In her essay Economia di guerra e inquadramento della società in URSS
(The War Economy and Social Control in the USSR
), Rebecca Manley writes that initially the German advance in Russia was welcomed by the local population and threatened the legitimacy of the reigning power
, while party leaders, officials, and factory managers often jumped ship
, with the abandoned populace openly cursing them
[A. Aglan and R. Frank, La guerra-mondo 1937-1947 (The World War 1937-1947
), Einaudi, 2015-16]. Her account goes on to describe the government's gradual reassertion of control: The cost in human lives was increasing and shortages were continuing to worsen [...] it was only with the victory of Stalingrad that Stalin and the Soviet system recovered a central role in war propaganda
. Overall, according to this author, the war years saw a surge of popular patriotism, even among those who had reason to distrust the State
. The authorities in Moscow maintained order on the home front, something that those of the Tsarist Empire had failed to do
.
The disorientation of non-Russian nationalities
In the Russian countryside, and particularly in the three Baltic countries, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Belarus, many had anxiously waited for the Germans as saviours and liberators from the Russian yoke
[István Deák, Europe on Trial, Hachette UK, 2015]. However, the peasants soon felt deceived by those in whom they had initially trusted, because the Germans did not dismantle the collective farms (the kolkhoz) into which their lands had been forcibly incorporated. The Germans conserved the kolkhoz, because they were afraid production would fall otherwise, and, on the contrary, increased forced requisitions. The Russian government did form assault groups, recruited among the detainees in the forced labour camps, but, in the main, these were anti-Bolshevik Russian nationalists, motivated by patriotism. In contrast, prisoners of subjugated nationalities, such as the Poles, Ukrainians, and Balts, often escaped to join the Germans. On the whole, releasing anti-Stalinist political prisoners
to enrol them in the army was forbidden; indeed, as we have already seen [Internationalism, April 2026], standing orders were to shoot all prisoners in the event of a forced retreat due to the German advance.
Resisters and collaborators
We have already written about the Russian partisans' mass struggles: it is also worth examining the case of the roughly one million Russians who collaborated militarily with the Nazis. Andrey Vlasov, a general who had distinguished himself in the defence of Moscow, was taken prisoner in 1942, went over to the Wehrmacht, and formed a Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia—which was barely tolerated by Hitler. The Russians did the same with German prisoners taken at Stalingrad, creating a League of German Officers around the figure of Marshall Paulus, who was banking on the German army rebelling against Nazism.
Vlasov's divisions—writes Gerald Reitlinger in The SS: Alibi of a Nation [Heinemann, 1956]—were caught up in the German collapse, and the Western Allies subsequently handed over all of Vlasov's soldiers who fell into their hands to the Red Army, as they did with the Cossacks and the other volunteers from the Soviet Union
. They were all shot, civilians and their families included.
Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, and Kalmyk horsemen had also joined Hitler's armies. The Don Cossacks, organised into two divisions numbering 70,000 men, fought like nomads, taking with them their families, household goods, and livestock; their camp was set up in Tolmezzo, in Friuli (Italy). 110,000 Turkmen also enrolled, transferred to Italy, they found themselves fighting a regiment composed of Japanese Americans.
The Allied forces also included 50,000 Indians and Pakistanis, and large Moroccan and Algerian contingents. On the German side, Ukrainians were engaged in the anti-partisan round-ups, but many groups of recruits enlisted by the Nazis defected and joined the Italian Resistance. This, too, is a sign of the imperialist nature of the war and of the international and potentially internationalist objective base of the Resistance.
In our view, resistance fighters
and collaborators
who were pitted against each other in all of the occupied countries should certainly not be put on an equal footing. Their class roots and ideologies, as well as their political positions, were diametrically opposed. They should be considered as part of the overall balance of the imperialist war—though not on the same political and moral footing—because they are the product of that war and the proof of its imperialist nature. They are the confirmation of the fact that fractions of the ruling classes used and then discarded, without qualms, both partisans and collaborators in the swirling vortex of their shifting alliances.
