Abstract
Historians have long assumed that Germany closely followed a take-no-prisoners policy in dealing with captured communists in the East. That was the direct conclusion to be drawn from Hitler’s notorious Commissar Order issued on the eve of the Barbarossa invasion, which prescribed summary execution of all communists and communist officials. Data published in the Soviet Union largely confirmed this impression, reflecting a dramatic reduction in Communist Party members during the first six months of the war in the East. New data suggest, however, that far from annihilating communist cadres as part of the so-called “Jewish-Communist” threat, the German occupation authorities instead recruited many former communists for service in occupation governmental work, as spies, or in other roles vital to German authorities in eastern zones. Post-Soviet archives offer profound insights into the development of Stalin’s special policy towards these suspected communist turncoats.
“Communists and Komsomol Members! Stand in the forefront in the struggle against the German-fascist bloody dogs”
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871 The Nusya Roth Collection.
One of the most enduring myths of the Second World War on the Eastern Front has been the image of the Soviet victory over fascism led by Stalin and the Communist Party. Throughout the war, ubiquitous photographs, posters, and newspapers celebrated the “courageous” communist leadership of the Soviet Union’s struggle against the enemy: “Communists and Komsomol members! Stand in the forefront of the struggle against the German-fascist bloody dogs!”
An equally powerful myth was that the German attack on the Soviet Union was likewise driven by ideology: as a war of liberation from the so-called “Jewish-Communist conspiracy”—the Żydokomuna. 1 One of the most basic presumptions about World War II on the Eastern front was that the Germans and their allies launched a total war of annihilation against Soviet communists. Historians have long accepted that Germany from the start closely followed a take-no-prisoners policy in dealing with captured communists in the East. That was the direct conclusion to be drawn from Hitler’s instructions to General Alfred Jodl on 3 March 1941 in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which emphasized “the necessity to immediately eliminate all Bolshevik leaders and Commissars.” 2
A few weeks later, on 30 March 1941, Hitler met with more than 250 senior military officers and high-ranking officials in Berlin. These were the senior officers who would soon carry out the largest invasion in history: the 22 June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union. At this meeting, Hitler chose to explain the ideological importance of the coming war with the Soviet Union. Army Chief of Staff General Franz Halder recorded Hitler’s remarks verbatim in his notes: “This war will be very different from the war in the West. . . . This is a war of annihilation,” said Hitler. “[The] War against Russia [is a war of] Extermination of the Bolshevik commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia. . . . We must fight the poison of subversion.” 3
Typical trophy photo from a Wehrmacht soldier’s personal scrapbook. Here, the soldier poses with a Luger pistol pointed at the head of a kneeling captured Soviet commissar, Summer 1941
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871.
This same message was emphasized with specific instructions on the handling of communists in the notorious Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl) issued on the eve of the Soviet invasion on 6 June 1941, an order that sanctioned summary execution of all communists and communist officials: In the battle against Bolshevism, the adherence of the enemy to the principles of humanity or international law is not to be counted on. In particular the treatment of those of us who are taken prisoner in a manner full of hatred, cruelty, and inhumanity can be expected from the political commissars of every kind as the real pillars of opposition. . . . The originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. So immediate and unhesitatingly severe measures must be undertaken against them. They are therefore, when captured either in battle or offering resistance, as a matter of routine to be dispatched by firearms.
4
On the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler declared war on commissars as the main carriers of the “communist bacillae,” of communist ideology, and ordered their total extermination. The May 1941 “Military Justice Decree” (Gerichtsbarkeitserlaß), which governed German SS jurisdiction in rear areas, and the Wehrmacht’s 19 May 1941 “Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia” further created an atmosphere of wholesale military brutality targeted against civilian populations in the East, with especial brutality to be meted out to communists, communist officials, and Jews—who were believed to be close allies to the communists. 5 Just five days before the Barbarossa attack, on 17 June 1941, Reinhard Heydrich issued unequivocal instructions to the officers of the Einsatzgruppen: “All officials of the Comintern (as communist politicians in general), the higher, mid-level and radical low-level officials of the party, of the Central Committee, of the regional committees, people’s commissars, Jews employed in party and state functions, other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators etc.) have to be executed.” 6 Collaborationist nationalist formations like Nachtigall and Roland were likewise instructed to “arrest and liquidate [Soviet] commissars and officers.” 7
Captured Soviet commissars in Summer 1941
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871.
In order not to distract from the war effort at the front, most of these “special tasks” of liquidation of ideological enemies of the Reich were assigned to special units of Einsatzkommandos subordinated to the SS—the Einsatzgruppen—who would “follow the German Army into the Soviet Union with the express intention of eliminating Communist functionaries, members of the intelligentsia, and male Jews.” 8
A collaborationist Red Army soldier identifies commissars and communists among POWs captured by the Germans in 1941
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871.
In the context of such clear signals from Hitler and the German military commanders, most have assumed that the Commissar Order was followed meticulously in Eastern zones. Expressing the mainstream conclusion, John Armstrong wrote: “In general, . . . Communist officials were scarce among the elements collaborating with the Germans, primarily because the latter, during the early stage of the war, shot all who were known to be ‘commissars.’” 9 More recently, respected Russian historian Boris N. Kovalev likewise emphasized the discriminatory policies of the German occupation regimes in the East, which were especially brutal toward families of Red Army soldiers and Communist Party members. 10
For years, scholars have relied on incomplete Soviet data to support this analysis. (See Table 1.) These data show that the Soviets entered the war with some 3.8 million full and candidate members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But just six months later, by the beginning of 1942, the ranks of Communist Party members had fallen to just over 3.06 million, representing a dramatic decline of approximately 800,000 Soviet communists in the first year of the war. 11
The Soviet Communist Party and the War, 1940-1943
Source: “KPSS v tsifrakh,” Partiinaia zhizn’ (1983) Number 15:14–32. (Data from p. 15).
