Somebody by early 1945.

Five.

One in 10 German soldiers captured on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day was a Soviet citizen.

Across the Eastern Front, Vemached divisions counted between a quarter and half their strength as men who had been born under Stalin’s rule.

At the end of the war, between 470,000 and 475,000 Soviet citizens stood in Vermach and Vafaness formations, representing somewhere between 10 and 15% of all German armed forces.

Historians estimate that over the course of the war, somewhere between 800,000 and 1.

4 million Soviet citizens served Germany in military capacities.

This was not a fringe phenomenon.

This was mass collaboration on a scale that defied every assumption about loyalty, ideology, and national identity.

For decades after 1945, Soviet historioggraphy buried this fact.

No monument stood to these men.

No official record acknowledged their existence.

In the West, popular memory focused on resistance movements and heroic narratives of anti-fascist struggle.

The men who fought under Hitler against Stalin became a footnote, an embarrassment, a historical inconvenience too complex to process.

And here’s something most people don’t know.

Did you know that in New York in America of all places, there stands a memorial to the Russian Liberation Army? In the United States, far removed from the battlefields of the Eastern Front, a memorial to the Russian Liberation Army stands in Nanuet, New York, within the grounds of the Novo Deavo Russian Orthodox Cemetery.

The monument is dedicated to the liberation movement of the peoples of Russia 1941 to 1945 and bears the inscription to those who fell in the struggle for a free Russia.

It reflects the perspective of certain immigrant communities who viewed Vasov’s forces not simply as collaborators, but as men who oppose Stalin’s regime.

Each year, memorial services are conducted at the site by Orthodox clergy, drawing visitors who continue to commemorate the movement and his fallen.

Decades after the wars end, the existence of such a monument in the United States illustrates how contested and enduring the legacy of the Russian Liberation Army remains.

Yet their story reveals something fundamental about the nature of totalitarianism and the limits of loyalty when survival itself hangs in the balance.

This is not a story of heroes.

It is a story of desperation, miscalculation, and the collision between two tyrannies that consumed millions of lives.

The men who wore German uniforms and fought Soviet forces were not ideological warriors for national socialism.

They were products of Stalin’s terror, survivors of his famines, prisoners facing starvation in German camps, and soldiers trapped between two collapsing worlds.

Understanding why hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens fought for Germany requires understanding what the Soviet Union had become by 1941.

Ysef Stalin’s consolidation of power had transformed the USSR into a landscape of fear, where survival depended on silent obedience and betrayal had become commonplace.

The collectivization of agriculture launched in 1929 had shattered the traditional peasant economy in a campaign of unprecedented brutality.

Teams of Communist Party agitators descended on rural communities and forced farmers to surrender their land, livestock, and personal property to collective farms managed by party appointees.

Those who resisted were labeled kulaks, class enemies whose very existence threatened socialist progress.

The Kulaks faced deportation to remote regions of Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Entire families were loaded onto cattle cars in winter and shipped to labor camps.

Children froze to death during transport.

The elderly died from exposure and starvation.

Estimates suggest anywhere from 1 million to 1.

5 million cossacs alone died during decacization policies, executed, deported or starved.

As Stalin attempted to eliminate the Cossacks as a distinct cultural and political group, peasant rebellions erupted across Ukraine and southern Russia.

Armed uprisings broke out in rural districts.

Stalin responded with overwhelming force.

Machine guns suppressed village protests.

Party officials and NKVD units crushed resistance with executions and mass arrests.

The campaign escalated into deliberate famine.

In November 1932, the Soviet poll bureau adopted the blacklist system in Ukraine.

Villages that failed to meet grain quotas were placed on blackboards.

Thlisted communes faced total food blockades.

All food was seized.

Trade was banned.

Deliveries ceased.

Military detachments surrounded villages, trapping inhabitants inside.

Between 1932 and 1933, 180 districts in Ukraine operated under this blacklist regime, representing 25% of all Ukrainian districts.

Organized groups of police and Communist Party officials ransacked peasant homes, taking everything edible from grain stores to personal food supplies to pets.

