A million under the tricolor flag, or how many Russians fought for Hitler. Who were the Vlasovites during the war? Roa transcript
At the beginning of September 2009, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia at its meetings touched upon the controversy regarding the published book of the church historian, Archpriest Georgy Mitrofanov, “The Tragedy of Russia. “Forbidden” topics in the history of the 20th century.”
In particular, it was noted that:
“The tragedy of those who are commonly called “Vlasovites”... is truly great. In any case, it should be interpreted with all possible impartiality and objectivity. Without such comprehension, historical science turns into political journalism. We...should avoid a “black and white” interpretation of historical events. In particular, naming the acts of General A.A. Vlasov - betrayal, is, in our opinion, a frivolous simplification of the events of that time. In this sense, we fully support Father Georgy Mitrofanov’s attempt to approach this issue (or rather, a whole series of issues) with a measure adequate to the complexity of the problem. In the Russian Abroad, of which the surviving members of the ROA also became part, General A.A. Vlasov was and remains a kind of symbol of resistance to godless Bolshevism in the name of the revival of Historical Russia. ...Everything that they undertook was done specifically for the Fatherland, in the hope that the defeat of Bolshevism would lead to the re-creation of a powerful national Russia. Germany was considered by the “Vlasovites” exclusively as an ally in the fight against Bolshevism, but they, the “Vlasovites” were ready, if necessary, to resist with armed force any kind of colonization or dismemberment of our Motherland. We hope that in the future Russian historians will treat the events of that time with greater justice and impartiality than is happening today.”
So, a very authoritative part of the Russian Orthodox Church is ready to forgive A. Vlasov for both collaboration with the Nazis and direct participation in hostilities against the Red Army in the name of the fact that this was done with the aim of destroying “godless Bolshevism.” Let's try to impartially understand how to interpret the actions of Lieutenant General of the Red Army Andrei Vlasov, and later the commander of the ROA.
Born on September 14, 1901 in the village of Lomakino, now Gaginsky district, Nizhny Novgorod region, in a peasant family. Russian.
In the Red Army since 1920. After completing the command courses, he took part in battles with the White Guards on the Southern Front. Since 1922, Vlasov held command and staff positions, and was also involved in teaching. In 1929 he graduated from the Higher Army Command Courses. In 1930 he joined the CPSU (b). In 1935 he became a student at the Military Academy named after M.V. Frunze. Since August 1937, commander of the 133rd Infantry Regiment of the 72nd Infantry Division, and since April 1938, assistant commander of this division. In the fall of 1938, he was sent to China to work as part of a group of military advisers. From May to November 1939 he served as chief military adviser. Awarded the Order of the Golden Dragon.
In January 1940, Major General Vlasov was appointed commander of the 99th Infantry Division, which in October of the same year was recognized as the best division in the district. For this, A. Vlasov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In January 1941, Vlasov was appointed commander of the 4th Mechanized Corps of the Kyiv Special Military District, and a month later he was awarded the Order of Lenin.
That is, it can be stated that Andrei Andreevich made a brilliant military career precisely during the period when the Stalinist regime destroyed the command staff of the Red Army by the tens of thousands. “The best friend of all military men” did not doubt Vlasov’s loyalty and devotion.
The war for Vlasov began near Lvov, where he served as commander of the 4th Mechanized Corps. For his skillful actions he received gratitude and on the recommendation of N.S. Khrushchev was appointed commander of the 37th Army defending Kyiv. After fierce battles, scattered formations of this army managed to break through to the east, and Vlasov himself was wounded and ended up in the hospital.
In November 1941, Stalin summoned Vlasov and ordered him to form the 20th Army, which was part of the Western Front and defended the capital. On December 5, near the village of Krasnaya Polyana (located 27 km from the Moscow Kremlin), the Soviet 20th Army under the command of General Vlasov stopped units of the German 4th Tank Army, making a significant contribution to the victory near Moscow. Overcoming stubborn enemy resistance, the 20th Army drove the Germans out of Solnechnogorsk and Volokolamsk. On January 24, 1942, for the battles on the Lama River, he received the rank of lieutenant general and was awarded the second Order of the Red Banner.
G.K. Zhukov assessed Vlasov’s actions as follows: “Personally, Lieutenant General Vlasov is well prepared operationally and has organizational skills. He copes well with commanding troops.” After the successes near Moscow, A. A. Vlasov, along with other generals of the Red Army, is called the “savior of the capital.” On instructions from the Main Political Directorate, a book is being written about Vlasov called “Stalin’s Commander.”
On January 7, the Lyuban operation began. Troops of the 2nd Shock Army of the Volkhov Front, created to disrupt the German offensive on Leningrad and the subsequent counterattack, successfully broke through the enemy’s defenses in the area of the village of Myasnoy Bor (on the left bank of the Volkhov River) and deeply wedged into its location (in the direction of Lyuban). But lacking the strength for a further offensive, the army found itself in a difficult situation. The enemy cut her communications several times, creating a threat of encirclement.
On March 8, 1942, Lieutenant General A. Vlasov was appointed deputy commander of the Volkhov Front. On March 20, 1942, the commander of the Volkhov Front K.A. Meretskov sent his deputy A. Vlasov to head a special commission to the 2nd Shock Army (Lieutenant General N.K. Klykov). “For three days, members of the commission talked with commanders of all ranks, with political workers, with soldiers,” and on April 8, 1942, having drawn up an inspection report, the commission left, but without General A. Vlasov. The suspended (“seriously ill”) General Klykov was sent to the rear by plane on April 16.
The question naturally arose: who should be entrusted with leading the troops of the 2nd Shock Army? On the same day, a telephone conversation took place between A. Vlasov and divisional commissioner I.V. Zueva with Meretskov. Zuev proposed appointing Vlasov as army commander, and Vlasov as army chief of staff, Colonel P.S. Vinogradova. The Military Council of the [Volkhov] Front supported Zuev's idea. Thus, Vlasov became commander of the 2nd Shock Army on April 20, 1942, while remaining at the same time deputy commander of the [Volkhov] Front. He received troops that were practically no longer capable of fighting, he received an army that had to be saved. During May-June, the 2nd Shock Army under the command of A. Vlasov made desperate attempts to break out of the bag.
“MILITARY COUNCIL OF THE VOLKHOV FRONT. I report: the army troops have been conducting intense, fierce battles with the enemy for three weeks... The personnel of the troops are exhausted to the limit, the number of deaths is increasing and the incidence of illness from exhaustion is increasing every day. Due to the cross-fire of the army area, the troops suffer heavy losses from artillery fire and enemy aircraft... The combat strength of the formations has sharply decreased. It is no longer possible to replenish it from the rear and special units. Everything that was there was taken. On the sixteenth of June, an average of several dozen people remained in battalions, brigades and rifle regiments. All attempts by the eastern group of the army to break through the corridor from the west were unsuccessful. Army troops receive fifty grams of crackers for three weeks. The last few days there was absolutely no food. We are finishing off the last horses. People are extremely exhausted. There is group mortality from starvation. There is no ammunition..."
On June 25, the enemy completely completed the encirclement of the army. The testimony of various witnesses does not answer the question of where Lieutenant General A. Vlasov was hiding for the next three weeks - whether he wandered in the forest or whether there was some kind of reserve command post to which his group made its way. On July 11, 1942, in the Old Believers village of Tukhovezhi, Vlasov was handed over by local residents (according to another version, he surrendered himself) to a patrol of the 28th Infantry Regiment of the 18th Wehrmacht Army.
While in the Vinnitsa military camp for captured senior officers, Vlasov agreed to cooperate with the Nazis and headed the “Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia” (KONR) and the “Russian Liberation Army” (ROA), composed of captured Soviet military personnel.
Vlasov wrote an open letter “Why I took the path of fighting Bolshevism.” In addition, he signed leaflets calling for the overthrow of the Stalinist regime, which were subsequently scattered by the Nazi army from airplanes at the fronts, and were also distributed among prisoners of war.
Russian Liberation Army, ROA - military units formed by the German headquarters of the SS Troops during World War II from Russian collaborators. The army was formed mainly from Soviet prisoners of war, as well as from among Russian emigrants. Unofficially, its members were called “Vlasovites,” after their leader, Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov.
The ROA was formed primarily from Soviet prisoners of war who were captured by the Germans mainly at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, during the retreat of the Red Army. The creators of the ROA declared it to be a military formation created for the “liberation of Russia from communism” (December 27, 1942). Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov, who was captured in 1942, together with General Boyarsky, proposed in a letter to the German command to organize the ROA. General Fyodor Trukhin was appointed chief of staff, General Vladimir Boyarsky was appointed his deputy, and Colonel Andrei Neryanin was appointed head of the operational department of the headquarters. The leaders of the ROA also included generals Vasily Malyshkin, Dmitry Zakutny, Ivan Blagoveshchensky, and former brigade commissar Georgy Zhilenkov. The rank of ROA general was held by former Red Army major and Wehrmacht colonel Ivan Kononov.
Among the leadership of the ROA were White Army generals V.I. Angeleev, V.F. Belogortsev, S.K. Borodin, Colonels K.G. Kromiadi, N.A. Shokoli, Lieutenant Colonel A.D. Arkhipov, as well as M.V. Tomashevsky, Yu.K. Meyer, V.Melnikov, Skarzhinsky, Golub and others, as well as Colonel I.K. Sakharov (formerly lieutenant of the Spanish army under General F. Franco). Support was also provided by: generals A.P. Arkhangelsky, A.A. von Lampe, A.M. Dragomirov, P.N. Krasnov, N.N. Golovin, F.F. Abramov, E.I. Balabin, I.A. Polyakov, V.V. Kreiter, Donskoy and Kuban atamans, generals G.V. Tatarkin and V.G. Naumenko. The army was financed entirely by the German state bank.
