Victims of Yalta by Nikolai Tolstoy

Author:Nikolai Tolstoy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pegasus Books

12

THE END OF GENERAL VLASOV

On 28 January 1945 it was officially announced in Berlin that the Russian army commanded by General Vlasov was no longer part of the Wehrmacht, but an independent force under the orders of the KONR Government.1 Hitherto, as was briefly outlined in Chapter One, the Vlasov ‘Army’ was a force existing on paper only, its ‘General’ a virtual prisoner. Although hundreds of thousands of Russians (as well as Ukrainian, Baltic, Caucasian, Tartar and other ‘national’ legions) were serving in the German army, it was as scattered units officered almost exclusively by Germans. General Vlasov could not issue an order to one platoon of an estimated 800,000 such Russians. The jealous refusal of Hitler and Himmler to accept Vlasov’s assertion that ‘only a Russian can beat a Russian’ led them to look on Vlasov and his ‘army’ merely as a propaganda fiction useful for inducing Red Army desertions. To Rosenberg, Vlasov’s unshakable determination to restore a united national Russia, purged of Bolshevism, was in direct opposition to his cherished policy of fragmenting Russia into its component parts. Of the Nazi leaders, only Goebbels was intelligent enough to realise (29 April 1943) that if ‘we were pursuing or had pursued a somewhat cleverer policy in the East, we would certainly be further along there than we are’.2

Perhaps the most inveterate enemy of Vlasov was the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler. To Himmler, the idea that Germany should owe anything to, or require anything from, a subhuman Slav was totally repugnant. He made his feelings clear in public at a speech on 14 October 1943 at Bad Schachen:

Herr Vlasov has begun to hold forth with the over-weening pride that is common to the Russian and the Slav. He has declared that Germany cannot conquer Russia, Russia can only be conquered by Russians. Observe, gentlemen, that this sentence is mortally dangerous …

The morning, midday and evening prayer of the German Army ought to be this. We have overcome the enemy, we, the German infantry have overcome every enemy in the world. If then some Russian comes along, some deserter who was perhaps, the day before yesterday a butcher’s boy and yesterday a general, created by Stalin, who now delivers lectures with the insolence of the Slav and inserts a sentence that Russia will only be conquered by Russians; if then all this occurs, I must tell you something. The man shows what sort of swine he is by this sentence alone.

Such were Himmler’s views in 1943. Less than a year later the same Himmler was to arrange a meeting with ‘Herr General’ Vlasov, at which he had to listen politely to sarcastic enquiries about the present position of the ‘subhumans’, and to a reminder that he, Vlasov, had commanded before his capture a Russian army which had inflicted serious defeats on the Germans in 1941. The meeting ended with Himmler’s promising to assist Vlasov in taking command of a genuinely independent Russian army. The cause of this volte-face in Himmler’s attitude is not far to seek.

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