These data set the foundation for Stalinist myth-building about the “Great Patriotic War” as a victory of the “Russian” people led by the Communist Party. 12 Both sides strenuously upheld the same myth: that the Soviet resistance was led by communists, and that the German Wehrmacht actively annihilated virtually all communists they captured on the Eastern Front.
Recent Research on the Commissar Order
Largely basing their work on the statements of Hitler’s officers in testimonies at Nuremberg, numerous scholars have expressed skepticism about the actual implementation of the Commissar Order. 13 These tendentious interpretations are based on testimonies of voices of German resistance like Tresckow, Stahlberg, Gersdorff, Bock, and others, who claimed to have challenged the illegal and immoral nature of the Commissar Order, which essentially denied Geneva Convention protections to communists and Jews. This debate falls under the worn rubric of Wehrmacht officers seeking to escape culpability for “Hitler’s crimes.” 14 Such self-serving testimony designed to avoid indictment for war crimes led Heinrich Uhlig, for instance, to insist as early as 1965 that “Most commanders not only failed to adhere to the Commissar Order, but sabotaged it openly, while [German] soldiers in most cases ignored it altogether.” 15
The main problem with the presumption of more than 800,000 communist cadres killed during the last six months of 1941 is that these data cannot be corroborated. The fact is that there were always serious discrepancies in the numbers of actual communists killed in German records. For years, historians relied almost solely on the reports of Einsatzgruppen units to record communist casualties in 1941 and 1942. Typical was this entry from Vilnius, Lithuania, dated 7 July 1941: “Searches and arrests were made and 54 Jews were liquidated on July 4, and 93 were liquidated on July 5. Sizeable properties belonging to Jews were secured. With the help of Lithuanian police officials, a search was started for Communists and NKVD agents, most of whom, however, are said to have fled.” 16 The same impression was sent from Belarus, from where by early July 1941 “almost all the officials of the Communist Party have fled;” 17 and in the Kyiv region on 17 September 1941 where “the most important officials of the C[ommunist] P[arty] and the NKVD and the influential Jews have fled and destroyed all documentary material.” 18 These reports confirmed impressionistic evidence that the war in 1941 against the alleged “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” struck substantially more Jews than communists, at ratios ranging from 10 to 100 to 1.
From a Wehrmacht soldier’s photo album: LEFT: “The Russian pigs will die of the plague!” RIGHT: “With the help of the Führer and of German soldiers the East will be cleansed of the communist contagion!” These photos were found by Soviet Red Army soldier Pëtr Pavlovich and his unit in October 1945 in a private home of a suspected fascist in the town of Elsterwerda, near Dresden, and sent to the Red Army newspaper Red Star. The photo album where the photographs were found included the German captions to describe these photos
Source: GARF R-7021, op. 128, d. 255, ll. 37-39.
My thanks to Jared McBride for sharing these images.
While Jews and Communists were inextricably linked in the popular imagination of the “enemy other,” curiously the link was not always so obvious to German military personnel. Over the past two decades, leading German historians have debated just how many Soviet political commissars and Communist Party members were in fact executed under the terms of the Commissar Order. In the early 1990s, for instance, Christian Streit estimated that only a few thousand commissars were shot on the Eastern Front under the terms of the Commissar Order. 19 In 2008, Felix Römer concurred with this low number. In his meticulous survey of Wehrmacht field reports, Römer concluded that not more than 10,000 Soviet political commissars had in fact been executed under the terms of the Commissar Order. This estimate is based on the discovery of 3,430 confirmed executions, and extrapolation from other areas where German military records are less detailed and complete. 20
Hitler’s main concern was the fear of a virtual “epidemic” of political indoctrination that allegedly had been observed inside prisoner-of-war camps during and after World War I. To guard against this “epidemic,” a special Reich task force was established to ensure that political commissars would not be incarcerated with rank-and-file soldiers in POW camps. Reinhard Otto found that some 12 to 14 percent of Soviet POWs in World War II were separated out by this task force for execution. By July 1942, some 38,000 Soviet prisoners of war had been executed in the camps under these “special treatment” provisions. 21
German leaflet urging Soviet Red Army soldiers to kill their commissars, 1941
“Beat the kike-stooge! His mug is just begging for a brick!”
[Frame 1:] “The commissars and their lackeys are forcing you to senseless resistance.”
[Frame 2:] “Drive off the commissars and surrender to the Germans. Cross over to the Germans using this password: Beat the kike-stooge! His mug is just begging for a brick!”
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871.
“Jews and Communists in Kaunus, [Lithuania].” German soldiers and local civilians often erroneously saw Jews and communists as one and the same. Photograph from a Wehrmacht soldier’s scrapbook, Summer 1941
The label was provided by the German soldier, written in his own hand.
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871.
In addition, during the first months of the war, the Germans worked with nationalist militias in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Romania. There is strong evidence that each nationality interpreted the Commissar Order differently, typically using the order as a sanction to arrest and execute all accused communists. On the northwestern front, for instance, the Finnish armed forces captured and turned over to the SS some 2,900 “special prisoners,” including four to five hundred Russian communists and 118 political commissars. 22 In Lithuania, captured communists were only temporarily detained by the Germans, and then released to face the anger of civilians over whom they had once ruled. SS Colonel K. Eger reported on 1 December 1941: “Some prisoners, especially Communist functionaries, were flogged, receiving ten to forty lashes each, depending on the degree of their guilt. After this the prisoners were returned to their cells. Those who were to be released were led to the market square where, after a short farewell, they were released in the presence of local residents.” 23 Similarly, in Ukraine, historian Oleksandr Melnyk found in Kherson that on 19 August 1941 when the Germans entered the city, no communists were shot. On the next day, Einsatzkommando 11a shot 390 Jewish men and 10 Jewish women, but only two non-Jewish communist officials were detained. Melnyk concluded: “It appears that with the exception of . . . Jews and a few indigenous Communists of higher stature, the remaining civilians, including Communist rank-and-file, were released after a meticulous registration. The latter development suggests that the occupation authorities initially made a conscious effort to exclude from the category of ideological enemies . . . provided these were not Jews and did not engage in acts of resistance.” 24
“Stalin Parade,” July 1941: Estonian nationalists in Reval (Tallinn) lead ousted pro-Soviet communists to their executions
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871.
