Red Army 1940

Hi

Today I received my grandads long awaited army records. I am a little shocked to say the least. As with many, the story goes that he never spoke about his experiences in WWII . Due to his Polish origin I always presumed he fought for Poland until he came under British command with the Polish 2nd corps.
But today I learnt that between 1940-41 he was a soldier with the Red Army and then 1941-44 he was a soldier with the German Army!!! My family is in shock. We have also found that he was Russian Orthodox.

Can anyone shine any light on this? Would he have been made to fight with the Germans against his will....??

I look forward to anyone that maybe able to help me.

Thanks

 

welcome natalie,good luck with search..

 

Howdy and welcome to the forum. I have not known to run across any instances where Russians were forced to serve with the Germans. Gen Vlasov did recruit from Russian POWs to form an army to fight with the Germans. The Germans also used Russians on an individual basis as 'helpers' with the German army. But all were voluntary from my understanding. So did he actually end up with the Polish 2nd Corps? Hard to see the transition from the German Army to the Polish Corps. Glad to have you with us. Happy posting.

 

Probably the choice of pow and all that brought on that front and serve another master. Unless we are called to make that choice.. Then we cant begin to understand.. If indeed that is the case. Welcome.

 

If he began the war fighting under the Soviet banner and later fought under the German one, chances have it that he was captured by the Germans and after seeing the conditions in their POW camps, switched sides... Whether by choice or force; he might have very well fought in Vlasov's army.

How did you come about finding out your grandfathers history?

Did he make it through the war?


Either way, im sorry for the news.

 

As others said, its wasnt uncommon. If im not mistaken, 500,000 Russians served under the Germans during the war.

Why he served for them? I would give some likely reasons
-A hatred of Communism; the wanting to liberate Russia from Tyranny
-Forced to fight with threats
-Chose to collaborate to get better treatment instead of dieing in a POW Camp.



By the way: Welcome to our humble home!

 

Actually the number reached closer to a million.

 

Natalie ~ Welcome!

 

Hi all wow! Thanks for all of your input. I have found all of this out from his war records which I applied for from RAF NORTHOLT. His personal statement said: "I was conscripted to fight under the Red Army in 1940 until 15th December 1941, on the 16th December 1941 I was fighting under the German Army. SO IN ONE DAY HE HAD SWITCHED SIDES?? Then it says he was caught by Allies 3 years later and fought in the Battle of Annacona, Battle of Bologna and another in Italy which I cant remember but wasnt Cassino. He died in 2006 and when we look back now our family think it is a miracle that he survived - he must have been a very determined man. He would never speak about what he went through. Was always very dubious when people questioned him of his experiences. even at 80 years old when I said that a historian wanted to question him on his experiences in Italy his response was 'no, who knows im here'....As his grandaughter he opened up to me the most. I remember saying"Gosh its cold" and he said "you dont know the meaning" - he then went on to tell me how he had fought in such snow that they would dig themselves in to keep warm and he saw a man touch his nose and the tip of it just broke away. I asked him why his arms was a funny shape and he said that one day whilst in camp he was told to wind up the car for a german officer. As he wound it the german officer started it and it snapped his arm back and he never received medical attention. He was an apprentice tailor and one day in camp he told me that whilst on kitchen duty he stole bread and sowed it into his jacket. He said he did it several times for himself and his friends. The day he got caught he was taken to an office and he said they should of shot him there and then but they let him go.
Sorry i have gone on but i thought I'd tel you a little about him.

 

I also forgot to mention that he was a White Russian. Any more info from you guys to piece this all together would be a great help.

 

Natalie;
This is not an unusual story; thousands of Red Army men who were captured in 1941 were induced to serve the Wehrmacht. It was usually a matter of survival.
JeffinMNUSA

 

Jeffin

My family has presumed that everything he did was of course to survive. Im sure he saw and did some brutal things to save his own back. I have written to the Red Cross and a place in Berlin that holds Wehrmacht records. I still wonder why, when he was captured by the Allies, he was allowed to fight under British command with the 2nd Corps. My surname cannot be traced anywhere so perhaps he lied his way in.

