 Hitler's Soviet Soldiers By Sergey Kharchenko |
It was September 1941. My little town had already been occupied by the Germans. All the Red Army soldiers had disappeared in a cloud of road dust. Wehrmacht front-line units replaced them. Soon, a commandant's office and outpost for patrols were set up in the otherwise blissful little oasis.
Barbed-wire love
My neighbor Katya was bathing her muscled boyfriend in her yard, separated from mine by a fence. I could see her washing his intimate parts, which my mother used to help me do when I was a child. His name was Petro. They were laughing. Then, they had breakfast and clinked short cut glasses full of homemade vodka. Peter had the big biceps of a Red Army officer. Katya was intoxicated. Her eyes were shining. She used to advise my mother to get quickly down to the camp to find a "second husband." She said the Germans might stop releasing captured Ukrainians and there wouldn't be any more men available.
The POW camp appeared near my town suddenly. Petro had a permit to live in our village. Although my mother pretended not to listen to Katya's advice, I knew she was sad and slightly envied our neighbor.
I was eleven years old at the time. Could I comprehend this great tragedy of my country? Wedges of swift German tanks were breaking through our army's lines and fronts to eventually devour a third of Soviet territory.
Today, at 75, I realize that I could have been killed during the war not just by a stray bullet but also as a victim of famine. Although they were retreating very fast, Soviet forces managed to move all strategic enterprises to Siberia, abandoning 80 million people to the mercy of fate.
Held captive at home
Hitler and his cohorts meticulously prepared their military advances. They wanted to become the masters of all the territories they seized. Before the war, the Third Reich's agricultural services had planned to transport Ukraine's black soil to Germany. When hostilities broke out, the Germans pressed our kolkhoz farmers into gathering crops to feed their valorous armies. Hitler was furious when he learned that Stalin had not asked the International Red Cross for help. The German dictator didn't want to feed his own prisoners.
My family consisted of my mother and two little sisters. We were lucky, because our father had many things that I could exchange for food in surrounding villages. The Germans did not touch boys they encountered on the roads.
In 1941, it was difficult to recognize our provincial village camp for all the captives. There was barbed-wire fence all around. Machine gunners stood in watchtowers like predatory birds. From within, one could hear the mute scream of bloodless lips. Thousands of barefooted Red Army soldiers waded through the mud. I looked into their imploring eyes and realized that these skeletons would not survive the winter. I was terrified. When I grew older, I understood that these people, who had been betrayed by Stalin and doomed by Hitler, were ready to serve even the Devil ... just to survive.
Today, historians claim that there were two million official Soviet deserters. We know that about three million Red Army soldiers died in German POW camps. General Koch was happy: his plan to clear the territory of inferior Slavs was being successfully implemented.
Very soon our camp disappeared. Our women had thrown crumbs over its fence but they could not save the doomed.
Petro turns into Ivan
In December 1941, Katya proved to be right: the Germans did release more Red Army soldiers. However, they soon began to use them to form special divisions, which is why there were so many Ukrainian polizei.
Petro did not want to serve in the German police because they were forced to execute people. He kissed Katya goodbye and became a 'German Ivan.'
In 1943, there were thousands of German Ivans. They received food rations and salaries. Among them were horsemen, drivers, builders, cooks, shoemakers, tailors, sappers and medical orderlies. German front-line generals confessed that without German Ivans the Wehrmacht armies could not solve transportation and supply problems in Russia. These turncoats fought everywhere. No fortune-teller would have been able to tell Katya where her second husband had been sent.
A friend named Klaus
Stalin had not expected operation Barbarossa. Hitler was surprised at the number of prisoners taken. German generals were soon faced with the question of what to do with the six-million-strong human biomass. Some of them even suffered nervous breakdowns grappling with the issue. In the end, they subconsciously followed Stalin's favorite proverb: To get rid of the person is to get rid of the problem. Some ordered their soldiers to burn all captives alive.
