Sellers, collaborators, traitors. Such epithets for decades in the Soviet Union, and then in Russia, were used to describe prisoners of war from the Red Army who crossed over to the German side. Why did they do that? Was it Stalin who pushed them into Hitler's arms?
The staggering successes of the Wehrmacht in the first months of Operation Barbarossa meant that by the end of 1941 only about two and a half million Red Army soldiers were held captive by the Germans. Among this mass was also Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Palij. His memoirs, entitled "Notes of an Officer from Captivity", is a unique testimony to understand why so many Red Army soldiers decided to fight alongside the Wehrmacht.
Who am I fighting for?
At the time of the German invasion of the USSR, Palij was serving as a captain of the engineering troops near Brest-on-the-Bug. Even though he was in the very eye of the storm on the very first day, he was one of the lucky ones to initially avoid being a prisoner. Together with his unit, he withdrew towards Kiev. He showed considerable resourcefulness and bravery, which even earned him a promotion to the rank of major.
By the end of 1941 alone, the Germans captured more than two and a half million soldiers of the Red Army (source:Bundesarchiv; lic. CC ASA 3.0).
Although he had no formal military training, in the second half of July 1941, he was directed to the front line to defend the right bank of the Dnieper at the head of a construction battalion. Even then, he had serious doubts:
What's pushing me to do this […]. Who do I defend, who do I force others to defend? […] I hate from the bottom of my heart everything that is behind my back. I hate this damn clique of sadists and Kremlin usurpers, I hate their ruler, Stalin's paranoid . I hate the very essence of this Soviet life, where millions of terrified and pathetic slaves dare not raise their heads ...
Palij knew what he was writing about. In the first half of the 1930s he was imprisoned for nearly a year, where he was accused of bourgeois nationalism, chauvinism and separatism […] , anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation directed against the authorities .
As he himself mentioned , during his stay behind bars he got his assignment to kill . And all because after completing his basic military service, he did not want to be associated with the Red Army for the rest of his life and preferred to return to a civilian life. Now, along with the "burglars" under his orders, he was to face the Wehrmacht.
As you can guess, the German assault ended in a real massacre of Soviet soldiers. Our hero, however, managed to avoid being captured this time, but a few days later the fortune turned away from him and the wounded leg fell into the hands of the Germans.
Camp hell
The first months behind the camp wires were hell. Palij, along with five thousand officers of the Red Army, ended up in a transit camp in Zamość. Conditions there were insulting to human dignity.
Palij initially managed to avoid captivity, but at the end of July 1941 his fortune left him and he shared the fate of millions of other Red Army soldiers (source:Bundesarchiv; lic. CC ASA 3.00.
The prisoners were starved (meals provided only several hundred calories a day ), they were forced to work hard and were constantly threatened with harassment from the side of the camp police - composed of former Red Army soldiers serving the Germans. As if that were not enough, with the onset of winter there was an epidemic of typhus that took a terrible toll.
In just a few months, more than 2/3 of the prisoners died. In the spring, the survivors had to decide what to do next. Some of them - wanting to save their lives - decided to change sides and fight alongside the Germans. Among them was Lieutenant Borisov, a close friend of Palij, who argued his decision as follows:
I could no longer even think of living cold, hungry, among the dying, fallen, demoralized and terrified. [...] I decided that I would return home there only if Stalin and his oprichnina were not there .
The conditions in the transit camps for Soviet prisoners of war were insulting to human dignity. The photo shows the camp near Smolensk (source:Bundesarchiv; lic. CC ASA 3.0).
A bullet to the head is waiting for us anyway
Then Borisov explained to a comrade of misery that there was no other way than to cooperate with the Germans. All because:
In the Criminal Code, in article 193, paragraph 22 it says:" Abandoning a combat position or enslaving the enemy without direct commanding orders is punishable by shooting ". In the special circulars of the Red Army Legal Board, it is stated:“The Soviet Union disagreed with the main principles of the 1929 international Red Cross Convention and refused to recognize their legal validity.