 

Natalie;
Not necessarily-it is possible that the Brits had a use for experienced soldiers and the Poles were accounted as quite good. What people had to do to survive in these most horrendous of circumstances? Well I do not believe that anyone who was not there has a right to criticize.
JeffinMNUSA

 

I totally agree. This is what i have found of interest:
By the time the Wehrmacht’s advance came to its first significant standstill near Moscow in December 1941, over 3.2 million Soviet soldiers had fallen into German captivity. By February 1942, 2 million of them had lost their lives. This mass death had been clearly premeditated. Prior to the German attack, in March 1941, Hitler had relieved his troops from allegiance to the traditional code of military honor: “The Communist is from first to last no comrade. It is a war of extermination.” And despite occasional criticism out of its ranks, the Wehrmacht generally complied with the regime’s genocidal premises.




Thus, for many Soviet soldiers, death came immediately after their capture: according to German orders, political officers (commissars) were to be shot on the spot and others, especially Jewish soldiers, were handed over to SS execution squads. Undernourished and liable to be shot if they were physically unable to carry on, tens of thousand then perished during the seemingly endless marches from the front to camps in Poland and Germany. Prisoners who made it to their permanent camp locations usually found nothing but a barren field surrounded by barbed-wire. For shelter, they were forced to dig holes into the ground. With no sanitary facilities, these “camps” soon became breeding grounds for typhus and dysentery. Then the coming of winter hit the inmates in their makeshift shelters. The most common cause of death among the POWs at that time, however, was starvation. In order to maintain the food supply of their own troops and that of the German civilian population, the leadership of the Third Reich had decided to induce a “natural” decimation of the Russian prisoners, whom they branded “subhumans” and “worthless eaters.” Some Soviet POWs even became the first victims of the gas chambers at a number of concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Clearly, the treatment of the Soviet POWs in 1941–1942 fell into line with Nazi designs of a racist war of conquest and annihilation in which no rules, be they legal or ethical, were recognized.





In early 1942, however, pressure mounted to make use of prisoners of war in industry and agriculture. Following the anticipated victory, the German leadership had initially planned to demobilize large portions of the Wehrmacht in order to create a manpower pool for the defense industry. But with the advance stalled, demobilization became impossible. Instead, a first batch of 400,000 Soviet prisoners in Germany were forced to toil on projects such as highway construction and mining. Requiring a healthy workforce, the labor program led to the gradual betterment of the prisoners’ living conditions. In the spring of 1942, the death rate in the POW camps began to drop, though this was not entirely due to sudden German benevolence: by now, so many prisoners had died that in many cases the meager allotments of food became sufficient for those who remained. Yet, not until July 1944 did the food supply for the working Soviet prisoners reach a level comparable to that of other Allied prisoners in German captivity.




In addition to labor, service in the German army seemed to offer a way of survival for Soviet prisoners. In 1942, the Wehrmacht and the SS began to recruit volunteers among the POWs. Appealing to anticommunist sentiment and the will to survive among the captives, their efforts had some success. Tens of thousands of former Soviet soldiers served in special German-led battalions, in the army of Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov, a former Red Army commander who had switched sides, and in German work battalions. The total number of former Soviet prisoners in the German armed services is unknown, with estimates ranging from 250,000 to about 1 million. The remaining POWs became part of the gigantic slave labor pool that propped up the Third Reich’s industry in the later years of the war. Their living conditions remained harsh, and another 1.3 million perished in German captivity between 1942 and 1945. Furthermore, in spite of Allied victory, the plight of many Soviet prisoners did not end in 1945. Of approximately 1.8 million prisoners eventually repatriated to the USSR, 150,000 were sentenced to six years forced labor for “aiding the enemy,” and almost all others experienced the hostility engendered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s infamous Order 270, which had called all Red Army soldiers who allowed themselves to be captured alive “traitors to the motherland.”

 

Then chances have it that he was a political prisoner conscripted from the Gulag along with many others. If this was in fact the case than he fought in the Shtrafbat battalion. It is a miracle that he survived.

 

Thanks again for your replies. Ive had a closer look at his documentation and sure enough there were the letters P.O.A
Surely not a Polish soldier in the Russian Liberation Army? Or has he told the Allies when he was captured in Normandy that he was infact Polish and so they have saved him from being sent back to the Gulag under Stalin. Or has he lied and said he was Polish? Our name exisits only in Britain (he had 2 sons). My dad (one of his sons) remembers grandad saying before he got married he could change his name. Maybe the guilt of carrying on a false name? Who knows. Either way luck was very much on his side.

 

Welcome Natalie....very interesting introduction.

 

Welcome, I see you already met some of finest rogues!

 

Interesting story.
I have read that when Polish troops captured Poles fighting for the Germans, they used to carry spare uniforms & offer them the chance to make amends by joining them, a quick change of uniform & they had instant replacements.