Families watched as their last reserves were confiscated.

Starving peasants were forbidden to leave Ukraine to search for food.

In January 1933, Stalin and Molotov sealed Ukraine’s borders.

Internal passports were introduced, denied to farmers so they could not travel without official permission.

Between 1932 and 1933, the holiday killed an estimated 3.

9 million Ukrainians.

At the height of the famine in June 1933, 28,000 people died every day.

That translates to 1,168 people every hour.

20 people every minute.

Soviet authorities extracted 4.

27 million tons of grain from Ukraine in 1932, enough to feed at least 12 million people for a year.

In January 1933, sufficient grain reserves existed in USSR state stores to feed over 10 million people.

Moscow refused to provide relief.

Soviet grain was exported abroad for cash, while villages emptied and bodies piled in ditches.

Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin’s Great Purge swept through the Communist Party, the Red Army, and Soviet society with paranoid intensity.

Show trials convicted old Bolsheviks of fantastical conspiracies.

Confessions were extracted through torture.

Executions followed swiftly.

The Red Army was decapitated.

Marshall Male Tokuchevsky and thousands of senior officers were arrested and shot.

By 1938, Stalin had eliminated three of five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 core commanders, and 154 of 186 division commanders.

The purge created a command vacuum filled with politically reliable but militarily inexperienced officers.

It shattered army morale and destroyed institutional knowledge.

Officers, intellectuals, party members, and ordinary citizens disappeared into the Gulak system or faced summary execution.

The NKVD secret police operated with quotas for arrests.

Regional NKVD officers received directives specifying numbers of people to be arrested in each category.

First category meant execution.

Second category meant 10 years in labor camps.

NKVD officers fulfilled their quotas by arresting neighbors, co-workers, and random citizens.

Fear became the daily condition of Soviet life.

Denunciations flooded NKVD offices.

Neighbors informed on neighbors over petty disputes.

Children were taught in schools to report their parents if they heard antis-siet talk at home.

Trust dissolved.

Families spoke in whispers.

People were arrested at night and vanished without explanation.

By 1941, millions of Soviet citizens had experienced state violence firsthand.

Millions more lived under the shadow of arbitrary terror, knowing that arrest could come at any moment for any reason or no reason at all.

The Gulak system held between 1.

5 and 2 million prisoners at any given time during the late 1930s.

Countless others had been executed or died in captivity.

The invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941, therefore, did not land in a unified, loyal socialist state.

It landed in a fractured empire held together by force where substantial portions of the population felt no allegiance to Stalin’s government and where some actively hoped for liberation from Soviet rule.

Operation Barbarasa opened with overwhelming German success.

The Vermacht advanced on three fronts, encircling Soviet armies in massive pockets.

At Bilisto and Minsk in June 1941, German forces captured 300,000 Soviet soldiers.

At Smealinsk in July, another 300,000 fell into German hands.

The greatest catastrophe came at Kiev in September 1941, where 665,000 Soviet troops were surrounded and captured in what military historians consider one of the largest encirclement battles in history.

Within 6 months, the Vermacht had captured millions of Soviet soldiers in vast encirclement operations.

By the end of 1941, over 3 million Soviet prisoners of war sat in German camps.

2/3 of them, more than 2 million men, would be dead by early 1942.

German military planners had made a deliberate decision to violate the Geneva Convention’s protections for Soviet PS.

The planning for operation Barbarasa included explicit directives to treat Soviet prisoners as expendable resources.

Economic planning documents from May 1941 stated openly that millions of people would starve as Germany extracted food from occupied Soviet territories to feed the Vermacht and the German home front.

Soviet PWS were deliberately excluded from food distribution plants.

They were to receive only what remained after German needs were met.

In practice, this meant designed starvation.

Daily rations were officially set at 1,487 calories for non-working prisoners in October 1941, an amount acknowledged by German quartermaster General Edward Vagnner as insufficient to sustain life.

Vagnner stated in a November 1941 meeting that non-working prisoners would die.

This was not a prediction, but a statement of deliberate policy.

Many prisoners received far less than even this starvation ration.

