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Defeating the Nazis became the animating force for everything in Soviet society for the next four years. The need to defend Mother Russia became everyone’s duty in the face of Hitler’s barbarism, and the building of socialism, so long trumpeted on the pages of the Soviet press, faded away. The result was the rapid development of a mosaic of moods…
The Nazis planned to make the eastern colonies an agrarian appendage of the German empire. They preserved kolkhozes, believing that agrarian reform could disrupt production, whereas the collective farm system might ease the transfer of peasants from Communist to German serfs. German Minister of Agriculture Herbert Backe remarked that had…
While the German armies had been desperately trying to carve out this new empire in the East, the tentacles of the SS and its various subsidiary organizations had been assiduous in their allotted task of securing the civilian population. In Russia their first move was to deprive the people of…
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…
German authorities put online Monday the names of 700,000 captured Soviet soldiers, most of whom died in horrific Nazi prison camps during the Second World War. The lists had previously been kept by German authorities who help people in former Soviet nations to discover how their menfolk died. “Now people…
The Russian émigrés would certainly not be welcomed back. Not only had they done nothing for their homeland, but the simple fact was that ‘Russia had been conquered with German blood for the protection of Europe against Russia’. When shortly after the German invasion of the USSR the Russian Grand…
Ulrike Goeken-Haidl. Der Weg zurück: Die Repatriierung sowjetischer Zwangsarbeiter während und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006. 574 pp. EUR 39.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89861-615-7. Reviewed by Leonid Rein (International Institute for Holocaust Research Yad Vashem)Published on H-German (July, 2009)Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher The Origins of the Cold…
How To Use the Formation Tables BelowThe tables below provide the organization of the Eastern…
A group of Russians captured by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa: Documents from secret archives…
“Ostarbeiter” (eastern workers) were mostly eastern European women brought to Germany for forced labor. They…
It is truly ironic that the most numerous units of foreign nationals raised by the…
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