I live in Prague (Czech Republic), and I can add a little information about the Vlasov soldiers. A couple of units of them ended the war here in Prague, where they awaited an uncertain future. When units of the U.S. Third Army under Gen. George Patton reached the western city of Plzen (only 55 miles from Prague), the citizens of Prague rose up in revolt, believing that Patton’s forces would continue their drive all the way to the capital. The Vlasov soldiers joined them, hoping to get guarantees of asylum (i.e., safe passage to the American lines). By posting themselves around key areas, they prevented the Germans from reinforcing their units already inside the city and thus spared Prague the fate of Warsaw and other cities. The Czechoslovak National Council, which had called for the uprising (5 May) on national radio, consisted at least in part of communists, so they could not give the Vlasov soldiers the guarantee of asylum they were seeking. The Vlasov soldiers then fled westward toward the American lines (some were captured and shot by the Soviets when they entered the city on 9 May). A monument to the Soviet soldiers was erected on the site where the Vlasovites set up their field kitchen, and the Vlasovites’ contribution to saving Prague was erased from history by the communist regime here until the restoration of democracy.
On the matter of Soviet soldiers deserting the Soviet armed forces and fighting on the side of the Germans, while Cecil doesn’t mention this aspect, I wonder how many of these deserters were ethnic minorities (Ukrainians, Latvians, Uzbeks, Azerbidjanis, etc) who perhaps thought that this was their best chance to get out from under Russian domination. Perhaps this post belongs in “General Questions”.
I have a thought. Why did they have to choose between fighting with Hitler or Stalin? Why did they have to fight at all? If they wanted asylum or were oppressed why not migrate to the US as many people of the time period and prior did. The jews have been moving out of Russia for decades due to Christian resistance. So it the way out was possible. Apparently fighting a bloody battle was far better than the steerage compartment of a boat for a month.
Welcome to those new to these Boards. Seeing as we’re talking about one of Cecil’s columns, it’s handy to have a link*: During WWII, did a Soviet general and his men desert to the Nazis?
[sub]Poke around the ATMB forum to find out how to make links, or click on the “quote” button at the bottom of a post to see how the formatting works.[/sub]
You misunderstand the situation that faced the average peasant in the Soviet Union in 1940. They did not have freedom of movement, they did not have financial resources, and their employment was fixed by the government. In short, for most Soviet citizens, there was no option for travelling within the USSR, much less out of the country. Therefore, they had no practical way of avoiding conscription into the Red Army.
Once in the Red Army, mutinies, desertion, dereliction of duty, and going AWOL were, to put it mildly, highly discouraged by the authorities. Did you think that there was a conscientious objector status available?
There is also the complication that the United States had strict immigration laws in effect throughout the 1930s that effectively shut down immigration from eastern Europe.
In particular, the Immigration Act of 1924 limited Russian emigration to 2248 a year.
Most other western countries had done the same thing.
Even if they hadn’t already done it in the 1920s, they would have in the 1930s because nobody needed new faces to feed during the worldwide depression.
The heyday of Jewish immigration to the U.S. was many decades earlier, pre-Stalin.
Stalin himself said it best: “It takes a very brave man to be a coward in the Soviet Army.”
(He also said “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” and “How many divisions has the pope?” He may have been a son of a bitch, but you have to admit he could come up with some good epigrams.)
BTW, I’ve seen the photos of Vlasov being hanged along with several other of his officers in a basement. They gave them less of a one-foot drop. Not as grisly as the Nazis’ hoisting Admiral Canaris up on piano wire, but still hardly quick and painless.
All in all, about a million foreigners joined the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front alone during WWII. Tens of thousands also volunteered themselves into the Waffen SS.
Among these:
39,000 Latvians
26,000 Ukrainians
8,000 Eastern Turks
20,000 Estonians
12,000 Byelorussians
50,000 Cossacks
I remember having seen a historic dramam on TV, some years ago. It was about a large russian unit which had fought for the nazis, and had entered Liechtenstein at the end of the war to avoid being caught by the russians. After relatively lenghty negotiations between the Liechtenstein government, the allies and the russians, they were turned back to the russians.
Was it Vlasov’s army, or another similar instance?
Really now Elyzabeth. I don’t mean to be too harsh, but that was rather silly, and just a bit offensive. Try to understand that you live in a nation where people have money, freedom of movement, and political options. Most of the world’s people don’t have such resources, and the fact that the US wasn’t willing to accept immigrants from Eastern Europe didn’t make it any easier. You might also consider the fact that some things (like ridding your nation of a monster like Stalin) are simply worth fighting for. The 50-60 million (MILLION!) civilians who died at the hands of the Nazis, Japanese army, or Stalinist purges deserve better than a catty second-guessing half a century later by a woman writing from the comforts of 21st century Massachusetts.
Another footnote of history is how these Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe and Russia were supported by the US under the guise of liberating captive nations.
Guessing this might be related to the events behind the Aldington-Tolstoy libel action, searching for “Liechtenstein + Cossacks” on Google threw up this reference and this one. Trying an incorrect spelling also produced this page. The author’s a self-described “Machiavelian Nihilist”, with an odd taste in Futurism, and the page is neutrally titled “The Bolshevik Rape Of Eastern Europe”, but he has this to say (in a badly punctuated manner):
None of these are a terribly good citation, but, between them, they would seem to confirm that the story is correct, except for the detail about them being returned to the Russians.