Because of growing concern about Soviet reprisals and the mistreatment of German POWs, and the specific objections of Field Marshal Günther von Kluge (that the death penalty on communists would only encourage the Soviets to resist more strenuously), the Commissar Order was formally rescinded on 6 May 1942. 25 Still, political commissars and Communist Party members continue to receive “special treatment.” For example, 200 communists were executed with Zyklon B gas at Neuengamme Concentration Camp in autumn 1942, and 59 political commissars were sent to Mauthausen Camp for liquidation in mid-April 1943. 26
Besides communists killed by German military and police units, we can also look at estimates of communist executions reported by irregular auxiliary police units, where the term “commissar” was defined far more broadly in the context of the “Jewish-Communist” enemy. Christoph Dieckmann has estimated that some 10,000 non-Jews were killed in Lithuania during the war, almost half of them during the first weeks, and most of these killed as communists or pro-communist collaborators. In contrast, Ukrainian nationalists were renowned for aggressively hunting and murdering communists and communist sympathizers. The result, according to historian Mykhailo Koval, is that approximately 50,000 communists were killed by nationalist formations in Ukraine in World War II, most in 1941. 27
Typical trophy photo of German reprisal against Soviet spies on the eastern front, 1941
The placard reads: “They were activists of the Bolshevik [communist] sabotage and spy organization.”
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871.
Added together, these rough numbers of communist casualties reach some 110,000 communists killed on the Eastern Front in 1941, far below the more than 800,000 that had disappeared from official lists inside the Soviet Union. These conflicting data raise serious questions: How do we explain this discrepancy between Soviet and German data? What actually happened to those 800,000 missing Soviet communists during the first six months of the eastern war?
“Nemetskie Shkury”—“German Skins”: Soviet Efforts to Purge Communist Collaborators
By far one of the harshest labels inside the Soviet Union during and after World War II was “nemetskie shkury”—“German skins”—a special phrase popularly applied to suspected pro-German collaborators.
As expected, the Soviet leadership took a harsh approach towards all forms of suspected collaboration with the enemy. 28 The framework of this harsh approach became apparent in autumn and winter 1941, following the successful Moscow counter-offensive that liberated large zones of the Soviet Union previously occupied by the Germans.
The successful Soviet counter-offensive that followed the Battle of Moscow not only delivered the Germans their first major defeat in the European theater. The Soviet victory likewise blunted the air of invincibility with which the Germans had moved into Soviet territory during the first six months of the war. Along a 650-kilometer front, from Kalinin in the north to Rostov in the south, the Soviets pushed the previously undefeated German army back up to 240 kilometers in some areas, in the process liberating zones that had fallen under German control during the first six months of the eastern war.
But Stalinist “liberation” went hand in hand with repression. As the Soviets returned to areas that had fallen under temporary German occupation during those tumultuous first months of the war, the Soviet secret police (NKVD/NKGB/Smersh) 29 conducted a ruthless “verification” (proverka) of local citizens and their behavior during the previous months of enemy occupation. In a letter of protest challenging the brutal vetting process conducted by Soviet investigators once territories had been reconquered, a young woman from Riazan described the ordeal that she and her neighbors had been forced to undergo: “After we had survived all these horrors [of the German occupation], local [Soviet] officials began to insult us. They accused us of giving our blood for the Germans (as if the Germans had either asked for or needed our permission), [charged] that we [were suspect because] we had not managed to flee (as if there had been time for that), most of all that we had gone to work for the Germans. And this said by people who never even saw the Germans!” 30 That same message was expressed in meetings all over liberated territories in 1942–1943. As a woman Community Party member complained defensively in Rostov: “We all know what war is, but people who were evacuated did not see the horrors that those comrades who stayed in occupied territory had to live through.” 31 Another Communist Party member conceded: “We cannot discount all of them, so we must determine how people behaved during German rule.” 32
Bad as it was for some, classified Soviet records reveal that the process of verifying party loyalty concentrated especially on Communist Party cadres who had remained in German territory without Moscow’s authorization. This typical official Soviet report (dated 29 January 1942) came from Tula, southwest of Moscow: “Many communists remained on territory temporarily occupied by the Germans without the permission of the Party organization. . . . The majority of communists remaining on occupied territory did not conduct an active struggle against the fascist aggressors.” 33
Failure to conduct an active resistance against the German invaders was the least of Moscow’s concerns. In fact, the Soviet leadership was receiving disturbing reports that in the face of a seemingly inevitable German victory, a considerable proportion of local communists had switched over to the side of the enemy. In Voronezh on the southwestern front, local investigators found that “more than a few communists remained [on German-occupied territory] and their behavior [during the occupation] warrants serious scrutiny.”
34
Police investigators had observed that a sizable proportion of local Communist Party members were not only not caught unprepared behind German lines, but in fact that they displayed “an evident desire to remain with the enemy and to actively support them.” In just one locale, Ol’khovatka District, 36 of 106 (34 percent) former local Communist Party members remained behind German lines against orders and wrote petitions to the German occupation authority requesting work. A schoolteacher, Pliukina—previously a respected Communist Party member who had received the prestigious Order of Lenin in 1939—declared in a written oath of loyalty to the Germans: In June 1941 I was forced to join the Communist Party. I was then ordered to evacuate by the local authorities. My passport, Party ID, and other documents were lost during the evacuation. I have recently returned to Ol’khovatka settlement and I want to work as a schoolteacher. I promise to carry out my work and all orders of the German government faithfully.
