TY - JOUR
AU - Langerbein,, Helmut
AB - The horrible fate of the almost six million Soviet POWs captured by the Germans in World War II—declared defectors and traitors of the Motherland in Stalin’s Order no. 270 of August 1941—was first documented in Christian Streit’s 1978 monograph Keine Kameraden.1Stalin’s Defectors, however, is about the “true” defectors, or at least those who threw in their lot with the Germans for one reason or another. Mark Edele, a historian at the University of Melbourne trained in the United States, Germany, and Russia, builds on his earlier scholarship on the cultural and social history of the Soviet war. Drawing upon a wide variety of archival material and an impressive knowledge of the secondary literature, he concludes that survival and discontent with Stalin’s dictatorship were the most important motivations. When reading the preface’s sweeping claims of combining many subfields of history, bringing back together different areas of historical specialization, and even recommending chapters to be skipped by non-historians, one could becomes skeptical. These doubts are potentially compounded when the author introduces his protagonist, Ivan Nikitisch Kononov, a Red Army Major who turned “Ataman of all Cossack Forces” fighting for the Germans against partisans in the occupied Soviet and Yugoslav territories. Kononov emigrated to Australia after the war and definitely was not representative of the vast majority of Red Army defectors. Fortunately, Edele recognizes the hagiographic character of a Kononov biography written by one of the latter’s former subordinates, and acknowledges him as a “somewhat untypical case study” used only to illustrate the variety and fluidity of defection and to underscore the development of the early historiography, which was largely based on the above biography and Kononov’s self-serving writings in exile. Indeed, Edele’s greatest strength is his careful and nuanced evaluation of the sources and the circumstances under which they were collected, and he refrains from unwarranted judgments. This is most evident in the quantitative chapter. According to Edele’s calculations, somewhere between two and six per cent of all Soviet POWs (117,000–318,000) voluntarily crossed the lines between 1941 and 1945, numbers vastly higher than among the Western Allies and attesting to the unpopularity of Stalin’s regime. The problems with the large discrepancy in Edele’s numbers begin with the limitations of language to adequately convey the multifaceted reality of the Eastern Front. The Russian and German words for defector, perebezhchik and Überläufer respectively, literally mean “someone who runs across a line”—somewhat more descriptive than the English term. But especially in 1941 the Germans made little distinction between POWs and defectors and simply shot most would-be defectors, or let them perish from maltreatment, malnourishment, and exposure with the millions of other POWs. Edele therefore argues that it is better to think about defection along a continuum of experiences. On one end of this spectrum is the “ideal defector,” a soldier who makes an active decision to throw away his weapon, raise his arms, and cross over to the enemy, or someone like Kononov who defected with his entire unit; and on the other end would be the “ideal captive,” a Red Army man who fights to the last bullet and gives up only when severely injured. In actuality, the vast majority fell somewhere between those extremes. Another reason for the different numbers is the character of warfare in 1941. The German Blitzkrieg was a war of fast movement and large encirclements that blurred traditional front lines and brought more than three million Soviet POWs into German captivity in the first months of the war alone. During the planning phase and Germany’s early “Euphoria in Victory”2 there were hardly any plans for POWs, defectors, or collaborators. Only after the Blitzkrieg turned into a war of attrition with more recognizable front lines (that could actually be crossed by defectors), did some Germans begin to see their potential value. Überläufer were now supposed to be defined similarly to Edele’s “ideal defector” and promised better treatment in separate camps. German military intelligence also began to collect more systematic data on defectors. But even the new definition remained open to interpretation and, as Edele reminds us, in this war of extermination the Germans never cared much about the well-being of the enemy. In fact, racial hatred and the treatment of the POWs were powerful disincentives to defection and needed little embellishment by Soviet propaganda. Yet the Soviets had additional means to keep their soldiers in line. First there was the Stalin order from the beginning of the war threatening not only perceived traitors but also their families. Then there was the actual administration of violence by local commanders and commissars who were authorized to execute potential defectors or those possessing German propaganda leaflets. A photo on the book’s cover shows three Red Army soldiers lighting a cigarette with a German propaganda flyer, with a caption reading “Allowed to smoke!”: the Germans unwittingly provided a practical way of destroying the evidence. In any case, Red Army soldiers’ sense of honor, pride, and obligation to their comrades, even among those who had suffered under Stalin, proved remarkably important barriers to defection. Similar notions kept their German adversaries fighting to the end. Despite those obstacles, at least 117,000 Red Army men—there is no documented case of a woman—decided that survival depended on leaving one totalitarian regime for the other. The battlefield situation, nationality, age, social status, previous civilian position, treatment by superiors, and most importantly, experiences with and attitudes toward the Soviet government factored in. Edele convincingly refutes the argument that with few exceptions their decision was simply “a plebiscite against Stalin and for the Germans.” Rather, he suggests that these were individuals waging their own personal wars for survival within the context of the ongoing struggle between Nazism and Communism. The instances of defectors who switched their loyalties multiple times powerfully support his point. Stalin’s Defectors is a great introduction to the complex issues of defection and collaboration, and a successful synthesis of different subfields and specializations in history. The author’s suggestion to skip the chapters on theory, historiography, and quantitative analysis could make the read easier for non-historians, and would detract little from the overall quality of the book. In a work of only 180 pages, however, the “required reading” chapters are necessarily short and look more like exploratory essays leading to future scholarly inquiry. One certainly would like to learn more about the defectors, their backgrounds, their experiences, and their motivations within the larger framework of the contested memory of World War II. Footnotes 1 Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945, new edn. (Bonn: Dietz, 1997). Regrettably, there is still no English-language translation. 2 To borrow an expression Christopher Browning coined in relation to the evolution of the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning, “A Product of Euphoria in Victory,” in Donald L. Niewyk, The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). See also Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). © 2019 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–45
JF - Holocaust and Genocide Studies
DO - 10.1093/hgs/dcz015
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/stalin-s-defectors-how-red-army-soldiers-became-hitler-s-collaborators-MPoZmmDim6
SP - 130
VL - 33
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -