LMGs, 12 HMGs, 6 80mm mortars, 1 120mm mortar 1 75mm leIG, 1 75mm PAK, 1 20mm/37mm Flak, 2 flame throwers, 1 105mm leFH 18 , 6 Panzerschrecke, & 56 Sturm Gewehr 41

1650TH DIVISIONAL SUPPORT REGIMENT: SUPPLY TROOP: 1650th (mot) 120 ton Transportation Company (4 LMGs) 1/,2/1650th Horse Drawn (30 ton) Transportation Companies (2 LMGs ea) 1650th Horse Drawn Supply Platoon OTHER: 1650th Ordnance Troop 1650th (mot) Vehicle Maintenance Troop 1650th Supply Company (3 LMGs) 1650th (mot) Field Hospital 1650th (mot) Medical Supply Company 1650th Veterinary Company (2 LMGs) 1650th (mot) Field Post Office

In a parallel formation to the ROA and KONR another large force of Russians was formed in March 1942 by German Intelligence. This force was the Versuchsverband Mitte (Experimental Formation of Army Group Center). Though officially known as Abwehr Abteilung 203 the unit was to have several names - Verband Graukopf, Boyarsky Brigade, Russian Special Duty Battalion, Ostintorf Brigade, and finally the Russian National People’s Army (Russkaia Natsionalnaya Narodnaya Armiya or RNNA). The unit was started when a Russian émigré, Sergi Ivanov, recruited several prominent Russian prisoners of war and other Russian exiles, to the German cause. Ivanov, acting as a liaison officer for the Abwehr, worked with Igor Sakharov, son of a White Russian General and émigré to Germany, and slowly they organized a force of 3,000 former prisoners of war.

By December 1942 they had 7,000 men training. A brigade was formed consisting of four battalions, an artillery battalion, and an engineer battalion. The organization of the units was based on the Russian model. In August 1942 Colonel Boyarsky took command in December Feldmarschal von Kluge inspected the brigade, was pleased with what he saw, and expressed his pleasure with its actions in combat in the German rear in May 1942. He then stated that he would issue the unit German uniforms and weapons and split it into a number of infantry battalions, which would be assigned to various German combat divisions. This offhanded command shattered the brigade's morale and 300 men promptly deserted. It had seen itself as the cadre of a Russian army of liberation. Despite their protests, the brigade was broken into the 633rd, 634th, 635th, 636th, and 637th Ost Battalions and employed in anti-Partisan operations.

Organising Hell in the East

2010-05-31T20:32:00.002+08:00

While the German armies had been desperately trying to carve out this new empire in the East, the tentacles of the SS and its various subsidiary organizations had been assiduous in their allotted task of securing the civilian population. In Russia their first move was to deprive the people of their local party officials. Hitler ordered that all political commissars were to be liquidated, and instructions went out to the 'special units', who acted independently of the army, that some were to be decapitated and their heads brought back to Berlin for further study. The SS were obviously intrigued with the cranial characteristics of those who were classed as untermenschen, a species of Slavic sub-humanity. But this was only the preliminary stage - a mere curtain-raiser to what was to come. This barbaric treatment of prisoners of war became a byword even among some Germans themselves. The Wehrmacht was sometimes involved, but almost invariably these tasks were left to the not so tender mercies of the special units. A report of the Soviet Chief-of-Staff at Sebastopol in December 1941 gives us some idea of the situation: he states

as a rule troop formations exterminate prisoners without interrogation...the shooting of prisoners at the place of capture or at the front line, which is practised most extensively, acts as a deterrent to soldiers of the enemy wanting to desert to us. (Hohne 1969:432)

The special units usually comprised Security Service (SD) personnel plus contingents of the Armed (Waffen) SS who were normally engaged on straightforward military duties, assisted by local militia. Some idea of the more general involvement of the military SS can be seen from a few random instances. Only two weeks after the opening of the Russian campaign, the 'Viking' Division shot 600 Jews in Galicia as a reprisal for 'Soviet crimes'. On some occasions entire villages were destroyed as a form of reprisal, and this kind of 'action' was by no means confined to the East. Lidice in Czechoslovakia was destroyed in 1942 in retaliation for the assassination of the Reich-Protector Heydrich. The 'Prinz Eugen' Division liquidated the inhabitants of Kosutica in 1943; and in 1944 came the destruction of Klissura in northern Greece. The year 1944 also witnessed the notorious murder of the inhabitants of Oradour-sur- Glane in France by the 'Das Reich' Division, and the killing of Canadian and British prisoners of war by members of the 'Hitlerjugend' Panzer Division during the battles in Normandy.

The worst of the atrocities were carried out by the re-formed Einsatzgruppen. There were four such units each comprising about 1,000 men, including support personnel such as wireless operators, drivers etc., and detachments from the Waffen SS and the police. Their instructions were couched - quite deliberately - in extremely vague terms. They were to act on their own responsibility to take 'executive measures against the civilian population' (quoted in Krausnick and Broszat 1970:78). The implicit intention of shooting Jews is not stated overtly, and it is not clear to what extent the army itself was always aware of these plans, although the chiefs may well have guessed what was going to happen. According to the evidence of Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of one such Einsatzgruppe, when the groups were being formed in May 1941 in preparation for the invasion of Russia, they were told of the secret decree of 'putting to death all racially and politically undesirable elements where these might be thought to represent a threat to security' (Krausnick and Broszat 1970:79). During the Nuremberg trials after the war, it transpired that at the time this was understood to include communist officials, second-class Asiatics, gypsies and Jews. Despite the care taken in disguising their intentions, members of the Nazi hierarchy were sometimes quite explicit in their planning on occupation policy. At one conference held in July 1941, the officials were told 'we are taking all necessary measures -- shootings, deportations and so on...[the area] must be pacified as soon as possible, and the best way to do that is to shoot anyone who so much as looks like giving trouble' (Krausnick and Broszat 1970:82). It does not take much imagination to realize that almost any measures, no matter how ruthless and bestial, could be justified in the name of security even where the victims - especially women and children - could be shown to pose no real threat to security at all.

There is very little evidence as to what actually took place during one of these 'actions'. For example there is no documentary material for the events leading up to the destruction of the small town of Tuczyn in eastern Poland, although a vivid picture has been 'recreated' by eight of the survivors - who gave their testimonies at different times in different places. There were only fifteen survivors in all out of a population of 3,500, and the stories that were told apparently have an amazing degree of consistency. For economic reasons Tuczyn was not destroyed at the same time as many of the surrounding Jewish settlements, so when the time came - as the inhabitants knew it must - they were 'prepared'. The head of the Jewish Council organized the people for resistance, but they had no weapons, only petrol, matches and bars. When the Germans came in the summer of 1942, the Jews set light to their own wooden houses, and the old and sick - led by the rabbi - jumped into the fire. Others tried to break out of the trap, and a thousand or so fled into the nearby Ukrainian forest. Only fifteen survived because of the actions of Ukrainian peasants who either killed them or handed them over to the Germans. Those who were saved were helped by the Baptist minority among the Ukrainians (Bauer 1976).

The actual executions were carried out on a massive scale by the members of the Einsatzgruppen, often with the active co-operation of local 'partisans' as, for example in Lithuania and the Ukraine. Thanks to the meticulous records kept by some of those involved, we often have complete breakdowns and statistics of their programme of mass murder. By 25 November 1941, Einsatzgruppe A had already executed 229,052 Jews; Einsatzgruppe B had killed 45,467 by 14 November 1941; Einsatzgruppe C 95,000 by the beginning of December of that year; and Einsatzgruppe D 92,000 by 8 April 1942. The speed at which these executions took place was frightening. For instance, in Kiev alone in two days in September 1941, reports showed that 33,771 persons were executed, mainly Jews. In fact, it is probable that by the end of 1942, as many as a million Jews had been killed. And this was just the beginning. The whole grisly process was about to be rationalized with the introduction of the gas chambers. Five extermination camps were set up for this specific purpose, as distinct from the other concentration camps which often functioned as labour industries for some eminent German firms.

Osttruppen

2010-05-10T17:26:00.001+08:00

WAR OF ANNIHILATION

2010-05-01T12:26:00.002+08:00

Hitler said on many occasions that his dreams of race and space inevitably would involve war with the USSR. Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union, was set for mid-1941. Even before it began Hitler insisted it was to be a Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation unlike any other in history. Planning began in earnest in July 1940 when Hitler stated again that it would not be enough just to win the war but that the Soviet state had to be “utterly destroyed.” After the “inferior race” was conquered, the Soviet peoples, like the Poles, were to become “a people of leaderless slave laborers.”

He was not alone in repeatedly insisting on “the utmost brute force” and said this war was going to be unlike anything seen before. When the invasion began it was by far the largest in world history. Himmler’s attitude on the eve of the attack was that he had “no interest in the fate” of such people. “Whether they thrive or starve to death concerns me only from the point of view of them as slave labor . . . in all other respects I am totally indifferent.”

In the beginning Operation Barbarossa was unstoppable, and the Germans took vast numbers of prisoners, so many in fact that it was possible to murder the Jews without giving much thought to concerns about their lost labor power. Numerous Soviet prisoners were shot out of hand, but many thousands were confined in camps, including some inside Germany, where it was well known locally that the men were starving to death and were otherwise in desperate shape. The mayor of at least one town wanted to have the road to the camp opened so that ordinary Germans could go to see for themselves “these animals in human form” and imagine what would have happened if “these beasts” had conquered Germany.

To illustrate the net effect of how Soviet prisoners were treated, we need only look at one German report from May 1, 1944. It states that by then the Germans had taken a total of 5,165,381 prisoners. The report speaks about a “wastage” of 2 million (i.e ., they died). Another 1,030,157 were supposedly “shot while trying to escape,” while 280,000 perished in transit camps, bringing the total to 3.3 million. By 1945, out of a grand total of 5.7 million prisoners of war, no less than 3.3 million of them died in captivity. We have to recall, however, that the Germans often made sure there were no prisoners to take and had largely stopped taking any by the time of this survey.

The civil population in one place after another across the occupied areas of the Soviet Union was simply allowed to starve to death, deported to work as slaves in Germany, or exploited on the spot. Mass starvation, however, almost inevitably accompanied the German invasion, because the troops were expected to live off the land, which in many cases had already been combed through for provisions by the retreating Soviet forces. Deliberate starvation was part of the great sieges such as the one at Stalingrad and the other at Leningrad, but we can see the effect of the occupation in many less well known areas like Charkov, a city with a population of nearly 1 million before nearly half of them left with the Soviet evacuation. Located on the road to Stalingrad in the southeast of the country, Charkov was already in terrible shape when the Wehrmacht arrived. Nevertheless, the German Armed Forces were told to live off the land, which meant seizing provisions where they could be found and that left very little for the native population. During each month of the German occupation, hundreds starved to death.

Starvation was magnified many times in cities like Leningrad where major battles took place. The siege of the city lasted from September 8, 1941, to January 18, 1943. Hitler and other leaders repeatedly said they did not even want it to surrender, nor did they wish any of the civilian population to escape. In this battle alone, according to official Soviet figures, civilian losses were put at 632,253, the vast majority of them dying from starvation, but the losses in fact were higher. Hitler told Goebbels that Leningrad should disappear, for it would be impossible to feed its 5 million inhabitants after the battle was won. Even on the ground by the winter of 1942 the death rate just for this city was estimated at between 4,000 and 5,000 per day before the registration system broke down.

The Slavic peoples suffered enormous losses. A reliable and conservative estimate puts the losses of the Soviet Union alone at around 25 million, of whom two-thirds or so were civilians. Some Soviet historians have only recently suggested the number of dead may have been twice as large in total, ranging close to 50 million. Although we have to be very careful with these kinds of statistics, there is no disputing the fact that the Soviets suffered by far the greatest casualties in the war. There should be no question in anyone’s mind that if the Nazis had won that war against Stalin, the results for the peoples of the Soviet Union would have been even more catastrophic.

Russia grants WW II vets housing, amnesty

2010-04-20T21:27:00.002+08:00

MOSCOW, April 16 (UPI) -- The Russian Duma passed legislation Friday giving amnesty to most World War II veterans and providing them with free housing.

The amnesty also applies to those who survived imprisonment in German concentration camps, workers in munitions factories and survivors of the Leningrad siege, ITAR-Tass reported. It does not include those convicted of murder or sexual assault on children.

The bills are linked to the 65th anniversary of the war's end on May 9.

"The amnesty is offered to apply without any restrictions to veterans of the Great Patriotic War, workers of the home front, who have worked for at least six months from June 22, 1941 through May 9, 1945, former prisoners of the concentration camps, ghettos created by the Nazi Germany and its allies, as well as residents of the besieged Leningrad," said Pavel Krasheninnikov, chairman of the State Duma Committee for Civil, Criminal, Arbitration and Procedural Legislation.

Krasheninnikov, who drafted the bill, said he expects about 100 to 200 people to qualify for amnesty.

The Duma, the lower house of Parliament, also approved a bill providing housing for World War II veterans and the families of veterans who have died, Voice of Russia reported. Officials estimate at least 1,200 veterans are homeless or forced to share housing.

FORMER INMATES OF AUSCHWITZ

2010-03-16T12:46:00.003+08:00

Other former inmates of Auschwitz were also to suffer at the hands of the Russians—ironically Russians themselves. 10,000 Red Army prisoners of war had been sent to Auschwitz in October 1941 to build the camp here at Birkenau. The handful who survived this horror, were, after their liberation, about to be persecuted again.

Pavel Stenkin, Former Soviet POW, Auschwitz: "They invented that at Auschwitz, this Camp of Death, they were training spies. So somebody got this idea in his head - what if they had turned me into a spy?"

Pavel Stenkin was sent into internal exile in the closed city of Perm in the Urals. A victim of Stalin's policy that all Red Army soldiers who'd been captured should be treated as suspected traitors.

Pavel Stenkin: "When I arrived in Perm to work I was called in every 2nd night - "admit this, agree to that, we know everything, we only don't know the purpose you were sent here for. But we will find out with or without your help. Come on, admit that you are a spy." And I would say - "I am not a spy, I'm an honest Soviet man." And the interrogator smiled ironically—"Soviet man". And he smiled again. "Just confess and it'll all be over."

They were tormenting and tormenting me. And then they decided to get rid of me. They sent me to prison. And the details of my sentence - do you think I heard anything or I read anything about it? I heard nothing and read nothing. Judges were in rush they had theatre tickets so they were in hurry to leave the court."

Pavel Stenkin was sent to a labor camp within the Soviet Gulag system. Captured by the Germans in 1941, he was finally released only after Stalin's death in 1953.

Pavel Stenkin: "I was always feeling hungry. It was not until I was released from prison, in 1953 that I started to eat my fill."

Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State

Book Review: Propaganda und Terror in Weißrußland 1941-1944: Die deutsche "geistige" Kriegsführung gegen Zivilbevölkerung und Partisanen.

2010-03-16T11:59:00.001+08:00

Babette Quinkert. Propaganda und Terror in Weißrußland 1941-1944: Die deutsche "geistige" Kriegsführung gegen Zivilbevölkerung und Partisanen. Krieg in der Geschichte. Paderborn: Schöningh Paderborn, 2008. 420 pp. EUR 58.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-506-76596-3.

Reviewed by Jeff Rutherford (Wheeling Jesuit University)
Published on H-German (March, 2010)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Nazi Germany's Battle for Hearts and Minds

On June 22, 1944, German occupation authorities staged an especially dramatic "day of celebration" in Minsk. During the early morning hours, marching columns of boys and girls from the White Ruthenian (Belarusian) Youth Organization (WJW) as well as members of a Belarusian SS unit marched to the German "cemetery of heroes" where they laid a wreath in recognition of Germany's efforts to free Belarus from the Soviet yoke. Following this part of the day's festivities, focus shifted to the center of the city where another procession took place, one that illustrated the German narrative of the war. The first few wagons that passed symbolized Bolshevik rule. A group of individuals wearing tattered clothes and standing behind the hammer and sickle flag were soon followed by a Stalin puppet manipulated by six "Jews." Slogans declaring that "Bolshevism destroyed the intelligentsia" and "Stalin and Lenin preach that religion is opium" were accompanied by sculptors of destroyed churches. The "'freedom' of the NKVD" was symbolized by a prison and a rail car traveling towards Siberia. "After such poverty, misery, exploitation and terror," (p. 363), the second stage of the procession--which focused on German "achievements" in the Soviet Union--began. Slogans such as "the path to European freedom" and "long live a free White Ruthenia" were accompanied by marching German troops and more WJW members. Doctors and workers, who symbolized modern medical care and the unity of Europe laboring to defeat the communist menace, followed the military procession. As Babette Quinkert notes in her comprehensive study of German propaganda in Belarus during the Second World War, this event was not isolated; rather, it was the culmination of the German state's approach to total war. Quinkert's work persuasively challenges the prevailing view that the Third Reich utilized only terror in its attempt to conquer the Soviet Union. Instead, she suggests, Germany pursued a much more balanced policy towards civilians living in the occupied territories.

