Soviets Who Helped the Nazis (Uncensored Version)

On June 22nd, 1941, one of the darkest chapters in human history began. As Axis forces burned their way across the Soviet Union, tens of millions would perish in a merciless war of annihilation. Despite this carnage, up to 1.5 million Soviet citizens would actually join their invaders In the plumes of smoke drifting across the Soviet sky, allegiances, ideologies, and even humanity itself could sometimes grow hazy. For the millions of Soviet soldiers on the front lines, Germany's invasion was apocalyptic from the very start. Inept leadership, logistical issues, and poor morale plagued the Red Army's initial response to the German onslaught. Soviet soldiers, most of whom were conscripts, found themselves surrounded by a superior enemy and were often unable to effectively defend themselves despite suicidal orders to do so. Adding to the sense of hopelessness, many of these Soviet soldiers had been personally terrorized by the very regime they were now desperately ordered to defend. Despite these abysmal conditions, countless Soviet soldiers did fight fanatically against their German invaders. Most Soviet soldiers felt a strong sense of loyalty toward their comrades, if not to their government, and few openly desired to collaborate with their enemies. However, as German armored units punched through Soviet lines, ensnaring millions of men in an inescapable ring of iron, everything changed. In the summer of 1941, nearly 3.5 million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner by the Germans. By the beginning of 1942, most of these men would be dead. Immediately after their capture, Soviet soldiers were led on grueling, weeks-long death marches. Stragglers were shot. Only after arriving at the exposed, barbed-wire enclosures that served as their POW camps would these huddled masses of living skeletons be given food. Cruelly, even this nourishment was purposefully insufficient. After all, prisoners were expensive, but starved corpses were free. In this nightmare come to life, it's perhaps unsurprising that some Soviet soldiers began to reconsider their principles. Furthermore, as hope for a quick victory against the Soviet Union began to fade away, the Germans began to slightly reconsider their genocidal policies against these Soviet POWs, withering away under their supervision. Perhaps, in exchange for collaboration, some prisoners could be allowed to live. The decision to collaborate was a complex choice for Soviet prisoners, and one that most ultimately rejected. Many Soviets were unimpressed by Nazi ideology, and knew that capture by the Red Army would mean almost certain execution or treason. Additionally, conditions in POW camps varied throughout time, and some Soviet prisoners felt that they could successfully wait out the war without collaborating. For other prisoners, the choice seemed simpler, collaborate or starve. Soon, former Soviet soldiers began to appear in the Wehrmacht. The most numerous category of Soviet military collaborators were the Hilfswillige, or Hiwis. Meaning those willing to help in German, Hiwis were typically ethnically Slavic prisoners who opted to join German auxiliary units. Initially, Hitler was adamant that these allegedly subhuman collaborators be used only in support roles, such as cooking, maintenance, and logistics. But as the war in the East grew increasingly desperate, some Hiwis began to be used in combat roles, and the Wehrmacht grew ever more dependent on them. Throughout the war, hundreds of thousands of Soviet collaborators would cycle through Hiwi units. By the Battle of Stalingrad, the encircled German Sixth Army alone included over 50,000 Hiwis. Separate from the Hilfswillige, the Germans also recruited non-Slavic Soviets into specialized Eastern legions. Nazi racial policy espoused the inferiority of Slavs, so the Soviet Union's non-Slavic ethnicities were seen as being important collaborators in the dismemberment of Stalin's empire. Six national fighting units were formed for Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, North Caucasians, Central Asians, and Volga Tartars. In addition to these units, many fighters from the Baltic states, who had been recently conquered by the Soviet Union, chose to fight alongside the Germans, making common cause with their war against communism. Another category of collaborationist military units were the Cossack formations of the German Wehrmacht. Cossacks were a semi-nomadic militarized people who had long inhabited the steppes and borderlands of Eastern Europe. Due to their unique history, Nazi ideologists proclaimed that Cossacks were not Slavs, but in fact possessed long-lost Aryan roots. Because of this, they were deemed ideal collaborators. Heavily persecuted by Stalin, many Cossacks were happy to comply. By 1943, Cossack units boasted over 25,000 soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front. While many former Soviet soldiers serving in the Wehrmacht ultimately chose to collaborate under the threat of starvation, not all collaborators needed this coercion. Nationalists and fascists blocked to the German banner, often hoping to overthrow Soviet domination of their homelands and secure a place for themselves in Hitler's new Europe. Notably, Ukrainian underground organizations such as the OUNB collaborated openly with the Germans at various points and launched a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Polish population of Western Ukraine, a sin which was soon returned on a smaller scale by the vengeful