However, there was antagonism between former Soviet prisoners and white emigrants, and the latter were gradually ousted from the leadership of the ROA. Most of them served in other Russian volunteer formations not associated with the ROA (only a few days before the end of the war they were formally affiliated with the ROA) - the Russian Corps, the brigade of General A.V. Turkula in Austria, 1st Russian National Army, “Varyag” regiment of Colonel M.A. Semenov, a separate regiment of Colonel Krzhizhanovsky, as well as in Cossack formations (15th Cossack Cavalry Corps and Cossack Stan).
On January 28, 1945, the ROA received the status of the German armed forces. On May 12, 1945, an order was signed to dissolve the ROA. After the Allied victory and the occupation of Germany, most members of the ROA were transferred to the Soviet authorities. Some were shot on site by the NKVD, together with US and British soldiers, and some were sent for many years to the Gulags of the USSR. Some of the “Vlasovites” managed to obtain asylum in Western countries, as well as in Australia, Canada and Argentina.
At the end of April 1945, A. Vlasov had the following armed forces under his command:
- 1st Division Major General S.K. Bunyachenko (22,000 people)
- 2nd Division Major General G.A. Zverev (13,000 people)
- 3rd Division Major General M.M. Shapovalova (unarmed, there was only a headquarters and 10,000 volunteers)
- reserve brigade of Lieutenant Colonel (later Colonel) S.T. Koydy (7000 people) is the only commander of a large formation who was not extradited by the US occupation authorities to the Soviet side.
- Air Force of General V.I. Maltseva (5000 people)
- VET division
- officer school of General M.A. Meandrova.
- auxiliary parts,
- Russian Corps of Major General B.A. Shteifona (4500 people). General Steifon died suddenly on April 30th. The corps that surrendered to Soviet troops was led by Colonel Rogozhkin.
- Cossack Camp of Major General T.I. Domanova (8000 people)
- group of Major General A.V. Turkula (5200 people)
- 15th Cossack Cavalry Corps under Lieutenant General H. von Pannwitz (more than 40,000 people)
- Cossack reserve regiment of General A.G. Shkuro (more than 10,000 people)
- several small formations of less than 1000 people;
In total, these formations numbered 124 thousand people. These parts were scattered at a considerable distance from each other, which became one of the main factors in their tragic fate. However, virtually all ROA military personnel who found themselves outside the zone occupied by Soviet troops at the time of Germany’s surrender were handed over to the Soviet side by the Western occupation authorities. And it was legally justified. According to international law, persons who previously had Soviet citizenship and, due to various circumstances, took the path of serving the Nazis, took the oath of allegiance to the Motherland and betrayed it, were considered collaborators and traitors subject to extradition.
Separate units of the Vlasovites were used by the Germans for security service and punitive operations, in particular the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, where they were distinguished by cruelty and looting.
The Vlasovites entered battle against units of the Red Army for the first time on February 8, 1945. On that day, the anti-tank detachment of Colonel I.K. Sakharov achieved partial success in an attack near the town of Ney-Levin on a position occupied by units of the 990th regiment of the 230th Stalinist Rifle Division. On April 13, two Vlasov infantry regiments attacked a bridgehead held by the forces of the 415th separate machine gun and artillery battalion from the 119th fortified region of the 33rd Army of the 1st Belorussian Front. During the first attack, the Vlasovites occupied the first line of trenches, achieving success where the Germans could not achieve it for two months. But then, during the battle, the division commander, Major General S.K. Bunyachenko refused to continue futile attacks due to strong artillery cover of the bridgehead from the eastern bank of the Oder. He carefully led the regiments out of the battle, and the fighting qualities of the Vlasovites were mentioned in a positive context in the report of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) dated April 14, 1945.
Among the Vlasov military leaders were career commanders of the Red Army (5 major generals, 2 brigade commanders, 29 colonels, 16 lieutenant colonels, 41 majors), who had excellent certifications while serving in the Red Army, and even three Heroes of the Soviet Union (pilots Antilevsky, Bychkov and Tennikov ). A number of commanders of the Red Army, having spent one to three years in German camps, joined Vlasov after the publication of the Prague Manifesto and the creation of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), when no one doubted the outcome of the war. Among them are Colonels A.F. Vanyushin, A.A. Funtikov, Lieutenant Colonels I.F. Rudenko and A.P. Skugarevsky and others. In April 1945, under the legal command of A.A. Vlasov there were more than 120 thousand people, however, they did not have time to complete the reorganization. The Vlasov army, which arose between November 1944 and April 1945, was armed with 44 aircraft, about 25 tanks and armored vehicles, more than 570 mortars, 230 guns, 2 thousand machine guns, etc.
At the beginning of May 1945, a conflict arose between Vlasov and Bunyachenko - Bunyachenko intended to support the Prague Uprising, and Vlasov persuaded him not to do this and remain on the side of the Germans. At the negotiations in North Bohemian Kozoedy they did not reach an agreement and their paths diverged.
In an open letter from A. Vlasov dated March 3, 1943, “Why did I take the path of fighting Bolshevism,” he wrote, in particular:
“I have come to the firm conviction that the tasks facing the Russian people can be resolved in alliance and cooperation with the German people. The interests of the Russian people have always been combined with the interests of the German people, with the interests of all the peoples of Europe.
The highest achievements of the Russian people are inextricably linked with those periods of their history when they linked their fate with the fate of Europe, when they built their culture, their economy, their way of life in close unity with the peoples of Europe. Bolshevism fenced off the Russian people with an impenetrable wall from Europe. He sought to isolate our Motherland from advanced European countries. In the name of utopian ideas alien to the Russian people, he prepared for war, opposing himself to the peoples of Europe.
In alliance with the German people, the Russian people must destroy this wall of hatred and mistrust. In alliance and cooperation with Germany, he must build a new happy Homeland within the framework of a family of equal and free peoples of Europe.
With these thoughts, with this decision, in the last battle, together with a handful of my loyal friends, I was taken prisoner.
I spent over six months in captivity. In the conditions of the prisoner of war camp, behind its bars, I not only did not change my decision, but became stronger in my convictions.
On an honest basis, on the basis of sincere conviction, with full awareness of responsibility to the Motherland, the people and history for the actions taken, I call on the people to fight, setting myself the task of building a New Russia.
How do I imagine New Russia? I will talk about this in due time.
History does not turn back. I am not calling the people to return to the past. No! I call him to a bright future, to the struggle to complete the National Revolution, to the struggle to create a New Russia - the Motherland of our great people. I call him to the path of brotherhood and unity with the peoples of Europe and, first of all, to the path of cooperation and eternal friendship with the Great German people.
My call met with deep sympathy not only among the broadest layers of prisoners of war, but also among the broad masses of the Russian people in areas where Bolshevism still reigns. This sympathetic response of the Russian people, who expressed their readiness to stand up under the banners of the Russian Liberation Army, gives me the right to say that I am on the right path, that the cause for which I am fighting is a just cause, the cause of the Russian people. In this struggle for our future, I openly and honestly take the path of alliance with Germany.”
So, the combat general of the Red Army, who saw with his own eyes the atrocities of the Nazis on Soviet soil, called on the Russians to “alliance with Germany.” At a time when the ovens of German concentration camps were being heated with the bodies of his former fellow citizens, A. Vlasov and the German intelligence services were developing “cunning” plans for recognizing the ROA as a “belligerent party” with neutrality towards the USA and England. Of course, a drowning man clutches at straws, but it is difficult to imagine a more insane combination generated by the hopelessness of Hitler's fascism and his minions.
On May 12, 1945, A. Vlasov was captured by soldiers of the 25th Tank Corps of the 13th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front near the city of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia while trying to escape to the western zone of occupation. The tank crews of the corps pursued Vlasov’s car at the direction of the Vlasov captain, who informed them that his commander was in this car. Vlasov was taken to the headquarters of Marshal Konev, and from there to Moscow.
At first, the leadership of the USSR planned to hold a public trial of Vlasov and other leaders of the ROA in the October Hall of the House of Unions, however, due to the fact that some of the accused could express views during the trial that “objectively could coincide with the sentiments of a certain part of the population dissatisfied with the Soviet regime,” it was It was decided to make the process closed. The decision to sentence Vlasov and others to death was made by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on July 23, 1946. On July 30-31, 1946, a closed trial took place in the case of Vlasov and a group of his followers. All of them were found guilty of treason. By the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, they were stripped of their military ranks and hanged on August 1, 1946, and their property was confiscated.
It is time to return to the beginning of our research and compare Hauptmann Shukhevych and Lieutenant General Vlasov, the UPA and the ROA. We have already noted that both Shukhevych and the majority of UPA fighters were not citizens of the USSR before the war. That is, by definition, they could not cheat on him. Brought up on the radical ideology of the OUN, they fought for a Ukraine that corresponded to their ideals. Yes, they collaborated with the Nazis, but who in those days did not dream of an alliance with the invincible Fuhrer? The Germans did not appreciate the opportunities that opened up for them in the event of a formal restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty. But the OUN members’ hopes for this were completely justified. Another thing is that Hitler then would not be Hitler, but the greatest political strategist. Until the fall of 1944, the OUN members were used by the Abwehr as an auxiliary force in the occupied territory. However, after the liberation of Ukraine, they waged a guerrilla war against Soviet power for many years, defending their ideals with all the methods available to them. It was a full-scale civil war with heavy losses on both sides. Galicians died in thousands under the heavy boot of “Uncle Joe”, but stopped fighting only after the sources of replenishment and weapons were completely depleted. As in every civil war, there were no right or wrong. Each side fought for its own vision of Ukraine. Therefore, neither the UPA fighters nor their commander-in-chief can but command a certain respect. As for their status as a “belligerent party,” this should be recognized for them specifically in a civil war.
