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In 1942, however, Vlasov was just the man that the political warfare faction was looking for, and the creation of an army of Soviet defectors under German control using him as a figurehead became its central preoccupation for the remainder of the war. “The Germans started a form of blackmail against the surviving Russian war prisoners,” war correspondent Alexander Werth notes. “[E]ither go into the Vlasov Army or starve.” The overwhelming majority of Soviet POWs refused the offer, and about 2 million POWs who were given the choice of collaboration or starvation between 1942 and 1945 chose death before they would aid the Nazis. But many thousands of Russians did join the invaders as porters, cooks, concentration camp guards, and informers, and later as fighting troops under German control.
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As will be seen, the Vlasov Army has frequently been portrayed in the West since the war as the most noble and idealistic of the Nazis' émigré legions. Vlasov was “convinced that it was possible to
overthrow Stalin and establish another form of government in Russia,” writes U.S. psychological warfare consultant Wallace Carroll in a widely circulated 1949 feature story promoting American recruitment of Vlasov's veterans. “What he wanted was a ‘democratic' government, and by ‘democratic' he meant … [a] republican and parliamentary system.”
⁸

In reality, Vlasov's organization consisted in large part of reassigned veterans from some of the most depraved SS and “security” units of the Nazis' entire killing machine, regardless of what Vlasov himself may have wanted. By 1945 about half of Vlasov's troops had been drawn from the SS Kommando Kaminsky, which had earlier been led by the Belorussian collaborator Bronislav Kaminsky.
*

The Kaminsky militia's loyalty to the Nazis won it an official commission in the Waffen SS, quite an honor for Slavic “subhumans,” coming from the Germans. They went on to spearhead the bloody suppression of the heroic 1944 Warsaw Ghetto rebellion with such bestial violence that even German General Hans Guderian was appalled and called for their removal from the field. The Germans eventually caught Kaminsky pocketing loot that he was supposed to have turned over to the Reich. They executed him in the last days of the uprising.

With Kaminsky himself gone, the SS then folded together his remaining troops with other Russian turncoats from POW camps, plus a variety of other ethnic Russian and Ukrainian
Schumabataillone
, or security units.
⁹
Many of these new soldiers had histories similar in all important respects to those of the Kaminsky men. They are who made up the “idealistic” Vlasov Army.

The German political warriors were themselves split over the traditionally knotty question of the minority nationalities in the USSR. Advocates of political warfare tactics within the Nazi Foreign Office, the SS, and German military intelligence, for example, generally favored uniting all the defectors and collaborators from the USSR into the Vlasov Army. The figureheads of that force were generally of Russian ethnic background and sharply opposed to the
nationalistic ambitions of the Ukrainians, Caucasians, and other minority groups within the USSR.

Alfred Rosenberg's nonmilitary (but thoroughly Nazi) ministry for the occupied eastern territories argued, on the other hand, that the Baltic, Ukrainian, and Islamic minority groups from the periphery of the USSR should be encouraged to create separate “national liberation armies” to free their homelands from both “Jewish-communism” and the imperialism of the Russians. Rosenberg's ministry created about a dozen “governments-in-exile” for Belorussians, the Crimean Tatars, Soviet Georgians, and other minority groups inside the USSR to carry out this program.

The old czarist Russia, it will be recalled, had been an expansionist empire for centuries and had gradually conquered much of Central Asia and the northern approaches to the Middle East. The subject peoples of those territories—the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kalmyks, and others—were primarily Muslim by religion and of Turkic or Mongolian ethnic background, with languages and cultures sharply different from those of the Orthodox Christian czars who attempted to rule them from Moscow.

Similarly, czarist Russia had also repeatedly attempted to assimilate the peoples along its European border to the west of Moscow. There Russians had historically clashed with the Lithuanians, Poles, and Romanians over a long strip of disputed territory stretching north to south from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Perhaps the most important prize in those early conflicts was the Ukraine, a rich, ethnically distinct area on the southeastern border of modern-day Poland.