As her title indicates, Quinkert examines connections between propaganda and terror as they developed from planning by Wehrmacht officials during the 1930s to the actual occupation of Belarus between 1941 and 1944. Her first section deals with the development of psychological warfare during the interwar period with a focus on its orientation towards the Soviet Union. Quinkert begins her analysis with a look at how Germany grappled with the importance of psychological warfare during the interwar period. Building upon the lessons of the First World War--which highlighted the importance of propaganda, both to strengthen one's own military and home fronts and to weaken the enemy's morale--German military thinkers attempted to construct a military policy that effectively employed propaganda. This process was accelerated after the reintroduction of conscription in 1935 and in 1938 chief of the Oberkommando des Wehrmacht Wilhelm Keitel enunciated its necessity for future war. He argued that Germany would have to exploit its entire means "against the enemy's armed forces, against the material sources of the strength of the enemy and the spiritual strength of his people" (p. 34). This statement was not mere rhetoric; the German army had established already in 1929 a Psychological Laboratory within the Reichswehr Ministry, which led to the creation of four Wehrmacht propaganda companies by 1938. Quinkert persuasively argues that not only did the Germans recognize "that wars of propaganda, economics and combat constituted an inseparable unity," but that they followed this idea to its logical end by building an institutional basis to wage such a multifaceted conflicted (p. 42).

One of Quinkert's most interesting theses concerns the development of the "criminal orders" that turned the German invasion of the Soviet Union into a war of unbridled savagery and atrocity. As Europe underwent a process of ideological polarization during the 1930s--a development most tangibly manifested by the Spanish Civil War--Germany's military thinkers engaged in a "war before the war" with the Soviet Union (p. 43). Two important points arose during this early planning. First, German authorities believed that the Soviets would utilize propaganda behind the advancing German front, stirring up resistance among civilians to the occupiers. This agitation, according to a 1935 study of such possibilities, could have "a devastating effect" on German operations (p. 45). Thus, individuals who could inspire both civilians and soldiers to such actions required special attention; this clearly meant commissars. Second, German propagandists believed that Soviet society could be split along "national and racial lines" and thus developed different programs for the various national groups (p. 47). One commonality among these propaganda lines was the failure of Bolshevism to provide its subjects with the land, peace, and bread it had promised and the resulting use of violence by the regime to keep the state together. Again, the commissars occupied a special place in this propaganda. One position paper from 1935 suggested the use of the following slogans to be directed towards Soviet conscripts: "beat them [commissars] to death, desert either individually or in entire units.... We promise you proper treatment and nourishment.... Turn your bayonets around and fight with us against the damned Jewish commissars" (p. 47). Here, the desire to break up the Soviet Union from within combined with a call for the murder of allegedly Jewish commissars. Already, six years before the Commissar Order was drafted and distributed to the Ostheer, commissars had been targeted for death by at least one section of the German army.

According to Quinkert, this line of thinking directly led to the formulation and implementation of the Commissar Order. The political and military leadership believed that murder of Soviet commissars would both destabilize the Red Army and ensure a far easier occupation of the eastern territories, as no one would lead civilian resistance in the rear areas. In other words, the murder of Soviet commissars was understood as what Quinkert describes as a "preventative defensive strategy against the guerilla war [Kleinkrieg] in the rear area" (p. 59). While her claim that that the German military carried out this order not merely for ideological reasons, but also for "independent pragmatic motives" is not entirely novel, it is certainly convincing and it provides evidence of a German army prepared to contravene the established rules of war long before the opening of Operation Barbarossa.

The implementation of the Commissar Order constituted one aspect of the terror utilized by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. Quinkert then shifts gears and examines the other side of German occupation policies in her second section: the institutionalization of propaganda for the eastern campaign. The resources devoted to the propaganda mission reflected its status as an important component of the operation. The Wehrmacht propaganda section attached thirteen propaganda companies to the army with another twelve war reporter companies attached to Luftwaffe, naval, and Waffen-SS units. These were complemented by units under the Reich Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories (which were active in the civilian-administered areas) as well by individuals attached to Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry. In addition, SD and police units, the Foreign Ministry, and Soviet nationals also worked to propagate the Nazi view of the war to the civilian population. Unlike the generally held view that "polycracy" doomed any rational occupation policy in the east, Quinkert persuasively maintains, "the central authorities not only cooperated closely, but also worked together in an effective and solution-oriented way" (p. 109).

Germany utilized various forms of media to reach the civilian population, ranging from pamphlets and posters (both image and text) to film and radio, on a hitherto unprecedented scale during the war. Quinkert notes that during the entirety of the French campaign, a total of two million leaflets were distributed by the Germans; in comparison, during the first week or so of the Soviet campaign, the Germans circulated some thirty million different pieces of propaganda materials. By the turn of the year, this number had risen to 433,000,000 pieces. Some of these materials originated in the Reich but the majority were produced locally by Wehrmacht propaganda units that ran their own printing presses and paper factories. This impressive production system, however, was stymied by problems of delivery: the same lack of roads and vehicles that starved the blitzkrieg made it very difficult for propaganda units to spread their message throughout rural Russia.

Quinkert then examines how German propaganda activities and messages changed during the course of the war by focusing on Belarus. While Belarus is perhaps the best-researched area of Germany's eastern empire, her analysis of connections between terror and propaganda allows for a generally fresh interpretation of the occupation. During the opening phase of the invasion, the propaganda line revolved around the idea of the Germans as liberators, saving Soviet civilians from "Jewish-criminal despotism" that had produced only "poverty and misery" (p. 140). The focus on the alleged links between Judaism and Bolshevism was complemented by concerted efforts to rouse the civilian population into open revolt against the Soviet state; this policy resulted directly from planning during the 1930s. Such cooperation, however, was framed by threats against those who failed to rise to the occasion.

Despite these attempts to win over or at least coerce the Soviet population into supporting the side of the invaders, such propaganda efforts failed. As Quinkert notes, "civilians were not only witnesses to such [German] crimes, but they themselves were also affected" by German occupation policies (p. 157). German claims that the Soviets caused their desperation and misery failed to convince individuals living in cities destroyed by German bombing or those who were rounded up and sent to prison camps in which the Germans murdered various categories of prisoners. Therefore, during the opening months of the war, the reality of German actions completely extinguished any possibility of winning the hearts and minds of the Belarusian population through positive propaganda.

Quinkert shows that in contrast to scholarly assumptions, once this initial propaganda foray failed, the Germans displayed flexibility by changing their message in hopes of achieving greater resonance with the population. Three primary and interconnected themes dominated the remainder of Germany's propaganda campaign in Belarus: the agrarian question; labor policies; and anti-partisan warfare (and its ties to the genocide of the Jews). Since Belarus was primarily an agricultural region, some Germans--primarily within the Wehrmacht and Alfred Rosenberg's Ministry--believed that a policy that promised an end to the hated kolkhoz system promised to generate real support for the occupiers. This policy was to be introduced to the population as one that would be an "intention for the long term" (p. 166) as the Germans feared that the immediate closing of the collective farms would disrupt their ability to live off the land in the Soviet Union.

When it was clear that the war would continue into 1942, German authorities became much more concerned about winning the support of Soviet civilians for the war effort and agricultural reform was made a priority. The propaganda campaign in support of these reforms concentrated on making them comprehensible to peasants and illustrating the "advantages" (p. 221) for them. That this was a major effort is evidenced by the ten million leaflets, one million copies of a special edition of a Russian-language newspaper, sixteen thousand posters, and one hundred eighty thousand sheets of guidelines distributed by Propaganda Section Ostland alone. Despite the intensity of this campaign, it proved a political failure. After an initial surge in peasant support for German policies, attitudes soon retreated back to indifference to the occupiers at best.

This swing was due in part to German anti-partisan policies--where the connection between terror and propaganda of Quinkert's title manifested itself most concretely. From the German perspective, partisans posed a real threat to the systematic exploitation of the country's agricultural resources, especially in 1942 and 1943. The Germans adjusted their policies from a more spontaneous reaction to partisans in 1941 to much larger, more systematic operations in later years. These "large operations" utilized terror on a tremendous scale in the rear areas in an attempt to quash the partisan movement. As Quinkert notes, these operations targeted "actual or alleged partisans ... with a merciless persecution and death" (p. 256), but they were accompanied by a propaganda campaign designed to delegitimate the partisan movement and convince civilians to assist the Germans. While German authorities hoped that the combination of terror and propaganda would lead to a quieter rear area, the campaign failed to extinguish the partisan threat. German rhetoric and promises failed to compensate for the murder of family members or friends linked to the partisans and use of violence actually drove civilians over to the resistance. The final German policy that led to a mushrooming of the partisan movement was the Reich Labor Action, and here again, propaganda constituted an important part of the program.

Part of Germany's newfound engagement with the civilian population drew on the realization that workers--both for the Reich and for the occupied territories--were desperately needed. Once again, the occupiers utilized various means of propaganda to persuade Soviet civilians to work for the Reich. Two primary themes emerged. First, propaganda emphasized the cultural and economic superiority of Germany, in order to convince Belarusians both that the Reich could not lose the war and that Germany could serve as a model for Belarus. Second, and by far the more important, especially as the war dragged on into 1943 and 1944, was the idea that Europe needed to unify around the German core in order to defeat Bolshevism. This idea of a new Europe struggling to save western civilization against the "Jewish Bolsheviks" led to a campaign that revised many long-standing German attitudes; as Quinkert notes, even the SS began to "revise ... anti-Slavic tendencies" in its training materials (p. 291).

This radical change in propaganda was part of a "change in course" (p. 274) that sought to elevate Belarus (or, in the contemporary terminology, White Ruthenia) to the level of an independent and sovereign state within the Nazi New Order. The idea of the "rebirth of White Ruthenia" (p. 297) now constituted a major piece of the German propaganda effort. The celebration described in the opening paragraphs of this review was the culmination of this effort; it was, in short, an attempt to construct a national identity for Belarusians distinct from competing Soviet or Russian identities that was, however, inextricably linked to Germany. As Quinkert points out, this day of national celebration took place a mere two weeks before the Red Army liberated Minsk from German rule. The military situation was just part of the quandary facing the occupiers. One of the higher-ranking members of the propaganda section in Minsk listed numerous problems plaguing the German propaganda effort: forced requisitioning and labor (some 380,000 Belarusians toiled in the Reich during the war); a peasantry increasingly caught between partisans and Germans; and destruction of homes and lives as well as other daily horrors facing the civilian population. He concluded by stating that all of these "could not be used by even the best propaganda!" (p. 365).

Quinkert has produced an important and useful addition to the literature on German occupation. Her exploration of the neglected topic of German propaganda in the occupied Soviet territories fills a considerable void in the literature without overstating its importance relative to the terror and violence applied on a wide scale by the Wehrmacht, SS, and other Nazi organizations. One minor difficulty in her study is its overwhelming reliance on German sources. While she has utilized three archives in the former Soviet Union, these have been primarily mined for German-language sources. Certainly the propaganda arm of the Wehrmacht was concerned with the ways in which its various messages were received by the population and it made every effort to gauge their effectiveness. Some Belarusian voices, however, would be useful in determining how civilians actually interpreted and understood German propaganda. Aside from this minor caveat, however, Quinkert's study persuasively highlights the totality of Nazi Germany's war effort in the Soviet Union.

General Andrei A . Vlasov at Leningrad

2010-03-12T08:30:00.002+08:00

At Leningrad, neither side succeeded in its designs for the isolated city. The German armies could not crack the stub- born Soviet defenses ringing Leningrad's southern outskirts, and, in fact, the line of battle changed very little. Soviet efforts to break through to the city were all but doomed by the plight of the Second Shock Army, whose 130,000 men had been cut off in the nearby Volkhov swamps since mid- March; rescue attempts diverted several Red Army divisions from their offensive assignments. At the end of March, a Soviet relief column managed to pierce the German lines and rush some supplies into the pocket. But the narrow corridor soon collapsed under German counterattack.

The Second Shock Army's prospects were bleak indeed, and its best hope seemed to be its new commander, Lieut . General Andrei A . Vlasov, a brilliant leader and popular hero who had flown in to take over on March 21. Vlasov had sprung to prominence during the disaster at Kiev, when his strong handling of an army made up of shattered divisions had been instrumental in preventing even greater losses. Then he had served with distinction in the winter counter- offensive in front of Moscow, and as soon as he arrived on the Volkhov front, he had shown his mettle by attacking two German divisions and advancing eight miles-to within 15 miles of Leningrad. It was true that his drive then petered out, but Moscow was still confident that if anyone could extricate the Second Shock Army, it was Vlasov.

But in April, Vlasov worked no miracles; his troops and tanks were immobilized by mud when the frozen swamps melted, and they could neither attack nor defend them- selves. The crisis deepened in May, and two other armies in Vlasov's group launched another desperate drive to open an exit route through the surrounding German lines. Finally they succeeded in driving a 400-yard-wide corridor through to the Second Shock Army. Many of Vlasov's wounded were evacuated through the gap, and a large number of troops rushed out in wild disarray. The corridor remained open only for a short time, until German artillery and Luftwaffe dive bombers closed it.

In June, the men of the Second Shock Army were sick, starving, almost out of ammunition and under constant, heavy German fire. German forces kept closing in, reducing the pocket. Many a time Vlasov radioed for help, but each time the Leningrad front headquarters in charge of the Vlokhov area told him to keep on pressing the attack. At one point, headquarters sent a plane to get him out, but he refused to leave his men.

Finally, in late June, the pitiful remnants of the Second Shock Army made their last attempt to break out. The men punched two small holes in the German lines. Vlasov, having done all he could, ordered his survivors to destroy whatever heavy equipment remained, then break up into small groups to try to escape. Some men filtered out, but German troops swarmed over those still in the pocket. About 32,000 Russians survived to surrender; all the rest lay dead or dying in the putrid swamp. The debacle had cost the Red Army nearly 100,000 men.

As for Vlasov, his story took a weird turn. German soldiers came upon the hero general in a farmhouse and took him prisoner. When the Russians next heard of Vlasov, they were bewildered and mortified to find out that he had turned traitor and was leading an army of Soviet defectors against their homeland. What had gone wrong with Vlasov? Soviet propagandists lamely suggested that he had been a German agent from the start and had deliberately led his army to destruction. Actually, Vlasov's harrowing experience convinced him that he had to undertake a patriotic war to liberate his countrymen from the ruinous clutches of Stalinism. But he paid the price for treason in full. In the last days of the War, when Vlasov and his anti-Communist Russians were stationed in Czechoslovakia, the turncoat general surrendered to American forces. He was sent back to the Soviet Union, where he was formally tried for treason, condemned and executed.