Stalin's commander Andrei Vlasov and his comrades, on the contrary, were citizens of the USSR and took the oath of allegiance to the Motherland while in the ranks of the Red Army. Therefore, they are clearly traitors and collaborators. If R. Shukhevych was devoted to the ideals of the OUN all his adult life, then A. Vlasov, having joined the CPSU (b) at the age of 29, after being captured, suddenly “saw the light” and wanted to fight “godless Bolshevism.” Moreover, on the side of the bloody Hitler, who is guilty of the deaths of tens of millions of Russians. Therefore, it makes no sense to compare the ideological “credo” of the OUN and Vlasovites: the former had it, but the latter did not. It is significant that while the OUN members fought underground against Bolshevism for a long time, the Vlasovites immediately surrendered after the defeat of Germany and did not even think about fighting for the “new Russia.”
Concluding our reflections, let us return to “godless Bolshevism” for its mainly declarative struggle against which the fathers of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad call for the rehabilitation of A. Vlasov. So, before the war, L. Trotsky noted that the most ardent anti-Bolshevik was I. Stalin, who destroyed more communists than Hitler and Mussolini combined. By the logic of the church hierarchs and the mustachioed “father of all nations,” should we be forgiven?
High command and officer corps of the ROA. Separation of ROA
On January 28, 1945, after the completion of the preparatory work that had been in full swing since September 1944, the existence of the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, united under the name of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA), became a reality. On this day, Hitler appointed Vlasov commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces and gave him command of all Russian formations, both newly formed and those resulting from regroupings. Since 28 January 1945, the Germans considered the ROA to be the armed forces of an Allied power, temporarily subordinate operationally to the Wehrmacht. By order No. 1 of the same date, Major General F.I. Trukhin was appointed chief of staff and permanent deputy commander-in-chief. It is unlikely that General Vlasov could have found a more successful candidate for this post. Coming from a noble-landowner family, a former student at St. Petersburg University, a former tsarist officer, Trukhin in the 30s taught “tactics of higher formations” at the Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army and, according to Major General P. Grigorenko, was, except for the military theorist G.S. Isserson, the only “extraordinary personality in the Academy.” The war found Trukhin in the post of chief of the operational department of the headquarters of the Baltic Special Military District (North-Western Front). A talented man with deep military knowledge, a strong character and impressive appearance, Trukhin belonged to the brightest representatives and true leaders of the Liberation Movement. His deputy, Colonel, and then Major General V.I. Boyarsky, a descendant of the Ukrainian Prince Gamaliya, former adjutant to Marshal of the Soviet Union M.N. Tukhachevsky, a graduate of the Frunze Military Academy, was also an outstanding personality. He was captured by the Germans while being the commander of the 41st Infantry Division. Colonel von Henning, who was involved in volunteer formations, described Boyarsky in 1943 as “an exceptionally intelligent, resourceful, well-read soldier and politician who has seen a lot in the world.” From the very beginning, Boyarsky's position was distinguished by independence and open opposition to the Germans, whom he treated as an equal and demanding enemy. This position was so obvious that in July 1943, Field Marshal Bush removed Boyarsky from his post as “staff officer for training and leadership of eastern troops” under the 16th Army. The adjutant of the so-called leadership group of the army headquarters was Lieutenant A.I. Romashkin, the head of the chancellery was Major S.A. Sheiko, translator - Lieutenant A. A. Kubekov. In fact, the “high command of the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia” (or, in other words, “the headquarters of the KONR Armed Forces”) performed the functions of the War Ministry.
An idea of the tasks of the headquarters is given by its organization as of the end of February 1945.
1. Operations department.
Head of the department: Colonel A. G. Neryanin. Born in 1904 into a working-class family, he graduated with honors from the Frunze Military Academy and the General Staff Academy. The Chief of the General Staff, Marshal of the Soviet Union B. M. Shaposhnikov called Neryanin “one of our most brilliant army officers.” While serving in the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA), he was the head of the operational department of the headquarters of the troops of the Ural Military District. He was captured in November 1941 in the Rzhev-Vyazma region, being the head of the operational department of the 20th Army headquarters.
Deputy head of department: Lieutenant Colonel Korovin. Heads of subdepartments: Lieutenant Colonels V.F. Ril and V.E. Mikhelson.
2. Intelligence department.
Head of the department: Major I. M. Grachev. Head of counterintelligence: Major A.F. Chikalov.
3. Communications department.
Head of the department: Lieutenant Colonel V. D. Korbukov.
4. Department of military communications.
Head of the department: Major G. M. Kremenetsky.
5. Topographic department.
Head of the department: Lieutenant Colonel G. Vasiliev.
6. Encryption department.
Head of the department: Major A. E. Polyakov. Deputy: Lieutenant Colonel I.P. Pavlov.
7. Formations department.
Head of the department: Colonel I. D. Denisov. Deputy: Major M. B. Nikiforov. Heads of subdepartments: captains G. A. Fedoseev, V. F. Demidov, S. T. Kozlov, Major G. G. Sviridenko.
8. Combat training department.
Head of the department: Major General V. Assberg (aka Artsezov or Asbjargas) - an Armenian, originally from Baku, graduated from a military school in Astrakhan, in 1942 he was a colonel, commanded the tank forces of one of the armies. Although he managed to lead his troops out of encirclement near Taganrog, he was sentenced to death, but then again thrown into battle and this time captured.
Deputy head of department: Colonel A. N. Tavantsev. Head of the 1st subsection (training): Colonel F. E. Cherny.
Head of the 2nd subsection (military schools): Colonel A. A. Denisenko.
Head of the 3rd subsection (charter): Lieutenant Colonel A. G. Moskvichev.
9. Command department.
Head of the department: Colonel V.V. Pozdnyakov. Born in 1901 in St. Petersburg, in 1919 he joined the Red Army, after appropriate training he was the head of the chemical service (nachkhim) of various military schools, regiments and divisions. In 1937 he was arrested and tortured. In 1941, near Vyazma, he was captured as the head of the chemical service of the 67th Rifle Corps. Deputy: Major V.I. Strelnikov. Head of the 1st subsection (General Staff officers): Captain Ya. A. Kalinin.
Head of the 2nd subsection (infantry): Major A.P. Demsky. Head of the 3rd subsection (cavalry): senior lieutenant N.V. Vashchenko.
Head of the 4th subsection (artillery): Lieutenant Colonel M. I. Pankevich.
Head of the 5th subsection (tank and engineering troops): Captain A. G. Kornilov.
Head of the 6th subsection (administrative, economic and military sanitary services): Major V.I. Panayot.
10. Propaganda department.
Head of the department: Colonel (then Major General) M. A. Meandrov. Born in Moscow in 1894 in the family of a priest. My father, a priest of the Church of St. Chariton in Moscow, was expelled in 1932 and died in exile. Meandrov graduated from the Alekseevsky Infantry School in Moscow in 1913, before the war he taught tactics at the Kremlin Infantry School, until July 25, 1941, he was chief of staff of the 37th Rifle Corps, then deputy chief of staff and head of the operational department of the 6th Army. He was captured in the Uman region. Deputy: Major M.V. Egorov.
Inspector of propaganda in the troops: Captain M. P. Pokhvalensky.
Inspector of propaganda among volunteers in Wehrmacht formations: Captain A.P. Sopchenko.
The song and dance ensemble, as well as a military orchestra, were subordinate to the propaganda department.
11. Military legal department.
Head of the department: Major E. I. Arbenin.
12. Financial department.
Head of the department: Captain A.F. Petrov.
13. Department of armored forces.
Head of the department: Colonel G.I. Antonov. Born in 1898 into a peasant family in the Tula province. He was captured as a colonel, commander of the tank forces of one of the armies. Deputy: Colonel L.N. Popov.
14. Artillery department.
Head of the department: Major General M.V. Bogdanov (in the Red Army he was a major general, division commander). Deputy: Colonel N.A. Sergeev. Combat training inspector: Colonel V. A. Kardakov. Artillery Inspector: Colonel A. S. Perchurov. Inspector for combat weapons: Lieutenant Colonel N. S. Shatov.
15. Department of material and technical supply.
Head of the department: Major General A. N. Sevastyanov (in the Red Army he was a brigade commander).
Commander of the Logistics Service: Colonel G.V. Sachs.
Food supply inspector: Major P.F. Zelepugin.
Quartering inspector: Captain A.I. Putilin.
16. Engineering department.
Head of department: Colonel (last name unknown). Deputy: Colonel S. N. Golikov.
17. Sanitary department.
Head of the department: Colonel Professor V.N. Novikov. Deputy: Captain A.R. Trushnovich.
18. Veterinary department.
Head of the department: Lieutenant Colonel A. M. Saraev. Deputy: Captain V.N. Zhukov.
19. Protopresbyter.
Archpriest D. Konstantinov. Confessor of the army headquarters: Archpriest A. Kiselev.
