5 Prisoners of war become soldiers of the ROA As part of the presentation of the history of the ROA, the question arises of the path of Soviet soldiers from their belonging to the Red Army through a fateful way station in German captivity to their entry into the army of General Vlasov. In this regard

CAPTURE- to captivate someone, to take captive, into captivity, to captivate, capture, enslave; beat off the cattle. PART of the enemy was beaten, another was captured, the rest fled. for the health of the eyes that captivated us (that look at us)! | to seduce with something, or with oneself, to attract and subdue morally, to subjugate without force. Walter Scott captivates with his descriptions of nature. she captivates everyone and fools everyone. -sya, they suffer. and return he is captivated by her, she captivated him, or he is captivated by her. Don’t be captivated by beauty, but be captivated by your mind and heart. captive, captive, captured, in war, in a raid, or by wild robbers, into slavery. a prisoner of war taken captive under the conditions and customs of war of educated peoples. captivity cf. captivity m. action according to verb. | captivity, the state of being captive, captured. to be in captivity. he was taken and captured. everyone is captive to their passions. | booty of war, everything taken in battle, plundered from the enemy. They took a hundred horses, fifty camels, and various clothes captive. captive, captive, captive, captive, captured; prisoner of war; taken into captivity by robbery, robbery, slave, serf, slave: | *enslaved. agreed with the enemy on the exchange of prisoners. Khivans trade in captives, stealing people. captive of his beloved. everyone is a captive and slave of his passions. captives - Nitsyn, belonging to them. captive, -chesky, related to them. captivity cf. captivity, meaning condition. captor, -nitsa, who has captivated someone, in all meanings. taken prisoner, in war, and | seducer, seducer. captivating gaze, voice or view of the area, enchanting, charming. captivating beauty. captivity church fetters, bonds, ligatures, chains, shackles. | Moscow Ryaz. bunch of rafts, nightmare, race. This is what causes the film, the snare, i.e., to captivate or captivate.

Article about the word " CAPTURE" in V. Dahl's dictionary was read 9057 times

Torture of captured enemies

An analysis of the materials studied by the author shows that in the second half of the 19th century, torture of captives was no longer as widespread among the Indians of the Wild West as it was in the first half of the century. Randolph Mercy noted the significant difference in the treatment of captives between the tribes of the eastern forests and the Indians of the Plains. He wrote: “Although the eastern aborigines subject their victims to tortures of the most terrible character, they rarely, if ever, deprive women of their chastity. Whereas the Plains Indians, on the contrary, do not kill their captives by prolonged torture, but invariably force the women to submit to their lustful desires.” If the Indians were victorious in the battle and did not lose any of their own, they could leave the young captives alive. But if the victory cost them blood, death awaited the prisoners. Matthews wrote: “I have never seen or heard of the Hidatsa capturing adult enemies for the purpose of torturing them to death, as was the custom among the eastern tribes. They killed their enemies immediately.” Reverend William Weill wrote in 1826 regarding the Osages that he had never heard of them torturing their enemies. Despite his words, there is ample evidence of this.