35
The Director of the Machine Tractor Station in Marievka District, Gvozdenko, wrote in a petition to his village elder, a German collaborator: I, Gvozdenko P. I., request your permission to work in the collective farm in Marievka village. From 1938 until my evacuation, I worked as director of the Marievka MTS. I have returned from Radchenskii District. I have been a member of the Communist Party since 1937, was born in 1893, and wish to work. I will loyally carry out the instructions of the . . . [German] government. I have destroyed my [Communist] Party ID.
36
A “Hitler Parade” in Baranovichi, western Belarus, autumn 1941
The poster reads: “Hitler-Liberator.” Such ritualized public celebrations featuring former communists, Soviet-era cadres and local officials were common public events that “celebrated” the German “liberation” from the so-called Żydokumuna, the “Jewish-Communist conspiracy.”
Source: YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, RG1871.
Another MTS director, Krekoten’, from Rossoshanskii District, was also a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet. All the same, following the typical line, he denied ever genuinely supporting the communists, insisting that he too had been coerced to join the Communist Party: I did not speak at general meetings at collective farms, I fulfilled no Party duties, and I led no agitation against the German army. I request that the Great German people give me a free life. I promise to work honorably. I will have no connections with any [opposition groups]. And I will faithfully follow all the laws of the German people.
37
Interrogated by the Germans, Krekoten’ informed against dozens of local communists, all of whom were subsequently arrested and executed in public hangings run by the Gestapo. Another communist, a Party instructor named Barranikov, helped the Germans to create false partisan units, which were used in deception operations to capture and execute members of the Soviet underground resistance. 38
This one locale reflects the experience of hundreds of others. Evidently, a large proportion of Soviet communists became collaborators with the Third Reich during the first year of the war; and far from carrying out their wholesale annihilation under the terms of the Commissar Order, German occupation officials seemed eager to enlist the support of these former communists. Typically, the public rituals where former communists rejected their Party status were accompanied by a standard public oath of loyalty to the Third Reich: “With this Holy Oath before God I swear that I will unquestionably obey the Leader and Supreme Commander Adolph Hitler and that I will conscientiously fulfill all of my commander’s orders. With honor and pride I will fight against Bolshevism—the enemies of my country and the enemy of the entire world. I know that if I do not keep this oath then I will be held strictly accountable according to all German laws.” 39
The first Soviet special initiative to deal with the problem of collaboration occurred within six days of the German invasion, on 28 June 1941, Soviet NKGB/NKVD/Procurator Order № 00246/0083/PR/59ss “On the Procedure for Arresting Traitors against the Motherland and Their Families.” The order granted the Soviet police and judicial organs broad sanctions to identify, investigate, and liquidate perceived threats from suspected traitors and their families. This applied not only to actual acts of collaboration and sabotage but also to anyone who attempted to cross the lines into territories occupied by the enemy. In the event that a civilian was killed while trying to cross over to German-occupied zones, then an investigation would follow to determine the degree of the violator’s “criminal intentions” (prestupnye namereniia), with strict instructions on the subsequent handling of suspected collaborators’ surviving family members. 40
Between June and December, there were numerous individual reports of collaboration, including collaboration of communists. But the next major Soviet secret police order came in mid-December 1941, following the successful Moscow counteroffensive. Issued directly from People’s Commissar of State Security Lavrentii Beriia on 12 December 1941, NKVD Order № 001683 established procedures for purging suspected collaborators from liberated territories: “Regarding Operational-Chekist Procedures in Areas Liberated from Enemy Forces.” 41 This order confirmed the preeminent role of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in newly liberated territories, sanctioning the recruitment of cadres from other services for the collection of informants’ reports (agentura) that identified local collaborators and German stay-behind spy networks: use secret “agents, informants, partisans, and also honorable Soviet citizens to identify and arrest turncoats, traitors and provocateurs—those in the service of the German occupation authorities, as well as those who have assisted them in carrying out anti-Soviet measures and persecution of Party and Soviet activists (aktiv) and of honorable Soviet citizens.” 42
The scale of official Soviet concern over Communist Party turncoats in particular was reflected in a decree dated 17 January 1942, which expanded the verification process (proverka) concerning Communist Party cadre loyalty to all liberated territories: “About Town and District (Raion) Party Organizations Liberated from the German Aggressors.”
43
In a cover letter accompanying the decree, Chief of the Soviet Committee on Propaganda and Agitation and member of the Central Committee M. A. Shamberg explained in detail the reasons why this decree had become necessary: As has now become clear, many communists voluntarily remained among the Germans. In Rostov city as of 25 December 1941, there had been registered 2,359 such communists; in Kalinin—more than 500, and so on. In all oblasts more than a few rural communists remained among the Germans. Some of these communists turned out to be open traitors [who] had worked for the Germans. In many regions the Germans organized a special registration of communists, and found communists who took part in this registration.
44
The problem went well beyond open collaboration with the enemy. As Shamberg further explained: Besides this category of communists who remained on German[-occupied] territory, there were more than a few communists in liberated cities and districts who—though they had not remained among the Germans—had in all of their behavior shown that they have nothing in common with the [Communist] Party. ([These are] cowards, deserters, embezzlers of state property, and so on.)
45
Shamberg’s proposed solution was unequivocal: “We must conduct in all towns and districts liberated from the Germans a re-registration of communists with the aim toward purging and organizationally reforming [local] Party organizations” of areas formerly under German control.
46
Later in the memo, Shamberg clarified why this initiative was necessary: “in order to expel the people who did not honor the title of member of the Bolshevik Party during the fight against the fascist invaders.”