The European SS
The SS, symbol of the guilt of the German people
in the victors' version, were in fact mostly not German. This in no way detracts from their viciousness, but the nationalist and even racist outrage against all German peoples, which was used to obscure German resistance to Nazism and the imperialist nature of the war, does not hold up to sociological investigation.
Reitlinger writes that Heinrich Himmler's idea of making the SS an international Nazi army
overcame the racial constraints requiring exclusively Aryan blood. In 1943, the foreigners began to outnumber the Reich Germans
in the Waffen-SS training camps. The aim was to recruit soldiers for Germany, even if they fought taught that first and foremost they were Europeans, champions of the historic values of civilisation against Asiatic Bolshevism
.
By 1943, the number of foreign SS divisions—which did not exist in 1939—rose to 35. In 1944, the moment of the greatest expansion of European collaborationism, France (Charlemagne), Belgium (Wallonie and Flanders), Holland (Nederland), Scandinavia (Nordland and Wiking) and of course Fascist Italy supplied divisions. Two Bosnian Muslim divisions were formed in the Balkans, with their own imams. Altogether, these divisions comprised 600,000 men. In the end, Hitler, raving in his Chancellery bunker, could only rely on enemy subjects to carry out his orders
.
Resistance and nationalism in Ukraine
Eastern Europe is the part of the world which has undergone the most imperialist partitions over the last century. In 1939, as a republic of the USSR, Ukraine—which had suffered brutal oppression under Stalin in the 1930s, with millions starving to death—occupied a vast Polish territory, Galicia, including the city of Lviv, as well as the Romanian region of Bukovina. In 1940, Russia annexed Bessarabia (present-day Moldova and Transnistria), partly to create a security buffer against the Germans, who were by now very close to its borders.
Even today, in the Ukrainian War, a nationalist
Poland looks to Galicia, and a historic
Romania looks to Bukovina and Moldova. The agreements between the victors of 1945 defined new borders and new spheres of influence. Poland was shifted 300 km to the west, giving it German territories (Silesia and Prussia) in exchange for those, like Galicia in the east, which were left to Ukraine (which was part of the USSR at the time).
The Resistance in Eastern European countries therefore followed a varied course over time, depending on the shifting of the various fronts. In Ukraine, Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which had fought against Poland since the 1930s, supported Berlin at the outbreak of war, supplying a Legion of volunteers for the attack on Russia. However, the Nazis disbanded the Legion, arresting its leaders and imprisoning Bandera himself, when a Ukrainian State was founded in zones controlled by him without their permission.
The OUN then gathered all its forces (100,000 combatants) against the German occupiers. With the advance of the Russians, Bandera, released from prison, moved from internal resistance to the German occupying power, through a wait and see position, to partial collaboration with the German troops opposing the advance of the Red Army
[Andreas Hillgruber, Storia della Seconda guerra mondiale, Laterza, 1994].
According to Reitlinger [op. cit.], Bandera's militias, who controlled vast stretches of territory astride Russia and Poland, were given weapons by the retreating Germans to defend themselves from a new Russian occupation. However, the Russian roundups, from 1944 to 1950, in which 300,000 people were deported, isolated Bandera's last squads in the forests, where they were still active until the mid-1950s.
Giorgio Vaccarino, in La Resistenza e l'Europa (The Resistance and Europe
), edited by Arturo Colombo [Le Monnier, 1984], completes the picture with Belarus. The arrival of the Russians, in 1939, was seen as an opportunity to free the country from Polish domination, but as early as 1940 the population were confronted with the methods of the Stalinist occupation (with 300,000 deported). In 1941, therefore, the German advance did not meet any form of popular resistance. However, very soon after, from 1942, mass deportations by the Nazis transformed Belarus into one of the most active regions of resistance
to the Germans. Subsequently, even here, this resistance was soon transformed into a widespread anti-partisan opposition to coming back under the absolute control of the Russians.