Long Soldier, Waco (Wichita). 1872

Among the tribes of the Southern Plains in the first half of the 19th century, the Lipans, Wakos, Tawakonis and Tawehashis were considered the most cruel and inhumane towards captives. Comanches and Arapahos were not considered cruel. Don Francisco Ruiz told the story of Lipan, captured by the Tawakoni Indians. He accepted the news that death awaited him with cold-blooded indifference and began to sing the song of death. Then he began to insult his captors, not forgetting a single dirty epithet addressed to them. The women, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to mock the victim, lit a huge fire at the foot of the pillar. Lipana's arms were twisted out of their sockets and tied to a post with a rope around his neck, and his legs were tied with another rope. The women dancing around the brave warrior periodically grabbed the rope tied around his legs and pulled so that his body was on fire. Others at the same moment grabbed the rope around their neck and loosened it. This continued for three days, and might have continued longer, for the Tawakoni took special care not to injure the vital organs of the prisoner, had he not been accidentally killed by a Comanche. We must pay tribute to lipan. He sang his song of death several times and endured the most severe torture with the greatest courage. Another example of the Tawakoni's sophisticated cruelty was shown by capturing about a dozen Tonkawa. They slowly and gradually removed the skin from the victims - first from the arms and legs, then from the torso. All this time, the wounded flesh was burned with burning coals. Anthony Glass, who visited the Tavehashes in 1808, wrote: “(They. - Author) are the only ones (among other tribes. – Author) in the method of killing their captives. About two hundred meters from the village a pillar is dug into the ground. The prisoners are stripped naked and tied to him. They stay there for a while and all the people come to see them. After this, women and children beat them to death with sticks. Then they cut the meat from the bones and hang it in two different ends of the village. But they never kill captives who have not reached puberty. They are made slaves or adopted into families, as is the practice of most savages.” The cruel treatment of captives earned the Wichita (Tawakoni, Tavehasham, etc.) a bad reputation. One of the Euro-Americans wrote: “The atrocities to which they subject their captives are so great that even the story of them will cause horror and make the storyteller complicit in them.”

Torture by fire was not limited to the Wichitas. One very authoritative source reported that the Assiniboines once tortured captive women and children of the Gros Ventres by impaling them on a stake placed near a huge fire, after which they roasted them alive.

Although, according to Wallace, it was not the custom of the Comanches to torture unfortunate captives, when angered, they could resort to extremely barbaric methods of revenge. The fate of a prisoner largely depended on who captured him. There is a known warrior who constantly castrated captive boys, crucified one of the captives and killed a Navaja just because he was sick. One day, a force of Comanches surprised a small group of Tonkawa who were roasting a Comanche warrior in preparation for his ritual consumption. They scalped them, cut off their arms and legs, cut out their tongues, and then threw the mutilated bodies of the living and the dead into the fire, adding wood there. When the victims groaned, begging for mercy, and fat and blood streamed from their bodies bursting with heat, the Comanches danced around the fire. On the other hand, Rhoda Greyfoot's father released a Mexican boy he was keeping to tend horses "because he didn't want to worry about teaching him the language." Later, he always released the prisoners or gave them the opportunity to escape.

A group of Osage scouts - participants in the military campaign on the river. Washita 1868–1869

Nelson Lee, who spent three years as a Comanche captive (from April 1855 to November 1858), described the ceremony of killing captives. A quarter of a mile from their settlement, the Comanches dug tall pillars, spaced about a meter apart. Four naked prisoners were tied to them - arms as high as possible (right hand to right, and left to left), and legs at the base of the pillars. The leader and old men were located not far from the pillars. Then a chain of two hundred warriors appeared, headed by a military leader. Each warrior carried a knife or tomahawk in one hand, and in the other a sharp flint, carved in the shape of an arrowhead. Everything happened in complete silence. As the column passed around the prisoners, two young warriors jumped out of its ranks and, grabbing the two poor fellows by the hair, with screams, cut off a tiny scalp from their heads, after which all the redskins stopped for half a minute and together uttered a war cry. Then the column continued its silent march in a circle, not paying attention to the two remaining prisoners. When she approached the two victims for the second time, flint tips came into play - each warrior, passing by them, shook a tomahawk in front of their faces with a wild screech, and then used the flint to inflict a shallow but bleeding cut on the body of the unfortunates. Lee could not say how many circles the warriors made, but the bodies of the victims eventually turned into a solid bloody mass, from which life slowly drained away. During the action, the soldiers even took a half-hour break for themselves - some lay down to smoke, others gathered in small groups. They all laughed and joked, pointing their fingers towards the bleeding prisoners. A couple of hours later, on the next circle, the column stopped, two warriors separated from it. They danced for about ten minutes, uttering war cries, and then crushed both victims' skulls with tomahawks. This was all over. The lives of two other prisoners were spared.

Warriors from the Oto tribe.