47
Communist Party newspapers explained these “cleansing” operations to their base, in this way reassuring the Soviet public that wartime collaborators—even communists—would not be allowed to go unpunished: The Party organization and the district Party committees are carrying out a great cleansing work of Party ranks, expelling those who did not justify the noble title of communist, who stained the name of Bolshevik out of human weakness or cowardice. The underground committee expelled Vasin and Plosnin who were afraid of joining the partisan unit and fled away. Party organizations are closely and severely examining the behavior of each communist who remained on occupied territory by checking out their activities.
48
These findings go against the grain of existing historiography on communists in the East. Contrary to longstanding popular presumptions, large proportions of Communist Party cadres in the East openly collaborated with the Germans during the first six months of the war. Moreover, the Soviet hierarchy was fully informed of these betrayals, and therefore moved to eradicate the problem of communist cadre collaboration early in the war. After the war, vigorous efforts were made to conceal the degree of communist collaboration with the fascist enemy even as suspected collaborators were expelled from the Party.
The initiative for a broad and brutal purge of German-occupied zones came not just from within the Soviet secret police and the Communist Party, but from other agencies as well. In his Top Secret summary report to the Communist Party’s Control Commission on 19 March 1942, Chief of the Red Army’s Political Department N. K. Spiridonov wrote in even more damning terms: The fascist invaders, in search of support in occupied zones, began to flirt with individual activists, sometimes even with communists who remained on German-occupied territory. The Political Department of the Army has uncovered a series of cases where “communists” and “Komsomol members” in liberated villages had for one reason or another not evacuated territories seized by the Germans and, having reconciled themselves to the situation, continued to live in their own homes. Displaying no sort of active struggle against the fascists whatsoever, and sometimes, on the contrary, protecting their own skins, they—having lost their Party identity—transformed themselves into accomplices of the enemy. They even helped the occupiers to rob and exploit the [Soviet] people. Betraying the Party and the Motherland, these traitors were essentially transformed into protégés of the German fascists, into enemies of the [Soviet] people.
49
Like the Soviet leaders in Moscow, the Red Army General Staff reeled at the growing belief that former communists-turned-traitors were being allowed to sabotage the Soviet home front, to walk freely in the Soviet rear. The General Staff therefore advocated the ruthless suppression of such turncoats, beginning with a “purge of communists who, though remaining on the territory occupied by the enemy, never took part in partisan detachments or underground [resistance] work.” 50
Ultimately, the task of verifying the loyalty of communist cadres who had lived under the German occupation fell to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police. Soviet documents confirm the commencement from early 1942 of a systematic and comprehensive Soviet state effort to counter the German use of collaborators from among former Soviet communist cadres. NKVD Order No. 0031, dated 9 January 1942, established a new department for the struggle against “infiltration networks of German intelligence, traitors, and German accomplices on territories of the USSR liberated from German-fascist forces.” This new organization became a permanent wartime section of the First Department in the Second Chief Directorate (Counter-Intelligence) of the NKVD. The first commander of the new section was Captain of State Security Matvei V. Podol’skii, who reported directly to the head of the Second Chief Directorate, Commissar of State Security P. V. Fedotov, the fourth-ranking officer in the NKVD.
51
In NKVD Instruction No. 0064, dated 18 February 1942, Deputy Director of the NKVD Vsevolod N. Merkulov provided lengthy, detailed instructions regarding the critical tasks of purging the Party of German collaborators that lay ahead.
52
Paragraph 3 focused in particular on former communists discovered in German-occupied zones: Organize the interrogation of all members and candidate-members of the Communist Party [VKP(b)] and Komsomol members who registered with the Germans. In the course of the interrogation learn from each of them: why did they remain among the Germans; what induced them to register; what did the Germans ask them; whom did they betray; did the Germans ask them to collaborate with them in one form or another. After exposing the detainee as a German collaborator, arrest this person and commence an investigation to elucidate all aspects of the case.
53
I want to emphasize that the focus here is on Stalinist institutional perceptions. In retrospect, it is absolutely clear that regardless of conditions, Communist Party and Komsomol members who were caught behind German lines during the first year of the war were treated with deep suspicion, and usually subjected to arrest and interrogation. In his comprehensive study of the fates of Soviet generals captured in combat during the war, Alexander Maslov found that “while they had all become Party members in the 1920s and 1930s, the Party had automatically expelled each on the first day of their imprisonment. This was because the Party considered being taken a captive a great disgrace, not only for a general, an officer, or a rank-and-file soldier, but also, in particular, for a communist. This was the case even if the captive officer or soldier behaved heroically in prison.” 54 As a rule, Stalin’s cohort expelled all communists who had failed to join the Soviet struggle against the German enemy while remaining behind in German-occupied zones. This would explain the huge numbers of Communist Party cadres expelled from the ranks of the Party during the first six months of the war. They had not been killed in the war. Rather, they were removed from Communist Party rosters for the “crime” of having failed to retreat from the German advance.
As one might expect, collaboration charges did not always mean that the accused was actually guilty of sedition. Typical was the case of Mikhail Lavrov, who in 1942 was executed for working as an agent for the German SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, the German Security Service). A Communist Party member from 1932, and a Party secretary in Mikhailov District near Kamenev-Podol’sk, Lavrov had been ordered to infiltrate German-occupied territory in June 1941 and to lead the creation of a partisan resistance movement inside Volhynia. Instead, according to Soviet Military Tribunal records, he betrayed seven district (raikom) underground units and the whereabouts of two partisan commanders, who were subsequently captured and executed by the Germans. In addition, Lavrov allegedly betrayed other cadres, along with the location of underground safehouses, the betrayal of call signs and passwords, etc. He also allegedly wrote a pro-German leaflet, Regarding the Victory of National Socialism over Bolshevism. 55 While Lavrov was condemned as a traitor, the Soviet court records ignored the fact that his alleged “betrayal” occurred in the context of incarceration and harsh interrogation over the course of several months in a Gestapo prison. The Soviet prosecutors painted the guilty with broad strokes, and often without regard for any extenuating circumstances.