The revolution of 1917 had added still another layer of complexity to the bitterness among these groups and had intensified the existing ethnic, class, and religious antagonisms. Many of the subject peoples—notably the Ukrainians, Armenians, and Georgians—attempted to set up new nation-states in their territories in the wake of the fall of the czar. All the major European powers, now including the predominantly Russian Bolsheviks, jockeyed for power in the contested regions, each of them backing a favored faction of the rebellious minority groups in a bid to expand its influence. By 1925 many of those struggles had been settled through force of arms in favor of the Soviets, particularly in the south and east of what was now the USSR. But the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in the north had managed to preserve a fragile national independence, and Poland had gained
thousands of square miles of the Ukraine under the armistice that ended World War I.

These earlier upheavals had left a powerful legacy of ethnic and religious discontent inside the USSR and had led to the creation of large anti-Communist émigré communities in several major European capitals. The violence and bloodshed that accompanied Stalinist land reform and the suppression of religion during the 1930s ensured that many of those wounds remained open.

Alfred Rosenberg's vision was to make use of these conflicts as a means of advancing what he perceived to be Germany's racial and national mission in the East. The German intelligence services had also systematically recruited sympathizers among the various émigré groups and by the eve of World War II had trained and armed several large squadrons of Ukrainian nationalists for use in both the 1939 division of Poland and the later blitzkrieg attack on the USSR.

The relationship between these forces and their German sponsors was complex and shifted repeatedly in the course of the war. As some minority nationalist leaders saw it, it was
they
who were using the Germans, not the other way around, in order to pursue their own aspirations of power. The German response to such ambitions reflected all the classical dilemmas of an imperial power caught between its desire for absolute control and the practical necessity of relying on minor allies with dreams of their own to achieve that end. The various factions of the Nazi state fought bitterly among themselves over how to deal with their unruly pawns. The émigré nationalists and the Vlasov forces were alternately supported and temporarily suppressed, then supported again as Germany's military fortunes in the East changed.

There was one thing, it seems, on which all the German political warfare specialists could agree: Most of the blood to be spilled in the envisioned anti-Communist revolution would be that of Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other natives of the USSR, not that of Germans. “Every Russian who fights for us,” the Nazi Foreign Office propaganda expert Anton Bossi-Fedrigotti argued, “saves German blood.”
¹⁰

The German generals who commanded the émigré anti-Communist legions had no illusions about the motivations of most of the defectors who agreed to work for the Nazis in the East. “The bulk of the volunteers … I am convinced, did not enlist to fight for the
[anti-Bolshevik] cause,” writes Lieutenant General Ralph von Heygendorff, a commander of the eastern legions (under Kostring's authority) from 1942 through 1944. Instead, the majority came “solely for the purpose of gaining personal advantages, immediately or within the near future. Many of these men attempted to demonstrate strongly an idealism which neither existed nor governed their actions.” In reality, it was the “horrible conditions prevailing in most of the [POW] camps,” according to Heygendorff, that led most of the collaborators to seize on cooperation with the Nazis as a “last hope.”

The few “true idealists” among their ranks, the German general continues, “who combined a pronounced anti-Bolshevik attitude with a fanatical love for their own people” were among the most brutal and violent of all the Nazis' legions when it came to dealing with the civilian population in the German-occupied regions, precisely because they were generally regarded as traitors by their own people. “They were extremely harsh toward fellow countrymen who failed to share their ideals,” Heygendorff writes. “In dealing with undependable individuals they were
so severe that we frequently had to intervene
” (emphasis added)—a German euphemism that indicates that the “idealists” were often responsible for mass murders of innocent civilians during the antipartisan campaigns.
¹¹

The Nazis selected the more promising and talented collaborators for intelligence missions behind Soviet lines, propaganda, sabotage, and—most commonly—the interrogation of the millions of Soviet POWs and civilians who had fallen into German hands during the opening months of the war. Multilingual defectors were often attached to the interrogation teams because of their language skills, knowledge of the local area, or, as noted above, enthusiasm for dealing with their compatriots “who did not share their ideals.” The German army and the SS specifically authorized torture and frequently employed it as a means of extracting information. Inside the POW camps local collaborators specialized in
Durchkämmung
, the “combing out” of Jews, “commissars” (Communist party members), and other undesirables from among the captured soldiers. The SS turned the “combed” ones over to the mobile killing squads for execution.