The Organization of the Eastern Troops, 5 May 1943

2010-03-04T11:45:00.007+08:00

How To Use the Formation Tables Below
The tables below provide the organization of the Eastern Troops in service of the Germany Army on 5 May 1943. Only units known to the General der Osttruppen, the commanding officer responsible for supervising eastern troops, are presented in the tables. The tables are not intended to display the organization of regular German Army formations and units, their titles are only provided to show which formation or unit each Osttruppen unit was attached to. The tables cover all Heeresgruppen and theatres of war. The Schematische Kriegsgliederung does not indicate to which specific divisional commands each unit is assigned to, unless the division in question is a German Army security division. Where an eastern unit has been attached directly to a German Army division, it is usually noted as being "bei...", so an eastern unit attached to the 344. Infanterie-Division would have a note next to it indicating that the unit is "bei 344. Infanterie-Division."
The tables are laid out so that the organization of higher-echelon formations, i.e. corps and armies, and their respective attachments should be clear. The tables go from the top-most organization to the bottom-level organization, so if you are reading the page from top to bottom you will begin at the Army Group level, and proceeding down you will see the various assigned Army and Corps. Use the links within the tables to jump from one formation to another.
Each table has a label at the top, indicating which formation it refers to. This title is repeated in the left-hand column of the table for reference. The right-hand column lists all of the Osttruppen units assigned to that particular formation. Within the right-hand column, each "level" of indentation indicates a level of subordination. No indentation means that the unit in question is directly attached to the main formation. Units indented one level are directly subordinate to the parent unit above it. A parent unit or formation of regiment size or larger with subordinate elements is always displayed in boldface type, and without being indented.
The echelon-level of certain units and command staffs, i.e. REGIMENT, BRIGADE, CORPS, etc., is provided next to the unit's or staff's title in brackets with capital letters: e.g. Armenische Legion (REGIMENT). This is used where the unit's or staff's title designation does itself indicate the exact size.
Research footnotes next to unit titles are presented in BLACK type and in brackets [ ]. These are footnotes that were added by the researcher, and are either additions, corrections, or translations of notes found on the original document.
Original footnotes next to unit titles are presented in BLUE type and in parenthesis ( ). These are notes added directly to the original document, and are not translated or altered from their original form.
Unit assignments are occasionally noted next to a unit in RED type and in brackets [ ]. These indicate the actual higher formation that the unit is assigned to.
The unit titles of all units and formations are presented in their original German form, and appear in BLUE type. If you need translations of their titles, use the Site Glossary. In most cases, the unit titles are in their unabbreviated form. Unit titles are left unabbreviated when the actual title can not be determined.
Source: This information was largely taken from the original document listed below, found on Microfilm Roll T78-413, Frame 1302, a holding of the U.S. National Archives. Supplemental information was provided by the sources listed at the bottom of this page.
Notes on the Summary Tables:
Below each Formation Table is a Summary Table that presents an overall picture of the total numbers of Osttruppen units, organized by unit type, ethnicity, and size, that were assigned to that formation on 5 May 1943. The Summary Tables are meant to be used to perform quick examinations of the total units assigned to each formation, and present this information in an easy-to-read format. In-depth examinations should instead be performed using the Formation Tables, as they provide more specific information. The Summary Tables use certain abbreviations and categories to organize the information, as noted below:
Categories:

Construction Battalions: includes all Bau- and Träger-Bau-.
Construction Companies: Includes all Bau- and Straßenbau-, and Eisenbahn-Bau-.
Supply Companies: Includes all Nachschub- and Nachschub-Transport-.
Cossack Cavalry: Used to differentiate between Cossack cavalry and other cavalry units.
Cossack: Cossack infantry units are listed under the regular "Infantry" categories, Cossack cavalry units are under their own category, "Cossack Cavalry."
Infantry categories: If not specified, units (regardless of size) are assumed to be infantry. Also includes Gebirgs-, Jäger-, Feld-, and Sicherungs-Infanterie-.
Cavalry: Also includes Kavallerie-Sicherungs.

Unit Composition/Size:

Unspecified units in 162. Infanterie-Division (turk.) are listed as being "Turkic."
School category units are company-sized units unless otherwise specified.

Abbreviations:

Armen.: Armenian
Aserb.: Azerbaijani
Estn.: Estonian
Finn.: Volga-Finnish
Georg.: Georgian
Kalmuken: Kalmuck
Kauk.: Caucasian
Kosaken: Cossack
Lett.: Latvian
Litau.: Lithuanian
Nordkauk.: North Caucasian
Nordukr.: North Ukrainian

Ost: Composed of mostly Russian and Byelorussian personnel, possibly with some Ukrainians, unless otherwise specified.
Ostvölk.: Eastern peoples (general term)
Turk.: Turkestani, also used as a general term for the "Asiatic" eastern peoples
Ukrain.: Ukrainian
Wolgatat.: Volga-Tatar
BR = Total Brigade-sized units.
R = Total Regiment-sized units.
B = Total Battalion-sized units.
C = Total Company-sized units.
P = Total Platoon-sized or smaller units

Schematische Kriegsgliederung der landeseigenen Verbände
5.Mai.43
T78-413, Frame 1302 (H 1/153)
OKH/Gen.St.d.H.
General der Osttruppen
Nr 402/43 gKdos.
Stand vom 5.Mai.43

General der Osttruppen

Heeresgruppe A Heeresgruppe Süd
Heeresgruppe Mitte
Heeresgruppe Nord
Oberbefehlshaber West
Wehrmacht Befehlshaber Ukraine
Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres
Total Eastern Troops, 5 May 1943

Heeresgruppe A

Direct Attachments Befehlshaber Krim
Befehlshaber der Straße Kertsch
17. Armee (A.O.K. 17)
Heeresgruppe A, Total Eastern Troops

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe A)

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe A)

Turkestanisches Feldzeug-Bataillon 8 (3 Kompanien) Turkestanisches Feldzeug-Bataillon 11 (3 Kompanien)
5. Georgische Nachschub-Transport-Kompanie/151
6. Georg.Nachschub-Transport-Kompanie/151
4. Turk.Nachschub-Transport-Kompanie/592
5. Kauk.Nachschub-Transport-Kompanie/546
Kaukasische Freiwilligen-Infanterie-Kompanie [No other designation]
Ukrainisches Bau-Bataillon 64 (4 Kompanien und Nachschub-Kolonne)
2 x Ost-Hiwi-Kompanie [These may be "Hiwi-Wach-Kompanien", but the designation is not clear]
Ukrainische Nachschub-Kompanie (mot.) 666
Ost-Fernsprechbetriebsstaffel 15
Ost-Fernsprechbetriebsstaffel 27
Ost-Fernsprechbetriebsstaffel 55
Ost-Fernsprechbetriebsstaffel 63

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe A), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Georg.	Kauk.	Ost	Turk.	Ukrain.	Total
Ordnance Battalions	-	-	-	2	-	2
Construction Battalions	-	-	-	-	1	1
Supply Companies	2	1	-	1	1	5
Hiwi Companies	-	-	2	-	-	2
Infantry Companies	-	1	-	-	-	1
Telephone Operation Sections	-	-	4	-	-	4
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	2	6	3	2	3B; 8C; 4P

Befehlshaber Krim (Heeresgruppe A)

Befehlshaber Krim (Heeresgruppe A)

Turkestanisches Infanterie-Regiment Bergmann (17 Kompanien) [Reorganized on 24 July 1943 as:]
Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./Bergmann (4 Kompanien)*
Kaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon II./Bergmann (4 Kompanien)*
Kaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon III./Bergmann (4 Kompanien)*
Aserbeidschanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./73 (5 Kompanien; in Auffrischung)
Aserbeidschanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 804 (5 Kompanien)
Aserbeidschanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 806 (5 Kompanien; in Auffrischung)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Batillon I./370 (5 Kompanien; in Auffrischung)
Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon II./4 (5 Kompanien)
Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./9 (5 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Bau-Bataillon 245 [Number of companies not given]
5. Aserbeidschanische Straßenbau-Kompanie/551
5. Aserbeidschanische Straßenbau-Kompanie/559
5. Aserbeidschanische Straßenbau-Kompanie/563
5. Armenische Bau-Kompanie/51
5. Armenische Bau-Kompanie/144
5. Georgische Wach-Kompanie/43B

Befehlshaber Krim (Heeresgruppe A), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Aserb.	Georg.	Turk.	Total
Infantry Regiments	-	-	-	1	1
Infantry Battalions	-	3	2	1	6
Construction Battalions	-	-	-	1	1
Construction Companies	2	3	-	-	5
Guard Companies	-	-	1	-	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	6	3	3	1R; 7B; 6C

* Counted as part of the regiment and not as independent battalions.

Befehlshaber der Straße Kertsch (Heeresgruppe A)

Befehlshaber der Straße Kertsch (Heeresgruppe A)

4. Turkestanische Nachschub-Kompanie/563 (In Zuführung:)
Georgische Bau-Kompanie 17
Georgische Bau-Kompanie 24
Turkestanisches Träger-Bau-Bataillon 1000

Befehlshaber der Straße Kertsch (Heeresgruppe A), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Georg.	Turk.	Total
Construction Battalions	-	1	1
Supply Companies	-	1	1
Construction Companies	2	-	2
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	2	1B; 3C

17. Armee (Heeresgruppe A)

17. Armee (A.O.K. 17) (Heeresgruppe A)

Kosaken Regiment Platow (Stab und 8 Kompanien) Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron (bei Regiment 4 ) [No other designation; probably refers to Radfahrer-Sicherungs-Regiment 4]
Ukrainisches Bau-Bataillon 131 (4 Kompanien)
Ukrainisches Bau-Bataillon 221 (4 Kompanien)
Ukrainische Bau-Kompanie 97
Ukrainische Bau-Kompanie 101
Ukrainische Nachschub-Kompanie 562
Ost-Bau-Kompanie 4
Ukrainische Kraftfahr-Kompanie (mot.) 562
Ost-Fahr-Kompanie [No other designation]
Ost-Nachschub-Kolonne [No other designation]
1. Ost-Nachschub-Kolonne/125
2. Ost-Nachschub-Kolonne/125
1. Turkestanische Infanterie-Kompanie/452
Turkestanische Nachschub Kolonne 452

17. Armee (Heeresgruppe A), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Kosaken	Ost	Turk.	Ukrain.	Total
Cossack Cavalry Regiments	1	-	-	-	1
Construction Battalions	-	-	-	2	2
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	1	-	-	-	1
Construction Companies	-	1	-	2	3
Supply Companies	-	-	-	1	1
Supply Columns	-	3	1	-	4
Motor Transport Companies	-	1	-	-	1
Motor Pool Companies	-	-	-	1	1
Infantry Companies	-	-	1	-	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	5	2	6	1R; 2B; 12C

Heeresgruppe A, Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Ethnicity	Total
Cossack Cavalry Regiments	1 Kosaken	1
Infantry Regiments	1 Turk.	1
Total Regiments		2
Construction Battalions	2 Turk.; 3 Ukrain.	5
Infantry Battalions	1 Turk.; 2 Georg.; 3 Aserb.	6
Ordnance Battalions	2 Turk.	2
Total Battalions		13
Construction Companies	1 Ost; 2 Armen.; 2 Georg.; 2 Ukrain.; 3 Aserb.	10
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	1 Kosaken	1
Guard Companies	1 Georg.	1
Hiwi Companies	2 Ost	2
Infantry Companies	1 Kauk.; 1 Turk.	2
Motor Pool Companies	1 Ukrain.	1
Motor Transport Companies	1 Ost	1
Supply Columns	1 Turk.; 3 Ost	4
Supply Companies	1 Kauk.; 2 Georg.; 2 Turk.; 2 Ukrain.	7
Total Companies		29
Telephone Operation Sections	4 Ost	4
Total Platoons/Sections		4

Heeresgruppe Süd

Direct Attachments6. Armee (A.O.K. 6) 1. Panzerarmee (Pz.A.O.K. 1)
4. Panzerarmee (Pz.A.O.K. 4)
Armeeabteilung Kempf
Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Süd
Heeresgruppe Süd, Total Eastern Troops

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Süd)

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Süd)

Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon II./198 (5 Kompanien) 6. Turkestanische Wach-Kompanie/571
7. Georgische Wach-Kompanie/571
4. Georgische Nachschub-Kompanie/592
5. Georgische Nachschub-Kompanie/592 [From 22 June 1943]
4. Turkestanische Nachschub-Kompanie/573
4. Ukrainische Wach-Kompanie/571
5. Ukrainische Wach-Kompanie/571
Ukrainisches Bau-Bataillon 112 [Number of companies not given]
Turkestanisches Bau-Bataillon 156 [Number of companies not given]
Turkestanisches Bau-Bataillon 305 (4 Kompanien und Nachschub-Kolonne)

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Süd), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Georg.	Turk.	Ukrain.	Total
Infantry Battalions	1	-	-	1
Construction Battalions	-	2	1	3
Guard Companies	1	1	2	4
Supply Companies	2	1	-	3
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	4	4	3	4B; 7C

6. Armee (Heeresgruppe Süd)

6. Armee (A.O.K. 6) (Heeresgruppe Süd)

Ukrainisches Infanterie-Bataillon 6 (8 Kompanien) [Renamed Ost-Bataillon 551 1 June 1943] Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 450 (5 Kompanien)
Ukrainisches Bau-Bataillon 109 (4 Kompanien und Nachschub-Kolonne)
Ukrainisches Bau-Bataillon 111 (3 Kompanien)
1. Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron/583

6. Armee (Heeresgruppe Süd), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Kosaken	Turk.	Ukrain.	Total
Infantry Battalions	-	1	1	2
Construction Battalions	-	-	2	2
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	1	-	-	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	1	1	3	4B; 1C

1. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Süd)

1. Panzerarmee (Pz.A.O.K. 1) (Heeresgruppe Süd)

Kosaken Abteilung 126 (4 Kompanien) Kosaken Abteilung 161 (4 Kompanien)
Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron (bei III. Panzerkorps) [No other designation]
1. Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron/82
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./94 (4 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./295 (4 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./371 (4 Kompanien)
Nordkaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon 802 (5 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 784 (4 Kompanien)
Aserbeidschanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./111 (5 Kompanien)
Ukrainische Bau-Kompanie 235

1. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Süd), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Aserb.	Kosaken	Nordkauk.	Turk.	Ukrain.	Total
Cossack Cavalry Battalions	-	2	-	-	-	2
Infantry Battalions	1	-	1	4	-	6
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	-	2	-	-	-	2
Construction Companies	-	-	-	-	1	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	1	4	1	4	1	8B; 3C

4. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Süd)

4. Panzerarmee (Pz.A.O.K. 4) (Heeresgruppe Süd)

5. Turkestanische Nachschub-Kompanie/606 5. Armenische Nachschub-Kompanie/619
4. Georgische Nachschub-Kompanie/606
6. Turkestanische Nachschub-Kompanie/606 [From 22 June 1943]

4. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Süd), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Georg.	Turk.	Total
Supply Companies	1	1	2	4
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	1	1	2	4C

Armeeabteilung Kempf (Heeresgruppe Süd)

Armeeabteilung Kempf (Heeresgruppe Süd)

Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron (bei 57. Infanterie-Division) [No other designation] Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron (bei 6. Panzer-Division) [No other designation]
4. Georgische Wach-Kompanie/591
5. Armenische Nachschub-Kompanie/591
6. Armenische Nachschub-Kompanie/591 [From 22 June 1943]
Ost-Wach-Bataillon 555 (3 Kompanien)
Ukrainische Infanterie-Kompanie 248
Ost-Kompanie 448
5. Ost-Wach-Kompanie/122B
6. Ost-Wach-Kompanie/122B

Armeeabteilung Kempf (Heeresgruppe Süd), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Georg.	Kosaken	Ost	Ukrain.	Total
Guard Battalions	-	-	-	1	-	1
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	-	-	2	-	-	2
Guard Companies	-	1	-	2	-	3
Supply Companies	2	-	-	-	-	2
Infantry Companies	-	-	-	1	1	2
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	1	2	4	1	1B; 9C

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Süd (Heeresgruppe Süd)

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Süd (Heeresgruppe Süd)

(Kosaken-)Kavallerie-Regiment von Jungschultz (12 Kompanien) [Renamed Kosaken-Regiment 1 (von Jungschultz) on 15 February 1943, and redesignated 3. Reiter-Regiment Sswodno on 1 June 1943] Kalmuken Kavallerie-Regiment Dr. Doll (19 Kompanien)
Kalmuken-Kavallerie-Regiment 5 Kuban (4 Kompanien)
Kosaken Abteilung I./454 (3 Kompanien)
Kosaken Abteilung II./454 (3 Kompanien)
Kosaken Abteilung III./454 (4 Kompanien)
Kosaken Abteilung IV./454 (4 Kompanien)
Kosaken Kavallerie-Ausbildungs-Abteilung [No other designation]
Kosaken Abteilung 213 (5 Kompanien)
Ost-Reiter-Ausbildungs-Abteilung Kranz (3 Kompanien)
Ost-Reiter-Abteilung 403 (3 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 783 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bau-Bataillon 559 (5 Kompanien)
Ost-Minenräum-Kompanie 554
1. - 3. Ost-Kompanie/556
1. und 2. Ost-Fernsprechbetriebsstaffel/66
Ost-Fernsprechbetriebsstaffel 62
Ost-Fernsprechbetriebsstaffel 43
Ost-Fernsprechbetriebsstaffel 51
Ost-Kompanie 213

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Süd (Heeresgruppe Süd), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Kalmuken	Kosaken	Ost	Turk.	Total
Cossack Cavalry Regiments	-	1	-	-	1
Cavalry Regiments	2	-	-	-	2
Cossack Cavalry Battalions	-	5	-	-	5
Cossack Cavalry Training Battalion	-	1	-	-	1
Cavalry Training Battalions	-	-	1	-	1
Cavalry Battalions	-	-	1	-	1
Infantry Battalions	-	-	-	1	1
Construction Battalions	-	-	1	-	1
Mine Clearing Companies	-	-	1	-	1
Infantry Companies	-	-	4	-	4
Telephone Operation Sections	-	-	5	-	5
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	7	13	1	3R; 10B; 10C