Actual deliveries often amounted to only 700 calories per day, consisting of thin soup made from rotten vegetables, bread baked from flour mixed with sawdust and straw, or occasionally raw potatoes.

Prisoners dug into frozen ground with their bare hands to create crude dugouts for shelter.

Some camps provided only open fields surrounded by barbed wire.

Prisoners had no protection from the elements during the brutal Russian winter of 1941 to 1942.

In Bellarussia, only pavilions, structures with roofs but no walls were available to house Soviet PS.

Prisoners stood exposed to snow and freezing temperatures.

Disease spread explosively through the camps.

Typhus transmitted by lice that infested the unwashed masses of starving men, killed tens of thousands.

Dysentery from contaminated water and food turned camps into open latrines.

Malnutrition destroyed immune systems.

Men’s bodies began to swell from protein deficiency.

Their skin cracked and bled.

They lost the ability to walk.

Witnesses described prisoners who had been reduced to skeletal figures with distended bellies and hollow eyes.

Between October 1941 and January 1942, between 300,000 and 500,000 Soviet prisoners died each month.

During the winter months, mortality spiked to catastrophic levels.

At times, 1% of all Soviet PS in the entire German camp system died every day.

That translates to approximately 8,000 deaths daily across all camps.

A death toll that rivaled the total deaths of all American and British PS in German captivity throughout the entire war.

By February 1942, over 2 million of the 3.

35 million Soviet prisoners captured in 1941 had died, primarily from deliberate starvation and exposure.

German guards filed reports describing prisoners eating grass and leaves in desperate attempts to fill their stomachs.

Prisoners fought over potato peelings.

They consumed bark from trees.

Some resorted to cannibalism in isolated cases.

Frozen corpses lined barbed wire fences where men had died trying to escape or simply collapsed from exhaustion and starvation.

This was the context in which the first Soviet volunteers emerged at Stalingrad.

His as the volunteers came to be known made up between 40,000 and 65,000 men representing a quarter of the German 6th army’s frontline strength.

By late 1942, HIV comprised 50% of the second Panza army’s 134th Infantry Division.

The term Hilts Villiger meant auxiliary volunteer, but the volunteerism was often a fiction.

For many Soviet PS, joining the German war effort was not an ideological choice or even a calculated political decision.

It was the difference between slow death by starvation in a camp and possible survival.

German commanders understood this.

They exploited the desperation of starving men to fill their chronic manpower shortages.

A vermarked officer wrote to General Ludvik Beck describing the contradiction.

It was disturbing that German forces were strengthening their fighting troops with Russian prisoners of war who were being turned into gunners, but manpower needs left no alternative.

The first volunteers emerged spontaneously.

German commanders in the field facing massive distances and chronic manpower shortages began recruiting Soviet PS for labor duties.

These men drove trucks, carried ammunition, cooked food, and performed manual labor.

They were not officially sanctioned.

As German casualties mounted, Huis began carrying weapons.

They served in small armed units for rear area security and antipartisan operations.

By mid 1943, around 600,000 Hiwis served in the Vermacht.

Another 200,000 served in police units fighting partisans behind German lines.

This gave a total of roughly 800,000 Hiwis at one moment in 1943 alone.

Over the entire war, probably well over 1 million Soviet citizens served as hilts in German forces.

The men who joined came from diverse backgrounds and motivations.

Former Red Army soldiers made up the largest group.

Anti-Stalinists who had survived the purges saw German invasion as potential liberation.

Kazaks, who had endured Stalin’s decac policies between 1919 and 1933, viewed collaboration as revenge against the Soviet state that had tried to eliminate them as a cultural group.

Ukrainians, Bellarusians, Caucasians, Central Asians, and members of ethnic minorities all appeared in German service.

Some sought survival, others sought revenge.

Some held genuine anti-communist convictions.

Many simply wanted to escape the camps.

Motives varied dramatically even within single units.

The largest and most formally organized collaboration took shape around General Andre Vassof.

Born in 1901, Vassoff had been a distinguished Red Army officer.

