Where were more traitors during the Second World War?
It is unlikely that Hitlerite Germany would be able to hold out against its opponents for such a long time, if not only a number of European states, but also millions of people in occupied countries would not take its side. Their traitors were everywhere, but in some countries and regions their number was just off scale.
They remembered the cops again
In May 2020, Russia will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. But, as they say, a war can be considered finished only when the last dead soldier is found and buried. To these words in relation to the war with Nazi Germany, one can also add that so far there has not been investigated a huge number of war crimes committed by both the Nazis and the traitors who collaborated with them - residents and citizens of states occupied by Germany.
In 2019, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation resumed investigations against the Baltic, Ukrainian and Russian collaborators who acted under the leadership of the Nazis in the occupied lands of the Soviet Union and were distinguished by special atrocities against civilians. So, a criminal case was opened on the mass murder of children in Yeysk (Krasnodar Territory). In 1941, an orphanage was evacuated to Yeysk from Simferopol. After the capture of Yeysk by the Nazis on October 9 and 10, 1942, the Nazis organized the massacre of children. In two days, 214 children from the orphanage were killed.
The execution, stunning with its cruelty, was carried out by the notorious SS 10a Sonderkommand, which operated at that time in the Rostov Region and Krasnodar Territory. This unit was commanded by Obersturmbanführer (Lieutenant Colonel) SS Kurt Kristman. A man with a university degree who received a doctorate in law, he was a staunch Nazi and served in the Gestapo during the war years. The famous execution of thousands of Soviet citizens in the Zmievsky beam in Rostov-on-Don is the work of Kurt Christman and his henchmen.In the early 1960s, Soviet counterintelligence calculated and arrested several policemen at once who served in the Sonderkommando and participated in the massacres of civilians. In the fall of 1963, a trial of 9 former members of the Sonderkommand 10a took place in Krasnodar. Buglak, Weikh, Dzampaev, Zhirukhin, Yeskov, Psarev, Skripkin, Surguladze and Sukhov appeared before the court. All executioners were sentenced to death. However, after the war the chief of the Sonderkommand Kurt Kristman lived quietly in Germany, became a successful lawyer - one of the richest people in Munich. Only in 1980, he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years, and in 1987 he died before he lived two months before his eightieth birthday.
Now Russian investigators have again raised documents about the crimes of the Sonderkommando. The main task is to identify and prove the guilt of other German soldiers who were involved in the murder of children in Yeysk, in the reprisals against peaceful Soviet people in other cities and towns. It is clear that all these executioners have already died, but their descendants should also know what the true face of these “people” was.
In 2011, a certain Ivan Demyaniuk, a Ukrainian policeman who served as a security guard in the Sobibor concentration camp, was sentenced to 5 years in Germany. However, due to the old age, Demjanjuk was not sent to prison and in March 2012, a 91-year-old former policeman died in a German nursing home in the spa town of Bad Feilnbach. And how many of these demyanyukov remained unknown, and yet on their hands - the blood of thousands of innocent people.
Collaboration Index
When Hitler Germany began to conquer one after another the European countries, in each of them there were many people who were ready to cooperate with the invaders. Recently, the director of the fundHistorical memory ”, Alexander Dyukov presented the“ index of the intensity of collaboration ”, thanks to which we can now get an idea of where there were the most people who collaborated with the Nazis.
Historians have sampled the estimated number of traitors for every 10 thousand people in countries whose territories were occupied by Germany in 1939-1945. I must say that these results are unlikely to surprise anyone - as many expected, a scientific study revealed several countries that were leaders in the number of collaborators per 10 thousand people, overtaking all other occupied territories.
The average collaboration index in countries of Western and Eastern Europe ranges from 50-80 people per 10 thousand people. Such indicators - in so different countries and regions as, for example, France and the RSFSR. So, in France, the collaboration index was 53,3 people per 10 thousand people. And this despite the fact that the French served in the Wehrmacht, in the SS. But most of the citizens of France, as we see, remained indifferent to Nazi occupation. Although not very actively resisted.
In the Soviet Union, the collaboration index was 142,8 per 10 thousand people. Such an impressive indicator at first glance became possible precisely because the collaborators of the Baltic states and Ukraine were calculated, who gave the bulk of Soviet traitors.
In the Netherlands and Belgium, the figures are even higher - approximately 200-250 per 10 thousand people. This is not surprising, since the Dutch and Flemish are very close to the Germans linguistically and culturally and were accepted into the service without any problems, and they quite willingly went to it. In Lithuania, the number of collaborators amounted to 183,3 per 10 thousand people - that is, noticeably more than the Soviet Union average, but also less than in the Netherlands and Belgium.
