The scale of Russian collaboration with the Nazis was astonishing.29 Approximately 10 percent of the whole population in the occupied territory supported the Germans, about 700,000 former Soviet servicemen became ‘hiwis’ (noncombatant volunteers) and 1.4 million participated in the Nazi-controlled military units. To administer this huge number of volunteers, in December 1942 Lieutenant General Heinz Hellmich was appointed ‘General for Eastern Troops’ and attached to the Second Section of the OKH General Staff’s Organizational Deparment headed by Claus von Stauffenberg, the future leader of the 20th July 1944 Plot.30 In January 1944, General Ernst Köstring, former Military Attaché in Moscow (1935–41) and in March-June 1943, ‘Delegate General for Caucasus Questions’ (i.e., military governor of the occupied part of the Caucasus), replaced von Stauffenberg and his title became ‘General of Volunteer Formations’.31 Köstring was born in Russia, spoke perfect Russian and knew the country well.
One can understand a Soviet POW volunteering for an Abwehr or Zeppelin school—it was the only chance for survival in the inhuman conditions of the German POW camps.32 Many also saw this as an opportunity to return to Soviet territory. However, the creation of Russian troops under German control was another matter. There were the above-mentioned Special ‘Druzhina’ SD Brigade and the Vlasov Army, as well as the Russian National Liberation Army (RONA) and various Cossack formations. The RONA of 10,000 men was created in the Lokot’ Republic, a Russian-administered region in German-occupied territory. It existed from 1941 to 1943 and was supported by Günther von Kluge, Commander of the Army Group Center.33 The main Cossack formation, the XVth SS Cossack Cavalry Corps, formed in 1943 under the command of the German General Helmuth von Pannwitz, numbered 50,000 men. On the whole, by mid-1944, the Wehrmacht had 200 battalions of troops formed of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians and other nationalities.
The memoirs of Soviet POWs mention an important psychological detail of being taken prisoner: ‘In a few days all imprisoned Red Army commanders suddenly turned into strong enemies of their own country, the country where they were born, and of the government which they had sworn allegiance to… Those who continued to address “Comrade Commander” were punched in their faces or were even beaten up more seriously, and saying “Gospodin ofitser” [“Sir officer”, the address used in the Czar’s Army] became common.’34 In Oflag XII-D for officers in Hammelsburg, the imprisoned Soviet major generals Fyodor Trukhin, Dmitrii Zakutnyi and Ivan Blagoveshchensky ‘cursed Stalin and the Soviet regime with the worst words and they agreed to the fact that [Mikhail] Tukhachevsky and his accomplices were innocent executed victims’.35 These three generals soon became among the most enthusiastic supporters of General Andrei Vlasov and his army. These examples show that many servicemen hated the Soviet regime so much that they were ready to fight against it, even on the enemy’s side. Not the least important reason for this was Stalin’s refusal to admit the existence of Soviet POWs. Soviet servicemen were supposed to commit suicide, not be taken prisoner.
The number of deserters and draft-evading individuals caught by the NKVD Rear Guard Troops was also enormous. According to Beria reports, from June 1941 till mid-1943, it reached 1,666,891 men; of these, 1,210,224 were deserters. Later, in May 1944 alone, 24,898 deserters and 26,300 draft-evading individuals were caught, 285 of whom were officers.36 Of this number, 9,128 individuals were arrested and transferred for investigation to SMERSH, NKGB, and the Prosecutor’s Office. Even at the end of the war, among 27,629 Soviet servicemen captured by the Germans between December 1944 and March 1945, 1,710 men (6 percent) crossed the front line voluntarily.37 If these figures are accurate, this is a very high number. Possibly, some Soviet POWs who changed lines so late in the war hoped to end up in the hands of the Allies. If so, they did not know that, according to the secret agreements in Yalta, most of them would be handed back to SMERSH and the NKVD.
In many Soviet regions, especially Ukraine, in 1941 the local population greeted the German troops as their liberators from the Soviet regime. The head of a partisan staff in Belorussia reported that the day before the Germans came ‘the unstrained anti-Soviet individuals whistled at and unequivocally threatened the evacuating Soviet and Party activists and their families, while some Soviet administrators used every reason to escape the evacuation’.38 In the Stavropolsky Region, located on the border with the Northern Caucasus and occupied by the Germans in 1942, the population was convinced that German rule would be forever.39 Soon the German atrocities against Soviet POWs, Jews, and later the whole population (with the German racial attitude toward Slavs as inferior Untermenschen) turned most of the people against the occupiers. But the Soviet regime refused to excuse either open collaborators during the two-year occupation period or the whole population living in the German-occupied territory, since everyone could be considered to have been ‘following orders of the German administration’ and, therefore, punishable as a traitor.40
The population of Belorussian and West Ukrainian territories taken back by the Red Army in 1943–44 immediately experienced Stalin’s attitude toward those who were under the German occupation. All men were mobilized. A witness wrote: ‘The lack in men [in the troops] was so considerable that mobilization, in fact, turned into hunting people, like slave traders hunted Negros in Africa in the past… At dawn we encircled a village. We were ordered to shoot every person after the first notification who would try to escape from the village. A special commando group entered every house in the village, forcing all men to come out, irrespective of age and health, and to gather in the square. Then they were convoyed to special camps. There they were checked by doctors, while the politically unreliable were taken away.’41
Regular soldiers called the mobilized locals chernorubashechniki (black shirts) or sumochnye divizii (divisions with bags) because these peasants were not given uniforms and many of them had self-made bags with food.42 Commonly they were not provided even with rifles because they were supposed to get trophy guns after a battle. Most of these unarmed people were wiped out in the first skirmish with the Germans.
The suspicion of collaboration continued until the end of the Soviet Union. Every Soviet citizen, even born after World War II, needed to mention in their biography form if he or she, or his or her relatives, had lived in the occupied territory during the war. If they did, this could prevent a person from being hired for a job connected with the military or secret issues, or from being allowed to travel abroad because for going abroad, each Soviet citizen needed the approval of the Communist Party and KGB officials.
Notes
1. Perry Biddiscombe, ‘Unternehmen Zeppelin: The Development of SS Saboteurs and Spies in the Soviet Union, 1942–945,’ Europe-Asia Studies, 52, No. 6 (2000), 1115–42; Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Fuhrungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 75–81.
2. Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany, 7th January to 19th January, 1946, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-04/tgmwc-04-28-06.shtml, retrieved September 7, 2011.