Poles. Soviet collaborators often played an important role in the Holocaust as well. Nationalist collaborators in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states eagerly aided the Germans in their extermination of Jews. POW camps proved to be a ripe recruiting ground for terror as well. Especially notorious were the so-called Trothniki men, plucked from the horrors of their POW camps and trained by the SS. These troops were used to guard concentration camps and actively engaged in the implementation of the Holocaust. Collaboration may have saved these soldiers' lives, but it ended many others. As Soviet collaborators traded fire with their countrymen on the battlefields of the Eastern Front, an even more complicated picture emerged in the vast swaths of Soviet territory under German occupation. Here, in the sparsely populated countryside, a brutal guerrilla war was waged that tore villages, neighbors, and even families apart. When the Red Army seemingly collapsed in the face of German aggression in 1941, many of the now-occupied territories of the USSR assumed that the war would soon be over. And in a way, it was. Deep behind German lines, Soviet rule became a thing of the past. Unable to spare the manpower to occupy the entirety of their holdings in Eastern Europe, the Germans set up local governments in many parts of the occupied Soviet Union, sometimes even employing former communist officials when their loyalty could be adequately assured. To the villagers, heavily persecuted by Stalin, these local governments represented a return to the old order. To Moscow, this unfolding situation amounted to treason. In response, Soviet-backed partisan groups were raised behind the front lines. The people of the occupied Soviet Union would be reminded who their loyalty belonged to. Partisan tactics were brutal. Far from being an organic resistance movement, Soviet citizens were often forcibly recruited into partisan detachments after having their villages ransacked for supplies. In response, many villages formed their own self-defense forces to protect themselves from the roving bandits under Stalin's command. Typically affiliated with the German-backed village administrations, these self-defense units collaborated with the Germans to varying degrees, and sometimes used their newfound power to murderously settle personal scores. For many villagers, it was impossible to truly pick one side to collaborate with. As the partisan war gained momentum, the German military cracked down brutally, burning entire villages and massacring any men, women, or children even suspected of aiding partisans. The partisans, for their part, inflicted similar misfortunes on anyone suspected of aiding the Germans. A tragically common situation involved German troops confiscating food and supplies at gunpoint from local villagers, only for those same villagers to be murdered as collaborators by the partisans. Clearly then, the notion of collaboration was hardly black and white. Many Soviet citizens who opted to join the German war effort behind the frontlines found themselves embroiled in this morally gray battlefield. Serving in specialized anti-partisan units, these men were tasked with rooting out partisans and destroying their bases of support. After the war, many of these soldiers claimed that they were supported by the village administrations and refrained from the sadistic violence often employed by the Germans. While this was sometimes true, the orphaned children and choking smoke left in the wakes of these units hint at a much darker reality. While many German aligned local governments were small in scale, some were much larger. This was the case of the Here, in the rural stretches of western Russia, several villages pooled their resources to form an anti-Soviet local government and raise their own self-defense detachments. These detachments were so successful and ruthless in their war against the partisans, that the region was granted self-governing status by the Germans, becoming something like a personal thief of the a man named Bronislav Kaminsky. Fanatical in his opposition to communism, Kaminsky envisioned the creation of a fascist Russian state and collaborated closely with the Germans to achieve his goals, even though Hitler remained entirely opposed to this independent vision. From his base in the Lokhot region of Russia, Kaminsky raised an anti-partisan force that numbered in the thousands. Famed for his ruthlessness, this detachment became informally known as the Kaminsky Brigade, and would see action in Russia, Belarus, and eventually Poland, where it would commit its most unspeakable acts. On August 1st, 1944, after much deliberation, the Polish Home Army launched an armed rebellion against the German forces in their capital city. The Warsaw Uprising had begun. Taken off guard by the scope and ferocity of Polish resistance, the Germans were soon forced to call in reinforcements, many of whom were Soviet collaborators such as the Kaminsky Brigade. As a result, about half of all of the German soldiers fighting in Warsaw did not speak German. Upon their arrival to Warsaw, Kaminsky and his men were given orders to terrorize and loot the neighborhood of Ochota, which they entered on August 9th. Over the next 10 days, the Kaminsky Brigade engaged in an unforgivable orgy of violence. They burned down hospitals full of wounded patients, but not before raping the women inside. They rounded up and murdered thousands of Polish civilians, executing them in front of Nothing was safe from Kaminsky's