The consequence of this is that soldiers and commanders of the Red Army and the fleet do not have the status of prisoners of war when taken into captivity, with all the ensuing consequences ” .
This was the interpretation that was carefully applied by the Germans who refused to be called prisoners of war against the captured Red Army soldiers. Thus condemning hundreds of thousands of them to certain death. However, Borisov did not blame his recent enemies, on the contrary, he argued that:
They, in the Kremlin, released the Germans themselves from responsibility for our lives. So Germany is our enemy? If they are enemies of Stalin and his gangs, then they are my allies.
The failure of the Soviet Union to adopt the convention on the protection of prisoners of war was used by the Germans, who killed hundreds of thousands of the captured Red Army soldiers (source:RIA Novosti archive; lic. CC ASA 3.0).
There were thousands of like-minded people, but Palij did not plan to change the front at this stage. Especially that he was transferred to a real POW camp in Germany, ensuring that human conditions awaited him. It quickly turned out that these were just empty promises and was once again one step away from starvation.
The choice between plague and cholera
But also this time fate smiled at him. Due to his technical education, he ended up in one of the sub-camps working for the Military Experimental Station in Peenemünde (NAR), where Hitler's marvelous weapons were constructed - V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets. He stayed there until the fall of 1944.
At that time, the camp was regularly visited by the representatives of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA), General Vlasov, who collaborated with Germany. They agitated in various ways to join the ranks of the formation. Months passed and the war was drawing to a close. For Palij and other anti-Bolshevik prisoners of war, however, this was not a reason to be happy.
The closer to the end of the war, Palij and other anti-Bolshevik POWs understood more and more that ROA was probably the only chance to save their lives. They did not know yet that after the war the Allies would hand them over to Stalin. The photo shows General Vlasov among the soldiers of the ROA (source:Bundesarchiv; lic. CC ASA 3.0).
They were well aware that as soon as the NKVD functionaries arrived in the camp, they would be sent to death by a firing squad or, at best, sent to a labor camp. No wonder then that years later he recalled:
For many the only solution was to voluntarily join the ROA , breaking out of NAR slave modes and joining a large, strong organization defending our national interests, with the goals and tasks of which we sympathized, and striving to achieve these goals whenever possible. Staying in the camp meant signing your own death warrant .
You have to find yourself on the verge of despair
This was especially true of senior officers, with generals at the helm, who had never been allowed to surrender and were now allowed to return home:
"on the shield", which in this case would mean tortured, disgraced, in a cattle car under NKVD guard , or "with a shield" - with banners unfolded, on a white horse, at the head of a division. What divisions? Of course, anti-soviet, anti-communist.
Under these circumstances, Palij finally, after much hesitation, decided to don the uniform of the Russian Liberation Army. However, he had no illusions. He knew that the choice he made was very uncertain. Unlike Borisov, he did not see Hitler as a savior. To avoid near certain death, he had to choose between plague and cholera.
The tragedy of the situation in which he found himself and thousands of others like him is best illustrated by the statement of one of the camp's companions. He noticed that:
You must be on the verge of despair to make a conscious choice between the external enemy and the internal enemy in favor of the former! Personally, I cannot do it, although I do realize what awaits me if I live to see myself again in the hands of an enemy within.
Although it was Stalin's decisions that made so many Soviet prisoners of war joined the Germans, after the war he had no mercy for "traitors to the workers' paradise" (source:public domain).
One of the few
It couldn't possibly have been more aptly expressed. Palij, however, made a good bet. He lived until the end of the war, and then, thanks to his participation in the German missile weapons project, he found his way to the United States. There, many years later, he wrote down his memoirs, thanks to which we can learn the motivation of those who decided to betray Stalin and join the ranks of Vlasov's army.
Many others were not so lucky. After the war, the Western Allies handed them over to Stalin, who was not going to show any favors. Until the very end, the dictator learned nothing. He did not understand that it was his own decisions that led to a wave of "betrayals" and "desertions."
Source:
Piotr Nikołajewica Palij, Notes of a captive officer , Oficyna Wydawnicza Finna 2015.