Heeresgruppe Süd, Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Ethnicity	Total
Cavalry Regiments	2 Kalmuken	2
Cossack Cavalry Regiments	1 Kosaken	1
Total Regiments		3
Cavalry Battalions	1 Ost	1
Cavalry Training Battalions	1 Ost	1
Construction Battalions	1 Ost; 2 Turk.; 3 Ukrain.	6
Cossack Cavalry Battalions	7 Kosaken	7
Cossack Cavalry Training Battalions	1 Kosaken	1
Guard Battalions	1 Ost	1
Infantry Battalions	1 Georg.; 1 Nordkauk.; 1 Ukrain.; 6 Turk.	9
Total Battalions		26
Construction Companies	1 Ukrain.	1
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	5 Kosaken	5
Guard Companies	1 Turk.; 2 Georg.; 2 Ost; 2 Ukrain.	7
Infantry Companies	1 Ukrain.; 5 Ost	6
Mine Clearing Companies	1 Ost	1
Supply Companies	3 Armen.; 3 Georg.; 3 Turk.	9
Total Companies		29
Telephone Operation Sections	5 Ost	5
Total Platoons/Sections		5

Heeresgruppe Mitte

Direct Attachments2. Armee LII. Armeekorps
VII. Armeekorps
XIII. Armeekorps
rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 580
2. Panzerarmee
XX. Armeekorps
XXXXVII. Panzerkorps
XXXXVI. Panzerkorps
XXXXI. Panzerkorps
XXXV. Armeekorps
LIII. Armeekorps
LV. Armeekorps
rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 532
4. Armee
LVI. Panzerkorps
XII. Armeekorps
IX. Armeekorps
XXXIX. Panzerkorps
XXVII. Armeekorps
Korück 559
3. Panzerarmee
VI. Armeekorps
II. Luftwaffen Feldkorps
XXXXIII. Armeekorps
201. Sicherungs-Division
rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 590
rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 582
Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Mitte
Heeresgruppe Mitte, Total Eastern Troops

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

Ost-Bataillon 82 (2 Kompanien) Ost-Bataillon 308 (3 Kompanien)
1. Ost-Fernsprecher-Kompanie/515
2. Ost-Fernsprecher-Kompanie/515
Turkestanisches Träger-Bau-Bataillon 1001 (3 Kompanien)
Ost-Kompanie 606
4. Turkestanische Nachschub-Kompanie/544 [Brjansk)
1. Ost-Kompanie/607
2. Ost-Kompanie/607 (Gomel)
3. Ost-Kompanie/607 (Gomel)
4. Aserbeidschanische Nachschub-Kompanie/548 (Gomel)
5. Turkestanische Wach-Kompanie/B99 (Orscha)
Turkestanische Infanterie-Kompanie 493 (Orscha)
Ost-Kompanie 608 (Orscha)
Ost-Kompanie 611 (Orscha)
Ost-Kompanie 609 (Minsk)
1. Ost-Kompanie/610 (Minsk)
2. Ost-Kompanie/610 (Minsk)
3. Ost-Kompanie/610 (Minsk)
4. Georgische Nachschub-Kompanie/B147 (Bobruisk)
5. Turkestanische Infanterie-(K)Kompanie/51B (Witebsk)
5. Turkestanische Nachschub-Kompanie/B107 (Witebsk)
5. Turkestanische Nachschub-Kompanie/B23 (Smolensk)
(In Zuführung:)
Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie 79
Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie 135
Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./1 (5 Kompanien)

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Mitte), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Aserb.	Georg.	Ost	Turk.	Total
Construction Battalions	-	-	-	1	1
Infantry Battalions	-	1	2	-	3
Telephone Companies	-	-	2	-	2
Infantry Companies	-	-	10	2	12
Supply Companies	1	1	-	3	5
Guard Companies	-	-	-	1	1
Construction Companies	-	-	-	2	2
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	1	2	14	9	4B; 22C

2. Armee (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

2. Armee (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

Ost-Reiter-Schwadron 299 Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie 120
Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie 123
Turkestanische Eisenbahn-Bau-Kompanie 217
LII. Armeekorps
1 x Schwadron/Ost-Reiter-Abteilung 57 [No other designation]
VII. Armeekorps
1 x Schwadron/Ost-Reiter-Abteilung 57 [No other designation]
Ost-Bau-Kompanie 168
Ost-Kompanie 407
XIII. Armeekorps
Ost-Kompanie 340
Ost-Kompanie 413
Ost-Kompanie 182
rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 580
Ost-Reiter-Abteilung 580 (3 Schwadronen)
Ost-Aufklärungs-Abteilung (mot.) 581 (4 Schwadronen)
Ost-Wach-Bataillon 552 (7 Kompanien)
Ost-Wach-Bataillon 581 (5 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./76 (5 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Feld-Bataillon I./389 (5 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./785 (4 Kompanien)

2. Armee (Heeresgruppe Mitte), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Ost	Turk.	Total
Cavalry Battalions	1	-	1
Reconnaissance Battalions	1	-	1
Guard Battalions	2	-	2
Infantry Battalions	-	3	3
Cavalry Squadrons	3	-	3
Construction Companies	1	2	3
Rail Construction Companies	-	1	1
Infantry Companies	4	-	4
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	12	6	7B; 11C

2. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

2. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

Ost-Kompanie 85 4. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/44
4. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/320
4. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/511
Kosaken Artillerie-Batterie 553
XX. Armeekorps
1. Ost-Kompanie/84
2. Ost-Kompanie/84
XXXXVII. Panzerkorps
1. Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron/137
2. Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron/137
Ost-Kompanie 45
Ost-Kompanie 102
XXXXVI. Panzerkorps
Ost-Wach-Bataillon 581 (2 Kompanien)
1. Ost-Kompanie/446
2. Ost-Kompanie/446
Ost-Kompanie 178
XXXXI. Panzerkorps
Ost-Kompanie 383
XXXV. Armeekorps
Ost-Kompanie 34
Ost-Kompanie 156
LIII. Armeekorps
Ost-Kompanie 25
Ost-Bataillon 441 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Kompanie 453
LV. Armeekorps
Ost-Bataillon 134 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Kompanie 110
Ost-Bataillon 339 (4 Kompanien)
1. Ost-Reiter-Schwadron/447
2. Ost-Reiter-Schwadron/447
Ost-Kompanie 455
Ost-Bataillon I./447 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon II./447 (4 Kompanien)
Armenisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./125 (5 Kompanien)
rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 532
Kosaken Kavallerie-Sicherungs-Abteilung III./57 (4 Schwadronen)
Ost-Bataillon 615 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 616 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 617 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 618 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 620 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Artillerie-Abteilung 621
Armenisches Infanterie-Bataillon II./9 (5 Kompanien)
Aserbeidschanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 807 (5 Kompanien)

2. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Mitte), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Aserb.	Kosaken	Ost	Turk.	Total
Cossack Cavalry Battalions	-	-	1	-	-	1
Guard Battalion	-	-	-	1	-	1
Infantry Battalions	2	1	-	10	-	13
Artillery Battalions	-	-	-	1	-	1
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	-	-	2	-	-	2
Cavalry Squadrons	-	-	-	2	-	2
Infantry Companies	-	-	-	15	-	15
Construction Companies	-	-	-	-	3	3
Artillery Batteries	-	-	1	-	-	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	1	4	29	3	16B; 23C

4. Armee (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

4. Armee (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

4. Ost-Nachschub-Kompanie (mot.)/604 5. Ost-Nachschub-Kompanie (mot.)/604
4. Ost-Nachschub-Kompanie/622
4. Ost-Nachschub-Kompanie/687
4. Ost-Nachschub-Kompanie/690
Ost-Kompanie 612
1. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/136
2. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/137
4. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/57
4. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/544
Ost-Kompanie 626 (mit Oberquartiermeister 4, A.O.K. 4)
Ost-Ersatz-Bataillon 4 (4 Kompanien)
LVI. Panzerkorps
Ost-Banden-Jagd-Kompanie (mit 31. Infanterie-Division)
1. Ost-Kompanie/131
2. Ost-Kompanie/131
Ost-Kompanie 10
1. Ost-Kompanie/267
2. Ost-Kompanie/267
Ost-Bataillon 456 (3 Kompanien)
XII. Armeekorps
Ost-Kompanie 260
Ost-Kompanie 268
Ost-Bataillon 412 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Banden-Jagd-Kompanie [Assigned to 98. Infanterie-Division]
IX. Armeekorps
Ost-Banden-Jagd-Kompanie [Assigned to 252. Infanterie-Division]
XXXIX. Panzerkorps
Ost-Kompanie 195
Ost-Kompanie 439
XXVII. Armeekorps
Ost-Kompanie 152
Ost-Kompanie 253
Ost-Bataillon 229 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 427 (2 Kompanien)
Korück 559
Ost-Bataillon 627 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 642 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 643 (3 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 629 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Artillerie-Batterie 614
Ost-Bataillon 646 (Dorogobusch) (3 Kompanien)
Ost-Kompanie 613 (Dorogobusch) (mit Ortskommandantur 292)
Ost-Wach-Kompanie 640 (Dorogobusch)

4. Armee (Heeresgruppe Mitte), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Ost	Turk.	Total
Infantry Battalions	9	-	9
Replacement Battalions	1	-	1
Supply Companies	5	-	5
Infantry Companies	14	-	14
Construction Companies	-	4	4
Anti-Partisan Companies	3	-	3
Guard Companies	1	-	1
Artillery Batteries	1	-	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	34	4	10B; 28C

3. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

3. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

Ost-Kompanie 639 Ost-Kompanie 644
Ost-Kompanie 645
Ost-Kompanie 59
2. Wolgatatarische Bau-Kompanie/825 [Became 4./Wolgatatarisches Bau-Bataillon 18 on 13 August 1943]
VI. Armeekorps
Ost-Kompanie 183
Ost-Bataillon 406 (3 Kompanien)
4. Georgische Bau-Kompanie/91
4. Georgische Bau-Kompanie/415
II. Luftwaffen-Feldkorps
1. Ost-Kompanie/263
2. Ost-Kompanie/263
3. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/248
3. Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie/416
XXXXIII. Armeekorps
Ost-Kompanie 205
Ost-Kompanie 331
Kosaken Abteilung 443 (3 Kompanien)
201. Sicherungs-Division
Kosaken Bataillon 622 (5 Kompanien)
Kosaken Bataillon 623 (5 Kompanien)
Kosaken Bataillon 624 (5 Kompanien)
Kosaken Bataillon 625 (5 Kompanien)
Kosaken Kompanie 638
Ost-Bataillon 603 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Reiter-Schwadron 201
1. Wolgatatarische Infanterie-Kompanie/825
5. Ost-Sicherungs-Kompanie/722
Ost-Wach-Bataillon 508 (3 Kompanien)
rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 590
Ost-Bataillon 281 (3 Kompanien)
rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 582
Ost-Bataillon 628 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 630 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Artillerie-Batterie 582
Ost-Ersatz-Kompanie 582
Ost-Unteroffizier-Schule

3. Panzerarmee (Heeresgruppe Mitte), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Georg.	Kosaken	Ost	Turk.	Wolgatat.	Total
Infantry Battalions	-	4	5	-	-	9
Guard Battalions	-	-	1	-	-	1
Cossack Cavalry Battalions	-	1	-	-	-	1
Infantry Companies	-	1	10	-	1	12
Replacement Companies	-	-	1	-	-	1
Artillery Batteries	-	-	1	-	-	1
Cavalry Squadrons	-	-	1	-	-	1
Construction Companies	2	-	-	2	1	5
NCO School Unit	-	-	1	-	-	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	6	20	2	2	11B; 21C

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Mitte (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Mitte (Heeresgruppe Mitte)

Ost-Ersatz-Regiment Mitte (9 Kompanien) [Became
Ost-Ausbildungs-Regiment Mitte on 10 July 1943 (handwritten note)] Kosaken Abteilung 600 (5 Kompanien)
Ost-Nachschub-Kompanie 350
Ost-Nachschub-Kompanie 354
Ost-Bataillon 633 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 634 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 635 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 636 (2 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 637 (4 Kompanien)
1. Ost-Kompanie/221
2. Ost-Reiter-Schwadron/221
Ost-Bataillon 602 (4 Kompanien)
1. Ost-Kompanie/203
2. Ost-Reiter-Schwadron/203
Ost-Bataillon 604 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Reiter-Schwadron 286
Ost-Bataillon 601 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 605 (4 Kompanien)

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Mitte (Heeresgruppe Mitte), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Kosaken	Ost	Total
Replacement Regiments	-	1	1
Cossack Cavalry Battalions	1	-	1
Infantry Battalions	-	9	9
Supply Companies	-	2	2
Infantry Companies	-	2	2
Cavalry Squadrons	-	3	3
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	1	17	1R; 10B; 7C

Heeresgruppe Mitte, Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Ethnicity	Total
Replacement Regiments	1 Ost	1
Total Regiments		1
Artillery Battalions	1 Ost	1
Cavalry Battalions	1 Ost	1
Construction Battalions	1 Turk.	1
Cossack Cavalry Battalions	3 Kosaken	3
Guard Battalions	4 Ost	4
Infantry Battalions	1 Aserb.; 1 Georg.; 2 Armen.; 3 Turk.; 35 Ost	42
Reconnaissance Battalions	1 Ost	1
Replacement Battalions	1 Ost	1
Total Battalions		54
Anti-Partisan Companies	3 Ost	3
Artillery Batteries	1 Kosaken; 2 Ost	3
Cavalry Squadrons	9 Ost	9
Construction Companies	1 Ost; 1 Wolgatat.; 2 Georg.; 14 Turk.	17
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	2 Kosaken	2
Guard Companies	2 Ost	2
Infantry Companies	1 Kosaken; 1 Wolgatat.; 2 Turk.; 55 Ost	59
NCO School Unit	1 Ost	1
Replacement Companies	1 Ost	1
Supply Companies	1 Aserb.; 1 Georg.; 3 Turk.; 7 Ost	12
Telephone Companies	2 Ost	2
Total Companies		111

Heeresgruppe Nord

Direct Attachments16. Armee 18. Armee
Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Nord
Heeresgruppe Nord, Total Eastern Troops

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Nord)

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Nord)

(In Zuführung:) Aserbeidschanische Bau-Kompanie 25
Aserbeidschanische Bau-Kompanie 87
Armenische Bau-Kompanie 254
Armenische Bau-Kompanie 257
Georgische Bau-Kompanie 127
Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie 414
Litauische Wach-Kompanie 650
Lettische Wach-Kompanie 651
Lettische Wach-Kompanie 652

Direct Attachments (Heeresgruppe Nord), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Aserb.	Georg.	Lett.	Litau.	Turk.	Total
Construction Companies	2	2	1	-	-	1	6
Guard Companies	-	-	-	2	1	-	3
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	2	2	1	2	1	1	9C

16. Armee (Heeresgruppe Nord)

16. Armee (A.O.K. 16) (Heeresgruppe Nord)

rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 584 Ost-Ersatz-Bataillon 16 (1. und 3. Kompanie in Aufstellung) [Number of companies not given]
Ost-Bataillon 667 (6 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 668 (6 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 669 (3 Kompanien in Vfg.; 3 Kompanien in Aufstellung)
Ost-Bataillon 620 (4 Kompanien)
1. Ost-Artillerie-Batterie/670
2. Ost-Artillerie-Batterie/670
Ost-Nachrichten-Kompanie 671 [Disbanded 23 August 1943]
Ost-Bataillon 653 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 654 (4 Kompanien)
Kosaken Kavallerie-Schwadron 655
Estnische Infanterie-Kompanie 657

16. Armee (Heeresgruppe Nord), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Estn.	Kosaken	Ost	Total
Replacement Battalions	-	-	1	1
Infantry Battalions	-	-	6	6
Artillery Batteries	-	-	2	2
Signals Companies	-	-	1	1
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	-	1	-	1
Infantry Companies	1	-	-	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	1	1	10	7B; 5C

18. Armee (Heeresgruppe Nord)

18. Armee (A.O.K. 18) (Heeresgruppe Nord)

rückwärtigen Armeegebiet 583 Estnisches Infanterie-Bataillon 658 (4 Kompanien)
Estnisches Infanterie-Bataillon 659 (4 Kompanien)
Estnisches Infanterie-Bataillon 660 (4 Kompanien)
Estnisches Ersatz-Bataillon Narwa (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 661 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 662 (2 Kompanien)
Ost-Ersatz-Bataillon 663 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon (Finn.) 664 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Bataillon 665 (4 Kompanien)
Ost-Pionier-Bataillon 666 (4 Kompanien)

18. Armee (Heeresgruppe Nord), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Estn.	Ost	Total
Replacement Battalions	1	1	2
Engineer Battalions	-	1	1
Infantry Battalions	3	4*	7
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	4	6	10B

* One of the Ost-Bataillone is designated as (Finn.). This probably refers Volga-Finns, and not Finns from Finland.