Although the army headquarters was not yet fully staffed at the beginning of March 1945, it contained as many officers as the entire Reichswehr Ministry in 1920. The administrative and economic department under the command of Captain P. Shishkevich, as well as the economic company under the command of Senior Lieutenant N.A. Sharko, was subordinate to the commandant of the headquarters, Major Khitrov. The security of the senior command staff, KONR and army headquarters was entrusted to a security battalion under the command of Major N. Begletsov. The head of security, Captain M.V. Kashtanov, was responsible for Vlasov’s personal safety. In addition, the headquarters was assigned an officer reserve camp under the command of Lieutenant Colonel M.K. Meleshkevich with an officer battalion (commander M.M. Golenko). At the direct disposal of the headquarters were also a separate construction battalion (commanded by engineer-captain A.P. Budny), a special-purpose battalion of the headquarters of the commander-in-chief, as well as the so-called auxiliary troops. These troops, formed from special personnel and workers transferred from technical units, under the command of Colonel Yaroput, at Vlasov’s personal request received military status, although at first they were intended to be attached directly to KONR for technical maintenance. The chief of staff of the auxiliary troops was first Lieutenant Colonel K.I. Popov, and just before the end of the war, Colonel G.I. Antonov.
Almost all of the army staff officers listed here were previously generals, colonels and staff officers of the Red Army. This alone makes clear the groundlessness of the later Soviet assertion that senior Soviet officers refused to join the ROA and therefore some nameless traitors were appointed as officers. Meanwhile, back in 1944, circles of national minorities hostile to Vlasov complained to the Eastern Ministry that former Soviet generals and colonels, people who once belonged to the “Stalinist guard,” “retained all their privileges and differences and enjoy all the benefits of life,” occupying leading positions in ROA. In addition to former Red Army officers, leading positions in the ROA were also occupied by some old emigrants. Vlasov, who understood the value of the political and military experience of emigrants, repeatedly spoke out in favor of cooperation with them and even introduced some into his inner circle. In this regard, it is worth mentioning one of his adjutants, Colonel I.K. Sakharov, the son of Lieutenant General of the Imperial Army K.V. Sakharov, former chief of staff of Admiral A.V. Kolchak. Colonel Sakharov took part in the Spanish Civil War on the side of General Franco and, like another old officer, Lieutenant Colonel A.D. Arkhipov, until the end of the war he commanded a regiment in the 1st Division of the ROA. Vlasov appointed the former regimental commander of the tsarist army, Colonel K. G. Kromiadi, as the head of his personal office. The officer for special assignments at the headquarters was Senior Lieutenant M.V. Tomashevsky, a lawyer, a graduate of Kharkov University, who, in order to avoid reproaches of careerism, refused the rank of ROA major. Generals Arkhangelsky and A. von Lampe, as well as General A. M. Dragomirov and the famous military writer, professor, General N. N. Golovin, who lived in Paris, who before his death managed to draw up the charter of the internal service of the ROA, joined the Liberation Movement. The head of the personnel department of the headquarters of the auxiliary troops was Colonel Shokoli of the Tsarist and White armies. The Directorate of Cossack Troops, created in 1945 under the KONR, was headed by the ataman of the Don Army, Lieutenant General Tatarkin. The Vlasov movement was also supported by the ataman of the Kuban army, Major General V. G. Naumenko, Cossack generals F. F. Abramov, E. I. Balabin, A. G. Shkuro, V. V. Kreiter and others. General Kreiter, later the plenipotentiary representative of the KONR in Austria, gave Vlasov the jewelry that had once been taken from Russia by the army of General Wrangel. However, over time, there were fewer and fewer such officers in the ROA, and by 1945 we can already talk about the deliberate pushing aside of old emigrants. Chief of Staff Major General Trukhin was especially wary of them. For example, he initially rejected the request of Major General A.V. Turkul to enlist in the army, fearing to associate the ROA with the name of this general, who became famous during the civil war as the commander of the Drozdovsky division of Wrangel’s army. In addition, some former senior emigrant officers, ready to join the ROA, put forward impossible demands, hoping to occupy leading positions. They had some reasons for this: after all, in the Cossack corps, which was formed by Major General Turkul back in 1945, or in the 1st Russian National Army under Major General Holmston-Smyslovsky, command was the prerogative of old emigrants, and former Soviet officers occupied lower positions posts. Meanwhile, the majority of older officers lagged behind the latest achievements of military science, and it was not easy for them to retrain. In any case, the friction between old emigrants and former Soviet soldiers, noted in volunteer formations, also manifested itself in the ROA. This is evidenced, for example, by the story of Major General B. S. Permikin, the former staff captain of the tsarist army, the founder and commander of the Talab regiment, which was part of Yudenich’s northwestern army and distinguished itself in the battles of Gatchina and Tsarskoye Selo in 1919. In 1920, Permikin commanded General Wrangel's 3rd Army in Poland. In the ROA, Vlasov appointed him senior teacher of tactics at the officer school. But in the camp of the 1st ROA Division the former White Guard officer was treated so rudely that in February 1945 Permikin chose to join the ROA Cossack Corps that was being formed in Austria under the command of Major General Turkul.
The appointment of a commander and the formation of a high command meant, at least externally, the completion of the process of isolation of the ROA, its formation as an independent unit. Indeed, it soon became clear that the Liberation Army had gained independence in at least two important areas: military justice and military intelligence. We have only fragmentary information about the military court, but it is clear from them that the position of the chief military prosecutor was established at the army headquarters, attempts were made to create a judicial order of movement “from top to bottom” and, in cooperation with the legal department of the KONR, to develop instructions and instructions for the prosecutor's office. supervision and conduct of trials. There is involuntary evidence from the Soviet side that Vlasov, being the commander-in-chief, also served as the supreme judge of the ROA: at the Moscow trial of 1946, he was accused of shooting several “prisoners of war.” In fact, the story is like this. Six ROA fighters, sentenced to death by a military court for spying for the USSR, were under arrest in April 1945 in the area of the ROA air force headquarters in Marienbad, since only there were premises from where it was impossible to escape. During his stay in Marienbad, Vlasov was shown the verdict, which, according to eyewitnesses, he approved extremely reluctantly, and only after it was proven to him that it was illogical to convince the Germans of the autonomy of the ROA and at the same time refuse to perform basic legal functions. The independence of the ROA was also manifested in the fact that the military court of the 1st Division in the last days of the war sentenced the German officer Ludwig Catterfeld-Kuronus to death on charges of espionage for the Soviet Union.
As for the intelligence service, at first both military and civilian intelligence were under the jurisdiction of the security department, created under KONR at the insistence of the Russians under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel N.V. Tenzorov. He was a man of character, although he had never been involved in such matters, a former physicist, an employee of one of the Kharkov research institutes. His deputies were Major M.A. Kalugin, former head of the special department of the headquarters of the North Caucasus Military District, and Major A.F. Chikalov. The counterintelligence department was headed by Major Krainev, the investigative department by Major Galanin, the secret correspondence department by Captain P. Bakshansky, and the personnel department by Captain Zverev. Some of the intelligence officers - Chikalov, Kalugin, Krainev, Galanin, Majors Egorov and Ivanov, Captain Bekker-Khrenov and others - previously worked in the NKVD and, obviously, had some idea of the work of the secret police. Perhaps the rest, although they were workers, architects, directors, school directors, oil workers, engineers or lawyers before the war, also turned out to be good intelligence officers. There were also representatives of the old emigration in this department, such as the officer for special assignments Captain Skarzhinsky, Senior Lieutenant Golub and Lieutenant V. Melnikov.
After the army headquarters moved from Berlin to the Heiberg training ground in Württemberg (to the place of training of troops) in February 1945, military intelligence was organizationally separated from civilian intelligence, and under the supervision of Major General Trukhin, the creation of the ROA's own intelligence service began. The intelligence department, organized at army headquarters, was, as already mentioned, entrusted to the major, and then to Lieutenant Colonel Grachev, a graduate of the Frunze Academy. On February 22, 1945, the department was divided into several groups: intelligence about the enemy - led by Lieutenant A.F. Vronsky; reconnaissance - it was commanded first by Captain N.F. Lapin, and then by Senior Lieutenant B. Gai; counterintelligence - commander Major Chikalov. By order of Major General Trukhin dated March 8, 1945, the department received reinforcements, so that in addition to the chief, there were now twenty-one officers working in it: Major Chikalov, four captains (L. Dumbadze, P. Bakshansky, S. S. Nikolsky, M. I. Turchaninov), seven senior lieutenants (Yu. P. Khmyrov, B. Gai, D. Gorshkov, V. Kabitleev, N. F. Lapin, A. Skachkov, Tvardevich), lieutenants A. Andreev, L. Andreev, A. F. Vronsky, A. Glavay, K. G. Karenin, V. Lovanov, Ya. I. Marchenko, S. Pronchenko, Yu. S. Sitnik). Later, Captain V. Denisov and other officers joined the department.
