At the end, only about 1.7 million Soviet POWs were still alive in German hands.30
Not all prisoners were taken because of military defeat or encirclement. In the autumn of 1941, changing sides and going over to the enemy occurred on a large scale. To prevent this, the heads of OOs attached to troops defending Moscow took measures even against their own subordinates. One order from the 16th Army’s OO head stated: ‘I warn all operational workers [the word “officer” was not used until early 1943] of Special Departments that if the acts of treason against the Motherland continue, the operational worker who is responsible for the unit in which such an act took place, as well as the OO head and deputy head of this unit, will be court-martialed.’31
Stalin’s harsh personal attitude toward Soviet POWs is evident in his infamous Order No. 270, dated August 16, 1941. Four days before that, NKO Commissar Timoshenko brought a draft of the order to Stalin and Stalin substantially edited it. The order included examples of three generals—Vladimir Kachalov, Commander of the 28th Army (Western Front), Nikolai Kirillov, Commander of the 13th Rifle Corps, and Pavel Ponedelin, Commander of the 12th Army (both at the Southern Front)—who supposedly panicked and deserted. It introduced the slogan ‘Cowards and deserters must be liquidated!’ The order concluded:
I order that:
1. Anyone who removes his insignia during battle and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter, whose family is to be arrested as the family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot.
2. Those who find themselves surrounded are to fight to the last and try to reach their own lines. And those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means, and their families deprived of all state allowances and assistance.
3. Bold and brave people are to be more actively promoted.
4. This order is to be read to all companies, squadrons, [and] batteries.32
Although Stalin wrote in the text ‘I order’, Molotov (GKO’s deputy chairman), four marshals (Semyon Budennyi, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Timoshenko, and Boris Shaposhnikov), and Army General Georgii Zhukov signed the order as well.
Soviet propaganda never mentioned that generals Nikolai Kirillov and Pavel Ponedelin were taken prisoner along with 103,000 servicemen (according to the German data) in one of the most devastating defeats of the Red Army in 1941, near the Ukrainian town of Uman.33 Hitler, on the contrary, widely publicized this victory and even invited Benito Mussolini, the Italian Duce, to visit the troops in the Uman pocket. On August 26, 1941, the two dictators boarded a plane at Hitler’s HQ Wolfschantze in East Prussia, and flew to Uman. In Uman, they inspected an Italian division that was fighting alongside the Germans.34 Not until 2010 did a Russian author finally publish a book about the Uman disaster.35
The Military Collegium condemned Generals Kachalov, Kirillov, and Ponedelin in absentia to death as traitors (paragraph 58-1b), not being aware that one of them, Kachalov, had already been killed in action. But Stalin, apparently, did not forget the humiliating visit of the two fascist leaders. In May 1945, SMERSH arrested Kirillov and Ponedelin, who had survived Nazi imprisonment, and in August 1950 the Military Collegium sentenced them to death for the second time and they were executed. Stalin personally approved the executions.
The Fallout from Order No. 270
After Order No. 270, Stalin signed an additional order that required commanders, commissars, and OOs of corps and divisions to report the names of all servicemen taken prisoner, as well as the names of their family members.36 The wives of Kachanov, Kirillov, and Ponedelin were arrested and sentenced to exile (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com).
Essentially, Order No. 270 was just the continuation of Stalin’s longstanding policy toward POWs. For instance, in 1938, most of the Russian soldiers who had been in German or Austrian captivity during World War I were persecuted, despite the passage of twenty years. In March 1938, Stalin made a note on an NKVD report concerning the arrest of former POWs: ‘Former Russian [underlined in the original] prisoners of war should be counted and examined. J. St[alin].’37 A prisoner recalled: ‘In 1938, workers and simple kolkhoz [Communist collective-farm] peasants started appearing in the prison cells [of NKVD investigation prisons], all utterly unable to imagine why they had been arrested. It turned out that they had been prisoners of war.’38
A new word began to be used, okruzhenets, meaning a serviceman who had been encircled (okruzhenie in Russian) by Germans. On September 6, 1941, the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda published for the first time an editorial article about POWs, but without a reference to Order No. 270. David Ortenberg, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, later recalled the main statement of the article: ‘It is a shame to be taken prisoner by the German-fascist scoundrels, a shame toward the people, comrades, families, children, and it is a crime against the Motherland.’39 Following this trend, the Leningrad Front commander, Georgii Zhukov, went even further than Stalin. In a ciphered cable of September 28, 1941, he ordered: ‘All servicemen should know that the families of anyone who has surrendered to the enemy will be shot, and all survivors of the surrender will be shot upon their return from captivity.’40
Following the directives of Order No. 270, in autumn 1941, field OOs focused their arrests on both low-level personnel and high-ranking officers.41 Additionally, the order was used for the execution of an enormous number of mid-level commanders, as well as privates, without trial, on the order of the army military council or a front commander. Lev Mekhlis personally ordered executions although he wasn’t even a member of a military council. After he and Kirill Meretskov arrived at the headquarters of the Northwestern Front as Stavka representatives in September 1941, Mekhlis simply wrote an order to execute General Vasilii Goncharov, Artillery Commander of the 34th Army, without trial.42 Goncharov was shot in front of the staff formation. Viktor Bochkov, OO head of the front, reported to Mekhlis on those officers who dared to complain about this execution. Then Mekhlis ordered the front tribunal to sentence Major General Kuz’ma Kachanov, Commander of the 34th Army, to death. Kachanov was executed in Mekhlis’s presence.
Though preoccupied with executions, Mekhlis did not forget that he, as head of the GlavPURKKA, was also in charge of troop morale. The commander of the 163rd Rifle Division of the same front received a cable from Mekhlis: ‘I’m sending a good military band to join [your] division…The enemy must tremble at the sound of the Soviet march.’43