Late 1860s

Hunter, who lived among the Kanza, Osage and Pawnee, wrote that when a military detachment returned to the village with captured enemy warriors, their fellow tribesmen came out to meet them and, after the first greetings and questions, attacked the prisoners with clubs, whips and stones. Women who lost their husbands or relatives in battles with this tribe were especially cruel. Women and children were immediately accepted into the families of the warriors who captured them or into the families of their friends. In each village, near the council tent there was a pillar, which in case of war was painted red. It was here that there was a “safety island” for the prisoner. Not far from him, women and children lined up in two rows, armed with stones, clubs, logs and branches of thorny plants. The captured warriors, one after another, were forced to run between them to the pillar. Some proud braves walked slowly and were beaten to death. Those who managed to reach the pillar were subsequently treated well, although they were kept under guard. Later, their fate was decided by the council. Those whose lives were spared usually found a wife in the tribe and stayed to live with them. When peace was again made between the tribes, former male captives could return to their own, but since this was considered ungrateful, such cases were rare. The same poor people who were sentenced to death were subjected to the most brutal torture. Usually their arms and legs were tied to one or two posts or trees, after which they were burned and cut, but in such a way that the torture lasted for a long time. The unfortunates behaved courageously, notifying their tormentors about their military exploits, which they performed against members of the tribe that had captured them. They called their captors women who could neither fight nor truly torture and could never compare with the warriors of their native tribe. They talked about their death as something insignificant - they would go to the Land of the Great Hunt, where it was much better than on earth, and their tribe would not suffer from loss, since it had enough fearless warriors who could take revenge for the insults. When the prisoners became weak from torture, they began to sing their songs of death, and then died without showing a single sign of pain.

There were cases when the council could save the lives of almost all captured soldiers. Hunter witnessed a bloody battle between the Kansas and a combined force of Othos and Omahas. Both sides suffered huge losses, but the Kanza emerged victorious, capturing twenty-five enemy warriors. They all managed to get through the rows of angry women and, severely wounded, reached the saving pillar. A few days later, the council of chiefs decided to spare the lives of all the captives, except for the two Omaha chiefs. They were subjected to the most severe torture, but they behaved bravely and did not utter a groan. The Omahas knew that the Kanzas were especially grieved by the loss of a brave warrior named Kiskemas. One of them laughed at the wife of the deceased: “I killed your husband, took his scalp and drank his blood. I owe my tribe nothing - I have fought for them many times and killed many enemies. There are enough warriors left to avenge my death and protect the hunting grounds, women and children. I am a man. Fate is not on my side today, and I die like a warrior."

Cox witnessed Flatheads torture a captured Blackfoot. The prisoner not only withstood the torture, but also laughed at his tormentors and convinced them that they did not understand anything about this matter. While they were cutting off his fingers one joint at a time, he turned to the one-eyed flathead and said, “It was my arrow that took out your eye.” After which the enraged warrior gouged out his eye, cutting his nose almost in half. “It was I who killed your brother and scalped your old fool of a father,” said the Blackfoot to the other, and he rushed to him and scalped him alive. He almost stabbed him, but the leader intervened and stopped the unrestrained warrior. The Blackfoot's attention turned to the leader: “It was I who captured your wife last fall. We blinded her, took out her tongue and treated her like a dog. Forty of our young warriors...” Then the leader of the flatheads could not stand it and killed the brave man with a shot in the heart.

The story of John Coulter, who managed to escape from the Blackfeet, became widely known in the West. Artist C. Russell

