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| European Waffen-SS Volunteers |
During the first months of
Barbarossa, Soviet Communist dictator Joseph Stalin issued the Stavka Directive No. 1919 concerning the creation of barrier troops in rifle divisions of the Southwestern Front, to suppress panic retreats. Each Red Army division was to have an anti-retreat detachment. Their primary goal was to maintain strict military discipline and to prevent disintegration of the front line by any means. These barrier troops were usually formed from ordinary military units and placed under NKVD command. On July 28 1942, Stavka Directive No. 227 established that each front must create one to three penal battalions, which were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front lines. From 1942 to 1945, a total of 422,700 Red Army personnel were sentenced to penal battalions. According to Russian military historian Grigori F. Krivosheev, very few of them survived the war. Anti-retreat detachments were used to prevent withdrawal or desertion by penal units as well. Order No. 227 also stipulated the capture or shooting of fleeing or retreating panicked front-line troops. Credit: Professor of International History Evan Mawdsley and author Robert W. Stephan. In 2011, historian Timothy D. Snyder summarised modern data made after the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s and states that Stalin's regime was responsible for 9 million deaths, with 6 million of these being deliberate killings. He further states the estimate is far lower than the estimates of 20 million or above which were made by other historians before him. Top image: Joseph Stalin in the Moscow Kremlin. Credit: Marina Amaral. SU propaganda photo. FU. Middle image: Soviet machine gun crew operating a Maxim gun in the Voronezh Oblast in Sept. 1942. Credit: Georgiy Stanislavskiy. PD. Bottom image: three Waffen-SS grenadiers who previously received the Iron Cross Second Class. Some sources identifies the trio as a Swede and two Dutchmen of the SS-Division Wiking. During the second half of 1942, the Wiking fought into and through the
Caucasus region. Credit: Karl Mensburg. Fair use.
The American author Timothy Snyder didn't even take into account the millions who died during the Ukrainian Holodomor. He excludes all famine deaths as purposive deaths. Others posit that the actions of Stalin's regime during the Holodomor can be considered as genocide. Several historians and authors, among them Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore, Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, and the director of Yale's "Annals of Communism" Jonathan Brent, still put the death toll from Stalin at about 20 million.
ReplyDeleteЗначит сил воевать у них не было, а пособничать были.
ReplyDelete