In tiny Luxembourg, the index was 526 per 10 thousand people. And here, too, it is hardly worth wondering, since the Luxembourgers are the same Germans, so they did not so much betray their duchy as they simply served the new German Reich.
First by the number of policemen
But the real champions in the number of collaborators are Estonia and Latvia. That's where the real forge of the progler elements was. In the Estonian SSR the number of traitors was 884,9 per 10 thousand inhabitants, and in the Latvian SSR - 738,2 per 10 thousand inhabitants. The numbers are impressive. After all, it is almost 10 times higher than in all other European countries. In fact, one in ten residents of these Baltic republics was a collaborator.
Given that Estonia and Latvia never differed in the large population, these figures look very plausible. Estonian and Latvian youth willingly went to the service of the Nazis, receiving uniforms, weapon, salary, as well as the opportunity to mock with impunity civilians in the occupied territories. Estonian and Latvian policemen committed atrocities in the territories of not only the Baltic states, but also of Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, and countries of Eastern Europe. Not particularly strong in battle, they showed themselves to be unsurpassed punishers and executioners.
So, under the village of Zhestyanaya Gorka in the Novgorod region, there was an extermination camp in which 2600 people were killed. The massacres of Soviet people were dealt with by punishers of the SD Tail Command, staffed by policemen from Riga. Many of Hitler’s minions did not subsequently suffer any punishment for their atrocities, and today the authorities of Latvia and Estonia honor the few surviving SS men and policemen, representing them as fighters for “liberating the Baltic states from Soviet occupation”.
Of course, it is not worth explaining Latvian or Estonian collaborationism with the alleged tendency of these peoples to betray. It must be remembered that Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania became part of the USSR just before the start of the war. A very significant part of the population of the Baltic republics not only did not like Soviet power, but hated it. In Nazi Germany, she saw a legitimate ally and patron, to whom young and not very collaborative workers came to the service.
Given that until 1917 the leading role in the Baltic was played by the Ostsee Germans, many of whom, however, honestly served the Russian Empire, the inhabitants of the Baltic republics remained a kind of reverence for Germany and the German people. We can say that there was a kind of "return to the old masters." By the way, the main ideologist of the Third Reich Alfred Rosenberg was also an Ostsee German, and he came from Estonia (Rosenberg was born in Revel, as Tallinn was then called, in 1893).
In Latvia and Estonia, SS divisions, auxiliary battalions, and organizations of the Omakaitse type were formed — a militarized structure that organized anti-partisan raids and protected the borders of Estonia from the penetration of residents of neighboring Leningrad Region who had escaped from hunger. Service in such structures was not considered something shameful. If relatives and friends turned their backs on the Russian collaborator, and after the war he was generally unambiguously perceived as the most disgusting criminal and traitor, in Estonia and Latvia, service to Hitler was considered in the order of things. And now the governments of the Baltic states at the highest state level are engaged in the rehabilitation of their collaborators, not even embarrassed by the fact that Nazism is cruelly condemned in Germany itself.
Former SS legionnaires are perceived by the Latvian and Estonian governments as national heroes. And the investigations that are now initiated by Russian investigative bodies are called upon to reveal the true face of these “heroes.” Indeed, among the few living former SS men, there are definitely people involved in serious war crimes, including on the territory of the RSFSR, where Estonian and Latvian formations directed here by the Nazis also operated.
The heroization of Nazism and collaboration takes place today in Ukraine. Meanwhile, unlike Estonia and Latvia, the Ukrainian SSR gives completely different indicators of collaborationism, which on the whole do not differ from the average European ones. And this is due to the fact that, strictly speaking, there were “two Ukraine”. Eastern and Southern Ukraine, Donbass and Novorossia, gave us wonderful heroes - underground, the same "Young Guard", millions of Soviet soldiers and officers, partisans, who fought with honor against the Nazis. But in Western Ukraine, the situation with collaborationism was almost the same as in the Baltic states, which was also associated with the peculiarities of both the mentality of the local population and the entry of Western Ukrainian territories into the USSR.
There is no doubt that figuring out the number of traitors, establishing their names, involvement in war crimes is a very necessary and, most importantly, timely task. It is not necessary to think that if 75 years have passed since the defeat of Nazism, then you can forget everything. As we see, history comes to life today and countries such as Ukraine or Latvia, actively use collaborators of the past in the construction of modern political myths that are clearly anti-Russian.
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