During World War II, not long after Germany attacked the Soviet Union, a Soviet general (Vlasow?) and his entire army deserted to the German side and fought with the Nazis against the Allies. After Germany surrendered, the general and his army requested asylum, knowing they faced certain death if they were delivered up to Stalin. Eisenhower adamantly refused their request despite the pleadings of his own officers, and the general and his troops were sent to their deaths. I would like to know the general’s full name, the facts surrounding his desertion and his service with the Germans, and the manner in which he and his men met their fate. –Arnold Bauer, El Cajon, California
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The man’s name was Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov, and we’ll get to his story in a minute. First you need to grasp the enormity of what happened to Soviet soldiers captured by the Nazis during World War II. Between five hundred thousand and a million Soviet POWs either volunteered to fight alongside Nazi troops against their former comrades or were coerced into doing so. Another six million Soviets, many of them POWs, were forced into German slave-labor battalions that manufactured war materiel. At the end of World War II, a total of about two million Russians came under the control of advancing American and British forces, many of whom had contributed (voluntarily or not) to the German war effort. Those in charge understood that Stalin considered these people collaborators or traitors, and in truth many of them did see the Soviet system as a hateful cancer on Mother Russia. Yet the western Allied forces–under supreme commander Eisenhower–repatriated virtually all the Russians to the Soviet Union, in some cases forcibly, knowing full well they were sending them to their doom.
After D day thousands of Russian troops, posted with German forces all over the western front, were captured by U.S. and British armies. Though Stalin refused to admit to the existence of Soviet turncoats, at the Yalta conference in February 1945 he demanded that all captured Soviet nationals be repatriated whether they were willing or not. Recognizing that they needed Stalin’s cooperation to obtain the release of their own POWs held in camps near the eastern front, the other Allied leaders secretly agreed.
