--- Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote: Maybe the Nazis would have been a better deal for the religionists (except Jews, of course). After all, they had "Gott mit uns" imprinted on their belt buckles and their State ministry had signed a mutual tolerance agreement with the Vatican.
---
Coincidentally the Moscow Times had an article mentioing this the other day:
Soviets Who Joined the Nazis
By Anatoly Medetsky Staff Writer
At the height of World War II, a Nazi warplane dropped Ukrainian national Pyotr Shilo by parachute 160 kilometers west of Moscow to assassinate Josef Stalin.
Shilo, a sales executive who had been jailed for embezzlement but later escaped, was carrying poisoned bullets and a small custom-made grenade launcher that could be attached to his forearm and hidden in a cloak sleeve.
But he never got a chance to use the weapon. Soviet intelligence learned of the plot through a tailor in Riga, Latvia, who had been asked to make a cloak with an unusually wide sleeve, and Shilo was arrested soon after he landed near the village of Karmanovo in the Smolensk region in 1944.
Shilo was one of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who fought alongside the Nazis during World War II. Some, like Shilo, wanted to avoid the law. Most, however, teamed up with the enemy because they opposed communism or -- as in the case of Muslims in the North Caucasus -- despised the Stalin regime for seizing their property and muzzling their religious practices.
What happened to Shilo and most of the other defectors is unknown. The Federal Security Service has sealed the Soviet-era archives that could shed light on exactly how many people switched sides, what threat they might have posed to Moscow, and their fates.
Historians who are trying to put the pieces together said the outcome of the war may have been drastically different if Nazi Germany had made better use of those who changed sides.
"They could have been a source for a second civil war if the Germans had applied a skillful approach," said Sergei Chuyev, a researcher who has studied the issue for six years.
The strongest threat from within came from the North Caucasus region, where locals created Nazi-led guerrilla squads that sabotaged the rear flanks of the Red Army, said Chuyev and Nikolai Kirsanov, a history professor.
Muslim guerrillas from North Caucasus republics such as Chechnya and Kabardino-Balkaria attacked Red Army troops heading to the front and oil rigs and mountain passes, they said.
Germany sent planes over the North Caucasus to drop military instructors to lead the guerrilla units, as well as weapons and gold to bribe officials, Chuyev said.
One of the larger guerrilla units had as many as 800 fighters and was led by a German major, Kirsanov said.
The guerrillas managed to disrupt operations to such an extent that the Red Army ended up allocating two divisions to guard roads and bridges at its rear in the North Caucasus, he said.
Other Russian regions provided soldiers to the German army after they were occupied. Muslim Tatars welcomed the Germans in Crimea in the hope for more religious freedom, Chuyev said. The Tatars also held a grudge against the government for nationalizing a large tobacco industry.
Germans armed up to 2,000 Tatars, who helped them keep a tight grip on Crimea by killing Soviet fighters and commissars, Chuyev said.
In all, 180,000 Soviet citizens were killed by Tatars in Crimea, Kirsanov said.
In occupied Kalmykia, a Buddhist region bordering the North Caucasus, the Germans armed a cavalry corps with 4,000 men and sent it on raids both at home and in Belarus and Poland, Chuyev said.
After the Red Army began driving the Germans back in 1943 and 1944, Stalin struck back by deporting hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush and Balkarians to northern Kazakhstan and Central Asia.
Historians said the deportations were justified in a war that had put the country on the verge of collapse. "It wasn't revenge. A country at war had this internal resistance that it had to quell by such a cruel method," Chuyev said.
Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the German army found support from poorer Russians who hoped to get their nationalized farmlands back. Also, scores of people famously changed sides in the Baltic states and western Ukraine -- areas that were made part of the Soviet Union just before the war.
Soviet prisoners of war proved to be an easy -- although ultimately unreliable -- way to plug security holes. There were so many in the first months of the war that the Germans could not supply them with enough food and accommodation. Facing death from hunger and disease, many POWs agreed to help protect roads and railroad stations, said Kirsanov, whose father was one such prisoner.
But the prisoners fled back to the Soviet side at any opportunity, he said. His father successfully fled on his third attempt.
As defections grew, Germans moved the units of prisoners to the front lines to face off against U.S. and British forces.
Relatives of people executed during Stalin's purges or sent to the gulag also assisted the Germans. In one colorful example, a Nazi commander allowed Bronislav Kaminsky, a member of a family that had suffered in the purges, to create his own small state on German-conquered land in the Bryansk region.
The Germans hoped the state, which had its own laws, courts and police, would maintain public order and prevent Soviet attacks, Chuyev said. The state, however, also appeared to have shown little mercy to the Germans, hanging two soldiers for killing a mill house owner and stealing his property, he said.
Historians are still looking for answers to how many Soviet citizens took up arms against the Red Army and what happened to them during and after the war. Most of what is known has come from the archives of the Soviet Communist Party and from White Guard emigrants, who also fought on the German side, Chuyev said.
St. Petersburg historian Kirill Alexandrov estimated in his book "The Officers' Corps of Lieutenant General A. A. Vlasov" that 1.19 million Soviet citizens joined the Nazis, while Swedish researcher Sven Steenberg in his book "Vlasov" cited German military commanders as putting the number at 700,000.
Kirsanov said those figures were bloated. In any case, he said, even if there were 1.2 million defectors, they would never have been able to conquer the Red Army, which numbered 12 million at the end of 1944.
Allied forces captured many of the Soviet citizens and handed them over to Moscow. Some were executed, and others were sent to chop timber in the freezing north or work in uranium mines, Chuyev said.
The Allies, however, kept Soviet citizens who worked for German intelligence and Soviet children who the Nazis had trained in special schools to become spies, Chuyev said. These people were used in espionage efforts against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he said.
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/05/05/004.html
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
Discover Yahoo! Use Yahoo! to plan a weekend, have fun online and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/