Pro-hitler russian liberation army Was Created by stalin

The ROA ([from the russian “russkaya osvoboditelnaya armiya” – Transl.] russian liberation army) is one of the well known  facts of soviet soldiers and officers’ collaboration  during World War II, but it is not an isolated case. Even according to russian historians, approximately one million one hundred and fifty thousand citizens of the ussr fought on the side of Nazi Germany during the entire war,  about 500 thousand “great russians” included.  At the end of the war, the Wehrmacht and the SS had 470–475 thousand soviet citizens, which was 10-15 % of the total number of German armed forces.

In the autumn of 1943, hitler was horrified when he learned about the large number of russian volunteers in his army and ordered them to be disarmed. Later he changed his mind and redeployed those military units to the Western Front.

In the summer of 1942, the hero of the 1941 moscow defense, soviet lieutenant general and order bearer Andrey Vlasov was captured by the Nazis and agreed to cooperate. Later,   in 1944, with his participation, the russian liberation army (ROA) was created, which he commanded until the spring of 1945.

At that time, in its barely twenty-year history, the ussr had created fertile ground for anti-soviet sentiment through the repression, “prodrazverstki”,  collectivization, annexation of its neighbors’ territories, along with the enslavement of the population.

According to the German command, between 1941 and 1945, five million 279 thousand red army soldiers were taken prisoners of war by the Nazis. Of those, three million 800 thousand were captured in the first five months of the war. The leader of the ussr, joseph stalin, abandoned his enslaved soldiers, declaring them “traitors to the motherland”.

Thus, workers and peasants oppressed by the soviet government, along with career officers, often joined the ROA out of despair, although there were also so-called “idea-driven” ones. According to archival data, the number of ROA troops in 1945 was 120-130 thousand. According to a 1949 sample of Vlasovites in prison camps in the ussr (more than 112,000), the national composition was as follows: 54,000 russians, or 48 % of the total;  20,000 Ukrainians, or 17 % of the ROA; belarusians – almost 4%; Georgians, Armenians, and Uzbeks – 3 % each; and so on. In fact, almost all nationalities of the soviet union were represented in the ROA.

The ROA was dissolved on May 12, 1945, and Andrey Vlasov was executed for treason in 1946. For their collaboration with the Nazis, Vlasov’ men- prisoners of war were sentenced to different terms in accordance with the laws of the ussr.

The archives of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine contain the case file of lieutenant general of the ussr  Andrey Vlasov.  The documents collected in it will for the first time reveal to the general public the content of the operational measures taken by the 4th  directorate of the nkgb of the Ukrainian ssr to clarify the circumstances of Vlasov’s capture, his activities as head of the ROA, establish his location and create operational positions in his close environment to capture him alive or kill him.