Sometimes the prisoner was given a chance to escape by organizing a kind of hunt for him. The most famous case occurred in 1808 with Colter, a famous guide and hunter. He was captured by a huge force of Blackfeet, along with a comrade, who resisted and was killed. The Indians chopped the corpse into pieces, throwing the entrails of the deceased in the face of the captive. The enraged relatives of the red man killed in the battle tried to finish off Colter with axes, but they were stopped. The leaders quickly held a council and ordered the stripped naked Colter to run away. When he had gone some distance, a war cry was heard behind him, and, turning around, the unfortunate man saw how a large group of young warriors with spears in their hands rushed after him. Colter ran faster, driven by fear and hope of salvation. After a couple of miles, his legs became weak, he began to choke, and a bloody veil appeared before his eyes. One of the pursuers took the lead and quickly overtook the fugitive. Realizing that he would not be able to escape, Colter stopped and screamed, begging for mercy. But the warrior did not seem to hear him. He threw off the blanket as he ran and, grabbing the spear with both hands, attacked the defenseless pale-faced man. The Indian hit from above. Kolter managed to dodge, intercepted the spear at the very head and, putting the remaining strength into the movement, pulled the enemy towards himself. The redskin stretched out on the ground, and the shaft of the spear broke so that the iron tip remained in the hands of the fugitive. Wasting no time, Colter plunged the tip into the head of the defeated enemy and, grabbing the blanket thrown by the warrior, rushed to run with renewed vigor. Behind them came the howl of enraged savages—according to Colter, they screamed like a legion of demons. Soon Colter managed to reach the river, which was five miles from the starting point. He struggled through the thickets and rushed into the water, where he noticed a beaver dam. Having dived under it, the fugitive surfaced, hidden from his pursuers by the roof of the beaver house. There he sat until night, trembling with fear and listening to the noise of enemies prowling around. Only when the Indians left did Colter emerge from hiding and set off. His only clothing was a blanket taken from a dead red man, and his only weapon was the tip of a spear. He walked day and night, eating roots, bleeding his bare feet and freezing at night in a tattered blanket. He had to be extremely careful, avoiding encounters with wild animals and hostile Indians. When he reached the nearest white men's fort - dirty, thin, overgrown and wounded - he was recognized only after he called his name. The fort was three hundred miles from where the Blackfeet captured it! Undoubtedly, this hunt for a captive organized by the redskins was not the only case in the history of the Wild West, but, apparently, few people managed to escape death like Colter.

Crow Warrior Walking Forward in battle gear

Enraged by losses suffered in battle or stubborn resistance, the Indians did not deny themselves the pleasure of subjecting prisoners to torture right on the spot. Having captured two white men in a battle at the Downer post station, the Cheyennes crucified one of them on the ground and, having cut out his tongue, “inserted in its place another part of the body” of the unfortunate man, then lit a fire on his stomach and howled like demons until he did not die in agony. The old trader Leonard told of a battle between the Crows and the Blackfeet, who built a fortification of logs, bushes and stones on a ridge, where they heroically defended themselves for a long time. The Crows won that battle and tortured the helpless wounded for a long time before finishing them off. Another time he saw how the Crows tortured a Blackfoot who had fallen into their hands. He was hung from a tree by the neck, after which the men shot him and the women stabbed him with sharp sticks. In the spring of 1853, the Crow overtook five Blackfeet and killed four in the ensuing battle. They did not kill the fifth, wounded in the leg. Instead, the Crows tore off his scalp and cut off his hands, after which they handed him over to the boys, who shot the unfortunate man with guns loaded only with gunpowder, which burned his body, whipped him in the face with his own scalp, and then beat him to death with blows tomahawks and stones to the head. After this, they dragged all five corpses to their camp, where they cut off their heads, arms, legs and genitals, tied them to poles and solemnly carried them around the camp. Sometimes the insane rage of the redskins was so great that they were ready to do anything just to get their hands on the unfortunate enemy. When Colonel Sumner's soldiers captured one warrior in a battle with the Cheyennes, the Pawnee scouts went to the colonel and offered to give up all the Cheyenne horses they had captured and all their pay for the service if he would hand over to them the prisoner, whom they intended to torture to death. Much to the regret of the scouts, Sumner refused them.

The Sioux claimed that they never tortured captives - they were either killed, accepted into the tribe, or released. Grinnell also noted that the Indians of the western Great Plains almost never did this. Stanley Vestal wrote: “The white people brought with them from the East a ready-made image of the Indians, which did not at all coincide with the image of the plains tribes.” Talking to White Bull, a Hunkpapa Sioux, and hoping that he would remember some incident, Vestal told him how white people sometimes burned blacks at the stake. “The leader looked at me in horror and exclaimed:

-Did you burn blacks?