My old friend Fedor managed to escape this hellish fate. When he was twenty, he miraculously slipped through the burning poles and rushed to a nearby wood unnoticed. He ran into a Wehrmacht soldier, who didn't even touch him. Fedor was breathless and had almost lost consciousness. The soldier simply identified himself as Klaus, turned his bicycle around and rode away. That day, Fedor was doubly lucky. As he continued his flight he came across some Soviet partisans, who had been bombing German echelons on almost a daily basis.
These guerillas were hunted by the so-called eastern divisions, which were manned by Soviet captives who knew the local forests well. They were not German Ivans but real cutthroats, merciless and uncompromising. Captives from both sides were savagely tortured.
Hitler's other allies
In 1942, my quiet town turned into Babylon. Various forces of the iron armada that was moving east towards Stalingrad stopped off there. We had an opportunity to acquaint ourselves with several corners of European culture: Italians in their blue uniforms, Romanians in tall astrakhan hats, Slovaks in green jackets, and even Finns in alpine boots.
The Don Cossacks were the most exotic of all. They rode their beautiful horses gracefully along the cherry orchards. The uneducated Hitler regarded them as direct descendants of the Ostrogoths.
The first battalion of Don Cossacks was formed from dying POWs. When Germany's 6th Army arrived at the Don River, many of them voluntarily joined up.
Slogans were published in the Gazavat Newspaper praising the collaboration of Soviet Moslems. They too supported the Germans as they invaded Crimea and the North Caucasus. Together with western Ukrainians, Don Cossacks, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, they took revenge on Stalin for his mass persecution of millions of innocent people.
A hero and a traitor
"This gifted commander is devoted to Stalin and Lenin's cause." Such was the appraisal made of KGB Lt. General Andrey Vlasov by party leaders and Red Army generals.
General Vlasov had managed the defense of Kyiv in the fall of 1941. Then he commanded the Second Shock Army in northern Russia. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner. In July 1942, the enemy surrounded him and his staff. Vlasov was taken prisoner.
I do not think that Vlasov decided to collaborate with the Wehrmacht because he was hungry. He had his own cook and his own political program. His new job became the recruitment of volunteers to join the Russian Liberation Army, which was charged with putting an end to 'Stalin's cabal'.
Sure that he had secured his victory, Hitler ordered his generals to get rid of Vlasov. In 1944, somebody else took over for the decorated Soviet general. The hundred-thousand-strong Russian Liberation Army had fought in various parts of the eastern front. In May 1945, General Vlasov and his comrades were executed.
Stalin punished millions of traitors. Thousands were killed, while thousands of others served in penal battalions or fed lice in concentration camps. Well after the end of the war, Stalin was still not certain that all his country's enemies had been eliminated. Only the great dictator's death prevented him from ordering more large-scale purges.
Looking back
I knew someone who had served with Vlasov. He was a gloomy and lonely old man. His last name, Dub (Oak), aptly expressed the character of the man who possessed it. Local boys teased him. World War II veterans despised him. But Dub stubbornly and silently continued to reside in the nearby town, which I occasionally visited. After the war, he had been sent to Siberia to serve a 14-year sentence for high treason.
When Gorbachev assumed office, making everyone into amateur orators and critics of Soviet reality, Dub also uttered a few words. He said Vlasov had supported Hitler because he hated the arrogance, stupidity and cruelty of Soviet generals. He explained his betrayal in one vivid detail. During the war, he saw the dead-bodies of Russian soldiers lying all around. The Germans, on the other hand, always buried their men, even erecting primitive tombstones on their graves.
Vlasov's opponents were silenced. They stood smoking nervously, perhaps recalling their own wartime offences and sufferings.
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More in the section:
Beggars and Bards
Soviet Nightingale
Read also previous issue' articles:
THE EAR: Time to Stop Traffic Terror
The USSR: What was it?
Socialist Realism From One Collector's Viewpoint
Weak Laws Make Ukraine Europe's Dumping Ground
Social Entrepreneurship Expands in Ukraine
Lenin and Ukraine
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