One of them later wrote that the German occupation allowed anti-Soviet attitudes to come to the fore:
If all of Russia had been occupied, it is very possible that the entire country would have become anti-Soviet. Under Soviet rule, these people remained docile and did not reveal their revolutionary inclination, something that requires a great effort of will. At the beginning of the war, the conviction that the Soviet government would soon collapse lent courage to even the most passive elements.129
Among Soviet prisoners of war, anti-Soviet ideologists made their appearance. Of these, special mention should be made of Milety Aleksan- drovich Zykov (probably a pseudonym), who claimed to have been an assistant to the editor of Izvestia from 1931 to 1935, to have been arrested in the purges, and then to have been released in March 1942. After being taken prisoner by the Germans, he drafted a memorandum calling for the creation of a new Russian government and army, headed by some Soviet general among the prisoners of war. This government would make a defensive alliance with Germany.
Another ideologist was Georgy Nikolaevich Zhilenkov, former secretary of the party in the Rostokino District of Moscow and later a member of the military council of the Twenty-fourth Army. In the fall of 1942, while in German captivity, he was appointed commander of the Central Experimental Unit, the "Ossinotorf Brigade," consisting of Russians and used against the Red Army. With Colonel Vladimir Boyarsky, excommander of the Soviet Forty-first Guards Division, Zhilenkov wrote several memoranda in which he called on the German government to form a Russian National Committee and a Russian army of 50,000—80,000 men, launch a war of national liberation against the Stalinist regime, and promise the Russian people an independent development in the framework of the "new order" in Europe. These memoranda were seasoned with a good dose of anti-Semitism.130
In mid-August 1942, Colonel Mikhail Shapovalov, former commander of a Soviet artillery corps, who was taken prisoner at Maikop, drafted a similar document.
It seems that Soviet officers who were prisoners of the Germans discussed the future of the Soviet Union intensively. All sorts of tendencies appeared, and many different proposals were made. One of them was that a "Committee for the Implementation of the 1936 Constitution" be formed.
To Hitler, however, the idea of having Russian, Slavic, allies seemed atrocious. He categorically forbade the arming of anyone in the occupied territories. "Only Germans shall have the right to bear arms," he ruled.131
As early as 1941 some German officers, who kept their distance from Nazi racial theories and were concerned only with military considerations, began to use Soviet prisoners as auxiliary personneclass="underline" interpreters, drivers, railroad police, and so on, and even as support troops. Later, with the development of the partisan movement, Russian units were formed against them. For example, in the Lokot District of the Bryansk Region a Russian brigade, 20,000 strong, was organized to fight the partisans. It was called the Russian National Liberation Army (Rossiiskaya Osvoboditelnaya Na- tsionalnaya Armiya—RONA), although it had police functions only. It was headed by Bronislav Kaminsky, an adventurer notorious for his cruelty. He enjoyed the absolute trust of the German authorities and was in effect the master of the district; he had been granted full power to police the area. By virtue of his service in the struggle against the partisans, Kaminsky was promoted to brigadier general by the Germans, and his "army" became an SS division. In the summer of 1944, this division was assigned to help crush the insurgents in Warsaw. Later the German commander ordered Kaminsky shot for the atrocities committed by his troops.132
In July 1941, on the initiative of Colonel von Tresckow, the chief of operations for the staff of the German Army Group Center who later participated in the 1944 plot against Hitler, a Russian brigade was formed under a Colonel Sakharov. In the same army group a Cossack unit was formed, headed by a former Red Army major and regimental commander named Kononov, a member of the Communist party since 1927. Kononov defected to the Germans on August 22, 1941.133
At the end of December 1941, with Hitler's blessing, the organization of "national legions" of non-Russian Soviet prisoners began. In total numbers these units were not very large: 110,000 from the Caucasus; between 110,000 and 170,000 from Central Asia and Kazakhstan; 20,000 Crimean Tatars; and 5,000 Kalmyks. On average, 15 percent of each unit consisted of Germans.134
Some former Soviet prisoners of war even became officers or noncommissioned officers in the national legions, but they did not have the right to issue orders to German soldiers. A very important fact that must be borne in mind is that many of the legionnaires were precisely exprisoners of war, rather than men who had deliberately crossed over to the German side. The fighting capacity of these units was not very high, and between 2.5 and 10 percent of the legionnaires deserted.
In 1943 70—80 percent of the national legions were sent west. Sometimes the legionnaires made contact with local resistance groups and went over to them.135 There were cases of open rebellion against the Germans, like the one in April 1944 by a Georgian battalion on Texel Island in Holland. It is probable that if the Soviet government had not abandoned its soldiers who were prisoners of the Germans, such cases of rebellion and of legionnaires joining the Resistance or crossing over to the Red Army would have been more numerous. But having lived in the Soviet Union, they knew only too well how vindictive the Soviet government could be. Nevertheless, in 1944 an SS regiment commanded by G. Alimov and made up of soldiers from Turkestan joined the uprising in Slovakia.
Such instances were not always the rule, however. For example, the Nazis used legionnaires and Cossack units against the resistance movements in Western Europe and the Balkans and in the suppressions of the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Also, in the Saint Donat massacre in the Drome region of France they used troops from the "national legions" (called Mongols by the local French population).136
It is important to understand the reasons that led individuals or groups to collaborate with the Germans. As a general rule, persecution by the Soviet government, particularly harsh during the period of collectivization, was responsible, as were the massive repression of the later 1930s and the chauvinist policies toward non-Russian minorities. It is not surprising that instances of collaboration with the enemy, including combat on the German side, were more frequent in both relative and absolute terms among non- Russian nationals than among Russians.
One can only speculate about the course events might have taken if, instead of implementing a policy of genocide, repression, and violation of human and national sensibilities, the Nazis had adopted a more moderate attitude, one more acceptable to the population, Russian or otherwise. Such a policy was impossible, however; the Nazis would have stopped being Nazis, and World War II would probably not have taken place. Hitler's Germany sought total subjection and partial extermination of the peoples of the Soviet Union, Poland, and other Eastern European states. Whatever the differences of opinion within the Nazi leadership over tactical questions, their goal remained unchanged: to enslave the Slavic peoples and make permanent the Reich's hegemony over Europe. This explains why the enemies of the Stalinist dictatorship in the Soviet Union had no choice but to fight the merciless invader of their country. They did so, however, with the secret hope that after victory things would improve.