Of the nearly six million Russians taken prisoner after 1941, only 1.1 million lived to see the end of the war.

Hitler declared that Russian soldiers would not be granted POW status, which meant captives would be treated as subhuman. There was tremendous risk in going against the Red Army, however. It should be emphasized that their defection to the German side was not done in favor of Nazism, but for the love of their homeland and for the cause of a second Russian Civil War. By that time, the German Army had established a semi-autonomous Cossack District from which they could recruit. Another 50,000 joined them by October 1942. On August 3, 1941, fully 70,000 Cossacks went over to fight for the Germans. Yet just 60 days after the beginning of World War II, the first major defection of Red Army soldiers to the German side occurred: It was a Cossack unit, the 436th Infantry, commanded by Major Ivan Nikitich Kononov. Just after RussiaвЂ™s poor military showing in the 1939 Russo-Finnish War, Stalin reintroduced the Cossacks into the Soviet military. Therefore, after the Revolution, the Bolsheviks retaliated by destroying all federated Cossack Republics in a terribly cruel manner, considering them all as part of вЂњWhite RussiaвЂќ (sympathetic to the tsar), though it wasnвЂ™t necessarily true. By the time of the last tsars, the Cossacks were widely viewed as a privileged military class.Дuring the Bolshevik revolution, sectors of the Cossacks put up some of the toughest resistance experienced anywhere by the Red Army. The great majority of them were loyal to the Romanov family, going all the way back to Catherine the Great.

Their superior horsemanship, proficiency with the saber, and colorful uniforms defined them.

They had lived in clans that were designated by the name of the nearest major river, i.e., Don Cossacks, Kuban Cossacks, Ural Cossacks. Traditionally, the Cossacks derived mostly from the area of southern Ukraine. The Cossacks: a Privileged Military Class Thousands of ordinary Soviets became partisans in the German military. Millions were displaced, and millions were killed.В A significant number of Soviet citizens, including many of the Cossacks, therefore greeted the invading Germans as liberators. Stalin ruthlessly expanded the collectivization program into an offensive against the peasantry. Minority nationalities inside the Soviet Union, including the Cossacks, were among those cruelly victimized during this period, especially those who posed resistance. The height of the Stalinist repression, the Great Terror, occurred in the late 1930s just prior to the German invasion. The Eastern Front war dragged on for four years and was characterized by unprecedented ferocity and loss of life, not only due to the war itself, but also to starvation, disease, slave-like working conditions, and the vast ethnic cleansing occurring under both Stalin and Hitler for different reasons. The Blitzkrieg into Russia, featuring panzer armor divisions, was initially successful but ultimately failed. The German Armed Forces High Command, the OKW, had originally counted on a 12-week war against the staggering Soviet Union, but under Joseph Stalin, the Soviets rallied and came back stronger than ever. The German field marshals and generals share in the blame for the debacle that was to come in the East. He was both right and wrong as it turned out, and thus Adolf Hitler was not the only German who had underestimated the Soviets. An estimated four million Red Army soldiers were captured by the Germans during the six months after the launching of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941.В Indeed, the chief of the German General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, wrote, вЂњThe Russians have lost this war in the first eight days! Their casualties-in both men and equipment-are unimaginable.вЂќ

Cossacks back to war german