Was there a widespread move among Soviet communists to defect to the German enemy? On the one hand, a large number of Soviets during the first six months of the war saw German victory in the East as inevitable. On the other hand, we also have to recognize the intrinsic logic of Stalinism: that anyone caught living in German-occupied zones would inevitably be scapegoated as collaborators. This harsh Soviet policy probably accelerated the process of communist defection. Just as in the 1930s, the likelihood of arrest no doubt spurred communist cadres caught behind German lines to collaborate with the enemy. 56
There are no comprehensive data yet available to define the core of communist cadres caught in the net between German and Soviet suspicions: How many communists were trapped behind rapidly advancing behind German lines? How many communists were actually killed by the Germans and their allies? How many communists registered with the German occupying authorities? How many communists openly collaborated with the occupation regime? Conversely, how many communists were punished for wartime collaboration by the Soviet regime during and after the war?
Preliminary and incomplete data suggest that the pool of real or suspected communist collaborators was quite large. In eight oblasts surveyed—Kalinin, Orlov, Riazan, Rostov, Stalino, Tula, Voronezh, and Voroshilov—at least 10 percent (Kalinin) but more often an average of 30–60 percent of local communist cadres were caught behind German lines during the first six months of the war, opening the way for a massive Soviet punitive action to track, interrogate, and punish large proportions of those communists who remained behind enemy lines.
Historian Kees Boterbloem has tracked the profound effects of the war in Kalinin Province, where 76.5 percent of cadres in 1946 had entered the Communist Party during or after the war. In Table 2 we see that there were 54,016 full and candidate members of the Communist Party in Kalinin Province in January 1941. Six months after the German invasion, and just two months after the occupation of most of Kalinin Province by the Germans, the total number of Communist Party members had fallen to 16,036, a reduction of 70.3 percent (see Table 2 above).
Communist Party Membership in Kalinin Province, 1941–1946
Source: Kees Boterbloem, Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953
(Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 1999), 103.
In short, while the Germans seem not to have been so inclined to persecute Communist Party members living and working in German-occupied zones of the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet punitive organs were eager to identify and punish suspected pro-German collaborators, especially former communists.
After the War
After the war, the question of wartime activities—one’s own actions, and also the behavior of family members and friends—would continue to haunt cadres for years to come. In 1944–1947, Stalin launched a broad program to vet communist cadres and to verify their wartime loyalties in an intensive search for “compromising materials” (komprometiruiushchie materialy) of deceptive state and Party officials. 57 As historian Jeffrey Jones observed, “Everyone who stayed in occupied territory was suspect –including [Communist] party members because they disobeyed orders to evacuate—and the result was discord in the local party apparatus between communists returning from evacuation or the front and those who [had] remained behind.” 58
The liberation of territories previously occupied by the Germans or their allies in the East brought with it a host of procedures to investigate the details of life under occupation. To ensure that these verifications (proverki) of Communist Party personnel went forward, the Central Committee’s Control Commission sent their own representatives to oversee the investigations, thereby guaranteeing that outsiders (and not sympathetic insiders) would rule on individual cases. These are reflected in surges of Party loyalty investigations throughout liberated territories in early 1942, following the Moscow counter-offensive, and 1943, following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the subsequent westward advance of Soviet forces. 59 Moscow’s Control Commission representatives were usually quite relentless in upbraiding local Party leaders for their failure to replace lost cadres with new recruits, or for their slow progress in examining cases of suspected Party disloyalty.
Typical were the findings in Rostov oblast. At a Party conference in Novocherkassk in February 1943, local Party chief N. I. Pastushenko conceded that many local Communist Party members “turned out to be simply traitors who gave other communists up to the Gestapo and eventually fled with the Nazis. . . . There were many communists who lost their heads and turned up at the German police or at the Gestapo and did everything they were ordered to do.” 60
In his investigation of vetting procedures in Rostov after liberation by the Red Army in 1943, Jeffrey Jones found that some 3,000 local Communist Party members were investigated between March and October 1943. Of these, 2,000 were approved, and 1,000 were expelled from Communist Party ranks. 61 At an October 1943 conference, Soviet officials agreed that “in the near future it is necessary to conclude the check up on communists who stayed in occupied territory and purge the party of all unreliable, unstable, and ‘hanging on’ (opportunistic) elements.” 62
The Central Committee surveyed the status of Rostov communists in October 1945. Between May 1943 and September 1945, some 11,429 communists were found to have stayed behind in German-occupied zones during the war. Of these, 7,124 (62 percent) were expelled from the Communist Party, and 1,500 (13 percent) were censured, but allowed to remain in their positions after the war. Only one in four Rostov communists (2,758, or 24 percent) were permitted to return to the Communist Party without penalty. Of those expelled from the Party, 2,652 members (37 percent) were expelled “for betrayal of the motherland, active work on behalf of the Germans, improper behavior during occupation, etc.”; 2,224 (31 percent) were expelled for registering with the Gestapo; and 852 (12 percent) for “passiveness in the struggle against the enemy.” 63
In Table 3, we can follow the same pattern of expulsion/retention in verification proceedings in several other regions of Russia that fell under German occupation.
Communist Party Member Collaboration in German-Occupied Zones, 1941–1943
Source: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 17, op. 122, d. 20, ll. 40–48 (Tula); ll. 107–8 ob. (Kalinin); ll. 109–24 (Riazan); op. 125, d. 38, ll. 1-9 (Voronezh); Kees Boterbloem, Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953 (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 1999), 103.
Drawing largely from materials in Rostov, Jeffrey Jones argued that after the war the Soviet leadership was more inclined towards leniency because authorities did not want to reveal the high degree of communist collaboration. 64 Perceptively emphasizing the importance of separating “cadres” from Communist Party members in postwar purges, Vanessa Voisin has effectively challenged Jeffrey Jones’s conclusion that these postwar sanctions for wartime collaboration were comparatively lenient. 65 In fact, Voisin has argued, Communist Party members were held to a higher standard, and as a result a substantial majority of those Party members who survived the war in enemy-occupied territories of the Soviet Union found themselves purged from Party membership by 1946.
