There were numerous cases when formation commanders and privates left positions without an order, ran away in panic, and left all military equipment behind. The most dangerous is… that some special departments did not even investigate such cases and did not arrest the guilty servicemen, and they were not tried. All secret agents should be instructed to identify such persons…
The fight against the deserters, panic-mongers and cowards is the main task of our organs [i.e., OOs], along with the fight against spies and traitors…
Special departments must introduce strong discipline and order in the rear of divisions, corps, and armies so the desertion and panic should be terminated in the next few days.14
According to the reports of the OOs of the Western, Northwestern, Southern, Southwestern and Leningrad fronts, from July to December 1941, 102 large groups of Soviet servicemen defected to the enemy. In addition, the OOs prevented the crossing over of 159 additional groups and 2,773 individual servicemen.15
Self-injured servicemen, nicknamed samostreltsy, were one more OO problem. On August 2, 1941, the GKO ordered the OOs to arrest ‘self-injured’ servicemen and, if necessary, to shoot them on the spot as deserters.16 A mortar man recalled in 2006:
There was a good guy in our company, a sharp-sighted observer, a Kazakh by origin.17 I was thunderstruck when it came to light that he put a bullet through his own arm. It was easily recognized. That’s all—military tribunal and death by shooting. As a rule, the execution was performed in front of the regiment’s formation.
There was another episode in the regiment. Several soldiers formed a circle and one of them threw a grenade in the center to wound everyone in the leg…
I heard about one more way to evade participating in combats—to raise your hand over the parapet of the trench [soldiers facetiously called this method of self-inflicted injury golosovanie, or ‘voting’]…
The special group in our regiment that prevented desertion and exposed the samostreltsy… was [called] Osobyi otdel and its staff numbered some five men… Everybody tried to keep their distance from them. We also knew that there were secret Osobyi otdel informers in all of the regimental detachments.18
Most of the Red Army men hated the osobisty. Here is a song written by members of an unknown tank crew (my translation):
Zyama Ioffe, a member of a military tribunal during almost the whole war who dealt with the osobisty on a daily basis, explicitly stated in 2009:
Every osobist looked at the surrounding people with the arrogant and impudent conviction that he could send any soldier or officer, despite rank and file, to a penal detachment or ‘make him knuckle under’, or shoot him to death, or ‘grind him into the dust of labor camps’ [Beria’s favorite expression], or organize a special vetting for him, etc…
The power over people and complete impunity, especially when the ‘worker of the organs’ [as the NKVD/MGB officers called themselves] was constantly told [by his superiors] that potential enemies and traitors existed everywhere while he was the only specially trusted person, used to turn him into a real piece of shit…
Very few had guts to withstand the osobisty.20
Another veteran, Izo Adamsky, an artillery officer, recalled that at the front line the hatred of the osobisty (who became SMERSH officers) continued until the end of the war:
On the Oder River [near Berlin, in May 1945], a drunken osobist slept in my dug-out all the time because he was afraid of going out alone and getting a bullet in his back. The osobisty even had an order about ‘self-guarding’ that forbade them to move around without guards at any time.
This was because many wanted to get even with the osobisty when they had an opportunity. I remember such occasions very well.21
In the numerous memoirs of the NKVD/SMERSH veterans published in the late 2000s, military counterintelligence officers typically wrote about themselves that ‘our authority was very high’ among servicemen.22 Obviously, even more than 65 years after the war they were not ready to face the real attitude of fighting soldiers toward them. As Ioffe put it, ‘almost everyone hated the osobisty’.
Only once did Ioffe see an osobist who was fighting the enemy. During a disastrous retreat from the Northern Caucasus in the autumn of 1942, Goldberg, head of the Army’s OO, ‘grabbed a machine gun from the hands of a guard soldier of the tribunal, and rushed to head off the running crowd. He stopped the retreating soldiers, turned them around, and led them back to the positions they had just left’.23
Stalin’s Order No. 270
The high number of Red Army servicemen who were taken prisoner (POWs), especially in Belorussia and Ukraine, was unprecedented. The German Army Group South, supported by several Italian, Hungarian and Slovak divisions, occupied Belorussia and most of Ukraine, while Romanian troops occupied the former Bessarabia and the region near Odessa. By the end of September 1941, in the area around Kiev (the capital of Ukraine) alone, 665,000 Soviet servicemen had been encircled and taken prisoner. The POWs became the main focus of Stalin’s anger and a target of military counterintelligence.
According to current Russian data, from June to December 1941, between 2 million and 3.8 million servicemen were taken prisoner.24 At the end of 1941 only about eight percent of the servicemen listed on June 22, 1941 remained in uniform.25 The Germans recorded higher numbers for 1941–43 than the Russian sources typically give. On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared that the German troops had captured 3,806,865 prisoners.26 In February 1942 Alfred Rosenberg, the German minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and the main ideologist of Nazi racial theory, wrote: ‘Currently, of 3.6 million POWs, only a few hundred thousand are capable of work. Most of them died of hunger and bad weather. Thousands are sick with typhus. In most camps the commandants… consider death to be the best solution for them.’27
In mid-1942, the number of prisoners continued to grow. By May 1942, the German and Romanian forces jointly conquered the Crimea, and 150,000 Red Army men were captured in the Crimea; 240,000 were taken the same May near Kharkov; 80,000 men were captured in June during the battle on the North Donets River; and about 95,000 men were taken in July near Sevastopol. Here is the number of Russian servicemen taken prisoner for the years 1941 to 1945 from both Russian and German sources:
| Year | Russian sources28 | German sources29 |
|---|---|---|
| 1941 | Approx. 2,000,000 | 3,355,000 |
| 1942 | 1,339,000 | 1,653,000 |
| 1943 | 487,000 | 565,000 |
| 1944 | 203,000 | 147,000 |
| 1945 | 40,600 | 34,000 |
| Total | 4,069,000 | 5,754,000 |