After the war, some intelligence officers were suspected of being Soviet agents. We are talking, first of all, about Captain Bekker-Khrenov, an experienced counterintelligence officer who held the post of head of a special department of a tank brigade in the Red Army, and about Senior Lieutenant Khmyrov (Dolgoruky). Both appeared at the Moscow trial of 1946 as witnesses for the prosecution, with the latter posing as Vlasov’s adjutant. The role of the head of counterintelligence of the ROA, Major Chikalov, who served in the border troops of the NKVD, then a political worker of a large partisan association operating in the Dnieper-Plavnya region, is also mysterious. Chikalov was captured at the end of 1943 along with the commander of this group, Major I.V. Kirpa (Kravchenko), and in 1944 both joined the Liberation Movement. The leaders of the ROA had no doubts about the authenticity of Chikalov’s spiritual revolution, however, according to some information, Vlasov was warned back in 1944 that Chikalov should not be trusted. After the war, Chikalov acted in West Germany as a Soviet agent and was recalled to the USSR in 1952, shortly before his exposure. Notable in this regard is the article by former senior lieutenant Khmyrov in the Soviet weekly “Voice of the Motherland,” which states that Chikalov was killed in Munich in 1946, and Khmyrov slanderously links Colonel Pozdnyakov with this murder. As the head of the personnel department, Pozdnyakov knew the officers of the army headquarters like no one else and even after the war kept some of the profiles. In one of his articles, Pozdnyakov wrote that Chikalov was unsympathetic to him as a former security officer, emphasizing, however, that he had no complaints about Chikalov’s work and that post-war affairs may not have any connection with the affairs of the war years. However, Pozdnyakov categorically denied that Soviet agents managed to get into the intelligence department.
The department faced difficulties of a different kind. Such, for example, as the methods of work of the counterintelligence officer of the 1st ROA division, Captain Olkhovnik (Olchovik), who was accustomed to acting independently and reporting the results only to the division commander, Major General S.K. Bunyachenko, without informing the intelligence department of the army headquarters. In addition, counterintelligence information often turned out to be insignificant, relating to the incompetent statements of this or that officer or soldier, violations of discipline, drunkenness on duty, the use of gasoline for private trips, etc. , and Trukhin, for whom the most important thing was to identify Soviet connections, seriously thought about replacing Major Chikalov with Captain Bekker-Khrenov, to whom he wanted to assign the rank of lieutenant colonel back in 1944. While the counterintelligence group fought against Soviet espionage with varying success, the intelligence group finally took up matters not intended for German eyes: on the orders of Major General Trukhin, it tried to establish contacts with American troops at the end of the war. In general, the work of the intelligence service of the ROA headquarters was first negatively affected by the distrust of German counterintelligence, then by organizational problems and a jealous attitude on the part of volunteer associations not subordinate to Vlasov. Nevertheless, the intelligence service has achieved some success.
The growing importance of intelligence in the ROA is evidenced by the creation at the beginning of 1945 of the ROA intelligence school in the “Hunting Lodge” near Marienbad under the leadership of one of the most talented intelligence officers, Senior Lieutenant Yelenev. In the Soviet interpretation, this school, designed to train intelligence officers and agents, mainly in the field of tactics, looks like a dangerous center of espionage, sabotage, terror and even the preparation of an uprising in the rear of the Soviet army - the latter charge was brought against Vlasov personally. It was the existence of this school that the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR considered as a particularly serious charge, although in the Soviet army military intelligence is considered a legitimate and honorable branch of the military, and practical training in the “Hunting Lodge” was unlikely to differ much from training in the corresponding Soviet institutions. Moreover, the school’s structure resembled a Soviet educational institution. Apart from the spirit that reigned here, everything about it was Soviet: the cadets wore Soviet uniforms and Soviet orders and medals, called each other “comrade” instead of the “master” accepted in the ROA, read Soviet books and newspapers, listened to Soviet radio and even ate in order, established in the Red Army. The cadets studied map orientation and cartography, methods of collecting and transmitting intelligence data, Soviet regulations, learned to use Soviet-made vehicles, weapons and radio transmitters, learned to handle explosives, etc. On March 11, 1945, Vlasov and Major General Maltsev came to the school on the occasion of the graduation of the first twenty people. Vlasov addressed the graduates with a speech in which he once again emphasized the importance of military intelligence. He said:
Only those few who are completely devoted to the ideas of the Liberation Movement and are ready to bear all the hardships of this extremely important work in war conditions are worthy of the honorary title of ROA intelligence officer. Russia, liberated from Bolshevism, will never forget their exploits.
The group was airlifted behind the front line with the task of organizing, together with the anti-Soviet resistance movement, a fight against the Soviet army. With great difficulty, we managed to obtain 20 thousand liters of gasoline necessary for this action. There is also information that such groups were more than once led across the front line by scout Senior Lieutenant Tulinov, and they suffered heavy losses. When forming the officer corps, as well as when creating the military legal service and military intelligence, the Russians were guided by their own ideas. The officer of the Liberation Army was defined as a representative of the new Russia in “European society” and differed from his comrades in the volunteer formations under German command. He was not just a military specialist who mastered his craft, but also a Russian patriot, devoted to the ideals of the liberation struggle, his people and fatherland. In the brochure “ROA Warrior” published in 1945. Ethics, appearance, behavior “The first of the qualities of an officer is the requirement put forward by Suvorov of absolute honesty in the service and in personal life. In relation to subordinates, the type of “father-commander” common in the old Russian army is taken as a model, who by personal example, justice and paternal care wins the respect and love of the soldiers. An ROA officer has no right to humiliate the dignity of his subordinates or other people. One more point is worth mentioning: an ROA officer is obliged to spare civilians, respect their national and religious feelings, and be generous to the defeated enemy. Under the editorship of Major General Trukhin, by December 1944, a regulation was developed on the service of officers and military officials of the ROA, which we can judge from the reviews of Colonels Boyarsky and Meandrov. According to this provision, in wartime, when assigning ranks from warrant officer to the rank of army general proposed by Boyarsky, it was necessary to proceed only from the achievements of a given officer, and not from the principle of seniority in service, while merits at the front were to be rated higher than in the rear. It was necessary to distinguish between rank and position and take into account the ranks received in the Red Army. Thus, the methods of appointment and promotion of officers also indicate the originality and independence of the Liberation Army.
Until 1944, the appointment and promotion of officers was handled by Kestring, a German general of volunteer formations, and he, on his own responsibility, could appoint only “compatriots” (Volksdeutsch), that is, in the case of the USSR, people from the Baltic republics. In relation to the pilots, the corresponding functions were performed by the inspector for foreign personnel of the Luftwaffe Vostok. Based on “personal qualities, military merit and political reliability,” the officer was assigned a certain rank within a given volunteer unit (in most cases corresponding to his rank in the Red Army), and the personnel department of the army or the Luftwaffe allowed him to wear a German uniform with the appropriate insignia. After the Reich recognized the Russian liberation movement in September 1944, a procedure was temporarily established by which the Russians submitted applications for officers of the emerging ROA to the general of volunteer formations. Finally, on January 28, 1945, Vlasov himself received the right, as Commander-in-Chief of the KONR Armed Forces, to appoint officers to his subordinate formations at his own discretion, determine their rank and promote them. However, there were some restrictions, indicating that the Germans were still clinging to the last possibility of control over Vlasov. For example, in order to promote generals - or to assign the rank of general - it was necessary to obtain the consent of the head of the SS Main Directorate through the OKW. As before, in addition to the right now given to Vlasov to assign the next rank, a sanction was also needed for the assignment of German insignia, which was distributed by the army personnel department on behalf of the general of volunteer formations and the Luftwaffe personnel department on behalf of the then inspector for eastern personnel of the Luftwaffe. This condition, caused by the requirement to comply with the well-known rules of equality, remained in force only as long as the ROA soldiers wore German insignia. The Russian side made efforts to return to the Liberation Army Russian shoulder straps, introduced back in 1943 in the then Eastern troops, but then replaced by German ones. Let us note, by the way, that this was the only point in which the wishes of the Russians were in tune with the aspirations of Hitler, who on January 27, 1945 spoke out against issuing German uniforms to the Vlasovites.
In practice, however, the promotion of officers was already carried out exclusively as the Russians desired. A qualification commission organized at army headquarters under the command of Major Demsky determined the rank of newly arrived officers. The appointments of junior officers were made by Major General Trukhin together with the head of the staff personnel department, Colonel Pozdnyakov, and the issue of appointing staff officers was decided by General Vlasov together with Trukhin and Pozdnyakov. We have no information about the objections of the German side. So, for example, the head of the SS Main Directorate, Obergruppenführer Berger, who, like his representative at Vlasov, SS Oberführer Dr. Kröger, tried to support the Liberation Movement, in February-March 1945 unconditionally agreed to provide Colonels V.I. Boyarsky, S.K. Bunyachenko, I.N. Kononov, V.I. Maltsev, M.A. Meandrov, M.M. Shapovalov and G.A. Zverev with the rank of major general. As for the other officers, the friendly understanding established between Colonel Pozdnyakov and Captain Ungermann, responsible for personal affairs at the headquarters of the general of volunteer formations, served as a guarantee of a friendly attitude towards the requests of the Russians.
Concerned about his prestige in relations with the Germans, Vlasov considered it unnecessary to personally prepare proposals for promotion. They were signed by the head of the personnel department of the army headquarters, Pozdnyakov. After the war, this was interpreted in such a way that for the Germans the word of Commander-in-Chief Vlasov had no value; they listened to the opinion of another person, a “German agent” at the headquarters of the ROA. Soviet propaganda, seizing on this argument, tried to present Pozdnyakov, whom it hated for his journalistic and political activities, as an instrument of the SD, Gestapo and SS, attributing to him all sorts of atrocities. To be convinced of the absurdity of these statements, from which it follows that Vlasov and the leading officers of the Liberation Army were at the mercy of a Gestapo agent, one need only look at Pozdnyakov’s official position. In his service, he was associated with the headquarters of the general of volunteer formations, but had nothing to do with the Gestapo and SD, and cooperation with them was absolutely excluded for organizational reasons. General of the Volunteer Forces Kestring wrote about this, this was emphasized by the former head of the Wehrmacht propaganda department, Colonel Hans Martin, who assured that he knew Pozdnyakov well from his previous work. Both of them, as well as Kestring’s former adjutant Captain Horvath von Bittenfeld (after the war - Secretary of State and Chief of the Office of the Federal President) speak of Pozdnyakov’s impeccable honesty, his patriotism and organizational abilities. However, if he had not possessed these qualities, it is unlikely that he would have been able to become Vlasov’s operational adjutant, and then take the responsible post of head of the command department.