All the same, there are indications of postwar leniency. Data reveal that there was a wide call for greater attention to details and circumstances in individual cases, and demands that the Soviet state recognize that remaining in German territory was not in itself an act of betrayal. 66 In a meeting in Pinsk on 22 July 1941, for instance, it was ordered that the first secretaries of district committees would “return to their own regions for the organization and management of underground work and leadership of the partisan movement.” 67 Under the cruel conditions of the German occupation, that was a short-sighted decision. The Germans were well prepared for underground resistance of the communists, and sending former chiefs back to regions where they were deeply resented and where moreover they would be widely recognized seriously imperiled the whole initiative. Within weeks, all but a few had been captured by the Germans. In the early weeks of the war, therefore, the Soviets found themselves deprived of the cadres most suitable for organizing intelligence and sabotage actions behind German lines. 68
Pending release of aggregate data on the wartime fates of those 800,000 members and candidate members of the Communist Party, we must rely on data collected from oblast reports. As of 1 October 1941, just prior to the German occupation, seven western districts of Riazan oblast that subsequently fell under German occupation counted some 1,768 members and 836 candidate members—a total of 2,603 persons—in the Communist Party. From 27 November 1941 to the region’s liberation from the Germans in January 1942, these seven districts lost 863 communists: 212 local communists and 131 candidate members (altogether 343 persons) were mobilized to serve in the Red Army; 333 members and 118 candidate members (451 persons) were evacuated; 36 members and 23 candidate members (59 persons) had disappeared, whereabouts unknown. Eight Communist Party members and two candidate members (10 persons) were killed during the occupation, while the overwhelming majority—1,040 members and 404 candidate members (1,444 persons)—had stayed behind during the German occupation of the region. 69 Overall, 55.3 percent of Riazan communists were suspected of collaborating with the Germans in World War II. Writing more generally, Elena Zubkova found that 29.2 percent of all expulsions from the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party between 1945 and 1947 were attributed to living under German or Axis authority during the war. 70
The Problem of Communist Collaboration and the Żydokomuna
As we have seen, Hitler’s notorious “Commissar Order” was applied inconsistently in the war in the East. The main victims of violence in the German “war of liberation” against the so-called Jewish–Communist conspiracy were not in fact communists, but Jews. While the German military seems to have been content in tolerating the rehabilitation of communists as turncoats, registering and exploiting these former Soviet cadres for military, civilian, and espionage work, violence was by and large meted out to the Jews, who would endure brutal reprisals for the excesses of Stalin’s regime.
This evidence of widespread communist collaboration with the German goes squarely against long-standing presumptions about the German war in the East. 71
During the more than seventy-five years that have passed since these events, the Soviet leadership worked to conceal the facts of the mass desertion of Communist Party cadres, and the subsequent brutal purges that followed when the Soviets returned to liberated zones. Russian historian Igor’ Ermolov has recently conceded that part of the civilian population of the USSR faced a serious dilemma with the outbreak of war in 1941: “To defend the established state order with its system of repression, which by then had affected a significant part of the population, or to go along with the Germans. . . . For all the criminal character of Nazi policy, it did not, especially in the first few months of the war, appear quite so abhorrent as it had been depicted by Soviet propaganda.” 72 Recent surveys of wartime diaries among Soviet civilians reflects the same ambivalence. Olimpiada Poliakova, a young woman from Pushkin, south of Leningrad, wrote in her “Diary of a Collaborator” on 22 June 1941: “All of us wish for the enemy to be victorious. . . . This damned state has stolen everything from us, even our patriotic feelings.” 73
The German War Report series, US Intelligence dossiers on leading members of the German war effort on the Eastern front, substantiate the fact that many Soviet citizens, especially members of the Communist Party, accepted the inevitability of German victory and therefore openly collaborated with the enemy. Interrogated by US Intelligence officers immediately after the war, Chief of German Counter-Intelligence or WALLI-III on the Eastern Front, Lieutenant-Colonel Heinrich Schmalschläger, confirmed: “For their III services (counter-espionage) [on the Eastern front], the Germans used almost exclusively Russian agents who had been captured or who had volunteered to turn against the Red Army.” 74 What kind of agents? Heinrich Fenner, Chief of Hauptkommando Süd, a key unit in the RSHA’s (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Main Security Office) notorious “Zeppelin” spy operation for German espionage and sabotage in the Soviet rear, told US interrogators: “The leader of any group was usually a [former] Communist who knew all details connected with the mission, had been well trained, and had been given information concerning his line of withdrawal, including passwords necessary to get back through the front lines. As a rule, the leader was the only one who could operate the group’s W[ireless]/T set. The leader was also the only one who carried a map, a compass, a watch, and money.” 75
Leading Russian collaborationist Oleg Anisimov recalled in his own report for the US War Report series: “The few surviving members of the Communist Party and the Soviet elite . . . displayed great energy, initiative, and public spirit in organizing the anti-Communist forces” for the Germans. 76 Writer Vasil’ Bykov agreed. Returning from service in the Red Army to his village in northeast Belarus, Bykov heard reports from his neighbors about wartime collaborators, especially “those who up to the war had been Soviet activists and during the war tried to serve the Germans.” 77 Anisimov added, “Not knowing the Russian language, the German officer who supervised a department of some local self-government was, for all practical purposes, entirely dependent on the Russian administrators under his orders. This was soon realized by most German officers. Their criterion in assessing the activities of a local Russian administrator was the latter’s efficiency. If the results of his activities were satisfactory, he was given nearly absolute freedom.” 78
German occupation authorities in the East conceded enormous autonomy to local former communists who chose to collaborate with the enemy. As the Russian mayor of German-occupied Pskov bragged in 1943: “Once you have won the confidence of the [German] military authorities, you are a little Tsar.” 79 The same pattern of German dependency on locals applied elsewhere, since the ratio of Germans to local collaborators in many departments and police organizations in the East ran from 1 to 5 in 1941 to 1 to 20 or more by 1943. Figures from the Reichskommissariat (Ukraine) show the SS employed some 15,000 Germans and 238,000 native police at the end of 1942, reflecting a ratio of nearly 1 to 16. 80 Which begs the question: who really controlled policy in German occupied zones? A member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (Schutzmannschaft) recalled: “When there are five Germans and fifty [Ukrainian] militiamen, who has power?” 81
In his close study of Soviet lists of German collaborators and NKVD investigative files, I. G. Ermolov found that “at least 30 percent of the ‘self-government’ apparatus during the period of [German] occupation were former Soviet and [Communist] Party cadres.” 82 So there is solid statistical evidence to conclude that the Third Reich did not sweep away the Soviet cohort, but instead elected to exploit former communist and state workers as managers of the civilian apparatus.