undisciplined horde of bandits. In fact, the Brigade was so single-mindedly focused on theft that Kaminsky himself was arrested and executed by the SS for failing to share the spoils of war with his German masters. For a power-hungry man who had stolen so much, it was perhaps ironic that his own life was stolen by those more powerful than himself. Tragically, Kaminsky's Brigade was hardly the most barbaric participant in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. That dubious honor would fall upon the Derlewanger Brigade. This unit, originally made up of released violent felons, included a significant number of Soviet collaborators by 1944. Immediately after arriving in Warsaw, this unit was sent to the district and given two simple directives. Raise the city to the ground and kill everything that moved. Derlewanger and his men happily complied. In the span of just two days, the Derlewanger Brigade murdered 40,000 Polish civilians. Their cruelty was truly bestial. Women and children were used as human shields before being shot and incinerated. Polish men were forced to burn the bodies of their family members before being pushed into the human pyre themselves. When the Brigade reached a Polish hospital, wounded German soldiers being treated inside begged Derlewanger's men to spare the merciful Poles who had been tending to them. Derlewanger didn't listen. The wounded Poles in the hospital were burned alive. The nurses were brought back to camp, tied to posts, and whipped before being gang-raped by the Brigade. They were then hanged to the accompaniment of flute music. For every man Derlewanger lost, his Brigade killed 1,000 civilians. This was not combat. This was inhumanity itself. After 63 days of depravity, the thousands of Soviet collaborators in Warsaw could point to many morbid accomplishments. The uprising had been suppressed. The city had been razed to its very foundations. And there were now 12 tons of human ash drifting silently through the burning sky. As the war continued, the scale of Soviet military collaboration with Nazi Germany only grew. By 1943, there were up to a million Soviet citizens under arms for the German Reich. However, despite these massive numbers, there were no independent formations of Soviet troops in the German military. Fearing mutiny and motivated by racial ideology, Soviet collaborators were frequently belittled and repeatedly denied any chance of independence from their German superiors. Only by the end of 1944 could a proper army of Soviet collaborators be formed. Led by the Soviet defector Andrei Vlasov, the Russian Liberation Army, or ROA, was a hastily assembled military formation that at its peak included up to 50,000 men. By this point in the war, it was becoming painfully obvious to Soviet collaborators that they had chosen the wrong side. Therefore, even as they prepared for combat against the relentlessly advancing Red Army, the true motivation of many in Vlasov's army was to escape westward and surrender to the hopefully less vengeful Americans. The most daring escape attempt was made by the 1st ROA Division under the command of Sergei Bunyachenka. After having his unit used as cannon fodder by the desperate Germans, Bunyachenka made the decision to go rogue and pull back to Czechoslovakia, where he hoped to link up with Vlasov and negotiate a deal with the approaching Americans. Outside of Prague, however, Bunyachenka received a strange request. With the Germans in disarray and the Soviet army barreling toward Prague, Czech resistance fighters sensed that the time was right for a national uprising. In need of backup, Czech leaders reached out to Bunyachenka's division and requested their assistance in liberating Prague from German occupation. Potentially hoping to build credibility with the soon-to-be victorious Allies, Bunyachenka agreed to this proposition and sent his forces into Prague on May 7th, 1945. There, Bunyachenka's army of collaborators turned decisively on their former Allies, disarming thousands of German soldiers and tipping the outcome of the Prague uprising in the insurgents' favor. Alas, this last-minute heroism did not wipe away the stain of treason in the eyes of Stalin. After withdrawing from Prague and successfully surrendering to the Americans, Bunyachenka and many of his soldiers were unexpectedly handed over to the Soviets, who swiftly reminded their former comrades that the price of collaboration was death. The fates of Soviet collaborators after the war were numerous. Many were captured and executed by the Soviets. Others got off with a sentence of hard labor. Some managed to escape to the West and live out their lives in exile. A few even managed to slip back into Soviet territory, their traumatic wartime experiences slowly fading from memory. The tragedy of Soviet collaboration in the Second World War complicates the narrative of black and white morality that predominates retellings of the conflict. On one hand, Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by Germans frequently had little choice but to collaborate if they wished to avoid starvation. On the other hand, many of these collaborators would go on to commit monstrous atrocities. For everyday Soviet people behind the frontlines, their homes were often consumed by a virtual civil war between partisan and anti-partisan forces. Can you really choose a side when both of your neighbors have guns to your head? For many in the Soviet Union, there were no winners or losers, no rights or wrongs, only survivors. And the eerie silence of the dead.