The work of these interrogators and interpreters was essential to the broader Nazi effort to locate and exterminate the Jews and Communists who had fallen into their hands. After the war the
German political warfare experts rarely discussed their own roles or those of their defectors in these interrogations, despite their clear participation in them. This is perhaps because, as noted by the Nuremberg tribunal in its decision on SS man and political warfare specialist Waldemar von Radetzky, “by admitting the translation functions, [they] would be admitting that [they] knew of executions which followed certain investigations.”
¹²
The political warfare experts were deeply involved in these interrogations throughout the war. Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, for example, who was later a central figure in CIA-financed émigré operations in Munich, spent much of the war as chief interrogator of the Russian intelligence directorate of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) on the eastern front.
¹³

Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of Einsatzgruppe D mass execution squads in the Caucasus, offers a glimpse into a part of the careers of the leaders of the political warfare faction and their collaborationist troops that might otherwise be lost to history. According to Ohlendorf, the collaborator units formed one of the most important—and incriminating—links between the German military officer corps, on the one hand, and the SS's
Einsatzgruppen
extermination squads, on the other. “The Army units had to sort out political commissars and other undesirable elements themselves”—that is, through use of native quislings and collaborators—then “hand them over to the
Einsatzkommandos
to be killed,” Ohlendorf testified. “[T]he activity of the
Einsatzgruppen
and their
Einsatzkommandos
was carried out entirely within the field of jurisdiction of the commanders in chief of the army groups or armies under their responsibility.”
¹⁴

Collaborators often played an important role in mass murders. The officers of these killing squads were, like Ohlendorf, primarily Germans attached to various police units under SS jurisdiction. But many of the troops in the killing squads, significantly, were not Germans. They were, according to Ohlendorf, collaborators on loan from the army known as
Notdienstverpflichtete
(emergency service draftees, later to be designated
Osttruppen
, or eastern troops), local militias or companies of defectors that were destined to be directly recruited into the Waffen SS.

“The importance of these auxiliaries should not be underestimated,” notes internationally recognized Holocaust expert Raul Hilberg. “Roundups by local inhabitants who spoke the local language resulted in higher percentages of Jewish dead. This fact is
clearly indicated by the statistics of the
Kommandos
which made use of local help.” In Lithuania municipal killing squads employing Lithuanian Nazi collaborators eliminated 46,692 Jews in fewer than three months, according to their own reports, mainly by combining clocklike liquidation of 500 Jews per day in the capital city of Vilnius with mobile “cleanup” sweeps through the surrounding countryside.

Such squads were consistently used by the Nazis for the dirty work that even the SS believed to be “beneath the dignity” of the German soldier. In the Ukraine, for example, Einsatzkommando 4a went so far as to “confine itself to the shooting of adults while commanding its Ukrainian helpers to shoot [the] children,” Hilberg reports. “We were actually frightened,” remembered Ernst Biberstein, the chief of Einsatzkommando 6, “by the blood thirstiness of these people.”
¹⁵

The collaborationist troops of the eastern front were, in sum, an integral part of German strategy in the East and deeply involved in Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews. The Western powers recognized this fact during the war. Collaborators captured by Western forces were treated as prisoners of war, and many were turned over to the USSR as traitors and suspected war criminals in the first months after Germany's surrender. The predominant opinion in the U.S. command at war's end was that it was now up to the USSR to decide what to do with the Nazis' eastern troops and other traitors, just as it was up to the Americans to decide what to do with Tokyo Rose and similar captured defectors from this country.