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Nord (Heeresgruppe Nord)

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Nord (Heeresgruppe Nord)

Ost-Reiter-Abt. 207 (3 Kompanien)

Nordkaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon 842 (2 Kompanien)*

Nordkaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon 843 (2 Kompanien)*

Armenisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./198 (5 Kompanien)
Ost-Pionier-Bataillon 672 (3 Kompanien)
Ost-Reiter-Abteilung 285
1., 2. Nordkaukasische Infanterie-Kompanie/844

Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Nord (Heeresgruppe Nord), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Nordkauk.	Nordukr.	Ost	Total
Infantry Battalions	1	-	2	-	3
Engineer Battalions	-	-	-	1	1
Cavalry Battalions	-	-	-	2	2
Infantry Companies	-	2	-	-	2
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	1	2	2	3	6B; 2C

Heeresgruppe Nord, Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Ethnicity	Total
Cavalry Battalions	2 Ost	2
Engineer Battalions	2 Ost	2
Infantry Battalions	1 Armen.; 2 Nordukr.; 3 Estn.; 10 Ost	16
Replacement Battalions	1 Estn.; 1 Ost	2
Total Battalions		22
Artillery Batteries	2 Ost	2
Construction Companies	1 Georg.; 1 Turk.; 2 Armen.; 2 Aserb.	6
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	1 Kosaken	1
Guard Companies	1 Litau.; 2 Lett.	3
Infantry Companies	1 Estn.; 2 Nordkauk.	3
Signals Companies	1 Ost	1
Total Companies		16

Oberbefehlshaber West

LXXXVIII. Armeekorps Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 787 (5 Kompanien)

Armenisches Infanterie-Bataillon 812 (5 Kompanien)

7. Armee (A.O.K. 7)

LXXXIV. Armeekorps

Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon 797 (5 Kompanien)

76. Infanterie-Division

Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon 798 (5 Kompanien)

1. Armee (A.O.K. 1)

Nordkaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon 803 (5 Kompanien)*

Wolgatatarisches Infanterie-Bataillon 826 (5 Kompanien)

Oberbefehlshaber West, Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Georg.	Nordukr.	Turk.	Wolgatat.	Total
Infantry Battalions	1	2	1	1	1	6
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	1	2	1	1	1	6B

Wehrmacht Befehlshaber Ukraine

2 x Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon (Schepatowka) [No other designation] Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon (6 Kompanien) (Mosyr) [No other designation]
Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon 2 (6 Kompanien)
Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon 4 (8 Kompanien)
Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon 6 (8 Kompanien)
Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon 10 (8 Kompanien)
Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon 11 (8 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 786 (5 Kompanien)
Nordkaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon 835 (5 Kompanien)
Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon 3 (8 Kompanien) (bei 1. Kavallerie-Division)
Kosaken Infanterie-Bataillon 9 (8 Kompanien) (bei 1. Kavallerie-Division)
Legionslager Shitomir
3 x Aserbeidschanische Kompanie [No type or designation given]
Legionslager Berditschew (Verlegung nach Zaslaw)
Armenische Kompanie [No type or designation given]
Legionslager Proskurow
9 x Turkestanische Kompanie [No type or designation given]
Legionslager Zaslaw
Georgische Kompanie [No type or designation given]
2 x Armenische Kompanie [No type or designation given]

Wehrmacht Befehlshaber Ukraine, Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Aserb.	Georg.	Kosaken	Nordkauk.	Turk.	Total
Infantry Battalions	-	-	-	10	1	1	12
Infantry Companies	3	3	1	-	-	9	16
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	3	3	1	10	1	10	12B; 16C

Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres

Wehrkreis im Generalgouvernement162. Infanterie-Division (turk.) 1. Kosaken-Division

Wehrkreis im Generalgouvernement (Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres)

Wehrkreis im Generalgouvernement (Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres)

Armenische Legion (BRIGADE) Legion-Führer-Schule (Legionowo) (BRIGADE)
Ostvölkisches Genesenden-Bataillon I (Kossow)
Armenisches Stamm-Bataillon
Armenische Unterführer-Kompanie
Armenisches Infanterie-Bataillon 810 (5 Kompanien)
Armenisches Infanterie-Bataillon 813 (5 Kompanien)
Armenisches Infanterie-Bataillon 809 (in Auffrischung)
Armenisches Infanterie-Bataillon 814 [Added by handwritten note dated 31 August 1943]
Aserbeidschanische Legion (REGIMENT)
Aserbeidschanisches Stamm-Bataillon
Aserbeidschanische Unterführer-Kompanie
Aserbeidschanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 817 (5 Kompanien)
Aserbeidschanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 805 (in Auffrischung)
Georgische Legion (REGIMENT)
Georgisches Stamm-Bataillon
Georgische Unterführer-Kompanie
Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon 799 (5 Kompanien)
Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon 822 (5 Kompanien)
Kaukasische Infanterie-Kompanie General Bergmann
Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon 795 (in Auffrischung)
Georgisches Infanterie-Bataillon 823 [Added by handwritten note dated 31 August 1943]
Nordkaukasische Legion (REGIMENT)
Nordkaukasisches Stamm-Bataillon
Nordkaukasische Unterführer-Kompanie
Nordkaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon 836 (5 Kompanien)
Nordkaukasisches Infanterie-Bataillon 800 (in Auffrischung)
Turkestanische Legion (REGIMENT)
Turkestanisches Stamm-Bataillon
Turkestanische Unterführer-Kompanie
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 788 (5 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 789 (5 Kompanien)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 781 (in Auffrischung)
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon 782 (in Auffrischung)
Wolgatatarische Legion (REGIMENT)
Wolgatatarisches Stamm-Bataillon
Wolgatatarische Unterführer-Kompanie
Wolgatatarische Dolmetscher-Vorschule-Kompanie
Wolgatatarisches Infanterie-Bataillon 827 [Number of companies not given]
Wolgatatarisches Infanterie-Bataillon 828 [Added by handwritten note dated 31 August 1943]
Vorlager
Zajezjerze
Malkinia
Biala Podkaska
Benjamino
Wlodawa
Demplin

Wehrmacht Befehlshaber Ukraine, Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Armen.	Aserb.	Georg.	Kauk.	Nordkauk.	Ostvölk.	Turk.	Wolgatat.	Total
Officers School (Brig.)	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	1
Convalescent Battalions	-	-	-	-	-	1	-	-	1
Reception Battalions	1	1	1	-	1	-	1	1	6
Infantry Battalions	4	2	4	-	2	-	4	2	18
NCO Companies	1	1	1	-	1	-	1	1	6
Translator Companies	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	1	1
Infantry Companies	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	7	4	6	1	4	1	6	5	1BR; 25B; 8C

162. Infanterie-Division (turk.) (Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres)

162. Infanterie-Division (turk.) (Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres)

Nachrichtenstaffel Divisions-Führer-Schule
Turkestanische Stamm-Kompanie
Wehrmacht-Instandsetzungs-Zug
Georgische Legion (REGIMENT)
Georgische Unterführer-Kompanie
Georgische Bau-Kompanie
Georgisches Ersatz-Bataillon [No other designation]
Aserbeidschanische Legion (REGIMENT)
Aserbeidschanische Unterführer-Kompanie
Aserbeidschanische Bau-Kompanie
Aserbeidschanisches Jäger-Bataillon I./97
Aserbeidschanisches Gebirgs-Bataillon I./4
Aserbeidschanisches Jäger-Bataillon I./101
Aserbeidschanisches Infanterie-Bataillon II./73
Aserbeidschanisches Ersatz-Bataillon [No other designation]
1. Turkestanische Legion (REGIMENT)
Turkestanische Unterführer-Kompanie
Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./305
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./44
Turkestanisches Ersatz-Bataillon [No other designation]
2. Turkestanische Legion (REGIMENT)
Turkestanische Unterführer-Kompanie
Turkestanische Bau-Kompanie
Turkestanisches Jäger-Bataillon I./100
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./384
Turkestanisches Infanterie-Bataillon I./297
Turkestanisches Ersatz-Bataillon [No other designation]
Vorlager
Neuhammer (mit Bau-Kompanie [No other designation])
Starakonstantinow

162. Infanterie-Division (turk.), Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Aserb.	Georg.	Turk.	Total
Replacement Battalions	1	1	2	4
Infantry Battalions	4	-	5	9
Reception Companies	-	-	1	1
Division's Officers School	-	-	1	1
Construction Companies	1	1	3	5
NCO Companies	1	1	2	4
Signals Section	-	-	1	1
Repair Platoon	-	-	1	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	7	3	16	13B; 11C; 2P

1. Kosaken-Division (Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres)

1. Kosaken-Division (Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres)

(in Aufstellung:) Kosaken Kavallerie-Regiment Don 1
Kosaken Kavallerie-Regiment Kuban 4
Kosaken Kavallerie-Regiment Terek 6
Kosaken Kavallerie-Artillerie-Regiment

1. Kosaken-Division, Total Eastern Troops:

Unit Type	Kosaken	Total
Cossack Cavalry Regiments	3	3
Artillery Regiments	1	1
Total Units by Ethnicity/Size	4	4

The Summary Table below displays the total number of Osttruppen units serving in the German Army on 5 May 1943. The regiments, battalions, companies, and platoons/sections listed in the above table include all independent units, as well as the subordinate elements of the 162. Infanterie-Division (turk.) and 1. Kosaken-Division. These totals are provided in order to allow a more immediate analysis of the type and number of Osttruppen units serving in the German Army on this date. The specific formation tables should be used for more in-depth examination of the Osttruppen units and their assignments.

Total Eastern Troops, 5 May 1943:

Unit Type	Ethnicity	Total
Artillery Regiments	1 Kosaken	1
Cavalry Regiments	2 Kalmuken	2
Cossack Cavalry Regiments	5 Kosaken	5
Infantry Regiments	1 Turk.	1
Replacement Regiments	1 Ost	1
Total Regiments		10
Artillery Battalions	1 Ost	1
Cavalry Battalions	4 Ost	4
Cavalry Training Battalions	1 Ost	1
Construction Battalions	1 Ost; 5 Turk.; 6 Ukrain.	12
Convalescent Battalions	1 Ostvölk.	1
Cossack Cavalry Battalions	10 Kosaken	10
Cossack Cavalry Training Battalions	1 Kosaken	1
Engineer Battalions	2 Ost	2
Guard Battalions	5 Ost	5
Infantry Battalions	1 Ukrain.; 3 Estn.; 3 Nordukr.; 3 Wolgatat.; 4 Nordkauk.; 8 Armen.; 10 Aserb.; 10 Georg.; 10 Kosaken; 21 Turk.; 45 Ost	118
Ordnance Battalions	2 Turk.	2
Reception Battalions	1 Armen.; 1 Aserb.; 1 Georg.; 1 Nordkauk.; 1 Turk.; 1 Wolgatat.	6
Reconnaissance Battalions	1 Ost	1
Replacement Battalions	1 Aserb.; 1 Estn.; 1 Georg; 1 Turk.; 2 Ost	6
Total Battalions		170
Anti-Partisan Companies	3 Ost	3
Artillery Batteries	1 Kosaken; 4 Ost	5
Cavalry Squadrons	9 Ost	9
Construction Companies	1 Wolgatat.; 2 Ost; 3 Ukrain.; 4 Armen.; 6 Aserb.; 6 Georg.; 18 Turk.	40
Cossack Cavalry Squadrons	9 Kosaken	9
Division Officers School	1 Turk.	1
Guard Companies	1 Litau.; 1 Turk.; 2 Lett.; 2 Ukrain.; 3 Georg.; 4 Ost	13
Hiwi Companies	2 Ost	2
Infantry Companies	1 Estn.; 1 Georg.; 1 Kosaken; 1 Ukrain.; 1 Wolgatat.; 2 Kauk.; 2 Nordkauk.; 3 Armen.; 3 Aserb.; 12 Turk.; 60 Ost	87
Mine Clearing Companies	1 Ost	1
Motor Pool Companies	1 Ukrain.	1
Motor Transport Companies	1 Ost	1
NCO Companies	1 Armen.; 1 Nordkauk.; 1 Wolgatat.; 2 Aserb.; 2 Georg.; 3 Turk.	10
NCO School Units	1 Ost	1
Reception Companies	1 Ost; 1 Turk.	2
Signals Companies	1 Ost	1
Supply Columns	1 Turk.; 3 Ost	4
Supply Companies	1 Aserb.; 1 Kauk.; 2 Ukrain.; 3 Armen.; 6 Georg.; 7 Ost; 8 Turk.	28
Telephone Companies	2 Ost	2
Translator Companies	1 Wolgatat.	1
Total Companies		221
Repair Platoons	1 Turk,	1
Signals Section	1 Turk.	1
Telephone Operation Sections	9 Ost	9
Total Platoons/Sections		11

Additional Sources:
Munoz, Antonio J. Hitler's Eastern Legions Volume II: The Osttruppen. New York: Axis Europa, Inc., 1997.
Tessin, Georg. Verbände und Truppen der deutschen Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS 1939 - 1945: Band 1 - 14. Osnabrück, Germany: Biblio Verlag, 1976.

Research: Forrest Opper and Jason von Zerneck

*Corrections by Victor N. Titov

ROA in Czechoslovakia May 1945

2010-03-02T15:21:00.000+08:00

Russia reflects on sixty-five years since the Soviet Union's World War Two victory

2010-02-27T23:36:00.000+08:00

This online supplement is produced and published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russia), which takes sole responsibility for the content.

Alexander Mekhanik, Expert magazine

Something has changed in Russia. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the values on which Soviet society was based – and after two decades of hard times – the search is on for a firm footing in values and ideology. Attention has focused on the Second World War, especially the question of what we were fighting for.

It seems, in Russia and in the rest of the world, that there are two points of view about the war. The first holds that Stalin's regime was undoubtedly tyrannical, but the war was fought for humanitarian values and freedom. The Soviet Union made a decisive contribution to the victory of these values, though it was certainly no showcase for them.

The second may be called the revisionist one, that the Second World War was in fact two wars: the one on the Western Front a battle for democratic ideals and freedom; the other, on the Eastern Front, between tyrants seeking to oppress and enslave nations.

One Russian political analyst has even written that, while the Western allies were fighting for democratic ideals, most people in the Soviet Union had little idea of either democracy or Nazism, and were simply fighting for the Motherland. And even then they thought long and hard before fighting: Stalin's regime had so "exhausted" them that many were ready simply to surrender. This, in part, explains why Russia lost the early stages of the war.
Most Soviet citizens fought simply for their Motherland, with no thought of ideology; the same can be said about most people in the anti-Nazi countries and those who fought in the Resistance. It is true that all the enemies of Germany and Japan also lost ground in the early stages of the war.

If one pursues the logic further, then, evidently, the French, as well as the Czechs, Belgians, Dutch and others, had been "exhausted" by democracy. That isn't too far from the truth: democratic positions, as we now know, were seriously undermined throughout Europe as a result of the First World War and the Great Depression. This preordained the victory of the fascists and the Nazis in Italy and Germany.

One shouldn't forget that the younger Soviet generation supported the regime because it had allowed them to have educations and careers that before had been off-limits to them. They were fighting, if you will, for the Soviet Dream, for anyone having the chance to become, if not general secretary of the Communist Party, then at least a marshal or a people's commissar.

Who was the backbone of the Resistance in France? Supporters of de Gaulle and the communists. De Gaulle could not be called a consistent democrat. In his youth he was, after all, close to the right-wing thinker Charles Maurras.

The countries that conducted a real underground partisan battle and put up a genuinely fierce resistance to the Germans were ones that had not been especially democratic before Nazism: Poland, Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Resistance leaders in these countries, such as Josip Tito and Enver Hoxha, could hardly be called democrats.

Indeed, only a small group of countries were then democracies, and far from contemporary notions of what a true democracy should be. Think of segregation in the United States; think of the state of human rights in British, French and other European colonies. In Eastern Europe there was real democracy only in Czechoslovakia: in Poland you had the Sanacja regime; in Lithuania Smetona's dictatorship; in Latvia Ulmanis's dictatorship; in Hungary you had the dictatorship of Horthy; and in Romania that of Antonescu.

Indeed, it's not a question of the moods of the warring countries, their citizens and leaders, or of their political systems: it's a question of the objective nature of a war which, from the point of view of the anti-Hitler coalition, was a war to preserve humanitarian and democratic values; a war for freedom in the highest sense of the word. This does not change the nature of the Soviet regime and its crimes, or the crimes of the English and the French in their colonies, or the discrimination against blacks and the lynch mobs in the US.

