History 05/01/20 Which repression was used against the red Army surrender
more than 4 million (according to some – to 5.75 million) of Soviet soldiers fell into German captivity during the great Patriotic war. The majority of the prisoners have to catastrophic for the red army beginning of the war. Naturally, the Soviet command could not introduce repressive measures and threats that were supposed to stop this practice.
the repression against the families of prisoners of war
With this problem, albeit in a smaller scale, faced the Russian Empire during the First world war. During the summer retreat of 1915 the commander of the 8th army of General Brusilov, for example, introduced protective groups, by ordering them to open fire on the destruction by surrendering. And the headquarters of the Supreme Commander presented to the approval of Nicholas II two measures. On one of them, the family voluntarily surrendered prisoners were deprived of state benefits are allocated to the families of soldiers taken from the army of the breadwinner. On the other, are prisoners of war, after the war, were subject to perpetual exile in Siberia. However, all that remained of threats.
Disaster perezhivajte the red Army in 1941, was much harder. And repression of surrender was already real. 16 Aug 1941, signed by Stalin, Molotov, Budyonny, Voroshilov, Timoshenko, Shaposhnikov and Zhukov left the Stavka order No 270.According to him, was subject to arrest families of commanders and political workers who are in captivity. Families of ordinary soldiers, surrendered prisoners, deprived the state of rations. In the military, surrendering, being ordered to open fire from all weapons. This time it was not empty words.
Separate commanders, as usual, went further in their “determination.” General of the army Georgy Zhukov, as commander of the Leningrad front, 28 September 1941, gave the order No 4976. For him to be shot families of all prisoners who surrendered, and on his return from captivity soldiers were waiting for the same fate. The same standards of beetles were guided in all positions. Fortunately, conducting this kind of order in life on other fronts did not depend on him alone. So this Zhukovskiy the order was aimed at the fear. But revealing the promised commander Kara – shooting of his wife and children (!) prisoner of the red army to his native Soviet power!
Stalin’s Order No 227 of 28 July 1942, usually called “not one step back!” and often quoted in the literature were, in fact, mitigating, and most importantly – legal regulation of struggle with desertion and surrender in comparison with the order of August 16, 1941. Because that leaves a wide scope for arbitrariness in the interpretation of the “defeatist” phenomena and their suppression.
Entrapment of the Germans in cruelty
About the same extent as provoking the Germans in atrocities against Soviet prisoners of war, we have to say no for decades. Don’t like to think about it now. But “war is war” and many of the facts of mass destruction of Soviet prisoners of war by the German military, there are certain facts of reprisals against German prisoners in the first year of the war by the Soviet military, and especially the ranks of the NKVD.
In July 1941, the Germans entered in Nikolaev, found some burned alive their prisoners. In retaliation, the Germans immediately shot four hundred Soviet prisoners of war. In October 1941, in the basement of the Taganrog police Department, the Germans found the bodies of their soldiers with signs of brutal torture. In response, were shot about 4,000 Soviet POWs.
the Commander of the 11th army, General Erich von Manstein wrote about the mass killing of the wounded German soldiers left in the hospitals during the occupation of the Crimea by the red Army in December 1941. This can be attributed to the attempt of Manstein to justify the atrocities of his subordinates. Moreover, after the war, Manstein was, quite rightly, sentenced to 18 years in prison for war crimes in the Crimea (though issued by the government of Germany through half a year “for health reasons”). However, in this case actually occurred, the head of the Main political Directorate of the red army Lev Mehlis, who was at that time the representative Rate on the Crimean front: “Nazi prisoners I ordered to be done.”
the Historian Boris Sokolov believes that in that period the murder of German prisoners was a deliberate step aimed at the mass reprisals of the Germans against Soviet prisoners of war. This, in the opinion of Stalin and his henchmen, was to avert a large part of the red army from surrender.
Crossed the line
In the repression and threats of repression against their prisoners, the Soviet high command clearly went too far and achieved the opposite effect. Described such a case in the fall of 1941, when a temporary camp for the newly surrendered soldiers were equipped ten kilometers from the front line. At this time the Soviet troops in this area made a counterattack and the Germans were ordered to retreat to new positions. The guards also left the camp, which was in the neutral zone. Following this, the Germans saw a large group heading towards them Soviet prisoners of war from this camp. Prisoners were asked to skip them using the position and equip a new camp. Go to their red feared because of the threat of execution.
Even a radical change in the course of the war has not eliminated the mass surrenders of red army prisoners, though, and made them much more rare. A voluntary rush to the enemy, occurred until the last months of the war.
Yaroslav Butakov
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