Cossack

The Organization of the Eastern Troops, 5 May 1943

Cossack SS Ukraine Waffen-SS 40 Min Read

How To Use the Formation Tables BelowThe tables below provide the organization of the Eastern Troops in service of the Germany Army on 5 May 1943.  Only units known to the General der Osttruppen, the commanding officer responsible for supervising eastern troops, are presented in the tables.  The tables are not intended to display the organization of regular German Army…

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Cossack PoW Waffen-SS 5 Min Read

BARBAROSSA POWS

Yugoslavs, Greeks, and other minor Allies suffered harm commensurate with their ethnic ranking in the perverse Nazi racial view of Europe, and with the degree of resistance offered to Nazi occupation of their home countries. The worst treatment of enemy prisoners, by far, was reserved for enemies of Germany wearing…

Cossack Military and Naval 12 Min Read

VLASOV ARMIES.

Strictly speaking, the Vlasov armies were those World War II Soviet troops who switched sides while German prisoners to join former Soviet general Andrei Vlasov in the war against the Soviet Union, thereby serving as a German propaganda weapon to undermine support for the regime of Joseph Stalin. More broadly,…

Cossack Piracy PoW Waffen-SS 4 Min Read

KEELHAUL

In February 1945, Major Denis Hills, an officer of the British Eighth Army in Italy, was given command of a POW camp at Taranto containing 8,000 men of the 162 Turkoman Infantry Division, classified as ‘repatriates’. His charges had been conscripted into the Red Army, been captured on the Eastern…

Cossack PoW Waffen-SS 15 Min Read

POWs – A Comparison of Treatment

The Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS took 232,000 British, Commonwealth, and American prisoners during the war, most in the course of the last year of fighting in Italy and France. The short duration in captivity of most, along with the prospect of pending Allied victory in the west, meant they enjoyed relatively…

Cossack Military and Naval Waffen-SS 4 Min Read

RESISTANCE…

A generic term for partisans and intelligence agents actively opposed to Axis occupation. Winston Churchill initially placed great hopes in local resistance to Nazi occupation, but this rarely materialized in the West. For instance, in Belgium the main emphasis was on providing intelligence to the Western Allies and aiding downed…

Cossack SS 2 Min Read

The Cossacks

Operation Keelhaul – Betrayal of the Cossacks in Lienz The Cossacks were probably the most militarily skilled and loyal foreign volunteers of the Wehrmacht. In September 1942 the German cavalry General von Pannwitz started raising a complete division with Cossacks, by absorption of previous regiment-sized units like Kampfgruppen von Jungschultz,…

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Austro-Hungarian Cavalry WWI

Pack-horse of a cavalry machine gun detachment; members of these and the telegraph detachments were…

Moldavia, Tatars and Cossacks I

When Bartolomeo Bruti travelled from Istanbul to Moldavia in the spring of 1580 he was…

The Organization of the Eastern Troops, 5 May 1943

How To Use the Formation Tables BelowThe tables below provide the organization of the Eastern…

The Russian Army of 1812

The Russian Army of 1812 was, in many respects, quite different from the one Napoleon…