I immediately assured him that I had never done this myself, but many whites were guilty of such cruelty. The leader was so amazed by what I said that he was silent for some time. I am sure that if I had committed such a crime, our friendship with the leader would have ended at that very moment.”

However, the author managed to discover contrary information about the Sioux, and, oddly enough, the incident of burning a captured enemy was described by the same Stanley Vestal, but in his other book. In the early 1850s, the Hunkpapa Sioux captured a Crow woman. According to custom, she should have been accepted into the tribe, but during the victory dances it somehow turned out that she Vitkovin -

Issues of Russian history are once again at the center of a political scandal. The speech of a schoolboy from Novy Urengoy in the Bundestag, dedicated to German prisoners of war who died in the USSR, was negatively received at home. The high school student, who stated that many Germans “wanted to live peacefully and did not want to fight,” was accused of “rehabilitating Nazi criminals” and demanded to be checked with the help of the FSB.

A high school student from Novy Urengoy, Nikolai Desyatnichenko, spoke at a meeting of Russian and German children on the Day of Mourning (a date dedicated to the memory of victims of wars and state violence). For this mourning event, German schoolchildren prepared reports on Soviet soldiers who died during World War II in Germany, and Russian students prepared reports on German soldiers who died on the territory of the Soviet Union. Nikolai Desyatnichenko spoke briefly about Corporal Georg Johan Rau, who was surrounded “in the so-called Stalingrad cauldron,” was captured and died there “from difficult conditions.” Nikolai Desyatnichenko told how he visited the burial place of Wehrmacht soldiers near Kopeisk: “I saw the graves of innocent people who died, many of whom wanted to live peacefully and did not want to fight. They experienced incredible difficulties during the war, which my great-grandfather, a war participant who was the commander of a rifle company, told me about.” At the end of his speech, the Russian schoolboy expressed the hope that “common sense will prevail throughout the entire Earth, and the world will never see war again.”

Many Russians reacted negatively to the high school student’s speech. Deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug Elena Kukushkina said that she filed an appeal to the prosecutor’s office with a request to find out “who was in charge of his project.” “In this report, words such as “fought”, “fallen soldiers in battles”, “the so-called Stalingrad cauldron” are used to describe the German invaders... These things must be stopped at the root,” said Ms. Kukushkina.
And Ekaterinburg resident Sergei Kolyasnikov saw in the student’s words “the rehabilitation of Nazi criminals” and called on Russians to contact the FSB, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the presidential administration (in 2007, Kolyasnikov was fined under the article on promoting Nazi symbols for selling German military equipment in a store).
Unfortunately, this is a new sign of our time - now sympathy or mercy is responded to with jingoistic hysteria.
The boy really did not formulate the phrase about “innocent victims” quite correctly. Of course, in Germany itself they don’t think so - decades of work by historians have shown that it is impossible to talk about “innocence” in this case. But the Russian schoolboy was not talking about punitive forces or members of the CC. He spoke about ordinary soldiers, many of whom were forced people and went to war against their will. Heinrich Böll described in his books how he found himself in the war - when the government announces a military conscription, there is nowhere to go.”

For the Memorial competition, many schoolchildren made projects on the theme of the Great Patriotic War. For many years, our guys recorded interviews with those who witnessed the war - sometimes with the Germans themselves. We must face the truth: the prisoners evoked pity among our people, such was their condition. It has been described many times how Soviet people combined hatred for enemies, for invaders - and at the same time pity for a specific dying person. Those who went through the thick of war also showed mercy towards the prisoners. I remember how one girl retold in her work the story of her grandfather, who was a boy in 1946. A German prisoner in a terrible state knocked on their door and asked for food. The father of the boy, who returned from the front without an arm, silently brought out the bread - although his family themselves did not eat enough. And he said to his amazed son: “This German was our enemy, but now he is just a dying man.” So, this mercy is the greatness of our people. And for some reason they are now trying to destroy this.
Former German prisoners of war said that they were amazed at the mercy of the Soviet people. And thanks to this mercy, they returned to their homeland with the awareness of their guilt. The boy can be forgiven for a careless word, because his message was just as merciful. We are constantly shouting about Christian values ​​- and this is exactly what this schoolboy demonstrates.