The question of what the communists were fighting for or, more broadly, the question of the values of communists in the USSR and in Europe is far more complex. The Russian Revolution was brought about by people who believed that the road they had chosen was the only possible road to a consistent democracy combining political and social freedoms.

During the Second World War those same people believed that they were fighting for their ideals. This is the fundamental difference between communism and fascism/Nazism, which in principle rejected democracy as an institution. One has only to compare the works of classic communists, from Marx to Lenin, with those of fascists/Nazis, such as Maurras, Mussolini, Hitler, et al.

It is not just the attitude toward democracy; it is the common spirit of universalism, humanism and cosmopolitanism that distinguished classic communism from the spirit of anti-humanism and chauvinism in fascism. Despite all the transformations, Soviet communism in those years still reflected classic values.

However one feels about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it did not run counter to the logic of the behaviour of leading countries in Europe at the time toward fascist Germany. From Britain to Poland and from Norway to Greece, all were trying to come to an understanding with Hitler behind each other's backs and at each other's expense.

First, the socialists and liberals of France, conservatives and labourites in Britain, and their European colleagues betrayed the Spanish Republic led by fellow socialists and liberals by allowing it to be torn apart by German and Italian fascists.

Then England and France, along with Poland and Hungary, betrayed Czechoslovakia. And between these betrayals they closed their eyes to Hitler's annexation of Austria. What could the Soviet leadership expect from such players? Another betrayal.

When France and England (after Germany invaded Poland) declared war, they were "just pretending". Small wonder that this war came to be known as the phoney war. This, evidently, is what Stalin was afraid of when he concluded his pact with Hitler: in the West there would be a pretend war, but in the East there would be a real one.

To all appearances, Stalin foresaw an extended war in the West and did not want to be left alone with Hitler. A highly rational, if not always highly moral, foreign policy combined with a domestic policy that was irrational in its terrorism: that was the trademark Stalinist style.

If the irrational anti-Semitism of the Nazis can be attributed to centuries-old prejudices peculiar to all of Europe, then the Stalinist terror cannot be attributed to anything but fear: fear of the ruling classes of old Russia that had suffered defeat in the Civil War; fear of the enemies real and imagined in one's own party; fear of the anarchic element in the peasantry, and so on. These fears were in part justified, but they assumed a paranoid form.

Responding to criticisms that he and Khrushchev did not do enough to expose Stalin's crimes, former first deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan reportedly said: "We couldn't do that because then everyone would have known what scoundrels we were."

That, too, is the difference between communism and Nazism: the communist scoundrels understood who they were because they realised the gulf separating them from the ideals they revered; the Nazis liked being scoundrels – that was their ideal.

Many historians and politicians in the new countries that rose from the ruins of the Soviet Union justify the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists and Lithuanian guerrillas on two fronts during the Second World War (against the Nazis and the communists) by saying that neither side in this "clash of tyrants" was better than the other; that these members of small nations were simply fighting tyranny. This is disingenuous: similar formations fought on the side of the Nazis and only towards the end of the Third Reich did they attempt to feign resistance.

The Second World War was no ordinary war. It was possibly the only war in history that was fought against absolute evil, a fight that united idealists defending their ideals, cynics defending their interests, and even scoundrels trying to incinerate their sins in the flames of a great struggle.

Together, they were all, like all the people who fought in that war, defending their Motherland, their life and their home in the present and the future – freedom for themselves and all mankind.

Soviet People’s Experience WWII

2010-02-23T11:47:00.000+08:00

Defeating the Nazis became the animating force for everything in Soviet society for the next four years. The need to defend Mother Russia became everyone’s duty in the face of Hitler’s barbarism, and the building of socialism, so long trumpeted on the pages of the Soviet press, faded away. The result was the rapid development of a mosaic of moods among the Soviet peoples. Russian historians have recently argued that the events of June 1941 awoke in the Soviet people the ability to think about variants, to critically evaluate a situation, and not to take the existing order as immutable. The effort to repel the Nazis also meant that, at least at the local level of Soviet life, the democratic centralism of Lenin and Stalin’s party was no longer tenable. The key criterion for becoming a Soviet leader was no longer a person’s party loyalty, but rather his or her contributions to the work of the front. Out in the provinces, the Communist leaders were told to train their subordinates in the following fashion: the party is interested in having people think, and stop instructing the masses and learn from them.

That life in the Soviet Union would now be shaped by the real interests of ordinary people was a big change from the 1930s, when life had been shaped by their imaginary desires, and Stalin’s terror squads had made sure the elites worked to meet them. Meanwhile, Hitler’s armies were well on their way toward Leningrad, Moscow, and central Ukraine by July 1941. Leningrad was soon surrounded and would be under siege for the next three and a half years as 1.5 million Leningrad residents starved to death in the process. The main reason Moscow did not suffer the same fate was Hitler’s decision to concentrate his efforts on capturing Ukraine with its fertile fields, coal mines, ferrous metals resources, and strategic access to the oilfields of the Caucasus. Although the Red Army’s successful counterattacks were another major reason for tl1is diversion to the south, there can be little doubt that Ukraine was also the area that Hitler prized most as the perfect lebensraum for the German people. And such strategic and racial motivations also help explain why Hitler did not take advantage of his being greeted as a liberator by the peoples of western Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic states who had suffered so much from the Nazi—Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.

Although the Nazis treated these peoples as "lesser-beings” (untermenschen) from the start and would not allow them any rights whatsoever, what really convinced the Ukrainians and others of 1·litler’s malevolent intentions toward the Soviet people was the German army’s treatment of its Red Army POWs and the occupied Jewish population. ln places such as Kiev, where 650,000 Soviet troops were surrounded in September 1941 after a spirited defense of the Ukrainian capital and the Dnieper River region, perhaps two-thirds of the Soviet POWs died of hunger in Nazi captivity. lt was amid the euphoria of such victories in fall 1941 that the Hitlerites devised their Final Solution to rid these captured areas of their "great misfortune"—the Jews. ln the end, almost half the Jews who died in the Holocaust (some 2.5 million people) were Soviet citizens. Importantly, some of these people died in ways more ghastly than the gas chambers of Poland—mass machine gunning was the most popular method used—as the Nazis, the Wehrmacht (or German army), and a still unknown number of local collaborators experimented with methods of killing to find the most efficient way to achieve genocide. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the surviving Ukrainian and Belorussian civilian populations could only hope for the return of the Stalinists and an authoritarian rule that they understood and might be able to manipulate to their advantage.

ln the face of such calamities, Stalin’s effort to maintain control over the Russian rear certainly did not show any relaxation of his coercive methods. Red Army men who surrendered, for example, were said to be traitors and were liable to court-martial. Meanwhile, Communist Party members who remained behind on occupied territory were automatically suspect, and if for some reason they crossed back into Soviet-held territory, they were subject to a rigorous check of their backgrounds. Workers who violated the 1940 labor legislation on tardiness, absenteeism, or the prohibition of movement from one job to another could be hauled before a military tribunal and the same eventually became true for those civilians who ignored compulsory labor mobilizations, responsibilities that impacted everyone but the elderly and the mothers of young children.

Stalin’s epic mistakes on the battlefield were soon overshadowed by Hitler’s own bungling, and the Soviets found themselves with a second chance. The Nazi leader’s earlier decision not to take Moscow ensured that fighting for the Russian capital would take place in the winter, only after the Soviets had had enough time to prepare their defenses. Nevertheless, it was mainly the desperate resistance and simple patriotism of rapidly enlisted men and rearguard troops that saved Moscow in winter 1941-1942 from the Wehrmacht’s ”Army Group Center” But the GKO’s incredibly centralized, command-and-administer system also allowed for the Ural and western Siberian economies to be quickly mobilized to meet the needs of the front. This was particularly important in winter 1941-1942 because the strategic Lend-Lease aid from the Soviet Union’s new American ally would not substantively help the Soviet war effort for another year. Even so, Stalin’s refusal to let his more able generals lead the efforts at the front resulted in yet more devastating defeats in spring 1942, with the Nazis now occupying all of Ukraine and moving toward their strategic goal of taking southern Russia and the Caucasus.

Here again, though, the Soviets were saved from themselves by Hitler’s hubris. The Nazi leader’s greatest strategic mistake came with his decision to try to destroy the besieged city of Stalingrad in fall 1942 in order to deal a public relations blow to the "man of steel." Hitler could have concentrated his efforts on occupying the Caucasus and Kuban (Russia’s own breadbasket) and exploiting their petroleum and agricultural resources in order to solidify his rule over his new eastern empire. But he went after Stalingrad in an effort to inflict a decisive blow against the Kremlin leader’s omnipotent presence in Soviet society. Stalin recognized the stakes too, and after a year of terrible retreat, he finally decided to listen to his generals and make a stand at this city lying along the Volga River The crucial point here is that the Wehrmacht was spread too thin by this time; Hitler did not have the resources necessary to continue his blitzkrieg. The Wehrmacht’s supply lines, for example, were stretched to the breaking point. Thus, the Soviets were eventually able to surround the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad and destroy it after Hitler stubbornly refused to let Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus retreat. This was the beginning of the end for the Germans—the crucial turning point in the war—where the logistics of what they were doing caught up with them. Hitler’s refusal to fully mobilize his own people and l1is murderous treatment of the untermenschen now meant the fighting initiative went over to the Soviet side.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s refusal to demand sacrifice from his own population resulted in anger and embitterment among the occupied Ukrainians and Belorussians as their sons and daughters were shipped to Germany to become slave laborers (Ostarbeitery). As the Soviets loomed on the eastern horizon, the Germans liberalized their agricultural policy by dissolving Stalin’s hated collective farms; however, at the same time, they were also stripping these areas of anything of value. Not only did the Germans seize raw materials, but they also took tools and macl1ines from factories and valuables from the republics’ museums and private apartments as well. One result of all this was a huge expansion in the forest—based anti—Nazi guerilla movement during 1943. True, many of these partisan fighters were motivated by a desire to curry favor with the advancing Red Army; but in the westernmost regions of the Soviet Union’s post—1939 borders, many partisans were there to fight sincerely for their nation’s political independence as Europe’s two totalitarian empires clashed. These "forest brothers," many of whom were as hostile to Moscow as they were to Berlin, would eventually be crushed by the NKVD after war’s end. However, their bravery and unhappy end deepened the hostility that many subject peoples felt toward Moscow.

British Returning Soviet Prisoners end of WWII

2010-01-29T21:29:00.000+08:00

Betrayal of Cossacks at Lientz. Painting by S.G.Korolkoff

At first the administration had no reservations about handing over to the Russians even unwilling Soviet citizens. In June 1945, for example, the Combined Chiefs of Staff authorized SACMED Field Marshal Alexander to transfer to the Soviet authorities approximately 50,000 Cossacks who had been serving with the German armed forces at the time of their capture. But the pressure on Washington had a cumulative effect, especially as public opposition to forced repatriation increased and there were no American soldiers in territories under Soviet control. Finally, on 21 December 1945, the commanding general of U.S. forces in the European Theater and the commander in chief of U.S. forces of occupation in Austria were instructed not to compel the involuntary repatriation of persons who had been citizens of and actually had resided within the Soviet Union on 1 September 1939 but who did not fall into any of the following classes: those captured in German uniform; those who had been members of the Soviet armed forces on or after 22 June 1941 and who had not subsequently been discharged; and those who had been charged by the Soviet Union with having voluntarily rendered aid and comfort to the enemy. By the time these instructions were given, more than 2 million Soviet citizens had already been repatriated from western Germany. This left only approximately 20,000 Soviet citizens in the U.S. zone in Germany. Moscow had attained its goal, but so had Washington: it achieved the quick repatriation of U.S. pows liberated by the Red Army all together approximately one-third of all U.S. pows and at the same time succeeded in ridding itself of the responsibility for millions of unwanted Soviet citizens in western parts of Germany.

The dispute between the British and the Soviets became public when, on 30 April 1945, Pravda published an interview with Colonel General Filip Golikov, head of the Soviet Repatriation Committee.�Golikov compared a figure of more than 1.5 million Soviet citizens repatriated from areas overrun by the Red Army with the lowly figure of 35,000 Soviets repatriated out of a total of more than 150,000 liberated by the Allies. Thousands of Soviet citizens, he claimed, were forced to wait many months for transport to their native land. Not everywhere, he charged, were former Soviet pows being treated as citizens of an Allied power. The Russian repatriation official then gave several examples of breaches of the Yalta agreement by the Allies: failure to report the presence of more than 1,700 Soviet citizens in three American-run camps in Britain; failure to hand over 300 Soviet citizens whose existence in Britain was known; efforts to deter Soviet citizens in Egypt from returning to the Soviet Union; failure to properly segregate Soviet pows from Germans in Camp 307 in Egypt; and failure to expedite the return to the Soviet Union of 1,156 Soviet officers and men. Sick Russians, furthermore, were being sent to German camp hospitals. Local censorship, he asserted, had prevented the Soviet repatriation administration from discovering these infamies until much later.

While the Foreign Office preferred to avoid public recriminations with Golikov for fear that this would poison the atmosphere further and impede finding solutions to thorny pow questions, Whitehall recognized that they could not entirely ignore Soviet propaganda, especially as Golikov’s statements had given rise to a number of parliamentary questions. On 2 May, for example, mp Thomas Henry Hewlett asked the foreign secretary ‘‘whether, in view of the excellent treatment given by the Russians to British prisoners of war whom they liberate, he can state whether special effort is made to extend similar treatment to Russian prisoners of war liberated by the British.’’ Undersecretary of State Richard Law dispelled ‘‘misleading statements’’ that had appeared in the press about British officials’ treatment of Soviet citizens liberated by British forces. Law told the House that many of the large numbers of Soviet citizens who had been liberated by the advancing Anglo-American armies since D-Day had been, or were at the time of their liberation, serving in the Todt and other German official criminal organizations; furthermore, a considerable number of them had fallen into Allied hands while still in German uniform. Law’s tactic was first to categorize the Soviet citizens as German collaborators and then to state that the vast majority of Soviet pows had been forced to serve the Germans against their will.

Members of Parliament were further told that 42,421 Soviet citizens had been repatriated from the United Kingdom and the Mediterranean area since October 1944; to this figure ought to be added the 14,565 liberated by U.S. forces. With the exception of one ship provided by the Americans, all the shipping and other transport for these 56,986 Soviet citizens had been provided by London, which meant there were less funds for other vital purposes. Pointing a finger at the Soviets, Law contended that the remaining Soviet citizens in western Europe could have been repatriated much earlier if the Soviet government had also provided shipping. For their part, the Soviet authorities had notified Britain of 3,854 British subjects liberated by their forces up to 21 April 1945; of these, 3,639 had passed through the camp in Odessa, which was the most advanced point to which the Soviet authorities had allowed British officers to have regular access. In this case, too, British shipping alone had been employed to bring these men home. Law concluded by giving a hint of Whitehall’s dissatisfaction with the Soviets’ decision to go public with their criticism.

Germany puts names of 700,000 captured Soviets online

2009-11-19T16:14:00.000+08:00

German authorities put online Monday the names of 700,000 captured Soviet soldiers, most of whom died in horrific Nazi prison camps during the Second World War.

The lists had previously been kept by German authorities who help people in former Soviet nations to discover how their menfolk died.

"Now people will be able to do the research all by themselves," said Klaus-Dieter Mueller, chief librarian of the State of Saxony Memorials Foundation in Dresden, which manages several state-run concentration-camp memorials that expose Nazi crimes.

The twin websites, www.dokst.de and www.dokst.ru, contain the full alphabetical list of men in German and in Russian, starting with the vital data of Erich Aawik, an Estonian born in 1919 who died in German captivity on November 24, 1943.
The German library has been digitizing the data since 2000 with help from the Russian, Ukraine and Belarus authorities. Officials said more names would be added as new information came to light.

