Recruiting From the POW Ranksįrom 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. When the Germans offered to abide by the Geneva Convention and allow the Red Cross to visit the POW camps, Stalin replied that there was no such thing as a Russian prisoner of war. They died by the hundreds of thousands and surrendered by the hundreds of thousands. The Russian soldiers went into battle with the German Wehrmacht to their front and the Soviet NKVD secret police at their back. On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa caught the Soviets totally unprepared. Stalin had refused to believe that Adolf Hitler, who had signed a nonaggression pact in 1939, was about to attack, despite intelligence that said otherwise. As later events would prove, the Cossacks offered more than a glorious welcome, and German General Helmuth von Pannwitz would find himself commanding a quarter million of the world’s best fighting men.īut the majority of those who came over to the German side had initially gone into battle as members of the Red Army, an army woefully unprepared for the better-trained, better-equipped Germans. It is little wonder that when the Germans arrived they were greeted as liberators, accepting the flowers and gifts that descended upon them. The Bolsheviks showed no mercy, liquidating the Cossack republics in the cruelest manner. In the years 1917-1920, some of the toughest resistance experienced by the Red Army came from the Cossacks of the Don River Basin, the Kuban, the Terak, Orenburg, the Urals, and Astrakan-the six federated republics that had been formed by these fiercely independent people. Soon they entered the Caucasus and the land of the Cossacks, the fierce and noble warriors of storied history. The Germans were driving hard deep into Russia. In the summer of 1942, the war between the Soviet Union and Germany was in its second year, and the Soviets were losing. No Such Thing as a Russian Prisoner of War Therefore, they would forever be known as White Russians.

Before fleeing, many had fought with the White Army and for the czar against the Red Army and the Communists, then better known as the Bolsheviks. They all held citizenship in other countries. Thousands had fled Russia at the time of the Revolution and had never lived in what became the Soviet Union. They were a disparate group, these Russians who wanted to stay in the West. It would not be until the 1980s that the awful truth began to emerge, that the world eventually knew as the Secret Betrayal. Sadly, these happenings also say much about the British and to a lesser extent the Americans, many of whom were willing participants in the forced repatriation. The reasons for this say more about the horror of life under the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution than Hitler’s Germany.

Never before in the annals of warfare had so many soldiers abandoned their own side to fight for the enemy. It mattered not that many had been forcibly removed from their homeland by the former German enemy.Īpproximately one million of the expatriates were military men who for various reasons took up arms against Stalin and volunteered to fight with Germany. 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. 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.

Between 19, 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.

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