After Vlasov was appointed commander-in-chief, the ROA soldiers were sworn in:
“I, a faithful son of my fatherland, voluntarily join the ranks of the troops of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. In the face of my compatriots, I solemnly swear to honestly fight under the command of General Vlasov to the last drop of blood for the good of my people, against Bolshevism.”*
The German side could not come to terms with the fact that the soldiers would swear allegiance personally to Vlasov, and clauses hinting at an alliance with Germany were included in the oath. In particular, it was said: “This struggle is being waged by all freedom-loving peoples, led by Adolf Hitler. I swear to be faithful to this union." This formulation was personally approved by the Reichsführer SS, and the Russians thus managed to avoid taking the oath to Hitler personally.
At the very end of the war, ROA soldiers still wore German insignia on their gray uniforms, which led to a fatal misunderstanding: the Americans saw this as proof of their belonging to the Wehrmacht. Meanwhile, not to mention the fact that the French soldiers of de Gaulle and the Polish General Anders in 1944-45. It was also not easy to distinguish them from American or British soldiers; the Vlasov soldiers, even outwardly, lacked the main sign of belonging to the Wehrmacht: the emblem of an eagle with a swastika. On March 2, 1945, the OKW urgently issued a belated order on this topic:
Members of Russian formations subordinate to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia are obliged to immediately remove the German emblem from their caps and uniforms. Instead of the German emblem, a sleeve insignia is worn on the right sleeve, and the cockade of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) is worn on the cap. German personnel communicating with the ROA are ordered to remove the ROA sleeve insignia.
From that moment on, the banner of the Liberation Army became - instead of the Reich banner - the white-blue-red naval flag with the St. Andrew's cross, established by Peter I, and the standard of the commander-in-chief was with tricolor tassels and the image of St. George the Victorious on a blue background. The official seal of the ROA read “Armed Forces of the Peoples of Russia.” If further evidence is required to confirm the autonomous status of the Liberation Army, then we can add that the Wehrmacht was represented in it - as in the allied armies of Romania, Hungary and other countries - only by liaison officers who did not have command powers: an OKW general under the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the KONR and groups communications with Russian divisions. With the exception of some connections of a purely formal nature, the Russian Liberation Army was legally and in fact completely separated from the Wehrmacht.
So, the Wehrmacht and the ROA were now officially considered allies. What many senior officers of the German army have been striving for for several years has happened. But this did not at all mean a transition to new, cloudless relations between Russians and Germans. In the army, especially at the lowest level, there was distrust of the Russians, born of ignorance and misunderstanding. It was difficult for the Germans to see the Russians as equal allies. There are many examples that clearly demonstrate how easily this mistrust grew into serious conflicts. This is the story of Captain Vladimir Gavrinsky, an officer from Vlasov’s personal guard. While on assignment for the commander-in-chief, the captain at the Nuremberg station argued with a German pilot over a seat in a second-class compartment. The railway sergeant-major who arrived in time instantly resolved the conflict by shooting the Russian officer in cold blood. But this happened in February 1945... The news of the murder of this honored officer, who received several orders for brave actions in the rear of the Red Army, reached the members of the KONR during a meeting in Carlsbad, causing them deep indignation. The Germans present at the meeting were also very upset by this incident. Vlasov sent a telegram to the Reichsführer SS expressing protest, and the Germans tried to hush up the matter. Captain Gavrinsky was given a military funeral of the highest order, which was attended by the city commandant of Nuremberg and senior German officers. However, Vlasov’s demand to bring the killer to trial was not fulfilled, and the sergeant major was simply transferred to another unit without any fanfare.
But the Russians did not forget about past enmity and previous humiliations. Thus, in a secret report from the intelligence department at army headquarters, dated 1945, an increase in hostility towards the Germans in the 1st ROA division was noted. This phenomenon was seen as the influence of Major M.A. Zykov, an outstanding man, but extremely contradictory and mysterious. In 1943, Vlasov appointed Zykov responsible for the press in the then nascent Liberation Movement. In the summer of 1944, Zykov was apparently arrested in Berlin by the Gestapo. His ideas enjoyed great success among students of propagandist courses in Dabendorf, who now occupied officer positions in the formations of the ROA. Therefore, some authors believe that political officers, like Zykov, who was previously Bukharin’s confidant and corps commissar in the Red Army, deliberately sowed discontent among the officers, driving a wedge between the ROA and the Wehrmacht. There are also clear hints of the influence of the “brilliant Jew Zykov” in the statement of a former employee of Vlasov dated December 23, 1944. He informed the Eastern Ministry, which already did not have particularly friendly feelings towards Vlasov, that the general’s entourage included people “opposed to everything German”, “who in advance remove from the propagandist course programs everything that is directed against the Anglo-Americans” and - that it was especially noted that “they remain completely silent about the Jewish question.” An example of such a way of thinking could also be the statement of Captain Voskoboynikov, recorded at the same time, which sounded provocative to National Socialist ears: “Jews are nice, intelligent people.”
According to the same source, there was secret agitation in the ROA not only against the Germans themselves, but also against the volunteer units still under their command. Agents or proxies of the ROA allegedly tried to sow confusion in the Eastern troops, persuading the soldiers to join Vlasov, “who will solve the Russian question without the Germans.” In the spirit of Soviet propaganda, these agitators called the officers of the Eastern Troops, many of whom had been fighting for more than a year, “Gestapo men, traitors and mercenaries,” contrasting them with genuine leaders who “did not sell out to the Germans,” that is, they went directly from captivity to Vlasov. These statements seem unlikely, since such a distinction would contradict the very principles of the KONR, which considered all Russian volunteers to be participants in the Liberation Movement, regardless of their location. Finally, we should not forget that most of the leading figures of the ROA came from the Eastern Troops, such as Major General Bunyachenko, who commanded a Russian regiment during the German offensive. The leadership of the ROA resolutely opposed all such anti-German movements, which developed more latently than on the surface. The head of the main propaganda department of the KONR, Lieutenant General Zhilenkov, was inclined to regard such sentiments as a targeted enemy provocation. In the military newspaper KONR “3a Rodinu” dated January 7, 1945, he wrote:
A soldier of the liberation army must show maximum respect towards his allies and take daily care to strengthen the military friendship of Russians and Germans... Therefore, soldiers and officers of the liberation army must show maximum correctness and full respect for the national orders and customs of the country on whose territory they will be forced to fight against Bolshevism.
Vlasov himself, who witnessed how, after the battle for Kiev, Stalin in the Kremlin demanded that Beria use all means to incite “hatred, hatred and once again hatred*” against everything German, it was in overcoming this hatred between the two peoples that he saw the basis of his policy, although he himself treated the Germans quite critically and soberly. His personal attitude towards the German allies is evidenced by his statement in a speech delivered on February 10, 1945 at the training ground in Munsingen on the occasion of taking command of the 1st and 2nd ROL divisions. In the presence of eminent German guests, he told the assembled troops:
During the years of joint struggle, friendship between the Russian and German peoples was born. Both sides made mistakes, but tried to correct them, and this indicates a commonality of interests. The main thing in the work of both parties is trust, mutual trust. I thank the Russian and German officers who participated in the creation of this union. I am convinced that we will soon return to our homeland with those soldiers and officers whom I see here. Long live the friendship of the Russian and German peoples! Long live the soldiers and officers of the Russian army! *
In his speech, Vlasov never mentioned Hitler and National Socialism. Therefore, the official German report about the ceremony in Munsingen emphasizes how difficult it is to adhere to the equality demanded by Vlasov. And it was precisely this condition that Vlasov put forward as the main principle of the relationship between the Germans and the ROL.
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The name of the armed forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, proclaimed with the support of the authorities of Nazi Germany. It was the largest form of organization of collaboration in the occupied territories during the Great Patriotic War.
Background of creation
In the summer of 1942, during the unsuccessful Lyuban offensive operation, the commander of the 2nd Shock Army, Lieutenant General of the Red Army, was captured by the Germans. He was sent to Vinnitsa, where a special camp was located, intended for representatives of the senior command staff who were interested in the German intelligence services.
On August 3, 1942, Vlasov and the former commander of the 41st Infantry Division, Colonel Vladimir Gelyarovich Baersky (who later adopted the pseudonym “Boyarsky”), who was held in the same camp, sent a letter to the Wehrmacht command in which they proposed forming a Russian army from among anti-Soviet Soviet citizens. Despite the fact that there was no response to this document, already in September 1942 Vlasov was transported to Berlin and began to be actively used by the Germans in propaganda activities. At that time, the former chief of staff of the 19th Army, Major General Vasily Fedorovich Malyshkin, the former member of the Military Council of the 32nd Army, Georgy Nikolaevich Zhilenkov, and a number of other former Soviet servicemen who agreed to go over to the enemy’s side, who later formed the backbone, were also brought there. senior command staff of the ROA. Activists took an active part in the ideological formation of the future organization, and the former Deputy Chief of Staff of the North-Western Front, Major General Fyodor Ivanovich Trukhin, later the Chief of Staff of the ROA, was elected a member of the Executive Bureau.