Nazi Germany breached the Geneva conventions on prisoners of war in its treatment of Red Army captives, using them as slaves and confining them in near starvation and disease. Relatives often still do not know how the men disappeared of where their remains are. Internet: www.dokst.de www.dokst.ru

Soviet Prisoners of War, 1941 to 1945

2009-10-27T12:41:00.001+08:00

Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) constitute one of the major groups that fell victim to Nazi German mass violence. For territories under German military occupation, the Department of Military Administration, Quartermaster General in the Supreme Command of Ground Troops (OKH) was in charge of Soviet POWs, whereas in Germany and areas under German civil administration, responsibility lay with the General Administration of the Armed Forces under the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). Prior to the attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941, German military authorities had decided that international law would not apply to Soviet POWs (unlike Polish, French, or British prisoners), with minimal provisions made for their shelter, food, transport, and medical supplies. Later Soviet proposals that both sides act in accordance with the Hague and Geneva Conventions were refused by Germany. On OKW instructions, most Soviet POWs were not registered by name in the camps in Soviet areas under German military occupation (Durchgangslager, or Dulags), and consequently no lists were passed on from these camps to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Following the German invasion, huge numbers of Red Army soldiers were captured, especially in July, September, and October 1941. Crammed into camps of up to 100,000 men, poorly fed, often without housing or sanitary provisions, the prisoners soon suffered from debilitation. Certain groups of military personnel were denied POW status: On Adolf Hitler’s instruction, the OKW issued its “commissar order” on June 6, 1941, according to which political officers in the Red Army were shot in 1941 and 1942. Other groups killed by German troops included Soviet soldiers shot on the battlefield although they had surrendered, alleged Jews, in many camps so-called Asians, women in the Red Army, and in some camps Soviet officers. Orders for these killings originated from platoon to army command levels. More than 100,000 prisoners were handed over to the SS and police in 1941 and 1942; very few survived. In addition, an undetermined number of Soviet POWs, believed to be in the six-digit range, were shot by military guards because of their fatigue during marches or when unloading trains that had transported POWs. In certain German-occupied Soviet areas, Soviet military stragglers were killed instead of being taken prisoner, as were most Soviet partisan fighters. The Germans arbitrarily interned Soviet civilians in several POW camps in 1941.

The German capture of large numbers of prisoners in similarly short time periods had not led to mass deaths in the German campaign against France in 1940. The majority of Soviet POWs died as a result of the deliberate undersupply of food, consequent starvation, frost, and hunger-related diseases. Prior to attacking the USSR, German authorities had planned the killing of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in “food-deficient” regions and in urban areas through starvation and a policy of brutal occupation. Racist and anticommunist, that scheme was to make good the overall German food deficit and to relieve the critical shortage of supplies for troops at the Eastern Front, perceived as crucial for the success of the giant military campaign. Thus, the plan was backed and co-initiated by the military. As military supplies always took priority, Soviet POWs became one of the specific groups targeted for extinction.

In October 1941 food rations particularly for Soviet POWs considered “unfit for labor” were significantly reduced. On November 13 the German Quartermaster- General Eduard Wagner stated, “Soviet POWs unfit for labor in the camps have to die of starvation” (Notes of the Chief of Staff of the 18th Army, quoted in Streit, 1997, p. 157). In many camps those “fit for labor” were separated from those deemed unfit. Yet as guards often mistreated both groups equally and prisoners were worked to exhaustion with insufficient food, this intended distinction scarcely made any difference and initially fit prisoners perished, too. Death figures shot up to 2 percent daily, especially in the German-occupied Soviet and Polish territories. Nearly two out of three million Soviet POWs had died by the end of 1941. Measures to reduce the mortality rate, adopted from December on, only succeeded in the spring of 1942. However, hard labor, poor rations, and bad treatment continued to take their toll until 1945. Orders by the German leadership were countered with brutality, violence, or gross neglect on the ground. Military and economic considerations, racism against Slavs, Jews, and so-called Asians, and anticommunism were at the core of interrelated motives.

In total, out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs, about three million died in German captivity, almost exclusively at the hands of the German military. Serious calculations, based on the interpretation of fragmentary German documents, range from “at least” 2.53 million to 3.3 million (Streit, 1997), with death figures revised downward for camps inside Germany on the basis of German records discovered in Russia and Germany in the late 1990s. Adding to their suffering, Soviet POWs returning to the USSR encountered collective suspicion and many were imprisoned without proper trial, as about a million had been forced or agreed under pressure to work for the German army, with hundreds of thousands fighting for the German army or SS under arms.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Streim, A. (1981). Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener im “Fall Barbarossa.” Heidelberg, Germany: C. F. Müller.

Streit, C. (1978/1997). Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941–1945, 4^th edition. Bonn, Germany: Dietz.

Streit, C. (2000). “Soviet Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Wehrmacht.” War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941-44, eds. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann. New York: Berghahn.

NEU EUROPA - NO ROOM FOR RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉS

2009-10-27T10:09:00.000+08:00

The Russian émigrés would certainly not be welcomed back. Not only had they done nothing for their homeland, but the simple fact was that ‘Russia had been conquered with German blood for the protection of Europe against Russia’. When shortly after the German invasion of the USSR the Russian Grand Duke Vladimir, then living in exile at St Briac in France, forwarded to Hitler a proposed proclamation calling on all Russians to cooperate with the Wehrmacht in their liberation from Bolshevism, he was immediately and sharply rebuffed. The proclamation, Ribbentrop wrote to Abetz, would hinder rather than assist the German war effort in that it would provide the Bolsheviks with an opportunity to claim that ‘Russia was now threatened by the return of the old Tsarist feudalism’.

There was of course never any question that the war Hitler unleashed in June 1941 was being fought for German ends and that the benefits accruing to other nations, though significant, not least the final exorcism of the red peril, were essentially incidental. During the 1930s Hitler had never portrayed Germany’s mission in Europe as anything other than a defensive bulwark against Bolshevism. Now, with his armies swarming towards Leningrad and Moscow, he was hardly likely to share his prize, particularly with states that had at best reacted with lukewarm support for the original Anti-Comintern Pact. When in mid-July 1941 a Vichy French newspaper suggested that the assault on the USSR was ‘Europe’s war’, and thus ought ‘to be conducted for Europe as a whole’, Hitler was appalled by this latest manifestation of Gallic impudence. In the course of the conference at which this issue was discussed, the Führer clearly outlined his intentions and the tactics he would employ to implement them. ‘In principle we have now to face the task of cutting the giant cake according to our needs,’ he explained, the order of priorities being ‘first, to dominate it; second, to administer it; and third, to exploit it’. In pursuit of these goals Germany would disguise its real aims in the Soviet Union through the simple expedients of avoiding superfluous declarations, emphasizing that the Reich had been forced to a military decision, and posing as a liberating force; it made no sense to ‘make people into enemies prematurely and unnecessarily’. The Germans would thus ‘act as though we wanted to exercise a mandate only’, but it must be clear ‘to us … that we shall never withdraw from these areas’.

These predatory designs soon brought the Germans into conflict with those who genuinely hoped for liberation from Bolshevism. In the Ukraine, for example, the establishment in September 1941 of the civilian administration under Erich Koch, who, according to a postwar account based on the experiences of both Germans and Ukrainians, demonstrated no intention of enlisting the help of the Ukrainians in the fight against Bolshevism, effectively destroyed the friendly relationship that had been established between the Wehrmacht and the indigenous population. As an early victory was expected, it was felt that Ukrainian participation in the struggle would serve only to complicate German aims in the Ukraine, especially in so far as these concerned its economic exploitation, for which the ‘most stringent measures’ were envisaged. Already by October 1941 the information that was reaching London about the nature of the German occupation led the Foreign Office to comment on the ‘grave psychological mistakes’ the Germans had made in handling the conquered population, for ‘their methods can only serve to rally the Russian people round the [Soviet] regime’. The thoroughly inappropriate nature of German policy and propaganda in the occupied territories was similarly highlighted by two collaborating Soviet officers who complained that it was simply not enough to stress the deprivations Bolshevism had inflicted on the Russian people. By late 1942 this repetitive and uninspiring message was becoming increasingly ineffective, not least as Soviet prisoners of war and the inhabitants of the occupied territories generally held that rule by Germany, far from being a liberation, was altogether a ‘bad bargain’. In contrast to the sterile monotony of German propaganda, Stalin, who had reintroduced religious freedom and curtailed the activities of the political commissars, had ‘taken the trumps out of Germany’s hands’.

Those in control of the Reich’s propaganda campaign in the east would not necessarily have disagreed with this diagnosis. Goebbels realized that the organizational chaos of German policy in the occupied territories was having a most detrimental effect on the battle for people’s minds. In April 1943 he commented on the failure to exploit Vlassov’s separatist army more effectively, which he held to be symptomatic of a fundamental flaw in the whole approach to the Russian war. ‘One is shocked at the absolute lack of political instinct in our Central Berlin Administration,’ he noted in this connection. ‘If we were pursuing or had pursued a rather more skilful policy in the East, we would certainly be further on there than we are.’ The Reich propaganda minister was certainly no friend of the Russian people, but he was not above admitting that mistakes had been made in the German conduct of the war; nor was he blind to the fact that a wiser occupation policy might have yielded significant results. Commenting on Vidkun Quisling’s observations on the German campaign in the east, Goebbels clearly agreed that it would be both possible and desirable to mobilize large sections of the Russian population against Stalin if only ‘we knew how to wage war solely against Bolshevism, not against the Russian people. Therein lies the only chance of bringing the war in the East to a satisfactory end.’

Goebbels’s’ colleague, Eberhardt Taubert, placed the responsibility for the hopeless conditions in the east squarely on the shoulders of Alfred Rosenberg, who had been appointed minister for the occupied territories shortly after the launching of Barbarossa. Taubert pointed out that Rosenberg had not only blamed the Jews for Bolshevism, but also the Russian people for tolerating it. Due to impurities of blood, the Russian had, in Rosenberg’s view, a ‘natural affinity to the destructive ideologies of Bolshevism’. It might be, Taubert continued, that Rosenberg had not fully thought out the consequences of his actions, but that did not excuse his whole notion of the Russians as Untermenschen being the product of a false conception. Moreover, Rosenberg had possessed insufficient strength of character to rectify his mistake once the detrimental effects had become apparent. Although Taubert’s diatribe against Rosenberg is understandable, if only for the obstacles the incompetent Reichsleiter placed before the German propagandists in the east, it might yet be a little harsh on a man who in March 1942 was warning against any reference to the occupied territories as German ‘colonial territory’, as this greatly annoyed the local populations and played directly into the hands of the Soviet propagandists.

Prisoners in Nazi Hell!

2009-09-21T14:28:00.000+08:00

Soviet POWS in Auschwitz-Birkenau

2009-08-29T00:56:00.001+08:00

Although there were a large number of Nazi concentration camps, the one that since World War II has come to represent them all and act as a symbol of the atrocity of the Holocaust is Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose remains continue to be visited by many thousands of tourists every year. Situated just outside the Polish town of Oswiecim, near Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau is also the largest mass murder site documented anywhere in history. Established first in May 1940 on territory occupied by Germany at the onset of World War II, Auschwitz soon emerged as the central killing center for Jews murdered by National Socialism and its allies. In less than five years some 1.1 million victims perished, overwhelmingly Jews, but also 75,000 Poles, 25,000 Roma and Sinti travelers, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and thousands of others—including many clergy and other persons opposed to Nazism on conscientious grounds. Its sheer size, slave labor facilities, and its bureaucratic management of genocide have made Auschwitz a central—often exemplary—part of the Holocaust story.

Finally, Nazi population policy— especially following the invasion of the USSR in June 1941—grew more intense and ambitious toward “undesirable elements.” By the summer of 1941, Russian prisoners quickly outnumbered surviving Polish workers at Auschwitz, receiving even worse treatment and being worked to death at even greater rates: of nearly 12,000 laborers, only 150 Russian POWs survived their first year building Auschwitz. In a related development for “solving” Nazism’s “demographic problems,” Russian POWs were also the first group gassed by the pesticide Zyklon-B, in September 1941, at the initiative of Höss’s deputy, Karl Fritsch, in the infamous punishment cells of Block 11. Previous attempts at mass murder by the Third Reich through shooting, explosives, injections, and carbon monoxide tanks and engine fumes were all superseded by the efficiency and availability of Fritsch’s successful experiment with Zyklon-B.

Book Review: Der Weg zurück: Die Repatriierung sowjetischer Zwangsarbeiter während und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg.

2009-08-02T19:30:00.000+08:00

Ulrike Goeken-Haidl. Der Weg zurück: Die Repatriierung sowjetischer Zwangsarbeiter während und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006. 574 pp. EUR 39.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89861-615-7.

Reviewed by Leonid Rein (International Institute for Holocaust Research Yad Vashem)
Published on H-German (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

The Origins of the Cold War

The front cover of Ulrike Goeken-Haidl's book is somewhat misleading. It shows happy Soviet citizens returning home after the years of experiencing forced labor, POW, and concentration camps at the hands of the National Socialists. But the story told in this book is anything but happy. It begins with the story of Lieutenant Jakob Dzhugashvili, the son of Josef Stalin from his first marriage, who was captured by Germans in July 1941 and committed suicide in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, knowing that at home in the Soviet Union, he and his comrades in misfortune, Soviet soldiers and officers taken prisoner by the Germans, were classified as "traitors of the Motherland." This striking example opens a very interesting, quite readable study that makes an important contribution to research on the processes that followed World War II, the origins of Cold War, and especially the problem of repatriation, which is still insufficiently studied.

Using Soviet and American records, Goeken-Haidl shows in eight chapters of her voluminous study the origins of the problem of displaced persons and the entire process of the repatriation of the 2.3 million Soviet citizens who, for various reasons, found themselves outside the borders of the Soviet Union at war's end. This problem dwarfed that of the 360,000 citizens of western Allied countries in similar situations, including some 50,000 British and American soldiers and officers captured by Wehrmacht and Japan strike forces. This huge displacement and its resolution stretched from the years when hostilities in Europe and the Far East were still in progress, through several decades beyond the end of World War II. The author places the repatriation problem in the broader context of the beginning of the Cold War. Paradoxically, the hardline position of the Soviet Union and its insistence upon repatriation of all its citizens outside its borders for any reason actually hindered the growth of the minority problem in Europe, which had been one of the main causes of the outbreak of the war.

In her study, Goeken-Haidl analyzes the reasons behind the decisions of all sides in the repatriation question. The United States adopted a mixed stance in response to the harsh Soviet position, which insisted on the return of all of its citizens, no matter the reason for their capture--including people with explicit or implicit reasons to avoid repatriation, such as Wehrmacht soldiers who had deserted the Red Army to fight against the Soviet regime or former residents of areas such as the Baltic states, which had been annexed in 1939-40 as a consequence of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. (The Soviet Union also insisted that Soviet repatriation personnel be accredited to work in U.S. or British DP camps.) Although the U.S. military had pursued what the author calls an "appeasement" strategy during the war, making every effort to meet Soviet demands and respond to complaints, no matter how absurd, in order not alienate their Soviet allies, the State Department had advocated a more rigid response to Soviet demands and pretensions right from the start. As Goeken-Haidl shows, the United States and Britain were quite vulnerable, as the Soviets held a number of British and American soldiers who had been held prisoner in German POW camps that were situated in the Soviet theater of war or its later zone of occupation. The USSR did not shrink from using these soldiers as hostages to forward its demands. Thus, although forced repatriation of Soviet or former Soviet citizens and side effects of this process--such as attempted or completed suicides by the affected parties--aroused public protest in both Britain and United States, the practice continued unabated until all of the British and U.S. soldiers in Soviet hands were released. Only afterwards was it revised.

Goeken-Haidl also analyzes the motives that defined the Soviet position on repatriation. According to her, from the very beginning, the Soviets viewed the policies adopted by the western Allies with great suspicion. The decision not to repatriate people from West Byelorussia, Western Ukraine, and the Baltic states, as neither the United States nor Great Britain had ever acknowledged annexation of these territories by the USSR, only enhanced these suspicions. The fact that many Soviet citizens did not rush back to the USSR after the war not only compromised the reputation of the Soviet state, it was also incomprehensible to Soviet authorities. From their point of view, if people did not wish to return to the victorious, "mighty" Soviet Union, their reluctance was attributed to the "intrigues" of the American and British imperialists. Moreover, the Soviet Union wished to conceal as thoroughly as possible the fact that quite a number of its citizens had defected to the enemy, instead of defending their "superior" system. Above all, the tradition of paranoid fear of the West and of its alleged destructive intentions toward the Soviet Union came to expression in the Soviet position.

Obsessive fear of the West was also expressed in the treatment of repatriates transferred to the Soviets. Throughout eastern Germany, the Soviet authorities established a complete system of gathering and filtration camps, at which returnees were to be checked for political reliability. Everyone who came in contact with the "capitalist world" in any way was seen with suspicion. Goeken-Haidl tells stories of humiliation, verbal and physical violence, and economic exploitation, all of which were prevalent in these camps. People who had been released from forced labor or liberated from POW or concentration camps only a short time before were now denigrated as "German lackeys" and "Nazi whores" by the personnel of the repatriation camps, most of whom had been recruited from the NKVD. In the absence of effective control from above, inmates of these camps were at the mercy of camp guards. The camps also possessed wide networks of spies, who came from the ranks of potential repatriates and had been promised advantages such as an acceleration of the repatriation process. Spies were supposed to uncover active Nazi collaborators and anyone critical of Soviet rule. Inhumane treatment of inmates led to a wave of escape attempts (many of them successful) and of suicides. On average, two repatriates escaped from each camp per week. Even for those who survived this process and returned home, reintegration into Soviet society was not easy. Many former forced laborers were dispatched immediately to various construction projects. Those who returned to their home villages and cities suffered from suspicious attitudes on the part of both local authorities and neighbors. Such attitudes lasted many years; in some cases, even to the present.