Cecil,
Thanks for posting a very fair, balanced and honest article on the Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Army (russkaia osvoboditelnaia armiia). I myself spent the better part of a year researching the Vlasov movement back when I wrote my undergraduate thesis and I can tell you how politically dangerous it is even today to write about collaboration during WWII. As much as it’s been maligned over the years as a Nazi propaganda tool, the Vlasov movement presented a surprisingly independent, liberal vision for Russia including a strong respect for the rights of minorities that the Stalinists lacked. However, as good as the avowed intentions of the Vlasovites might have been, let’s face facts: they did collaborate with the Nazis. Vlasov’s alleged final words, “in time the (Russian) people will remember us with warmth”, doubtfully will come to pass. Too many people suffered under the Nazi occupation.
Two points on Vlasov - One, after the GULAG was published, there was a book - British I think - called “The Last Secret” which talks about the forced repatriations. Might be out of print, but definitely worth the read. Two, this disaster and tragedy led to the stalemate of the last two years of the Korean War. The Red Chinese wanted all persons captured in Red Chinese / North Korean uniforms returned, forcibly if necessary, to Red China / North Korea, and the UN did not. Truman was aware that South Koreans had been impressed into the North Korean Army, and many Koreans were impressed into the Red Army, so the Vlasov experience weighed heavily in the decision. The Red Chinese were so adamant on this point it took Eisenhower threatening nuclear weapons to get them to abandon it, and the armistice ensued shortly thereafter.
Best column in a while IMO. Good job Mr Adams.
Before judging Elyzabeth harshly, it might be appropriate to think about how hard it can be to accept historical facts and the choices people have made in the past. I find it hard to understand how WWI soldiers could bring themselves to run into machine gun fire, the enormity of the Holocaust, or the rationalizations for slavery, for example. The motivations I try to assign just won’t stretch far enough.
In any event, it is best to fight ignorance gently, IMO.
I might be in the 21st century comforts in MA however I’m not ignorant to the tyranny of war. My family are from Europe and lived through WW2 and Turkish rule in the middle east. I may not have lived the travesties but I know of the stories quite well. There are ways of escaping, defending ones life and family. I feel for these men, no human should die by the hands of their own people or by any other human, for that matter. Jews were leaving the USSR not only to the US but to other countries, and not solely prior to the dates mentioned in the article. The will to live is strong, the strength to make the correct decision though, is hard to come by. I guess my view on this is to hope we all see the errors of the past, and work towards a better future. Call it a pipe dream, but it can be possible.
Tales of escape from tyranny and the despeate measures that people took to do so are breathtaking in their wonder and horror.
But the reality is that these tales are few and far between. Approximately 15 thousand Jews (many from Russia) managed to make it to Shanghai, about the only place in the world in the late 1930s that would accept refugees who were officially stateless and had no proper passports and visas.
That’s a far cry from getting 15 million out of Russia, though. That was absolutely impossible, no matter how brave or desperate they might have been. The reality was that nobody would have taken them or allowed them to leave. (Even Shanghai would have closed its doors if any more had arrived there.)
Some did try. And we sent gun ships to turn them away:
http://www.whitepinepictures.com/seeds/iii/36/sidebar.html
The world was a different place then. Or not so different if you are trying to escape Haiti for the US even today.
Just as a side note, a number of refugees also found safety in Harbin and Mukden in the Japanese puppet of Manchuko. The Japanese were bastards in WWII…you get no arguement from me there, but one thing in their favor is that they weren’t anti-Semitic, and many members of the Japanese government were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews in WWII.
It is true that the Japanese treated the Jews with no more brutality than it did other Europeans and certainly far less than they did the Chinese in Shanghai despite pressure from the Nazis to crack down harder on them. They were the lesser of the two evils in that regard.
Just as a side note, I recently found out that Venezuela was another possible refuge for Jews at that time. Just a small number, though.
The idea that large numbers of Jews could have been saved if only they tried is simply preposterous, however.
Stalin was certainly a son of a bitch, but his famous quote, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” is sadly true. You only need to look at our own media for evidence of this. One guy dies in Afghanistan or Iraq and his whole life story (including how his family is suffering the loss) is plastered all over the tv, newspapers, Time magazine, etc. What about all the others who died in the fighting? Go to Normandy and you’ll see thousands of graves of fallen U.S. soldiers. On their tombstones are their names and dates of death, but no life stories. Are there tragedies behind those names and dates? Sure, but we never hear about them. Large numbers of dead numb the mind, but one dead is an individual thing, and so it touches us more personally.
One the subject of collaboration, we have to be a bit careful about how we use that term, because it’s been thrown around a bit too freely. Can we call Finland a collaborator nation, even though it fought the USSR only because Stalin illegally took territories from them in 1940? What about France? Your country has gone down in defeat and you have no hope of being rescued from your current situation. Do you fight on and get thousands more of your people killed and your country destroyed? Bravery sounds nice when you aren’t the one being asked to fight and die. On the other hand, how do we treat the subject of Oskar Schindler, who was certainly a registered Nazi, but who saved some Jews from certain death? Or the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who issued exit visas to Jewish refugees, even handing the visa stamp to a Jewish man at the trainstation when he was leaving to continue the job?
Fact is, the no war in history is a struggle of good vs. evil (although WWII was the closest we’ve come to such), and for proof, we need look no further than Stalin.