Creation of ROA
On December 27, 1942, the so-called “Smolensk Declaration” was adopted, the signatories of which were Vlasov and members of the so-called “Russian Committee”. The document was reproduced and actively used in German propaganda. Its authors suggested that the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army go over to the side of the “Russian Liberation Army operating in alliance with Germany.” This day is considered the date of creation of the ROA. The formation of its units began at the beginning of next year. A ROA school was created in the city of Dabendorf, and symbols were adopted. On April 29, 1943, by the Regulations on Volunteers, all Soviet prisoners of war and emigrants of Russian nationality who agreed to go over to the enemy’s side were included in the ROA.
For a long time, the German command did not dare to involve ROA units in direct participation in hostilities - they were only involved in guard duty and the fight against partisans and underground fighters. The very idea of creating Russian collaborationist formations for a long time caused opposition among the Wehrmacht and SS command. In 1944, many activists of the NTS and ROA, who propagated the ideology of Russian nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, were arrested by the Gestapo, some of them were executed. However, by the fall, due to the crisis on all fronts, the leadership of the Third Reich was forced to sanction the official creation of governing bodies for Eastern collaboration.
On September 16, 1944, a meeting between the Reichsführer SS and Vlasov took place at Hitler’s headquarters near Rastenburg, as a result of which the ROA received official status. On November 14, 1944, the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR) was proclaimed in Prague, and the Russian Liberation Army became its armed forces. Vlasov was simultaneously both the chairman of the KONR and the commander-in-chief of the ROA. The army was not a structural unit of the Wehrmacht, although it had its own branches of the military and its own command, and was fully financed and provided by the Third Reich.
On January 28, 1945, by order of Hitler, Vlasov was officially appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armed forces with all formed and Russian formations subordinate to him. Formally, the armed forces of the KONR were considered by the Germans to be the army of the union state. By the spring of 1945, the ROA included: 3 infantry divisions (commanders - Major Generals S.K. Bunyachenko, G.A. Zverev, M.M. Shapovalov) with a total number of more than 40 thousand people; air force (commander - Major General V. I. Maltsev); a number of individual units, Cossack and cavalry formations. However, a number of eastern formations created under the auspices of the Third Reich were never transferred to the command of Vlasov. In total, according to estimates by various historians, it included from 120 to 130 thousand soldiers and commanders, scattered over an area from Yugoslavia and Italy to the Dresden region. Among them are many former Soviet officers (1 lieutenant general, 5 major generals, 2 brigade commanders, 29 colonels, 16 lieutenant colonels, 41 major, 1 brigade commissar, 5 military engineers of the 2nd and 6 3rd ranks, 1 captain 1st rank of the Navy, 3 senior lieutenants of state security, etc.)
Participation in hostilities and the end of the ROA
On February 9, 1945, the strike group under the command of Colonel I.K. Sakharov took battle against units of the 230th Infantry Division (commander - Colonel D.K. Shishkov), storming the settlement of Neulevin, as well as the southern parts of the settlements of Karlsbize and Kerstenbruch. After this success, Himmler, who included a number of ROA formations in the Vistula Army Group he led, decided to involve them in the battles on the Oder. The 1st ROA Infantry Division under the command of General S.K. Bunyachenko, on the orders of the German command, attacked Soviet positions on the western bank of the Oder. They managed to break through the first line of defense, but the further offensive was bogged down due to the lack of German support and strong barrage fire from the other bank of the Oder.
On April 15, 1945, Bunyachenko and his division voluntarily left their positions, violating the order of the German command, and moved to occupied Czechoslovakia, where the headquarters of KONR and ROA were located. By that time, Germany’s defeat had become obvious, and Vlasov and his generals planned to break into Yugoslavia, where they would unite with anti-communist formations. However, the rapid advance of the Red Army and allies thwarted these plans, as a result of which the ROA formations, one after another, began to surrender to the British and Americans. Subsequently, many who surrendered to the Allies were extradited to the USSR in accordance with previously reached agreements.
A number of ROA military leaders - F.I. Trukhin, M.M. Shapovalov, V.I. Boyarsky - were arrested by Czechoslovak partisans. Some units of the Vlasovites joined the fight against the fifty-thousand-strong German garrison, which began on May 5, 1945. The day before, S.K. Bunyachenko, the chief of staff of his division N.P. Nikolaev and I.K. Sakharov signed an agreement on a joint fight against the rebel command. Bunyachenko's division fought until the Czech National Council refused to confirm the guarantees previously given to the Vlasov rebels. Ultimately, it found itself surrounded by the Soviets and was dissolved. Most of its personnel were captured by Soviet infantry and tank units. On May 12, 1945, on the Lnarzhe-Pilsen road, the battalion of Captain Mikhail Ivanovich Yakushev captured a car in which General A. A. Vlasov was traveling west.
Prosecution in the USSR and the post-war fate of former ROA servicemen
After the end of the war, former fighters and commanders of the Russian Liberation Army were prosecuted under Soviet law. July 30 - August 1, 1946, the case of 12 senior commanders of the ROA (A. A. Vlasov, F. I. Trukhin, G. N. Zhilenkov, V. F. Malyshkin, I. A. Blagoveshchensky, M. A. Meandrov, V. I. Maltsev, S. K. Bunyachenko, D. E. Zakutny, G. A. Zverev, N. S. Shatov, V. D. Korbukov) was considered in a closed trial. All of them were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on the night of August 1, 1946 in the courtyard of Butyrka prison in Moscow. Most of the Vlasovites returned to the USSR were also sentenced, depending on the degree of their participation, from various terms of imprisonment to the death penalty. Among those sentenced to capital punishment were two former Heroes of the Soviet Union who served in the ROA Air Force - B. R. Antilevsky and S. T. Bychkov.
A large number of former ROA servicemen ended up abroad, where their organizations functioned for a number of years, the ideological basis of which continued to be the Prague Manifesto of 1944. A number of ex-Vlasov members were NTS activists. The movement, which failed to form strong organizations in the West in the post-war years, finally ceased to exist by the early 1980s.
This term has other meanings, see Roa.
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Russian Liberation Army |
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Years of existence | |
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Subordination |
Third Reich (1943-1944) KONR (1944-1945) |
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Armed forces |
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Includes |
infantry, air force, cavalry, auxiliary units |
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Function |
confrontation with regular units of the Red Army |
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Number |
120-130 thousand (April 1945) |
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Nickname |
"Vlasovites" |
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March |
“we are walking across wide fields” |
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Equipment |
German and Soviet captured weapons |
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Participation in |
The Second World War:
Eastern front |
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Marks of Excellence |
Sleeve badge |
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Commanders |
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Notable commanders |
Commander-in-Chief: A. A. Vlasov (from January 28, 1945) S. K. Bunyachenko, G. A. Zverev, V. I. Maltsev |
General Vlasov inspects ROA soldiersRussian Liberation Army, ROA- the historically established name of the armed forces of the Committee for the Liberation of Peoples of Russia (KONR), which fought on the side of the Third Reich against the USSR, as well as the totality of the majority of Russian anti-Soviet units and units of Russian collaborators within the Wehrmacht in 1943-1944, mainly used at the level of individual battalions and companies, and formed by various German military structures (the headquarters of the SS Troops, etc.) during the Great Patriotic War.
The insignia of the Russian Liberation Army (sleeve insignia) was worn by about 800,000 people at different periods of time, but only a third of this number was recognized by the leadership of the ROA as actually belonging to their movement. Until 1944, the ROA did not exist as any specific military formation, but was mainly used by the German authorities for propaganda and recruiting volunteers for service. The 1st Division of the ROA was formed on November 23, 1944, a little later other formations were created, and at the beginning of 1945 other collaborationist formations were included in the ROA.
The army was formed in the same way as, for example, the North Caucasian Sonderverband Bergmann, the Georgian Legion of the Wehrmacht, mainly from Soviet prisoners of war or from among emigrants. Unofficially, the Russian Liberation Army and its members were called “Vlasovites,” after the surname of their leader, Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov.
Story
The Russian liberation army was formed mainly from Soviet prisoners of war who were captured by the Germans. On December 27, 1942, Lieutenant General A. A. Vlasov and General V. G. Baersky, in a letter to the German command, proposed organizing the ROA. The army was declared as a military formation created to “liberate Russia from communism.” For propaganda reasons, the leadership of the Third Reich reported this initiative in the media, without, however, doing anything organizationally. From that moment on, all soldiers of Russian nationality in the structure of the German army could consider themselves servicemen of the Russian Liberation Army, which, however, existed then only on paper.
The formation of ROA units began in 1943; they were involved in security and police service and the fight against partisans in the occupied territory of the USSR.
According to the regulations on volunteers, issued on April 29, 1943 by the Chief of the OKH General Staff, Major General K. Zeitzler, all volunteers of Russian nationality were formally united into the Russian Liberation Army.
General F.I. Trukhin was appointed chief of staff, General V.G. Baersky (Boyarsky) was appointed his deputy, Colonel A.G. Neryanin was appointed head of the operational department of the headquarters. The leaders of the ROA also included generals V.F. Malyshkin, D. E. Zakutny, I. A. Blagoveshchensky, former brigade commissar G. N. Zhilenkov. The rank of general of the ROA was held by former Red Army major and Wehrmacht colonel I. N. Kononov. Some priests from the Russian emigration served in the marching churches of the ROA, including priests A. N. Kiselev and D. V. Konstantinov. One of the authors of a number of program documents of the Vlasov movement was journalist M. A. Zykov.
Captain V.K. Shtrik-Shtrikfeldt, who served in the German army, did a lot to create the ROA.