The head of Novy Urengoy, Ivan Kostogriz, also spoke out in defense of the student. “His speech, using the example of the history of this German soldier, calls for a peaceful existence throughout the Earth and rejection of war, bloodshed, fascism, suffering and violence as such,” said the head of Novy Urengoy. According to the press secretary of the governor of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Nadezhda Noskova, the district government has not yet carried out any inspections of the educational institution where Nikolai Desyatnichenko studies. “The government has no claims against the gymnasium. The text of the report in the video being distributed is taken out of context. At the end of the speech, the student expressed hope that people will be friendly and will never allow such a terrible war as the Great Patriotic War."

Since the USSR did not sign the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War and, after the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, refused to comply with its two most important conditions - the exchange of lists of prisoners of war and granting them the right to receive parcels from their homeland through the International Red Cross, Hitler had an excellent pretext for almost legally killing Soviet prisoners of war starved. The captured Red Army soldiers found themselves not only without help from their homeland, but also without any international legal protection. The Germans shot them for any reason and without any reason, hoping that the victory of the Reich would write off everything.

The death of prisoners from hunger, disease and executions fit well into Hitler’s program to reduce the size of the Slavic population by several tens of millions of people. Almost two thirds of our prisoners - about four million out of six - did not live to see the end of the war.

To be fair, I would like to emphasize that Stalin also encouraged mercilessness towards German prisoners, hoping to harden the Red Army soldiers and discourage them from surrendering to the enemy with his inevitable reprisals. He directly recommended to his generals to shoot the prisoners. Evidence of this is his conversation over a direct wire with the commander of the Reserve Front G.K. Zhukov on September 4

1941. Zhukov reported that “today a German soldier came over to our side, who showed that this night the defeated 23rd Infantry Division was replaced by the 267th Division and immediately he observed SS units.” Stalin reacted in a very peculiar way: “You don’t really believe in prisoners of war, interrogate him with passion, and then shoot him.” The Germans did not use repression against Soviet defectors.

Here are some more examples. At the end of July 1941, near Nikolaev, Wehrmacht soldiers found several Germans burned alive. The NKVD officials tried to make the victims suffer longer, tied the unfortunate people to trees and doused only the lower part of the body with gasoline. In retaliation, the Germans shot 400 Soviet prisoners of war. In Melitopol, in the basement of the local NKVD, the corpses of German soldiers were discovered, who had glass tubes inserted into their genitals and then broken with a hammer.

Soldiers of the SS Life Standard "Adolf Hitler", who burst into Taganrog on October 17, 1941, found six mutilated corpses of German soldiers in the building of the local NKVD. In response, the SS shot almost 4 thousand prisoners.

Soviet troops, who landed on the Kerch Peninsula at the end of December 1941, carried out brutal reprisals. The commander of the 11th Army, Erich von Manstein, testifies: “In Feodosia (which German troops soon recaptured. - B.S.) the Bolsheviks killed our wounded who were in hospitals there, and they dragged some of them, lying in plaster, to the seashore, doused them with water and froze them in the icy wind.” In Kerch, a German doctor had his tongue pulled out and nailed to the table. The barbaric executions of prisoners were sanctioned by the representative of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command on the Crimean Front, Deputy People's Commissar of Defense and Head of GlavPUR L. Z. Mehlis, who claimed that “in the city of Kerch, up to 7 thousand corpses of the civilian population (up to and including children), were all shot by fascist monsters. The blood runs cold with anger and thirst for revenge. I order the fascist prisoners to be put to death.”