Goeken-Haidl has written a fascinating book, though the account sometimes sacrifices precision and thoroughness. For instance, she mentions only briefly the loophole created by the U.S. decision not to transfer persons from eastern Poland and the Baltic states, and mentions only one or two of the most spectacular cases of war criminals from among Nazi collaborators who exploited this decision to pose as anti-Soviet fighters and escape justice. I mentioned an example of this pattern in a recent article on the 30th Waffen-Grenadier Division of the SS, or "1st Byelorussian," many of whose members had been auxiliary policemen before entry into the SS, and had participated actively in the genocide of Byelorussian Jewry and in the so-called anti-partisan warfare, in course of which thousands of innocents were killed. After the bulk of this division's soldiers found themselves in DP camps in the American zone, they posed as Poles, escaped transfer to the Soviet authorities, and were able to live in the countries against which they had fought during the closing stages of the World War II.[1]. At the same time, while depicting at length the hardline position of Soviets in questions of repatriation, Goeken-Haidl either omits or ignores the fact that during the Cold War, U.S. military intelligence did not hesitate to exploit the anti-Soviet sentiments of DPs and later, of non-repatriated immigrants, for strategic purposes, especially in view of the possibility of the transition from a "cold" war to a hot one. In such efforts, the authorities often ignored the problematic past of such people.[2] At the same time, while criticizing the study of Nikolaj Tolstoj, whose main focus falls upon the forced repatriation of Soviet citizens, Goeken-Haidl can be seen as moving too far in the opposite direction by focusing on unwilling returnees. A stronger treatment of voluntary repatriation might have created a more balanced picture.

Finally, Goeken-Haidl's study is not free of some technical problems, inaccuracies, and omissions. Thus, for example, the Byelorussian city of Slonim is termed a village (p. 381), though during the Nazi occupation, it was large enough to be a center of German civil area administration (Gebietskommissariat). On the same page, she also mentions the activities of the infamous Latvian Arajs Kommando as a guard unit of Salaspils concentration camp near Riga, but omits mention of the role played by the same group in the extermination of the Latvian Jews. Konrāds Kalējs, a member of this commando, was accused not only of maltreatment of Salaspils's inmates, but explicitly of participation in the execution of the "Final Solution." It would have been appropriate, moreover, to include at least an index of names or locations in order to facilitate navigation through such a long book, and lengthy footnotes occasionally disturb the smooth reading of the book.

Notes

[1]. Leonid Rein, "Untermenschen in SS Uniforms: 30th Waffen-Grenadier Division of Waffen SS," Journal of Slavic Military Studies (April 2007): 329-345.

[2] Thus, for example, Stanislav Stankevich, who occupied the post of mayor of Borisov during the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia and was directly involved in the murder of 7,000 Borisov Jews in October 1941, served for many years after the war in the Byelorussian service of Radio Free Europe and was never prosecuted for his wartime activities. The postwar fates of Stankevich and many other Byelorussian collaborators are tracked in John Loftus's controversial study, The Belarus Secret (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).

THE STORY OF HITLER'S 'MIRACLE WEAPON'

2009-05-29T22:45:00.003+08:00

When the Soviets advanced into eastern Germany, the Nazis tried to quickly evacuate the jet factory. But by then, it was too late for the jet to have much effect on the outcome of the war.

By Uli Suckert

At the very end of World War II, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler still hoped that state-of-the-art technology could turn the tide in his favor. One of those projects, the Messerschmitt jet fighter, found a home in a remote corner of eastern Germany. But it was too late.

It took four and a half years, but finally, on March 20, 1944, World War II -- and more specifically, the armaments industry -- came to a remote corner of eastern Germany called the Lausitz. As the Allies flew an ever-increasing number of air raids over Germany's industrial and urban centers, large weapons factories in Nazi Germany began an exhaustive search for suitable places to relocate -- sites as inconspicuous and isolated as possible. Indeed, by 1943, Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, had already forged plans to relocate the aviation industry to areas the Allies were unlikely to bomb.

It took a year, but then Junkers, an airplane and engine manufacturer from Dessau, moved into a factory belonging to the Moras Brothers textile company in Zittau, which today is located near Germany's border with Poland and the Czech Republic.

Disguised as a company called Zittwerke AG, it was far from run-of-the-mill as far as armaments factories go. Zittau was to be where the world's first production-ready jet engine would be completed, the same engine that was to power Hitler's secret weapon, the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter.

Jürgen Ulderup from Junkers' Dessau production site was tasked with taking over as plant manager in Zittau. He immediately set up a network of manufacturing plants throughout the region, all top secret. Key to getting the project off the ground was his demand that 18 long-established textile producers make space in their factories for armaments production. Some companies had to turn over their factories in their entirety. It proved a further blow for the region's textile industry, already largely crippled and converted to the war economy.

Core of the Enterprise

But winning the war took priority, and the remote corner of Nazi Germany now began producing components for the clandestine jet engine. Ulderup hired over 2,500 employees and put them to work in the Zittwerke plants, under the direction of aviation industry experts. They worked in the Moras factory, the Haebler Brothers textile company in Zittau, the Rudolf Breuer mechanical weaving mill in Reichenau, the Kreutziger & Henke company in Leutersdorf, the Ebersbach spinning and weaving mill, and at 13 other factories located in regional towns and villages.

But the core of the enterprise was to be found on the grounds of a former World War I prisoner of war camp in the present-day Polish town of Porajów -- a camp which had been converted for use by the German armed forces. The factory, guarded by the 17th SS "Totenkopf" battalion, simply moved into several half-finished barracks.

Deep in the heart of the compound, behind several rows of barbed wire, was the administration building where a detachment from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp was housed. Along with prisoners of war and the so-called "Eastern workers" -- forced labor from countries such as the Ukraine -- over 850 concentration camp prisoners did most of the work in the Zittwerke factories.

Not long after Junkers had settled in, the sound of industry filled the Neisse River Valley day and night. Rumors of a "miracle weapon" circulated among the local population, but no one knew exactly what the factory produced. It wasn't until final assembly that the object in question could be recognized for what it was: a special turbojet engine for a new type of jet fighter.

Shiny New Me 262s

Technicians had already tested the engines. A Messerschmitt plane, the Me 262-V 1, powered with a Junkers Jumo 004A-0 jet engine, took to the air as early as March 2, 1943. The test proved successful. And before long, the Zwittau factories mastered all aspects of the jet engine's production, from pre-assembly to shipment.

The factories were well connected to the Third Reich's rail network, with covered freight cars lugging the completed engines -- once they had passed inspection -- to the south. There, in the forests surrounding the Bavarian towns of Regensburg and Augsburg, workers installed the new engines into the jets. A converted Autobahn nearby served as a runway from which the shiny new Me 262s took off for their test flights. Only then would they be loaded onto freight trains for delivery to the Luftwaffe.

The Nazis had high hopes for the new jets. By the beginning of 1945, with the Russians closing from the east and the US and Britain marching in from the west, it was clear that Germany faced a catastrophic defeat, but the Nazi leadership refused to give up hope. On February 28, 1945, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels announced to the nation that Germany's "miracle weapon" would soon turn the tide of the war.

For Zittau, however, indications were mounting that it would be too late. The day before the Goebbels speech, the city of Görlitz just north of Zittau had been declared part of the front. Workers in the jet engine factories could already hear the thunder of enemy guns.

Hectic Evacuation

It wasn't long before the hectic evacuation got underway. A Wehrmacht counterattack near the present-day Polish town of Luba on March 7 and 8, 1945 managed to push back the Red Army. But after heavy losses on both sides, the Soviets halted the German advance, such as it was, and the factories ceased production.

Given the importance of the jet engine project, it didn't take long for evacuation of both workers and factory machinery to get underway. In early March, two special trains carrying the most vital elements of the production chain made their way from Zittau to the west, one on the 6th and another on the 10th. They ultimately ended up in the town of Nordhausen, located in the state of Thuringia, some 100 kilometers west of Leipzig.

Luftwaffe soldiers, who had guarded the Zittwerke's various factory locations producing jet engines for the Me 262, also boarded the train in Zittau. Two trains with over 500 people left directly from the factory premises for Halberstadt in Saxony-Anhalt. A final train, belonging to the Wehrmacht, left on April 30, just days before the end of the war, presumably carrying the last of the military units.

Mass Grave

But the Nazis didn't evacuate everything. Inside the remaining restricted military area, the forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners remained. Many of them died. A factory doctor issued 70 handwritten death certificates in April and the beginning of May. The causes of death listed were primarily "acute heart failure with asthenia," "pulmonary tuberculosis," "pneumonia," or "scurvy."

The role Zittwerke plant manager Jürgen Ulderup played in the deaths remains something of a mystery. According to his own reports, Ulderup fled by bicycle from Zittau to Osnabrück in western Germany in the last days of the war, with a backpack crammed full of copper bars. His driver, along with his company car, had long since disappeared, according to the former Nazi plant manager.

Today only a mass grave in Zittau's women's cemetery provides a reminder that the so-called "miracle weapon" was produced locally. A well-kept lawn covers the area behind the cemetery wall, where civilian victims of World War II are buried. They include the prisoners and forced laborers who sweated away in Nazi Germany's final attempt to turn the tide of onrushing World War II destruction.

Traitors to the fatherland?

2009-05-09T22:53:00.000+08:00

PHL

Posters in light-boxes in Lviv praised the SS Galicia, a Ukrainian unit that fought under Nazi Germany, as defenders of the nation against Soviet aggression. Nationalist politician Oleh Tyahnybok placed the ads.

The debate still rages over the SS Galicia, hailed by some as anti-Soviet nationalists.

They are either war criminals or national heroes, depending on who is telling their history.

In the annals of the still-heated debate over Ukraine’s tragic World War II experience, one is hard-pressed to find another 200 survivors who still stir more passions than the former members of the SS Galicia division. Their youngest known surviving member is 83 years old, but the controversy they inspire shows no sign of dying out soon.

The Nazi regiment was created in 1943. By then, the tide had already turned in favor of the Allies after Soviet troops ravaged the Nazi fighting machine in the epic Battle of Stalingrad. The racist Hitler had dropped his insistence on having only German soldiers of the “master race” go to war for him, a sign of his growing desperation.

The Ukrainians who joined the SS Galicia division – and who took battle orders from Nazi commanders – consisted of up to 20,000 men selected from 70,000 Ukrainian volunteers. Uniformed and trained by the Nazis in Germany, France and Denmark, the division won praise from Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo chief who was one the most feared men in Europe at the time.

How could Ukrainians join such an outfit?

The most benevolent description of the motives of the men of the SS Galicia division is that they were gambling on the defeat of Nazi Germany. According to this logic, they wanted to rid Ukraine of Stalin’s Red Army and secure Western support to reclaim national independence after the war.

The harshest description is that they betrayed their nation, committed war crimes and slowed the Allied Victory.

“This is what I ask myself, what made those people volunteer?” said Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the nationalist Svoboda Party, which is currently gaining popularity in western Ukraine. “I can tell you what motivated those people. Before their eyes, the Communists destroyed their families, [and so] they didn’t care what flags they fought under against the Bolsheviks.”

Western Ukraine, and particularly the part called Halychyna or Galicia, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the empire dissolved after World War I, Ukrainians there seized the moment to declare independence in 1918. The freedom was short-lived. The western region fell under Polish rule, making Ukrainians chafe for a liberator. In 1939, after Stalin and Hitler signed their non-aggression pact, the Soviet Army invaded – claiming they were freeing the Galicians.

Although the Soviet soldiers were initially welcomed with bread and salt by the population, Stalin-ordered repressions and murders quickly turned the lives of western Ukrainians into nightmares.

“My grandfather was buried alive in jail by NKVD [the security service] because he was a priest,” said Tyahnybok, whose party recently paid for an advertising campaign to promote the SS Galicia, or the 14th Grenadier Division Der SS Galicia (Number 1 Ukrainian), as it was officially called by the Nazis.

Tyahnybok’s party purchased 20 advertising light boards on Lviv’s streets in April, advertising the SS Galicia as “defenders of Ukraine” who fought against Communist oppression. The campaign, organized to mark the division’s 66th anniversary, triggered an explosive reaction among public and politicians. The advertisements were commissioned for a month, but taken down a day early because of public pressure.

Mykola Posivnych, a historian at the Institute of Ukraine Studies, said volunteers of the SS Galicia had complicated motives for joining the military unit, including strong financial incentives by the Nazis.

“Everybody had different motivations, but most people went there because they needed to feed their family,” Posivnych said. In exchange, newcomers to the division had to pledge an oath to Hitler to fight Bolshevism.

Ukraine was World War II’s primary battleground, with Nazis and Soviets alternating control of the territory, which was coveted for its rich fertile land and ability to feed millions. An estimated eight million Ukrainians, including four million civilians, were killed during the war. The Nazis and Soviets practiced scorched-earth policies of burning or destroying everything they could – including factories and villages – when their armies retreated.

Those in western Ukraine had few options for avoiding the ruthless armies of the dictators from the east and west. Apart from the SS Galicia, they could join the underground Ukrainian Insurgent Army – known by its UPA acronym. UPA members, the military wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, fought against all foreign enemies of Ukraine and were primarily active in the western half of the country. Their guerrilla battles against Soviet power in Ukraine continued until the 1950s, despite Soviet assassinations of their top leaders in exile abroad.

Some Ukrainians, however, thought the insurgent army’s quest was futile. SS Galicia members "thought it was impossible to fight against four enemies: Poland, Romania, Hungary and Soviet Union,” Posivnych explained. “They had to choose allies.”

The SS Galicia’s military record was mostly brief and tragic. Some believe they were used as Nazi cannon fodder. Most were killed in a major battle in the western Ukrainian town of Brody in 1944. Soviet troops so overpowered them in battle that only some 5,000 soldiers survived the encounter.

After the Battle of Brody, the remnants were scattered and many reorganized into a different military unit. After the German surrender, the SS Galicia survivors also surrendered to the Western allies and were sent to a prisoner of war camp in Rimini, Italy. Apart from Ukraine, its members later resettled in Germany, Britain, Australia, Brazil, United States and Canada.

As a part of the Nazi SS force, the division was also investigated for its potential role in mass killings of Jews and Poles and the suppression of uprisings in Slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and France.

Marcial Lavina, representative of Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human rights organization (www.wiesenthal.com), said “there are indications that [the unit] might have committed war crimes at the end of the war in Poland, but this is still being investigated.” The organization, which has doggedly pursued war criminals responsible for the Holocaust, recently gave Ukraine an “F” grade in hunting down Nazis, citing a lack of political will.

But a number of other international investigations, including one by the Canadian Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes, also known as the Deschenes Commission, and another one led by Polish historians, cleared the Ukrainian group of accusations of participation in war crimes. “Commissions justified [SS Galicia] as soldiers, meaning they did not commit crimes against humanity or terrorist acts against unarmed population. Their function was solely to fight at war,” Posivnych said.

But many Ukrainians are unconvinced. Oleksandr Feldman, a deputy from Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s bloc, said SS Galicia members were “military criminals, whom current moral freaks are trying to rehabilitate, whiten up and present as victims of historical injustice.”

Leonid Mukha, an 84-year-old resident of Mykolaiv and a former member of the division, said many myths surround the SS Galicia. He witnessed two historical tragedies that he said the SS Galicia is wrongly implicated in.

One of them was the suppression of an uprising in Warsaw, Poland, in the autumn of 1944. “The Galicia [division] did not take part in this suppression,” Mukha said. “For 63 days, the Soviet army was standing on the right side of the Warsaw, watching Germans suppress that uprising. They did nothing because it was the uprising of people they didn’t respect, the Polish nationalists.”

The other tragedy he witnessed was the May 1944 massacre of an estimated 500 to 1,200 people in the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka. “The German punishing unit, like the Russian NKVD, came into this village, the fight began and Germans destroyed the village,” Mukha said.

Ukrainian historian Posivnych said that, “regarding mass killings, there is no black and white in this case. There are more politics here than real events.” Asked whether the men of the SS Galicia were patriots or traitors, Posivnych replied: “The truth is somewhere in the middle.”