On this day 27th December 1942.The Germans form the Smolensk Committee to persuade Soviet POWs to fight for the Axis powers.

On this day 27th December 1942.The Germans form the Smolensk Committee to persuade Soviet POWs to fight for the Axis powers.

From the beginning of the war, the German officer corps, most of whom who did not share Hitler’s racist theories, had plans to recruit Russian soldiers to its cause, and the recruiters were amazed at how easy it was, even after Hitler declared that since Stalin did not recognize the Geneva Convention, Russian soldiers would not be granted POW status.

According to Hitler and other top Nazis, they were subhuman anyway. Of the 5,754,000 Russians taken prisoner after 1941, only 1,150,000 survived until 1945.

Given the brutality of the Germans, it seems incomprehensible that so many were still ready to don German uniforms, pick up German rifles, and go forth to do battle against Stalin.

To call them traitors strains the credibility of even the most prominent statesman. Indeed, they loved their country. It was their government they hated.

Just 60 days after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the first major defection of Russian soldiers to the German side occurred.

A Cossack unit, the 436th Infantry commanded by Major Ivan Nikitich Kononov, surrendered. Kononov laid bare his intentions to join the fight against Stalin. He told his troops how much he hated Stalin and then gave them a choice.

“Those who wish to go with me take up their position on the right, and those who wish to stay take up position on the left. I promise no harm will come to those who wish to stay.” The entire regiment moved to the right.

Kononov’s disenchantment with Stalin had begun during the 1939 war with Finland, when so many Russian soldiers had died unnecessarily.

He had been waiting two years for his chance to desert. In his naiveté concerning the Germans, he did not realize he had left one evil to join another.

German General Max von Schenckendorff knew of Hitler’s plans to destroy Russia as a nation, but how could he turn down another hard-fighting regiment? Kononov and his men were ecstatic that they were now the 102nd Cossack Regiment of the German Army.

They would prove their mettle in battle as they cleared the steppes of the Red Army and communist partisans.

While Kononov saw siding with the Germans as a chance to create a different homeland, German generals knew better.

However, they were on the front lines and losing thousands of men daily. They welcomed help, no matter where it came from.

In their defense, even though they knew of Hitler’s plans for Russia they may have held out hope that even the bigoted Nazi leader would come around when he saw the fighting quality of these subhumans.

There was no real chance of this happening. Hitler would never give up his insane racist beliefs.

But what the Germans were looking for was a Russian de Gaulle, a leader capable of molding one million Russians into an anti-Stalin army.

They found him. It is too bad the Germans did not measure up to the man they picked.

His name was General Andrei Andreievich Vlasov. He towered over other military men in both stature and intellect.

He came from humble beginnings but had great integrity and was one of the ablest generals in the Red Army. To this day there is a statue of him in a White Russian community in New York State.

Vlasov had been a strong believer in the Bolshevik cause and had helped defeat the White Army, though he did not join the Communist Party until 1930.

Like so many, he became disenchanted with Stalin and his henchmen, realizing the Soviet Union had become a paradise for only a few and a living hell for everyone else.

The reckoning:

By the end of the war, over two million Russians who had been living in the occupied countries of Europe, some voluntarily, some not, were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union.

Many met death by execution immediately, while others were literally worked to death in the hundreds of gulags that dotted the largest slave society in history.

Whether these individuals were civilian or soldier, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin reasoned that anyone who had been living outside the borders of the Soviet Union was to be considered contaminated by anti-Soviet ideology and therefore could not be trusted.