Of course, we can provide an order of magnitude more equally reliable evidence of German atrocities against Soviet prisoners. But what is important here is not the numbers, but the trend. From the very beginning of the war, Stalin treated German prisoners in the same way as Hitler treated Soviet prisoners, there were simply much more of the latter. On August 16, 1941, the Soviet leader issued Order No. 270 of the People's Commissar of Defense, according to which all those suspected of intending to surrender were subject to execution, and their families were deprived of “state assistance and support.” The commander of the Leningrad Front, G.K. Zhukov, went even further when, on September 28, 1941, in code No. 4976, he ordered his subordinates: “Explain to all personnel that all families of those who surrendered to the enemy will be shot and upon returning from captivity, they will also all be shot.” When carried out literally, it meant the execution of even infants!

The Germans responded to Order No. 270 and orders such as the Zhukov ciphergram by publishing propaganda articles. On June 21, 1942, a member of the Military Council of the Volkhov Front, A. I. Zaporozhets, sent G. M. Malenkov, A. S. Shcherbakov, L. P. Beria and A. N. Poskrebyshev a translation of an article from the German newspaper “Di Fronte” dated May 10 1942 under the eloquent title “Prisoners of war are enemies. How Stalin treats his soldiers." It stated quite reasonably: “The Soviets consider all prisoners of war as traitors. They refused international treaties signed by all cultural states - there is no exchange of seriously wounded, there is no postal service between prisoners and their relatives.

Now the Soviets went even further in this direction: they placed under suspicion all their own prisoners of war who escaped or returned from captivity in other ways (the so-called encirclements, many of whom were released by the Germans and hid the very fact of being in captivity. - B. WITH).

The rulers of the Soviets, not without reason, are afraid that everyone who finds themselves on the other side of the “socialist paradise”, returning to the USSR, will understand the Bolshevik lies. They see each one as a dangerous anti-Soviet propagandist.”

It also said about filtration camps: “By order of the People's Commissar of Defense, all those returning from captivity are considered as “former” military personnel and their military rank is taken away from everyone without trial or investigation.

For these former military personnel, collection and testing camps are organized, subordinate to NGOs...

When sent to assembly points, former military personnel are confiscated from bladed weapons and firearms. Personal belongings, documents and letters remain with those arrested. Signs, unit numbers, as well as the place and time of disappearance are recorded in special books. Postal communications for former military personnel are prohibited. All letters received in their name are stored in the commandant's office in sealed envelopes. Former military personnel receive neither salary nor clothing.

The time spent in prefabricated and test camps is limited to 5-7 days. After this time, the healthy are transferred to special NKVD camps, and the sick and wounded to infirmaries... Upon arrival at the NKVD camp, former military personnel are “subject to vigilant observation.” What is meant by this special observation and where it ends is already well known today.”

The German front-line newspaper emphasized:

“In the light of these orders and instructions, it is not surprising that this is what happened in one sector of the Eastern Front.

In close proximity to the German positions there was a large camp of Soviet prisoners of war. A small number of German soldiers guarded about 10,000 prisoners. Soviet planes stormed German positions. At this time, the German guards had to retreat and abandoned the prisoners of war, as German troops took up new positions. Towards the end of the day, German officers and soldiers, to their great surprise, noticed that columns of unarmed Bolsheviks were moving in the direction of their position. A group of commissioners turned to the German commander and stated that the entire camp had decided to follow the German troops and ask, if possible, to take them under their protection as prisoners of war, and in no case allow the camp to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks again.

The commander allowed the prisoners to pass through the German lines and set up a camp in another area...

Only a few escape from captivity. The misfortune of finding yourself again behind the line of Bolshevik positions during battles also befalls only a few.

From the huge mass of prisoners of war, in the future, detachments of irreconcilable and sworn enemies of Stalin and Bolshevism will be formed.”

I don’t know whether the incident with the voluntary return of an entire camp of prisoners to the Germans actually happened. This is hard to believe. Unless, of course, we were talking about a special camp - for defectors, where living conditions were more bearable. But there is no doubt that the Germans once and for all in the winter of 1941/42 missed a real chance to form anti-Bolshevik regiments and divisions from Soviet prisoners of war.