Among the leadership of the ROA were former generals of the Russian Civil War from the White movement: V. I. Angeleev, V. F. Belogortsev, S. K. Borodin, Colonels K. G. Kromiadi, N. A. Shokoli, Lieutenant Colonel A. D. Arkhipov, as well as M.V. Tomashevsky, Yu.K. Meyer, V. Melnikov, Skarzhinsky, Golub and others, as well as Colonel I.K. Sakharov (formerly a lieutenant in the Spanish army under General F. Franco). Support was also provided by generals A. P. Arkhangelsky, A. A. von Lampe, A. M. Dragomirov, P. N. Krasnov, N. N. Golovin, F. F. Abramov, E. I. Balabin, I. A. Polyakov, V. V. Kreiter, Don and Kuban atamans generals G. V. Tatarkin and V. G. Naumenko . One of the adjutants of General A. A. Vlasov was a member of the NTS L. A. Rahr.
However, there were serious disagreements between former Soviet prisoners and white emigrants, and the “whites” were gradually ousted from the leadership of the ROA. Most of them served in other Russian volunteer formations not associated with the ROA (only a few days before the end of the war they were formally affiliated with the ROA) - the Russian Corps, the brigade of General A. V. Turkula in Austria, the 1st Russian National Army, the “Varyag” regiment of Colonel M. A. Semenov, a separate regiment of Colonel Krzhizhanovsky, as well as in Cossack formations (15th Cossack Cavalry Corps and Cossack Stan).
The practical creation of the ROA began only after the establishment of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), which was formed in Prague on November 14, 1944. The committee, equivalent to the government in exile, established the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (AF KONR), which became the ROA. It had its own command and all branches of the military, including a small air force. General Vlasov, as Chairman of the Committee, simultaneously became the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, which de jure and de facto represented a completely independent Russian national army, connected with the Third Reich only by allied relations. The ROA was financed by the Ministry of Finance of the Third Reich. The money was issued as a loan, repaid “as far as possible,” and was not included in the budget of the Third Reich. On January 28, 1945, the ROA received the status of the armed forces of an allied power, maintaining neutrality towards the United States and Great Britain.
After the victory of the USSR and the occupation of Germany, most of the members of the ROA were transferred to the Soviet authorities. Some of the “Vlasovites” managed to escape punishment from the Soviet authorities and escaped to Western countries.
Compound
An order from General Vlasov aimed at combating the arbitrariness of commanders in the ROA.
By April 22, 1945, the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia included the following formations, units and subunits:
Commander-in-Chief, a group of personal subordinate officers (Colonel K. G. Kromiadi, Lieutenant Colonel M. K. Meleshkevich, Captain R. L. Antonov, Chief Lieutenant V. A. Reisler, etc.), personal guard company of Captain P. V. Kashtanov ;
1st Infantry Division of the KONR Armed Forces, Major General S. K. Bunyachenko, fully armed and staffed (about 20,000 people);
2nd Infantry Division of the KONR Armed Forces, Major General G. A. Zverev, personnel were armed with automatic weapons up to and including machine guns, there were no heavy weapons (11,856 people);
The 3rd Infantry Division of the KONR Armed Forces, Major General M. M. Shapovalov, had only a cadre of volunteers, unarmed (10,000 people);
Air Force of KONR Major General V.I. Maltsev (more than 5,000 people);
Training and reserve brigade of Colonel S. T. Koida (7000 people)
Russian corps of Lieutenant General B. A. Shteifon (5584 people);
15th Cossack cavalry corps AF KONR (32,000 people excluding Germans);
Separate corps of Major General A.V.Turkul (about 7000 people);
Separate Cossack corps in northern Italy (Cossack Stan) of the Marching Ataman, Major General T. I. Domanov (18,395 people);
Separate anti-tank brigade of Major Vtorov (1240 people);
Auxiliary (technical) troops directly subordinate to the Commander-in-Chief (about 10,000 people);
The central headquarters of Major General F. I. Trukhin, the officer reserve at the headquarters of Lieutenant Colonel G. D. Belaya, a separate cavalry squadron of Captain Tishchenko, the security battalion of the headquarters of Captain A. P. Dubny, the special detachment for the protection of KONR valuables of Captain A. Anokhin (up to 5000 people);
1st United Officer School of the Armed Forces of the KONR, Major General M. A. Meandrov (785 people);
Bratislava reconnaissance school of the KONR Armed Forces, Major S. N. Ivanov;
Marienbad reconnaissance school of the KONR Armed Forces, captain R.I. Becker;
Directorate of Cossack Troops under KONR;
In total, these formations, according to various sources, numbered about 120-130 thousand people. These formations were scattered over a large section of the front from Zagreb (Croatia) and Tolmezzo (northern Italy) to Bad Schandau (southwest of Dresden).
Vlasovites, or fighters of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) are controversial figures in military history. Until now, historians cannot come to a consensus. Supporters consider them fighters for justice, true patriots of the Russian people. Opponents are unconditionally confident that the Vlasovites are traitors to the Motherland, who went over to the side of the enemy and mercilessly destroyed their compatriots.
Why did Vlasov create the ROA?
The Vlasovites positioned themselves as patriots of their country and their people, but not of the government. Their goal was supposedly to overthrow the established political regime in order to provide people with a decent life. General Vlasov considered Bolshevism, in particular Stalin, the main enemy of the Russian people. He associated the prosperity of his country with cooperation and friendly relations with Germany.
Treason to the Motherland
Vlasov went over to the enemy’s side at the most difficult moment for the USSR. The movement that he promoted and in which he recruited former Red Army soldiers was aimed at the destruction of the Russians. Having sworn an oath of allegiance to Hitler, the Vlasovites decided to kill ordinary soldiers, burn down villages and destroy their homeland. Moreover, Vlasov presented his Order of Lenin to Brigadeführer Fegelein in response to the loyalty shown to him.
Demonstrating his devotion, General Vlasov gave valuable military advice. Knowing the problem areas and plans of the Red Army, he helped the Germans plan attacks. In the diary of the Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich and the Gauleiter of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, there is an entry about his meeting with Vlasov, who gave him advice, taking into account the experience of defending Kyiv and Moscow, on how best to organize the defense of Berlin. Goebbels wrote: “The conversation with General Vlasov inspired me. I learned that the Soviet Union had to overcome exactly the same crisis that we are overcoming now, and that there is certainly a way out of this crisis if you are extremely decisive and do not give in to it.”
In the wings of the fascists
Vlasovites took part in brutal reprisals against civilians. From the memoirs of one of them: “The next day, the commandant of the city, Shuber, ordered all the state farmers to be expelled to Chernaya Balka and the executed communists to be properly buried. So stray dogs were caught, thrown into the water, the city was cleared... First from Jews and merry ones, at the same time from Zherdetsky, then from dogs. And bury the corpses at the same time. Trace. How could it be otherwise, gentlemen? After all, it’s not the forty-first year already—it’s the forty-second year! Already the carnival, joyful tricks had to be slowly hidden. It was possible before, in a simple way. Shoot and throw on the coastal sand, and now - bury! But what a dream!”
ROA soldiers, together with the Nazis, smashed partisan detachments, talking about it with gusto: “At dawn they hung captured partisan commanders on poles of a railway station, then continued to drink. They sang German songs, hugged their commander, walked through the streets and touched the frightened nurses! A real gang!
Baptism of fire
General Bunyachenko, who commanded the 1st Division of the ROA, received an order to prepare the division for an attack on a bridgehead captured by Soviet troops with the task of pushing Soviet troops back to the right bank of the Oder in this place. For Vlasov’s army it was a baptism of fire - it had to prove its right to exist.
On February 9, 1945, the ROA entered its position for the first time. The army captured Neuleveen, the southern part of Karlsbize and Kerstenbruch. Joseph Goebbels even noted in his diary “the outstanding achievements of General Vlasov’s troops.” ROA soldiers played a key role in the battle - thanks to the fact that the Vlasovites noticed in time a camouflaged battery of Soviet anti-tank guns ready for battle, the German units did not become victims of the bloody massacre. Saving the Fritz, the Vlasovites mercilessly killed their compatriots.
On March 20, the ROA was supposed to seize and equip a bridgehead, as well as ensure the passage of ships along the Oder. When during the day the left flank, despite strong artillery support, was stopped, the Russians, whom the exhausted and dispirited Germans were waiting with hope, were used as a “fist”. The Germans sent Vlasovites on the most dangerous and obviously failed missions.
Prague Uprising
The Vlasovites showed themselves in occupied Prague - they decided to oppose the German troops. On May 5, 1945, they came to the aid of the rebels. The rebels demonstrated unprecedented cruelty - they shot at a German school with heavy anti-aircraft machine guns, turning its students into a bloody mess. Subsequently, the Vlasovites retreating from Prague clashed with the retreating Germans in hand-to-hand combat. The result of the uprising was the robberies and murders of the civilian population and not only the Germans.
There were several versions of why the ROA took part in the uprising. Perhaps she tried to earn the forgiveness of the Soviet people or sought political asylum in liberated Czechoslovakia. One of the authoritative opinions remains that the German command issued an ultimatum: either the division carries out their orders, or it will be destroyed. The Germans made it clear that the ROA would not be able to exist independently and act according to its convictions, and then the Vlasovites resorted to sabotage.
The adventurous decision to take part in the uprising cost the ROA dearly: about 900 Vlasovites were killed during the fighting in Prague (officially - 300), 158 wounded disappeared without a trace from Prague hospitals after the arrival of the Red Army, 600 Vlasov deserters were identified in Prague and shot by the Red Army
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