He helped defend Moscow in 1941 and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

Newspapers printed his face as a defender of the capital.

In June 1942, while commanding the second shock army during an attempt to break the siege of Leningrad, Flassoff was captured.

After months in German captivity, he agreed to cooperate with German authorities.

In December 1942, Vlov signed the Smalinsk declaration, calling on Russians and other Soviet peoples to abandon Stalin’s dictatorship.

The declaration promised to eliminate collective farms and force labor, restore private enterprise, and guarantee freedoms of speech and religion.

The declaration announced the formation of a Russian liberation army, but Hitler refused to authorize any genuine Russian military force.

Flassoff’s army existed only as propaganda.

His name and message were used to encourage Soviet defections, but he commanded nothing.

Soviet troops serving under German control remained scattered across dozens of ospatalone eastern battalions formed from various Soviet nationalities.

The Vermacht incorporated these units into its own command structure.

They fought under German officers.

Their status remained informal and improvised.

Hitler’s adamant opposition to arming Slavs meant that Soviet volunteers operated in organizational limbo, needed but never trusted, used but never legitimized.

This changed only when Germany began losing.

After Stalingrad’s fall in February 1943 and the failed Kursk offensive in July 1943, German manpower shortages became critical.

Between November 1942 and October 1943, the Eastern Front sustained over 1.

5 million casualties with close to 700,000 permanently lost.

By December 1943, the German army on the Eastern Front had shrunk by more than 1 million men to just over 2 million soldiers.

40 divisions were disbanded or merged.

German infantry divisions had their authorized strength cut nearly in half to 10,700 men.

To compensate for these catastrophic losses, the Vermacht intensified recruitment of Soviet PS and civilians.

By late 1943, he numbers surged to an estimated 250,000.

By 1944, their total reached approximately 600,000.

As Germany’s position deteriorated, even Hinrich Himmler recognized the need for foreign manpower.

On September the 16th, 1944, Himmler met with Vassoff and offered landmark concessions.

He agreed to establish a committee for the liberation of the peoples of Russia as a provisional government should Germany regain Russian territory.

He authorized the formal creation of the armed forces of the committee for the liberation of the peoples of Russia.

On November the 14th, 1944 at Prague’s Radkani Castle, Vasov proclaimed the Prague Manifesto before an assembly of SS and Vermarked officers.

The manifesto outlined a vision of a post Stalin Russia built on democratic principles and national self-determination.

Thousands of former Red Army soldiers in P camps signed up to join Vlassov’s army.

By early 1945, Vasov commanded two divisions.

The first infantry division led by General Sergey Bunachenko was fully organized with approximately 20,000 men.

The second infantry division under General Mikuel Meandrov remained incomplete.

A planned third infantry division never formed.

Several other units including the 15th CSA cavalry corps under General Helmouth Vonanvitz nominally pledged allegiance to Velasoff’s command, though actual integration never occurred.

In total, Vlassoff’s Russian Liberation Army numbered between 50,000 and 130,000 men, depending on how one counted attached formations.

This was a significant force, but it was too little and far too late.

The CSI formations represented another substantial body of Soviet citizens in German service.

Ksaks had operated alongside Vermacharked forces from the beginning of Operation Barbarasa.

In August 1941, an entire Red Army regiment, the 436th Infantry Regiment, under Major Ivan Kongh, a Don Ksac, defected to the Germans.

Kongh had a distinguished career in German service, ending the war as a major general in the 15th Csac Cavalry Corps.

In October 1942, Germans established a semi-autonomous Csac district in the Kuban region.

They recruited cossacs from occupied areas, P camps and Red Army defectors.

In April 1943, Hitler authorized the formation of a cosac division under German general Helmouth Fonanvitz.

The division was formed at Miao in Poland from existing CSAC units and refugees.

It consisted of seven regiments representing different CSA hosts, Don, Kuban, TK, and Siberian CSAs.

The division brought families with them, forcing Germans to establish camps for dependence.

In September 1943, the Ksac division was sent not to fight the Red Army, but to combat Yuguslav partisans.

Continue reading….
Next »