* * *
This new evidence of widespread communist cadre collaboration strongly points to three initial conclusions. First, Soviet Communist Party cadres were hardly the monolithic, loyal, and disciplined force in the war against Germany in the East. From the early weeks of the war, as the German Blitzkrieg moved well into Soviet territory, the Soviet leadership faced a serious drain of leadership cadres who were showing a startling tendency either to cease political or resistance activity altogether, or to collaborate openly with German occupation forces. Far from fitting into the traditional stereotype of wholesale intolerance of former Communist Party members, advancing German forces often welcomed self-confessed former communists, preferring to parade these turncoat communists as propaganda tools, or to utilize them as local administrative or intelligence assets. Historian Sergei Kudryashov, who has closely studied the question of wartime collaboration in German-occupied zones, has concurred with these findings: On acquaintance with documents, one is struck by a factor which was previously unmentionable, namely that the Germans were able to attract former Communists to collaborate with them, even those who prior to the war had been part of the Soviet leadership. . . . In every inhabited locality, all Communists were instructed that it was obligatory for them to report and to register. It is remarkable how strictly the occupying forces adhered to the policy of using those communists who relinquished their party membership for administrative duties. . . . Disregarding ideological considerations, the occupiers were ready to use the experience and standing of self-renounced communists.
83
Noted historian Aleksei Popov agreed: “Documents demonstrate the fact that a distinct portion of the members of the Soviet administrative apparatus had begun to collaborate actively with the [German] occupation.” 84 In short, there is solid evidence to question the rigidity of the German Commissar Order, at least during the first wave of German occupations in 1941. And there is some reason to believe that former communists who collaborated with the Germans worked in an atmosphere of suspicion, one where they would be expected to prove their loyalty to the Third Reich again and again. As A. N. Tolstoi observed: “The fact is that the most monstrous and most cruel from among the Germans are [former] communists, cadres who have crossed over to the side of fascism. They are earning for themselves forgiveness [for their communist sins]. They are [therefore] the most brutal of all.” 85
The mass defection of substantial portions of the local Communist Party elite posed a special problem for the Soviet leadership, since the active collaboration of some of those cadres became a key factor that enabled the Germans to dismantle Soviet stay-behind networks almost entirely during the first six months of the war. In his recent authoritative study of the Soviet partisan movement based substantially on previously restricted Soviet security archives, Aleksei Popov observed that not a single Party or Komsomol underground partisan unit survived the first five months of the war. Without exception, every Communist-controlled unit operating behind German lines had either been destroyed or forced to disband during the first year of the war. 86 In his study of the evolution of German reprisals against non-combatants in Ukraine, historian Truman Anderson has demonstrated persuasively that the populations in German-occupied zones were not inclined towards widespread opposition to the Germans during the early months of the war. Citing a Red Army colonel during German interrogation in late 1941: “We reckoned with a partisan movement of very different dimensions. Our [surveillance] behind the front over the course of three weeks has convinced us that there is no movement of the kind we imagined and prepared.” 87 Soviet-organized partisan operations and stay-behind networks had been crushed in the early months of the war.
What accounts for such devastating results? The readiness of large numbers of local communists to denounce their resisting former colleagues to the German authorities clearly played a primary role. As I have argued elsewhere, these developments forced the Soviet leadership both to increase the proportion of specially trained operations groups for behind-the-lines actions, units that depended overwhelmingly on an uneasy alliance with the only effective partisan base left: ethnic nationalist rebel elements. The Soviet wartime support of various nationalist rebel elements would considerably enhance the effectiveness of nationalist rebel opposition to Soviet power throughout the western borderlands after the war, and open the way for Western covert support for such nationalist rebel movements under the rubric of anti-Soviet liberationism even before the war with Germany had ended. 88
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a public presentation, the 2014 Meyerhoff Annual Lecture in Holocaust Studies, presented at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on 28 October 2014. I am grateful to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Northeastern University Faculty Research Fund, all of which supported this research. I would also like to thank the following archivists and scholars who provided assistance in Russian and Ukrainian research collections: S. V. Mironenko and D. N. Nokhotovich in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow; K. M. Anderson, N. V. Murav’eva, and E. E. Kirillova at the Russian State Archive for Social and Political Research; Iu. I. Shapoval, N. V. Makovska and I. L. Komarova at the Central State Archives of Public Organizations of Ukraine (Kyiv); Stanlee Stahl of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous; and to Jonathan Brent and his staff at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research. Several colleagues provided useful comments, suggestions, and materials: the late John Armstrong, Niko Banac, William Chase, Franziska Exeler, J. Arch Getty, Christian Ingrao, Regina Kazyulina, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Terry Martin, Jared McBride, Dieter Pohl, Gabor Rittersporn, Per Anders Rudling, Alexander Statiev, the late Richard Stites, David Stone, Madelyn Stone, and Jolanta Wolańczyk.