Generals captured by the Germans. Generals who died a soldier's death

During World War II, 5,740,000 Soviet prisoners of war passed through the crucible of German captivity. Moreover, only about 1 million were in concentration camps by the end of the war. The German lists of the dead showed a figure of about 2 million. Of the remaining number, 818,000 collaborated with the Germans, 473,000 were killed in camps in Germany and Poland, 273,000 died and about half a million were killed en route, 67,000 soldiers and officers escaped. According to statistics, in German captivity two out of three Soviet prisoners of war died. The first year of the war was especially terrible in this regard. Of the 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans during the first six months of the war, about 2 million were dead or exterminated by January 1942. The mass extermination of Soviet prisoners of war even exceeded the rate of reprisals against Jews during the peak of the anti-Semitic campaign in Germany.

Surprisingly, the architect of the genocide was not a member of the SS or even a representative of the Nazi Party, but just an elderly general who was on duty. military service since 1905. This is Infantry General Hermann Reinecke, who headed the department of prisoners of war losses in the German army. Even before the start of Operation Barbarossa, Reinecke made a proposal to isolate Jewish prisoners of war and transfer them into the hands of the SS for “special processing.” Later, as a judge of the "people's court", he sentenced hundreds of German Jews to the gallows.

83 (according to other sources - 72) generals of the Red Army were captured by the Germans, mainly in 1941–1942. Among the prisoners of war were several army commanders and dozens of corps and division commanders. The vast majority of them remained faithful to the oath, and only a few agreed to cooperate with the enemy. Of these, 26 (23) people died for various reasons: shot, killed by camp guards, died from disease. The rest after the Victory were deported to Soviet Union. Of the latter, 32 people were repressed (7 were hanged in the Vlasov case, 17 were shot on the basis of Headquarters order No. 270 of August 16, 1941 “On cases of cowardice and surrender and measures to suppress such actions”) and for “wrong” behavior in captivity 8 generals were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. The remaining 25 people were acquitted after more than six months of verification, but then gradually transferred to the reserve.

Many of the fates of those Soviet generals who were captured by Germans are still unknown. Here are just a few examples.

Today, the fate of Major General Bogdanov, who commanded the 48th Infantry Division, which was destroyed in the first days of the war as a result of the Germans advancing from the border to Riga, remains a mystery. In captivity, Bogdanov joined the Gil-Rodinov brigade, which was formed by the Germans from representatives of Eastern European nationalities to carry out anti-partisan tasks. Lieutenant Colonel Gil-Rodinov himself was the chief of staff of the 29th before his capture. rifle division. Bogdanov took the position of chief of counterintelligence. In August 1943, soldiers of the brigade killed everyone German officers and went over to the side of the partisans. Gil-Rodinov was later killed while fighting on the side Soviet troops. The fate of Bogdanov, who went over to the side of the partisans, is unknown.

Major General Dobrozerdov headed the 7th Rifle Corps, which in August 1941 was tasked with stopping the advance of the German 1st tank group to the Zhitomir region. The corps' counterattack failed, partially contributing to the Germans' encirclement of the Southwestern Front near Kiev. Dobrozerdov survived and was soon appointed chief of staff of the 37th Army. This was the period when, on the left bank of the Dnieper, the Soviet command regrouped the scattered forces of the Southwestern Front. In this leapfrog and confusion, Dobrozerdov was captured. The 37th Army itself was disbanded at the end of September, and then re-created under the command of Lopatin for the defense of Rostov. Dobrozerdov withstood all the horrors of captivity and returned to his homeland after the war. His further fate is unknown.

Lieutenant General Ershakov was, in the full sense, one of those who were lucky enough to survive from Stalin's repressions. In the summer of 1938, at the height of the purge process, he became commander of the Ural Military District. In the first days of the war, the district was transformed into the 22nd Army, which became one of three armies sent to the very thick of the battles - to the Western Front. At the beginning of July, the 22nd Army was unable to stop the advance of the German 3rd Panzer Group towards Vitebsk and was completely destroyed in August. However, Ershakov managed to escape. In September 1941, he took command of the 20th Army, which was defeated in the Battle of Smolensk. At the same time, under unknown circumstances, Ershakov himself was captured. He returned from captivity, but further fate his is unknown.

The fate of Major General Mishutin is full of secrets and mysteries. He was born in 1900, took part in the battles at Khalkhin Gol, and by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he commanded a rifle division in Belarus. There he disappeared without a trace during the fighting (a fate shared by thousands Soviet soldiers). In 1954 former allies informed Moscow that Mishutin holds a high position in one of the Western intelligence services and works in Frankfurt. According to the presented version, the general first joined Vlasov, and then last days War was recruited by General Patch, commander of the American 7th Army, and became a Western agent. Another story, presented by the Russian writer Tamaev, seems more realistic, according to which an NKVD officer who investigated the fate of General Mishutin proved that Mishutin was shot by the Germans for refusing to cooperate, and his name was used by a completely different person who was recruiting prisoners of war into the Vlasov army. At the same time, the documents on the Vlasov movement do not contain any information about Mishutin, and the Soviet authorities, through their agents among prisoners of war, from interrogations of Vlasov and his accomplices after the war, would undoubtedly have established the actual fate of General Mishutin. In addition, if Mishutin died as a hero, then it is not clear why there is no information about him in Soviet publications on the history of Khalkhin Gol. From all of the above it follows that the fate of this man still remains a mystery.

At the beginning of the war, Lieutenant General Muzychenko commanded the 6th Army of the Southwestern Front. The army included two huge mechanized corps, on which the Soviet command had high hopes (they, unfortunately, did not come true). The 6th Army managed to provide strong resistance to the enemy during the defense of Lvov. Subsequently, the 6th Army fought in the area of the cities of Brody and Berdichev, where, as a result of poorly coordinated actions and lack of air support, it was defeated. On July 25, the 6th Army was transferred to the Southern Front and destroyed in the Uman pocket. General Muzychenko was also captured at the same time. He passed through captivity, but was not reinstated. It should be noted that Stalin’s attitude towards the generals who fought on the Southern Front and were captured there was harsher than towards the generals captured on other fronts.

Major General Ogurtsov commanded the 10th tank division, which was part of the 15th mechanized corps Southwestern Front. The defeat of the division as part of the “Volsky group” south of Kyiv decided the fate of this city. Ogurtsov was captured, but managed to escape while being transported from Zamosc to Hammelsburg. He joined a group of partisans in Poland, led by Manzhevidze. On October 28, 1942, he died in battle on Polish territory.

Major General tank troops Potapov was one of five army commanders captured by the Germans during the war. Potapov distinguished himself in the battles at Khalkhin Gol, where he commanded the Southern Group. At the beginning of the war, he commanded the 5th Army of the Southwestern Front. This association fought, perhaps, better than others until Stalin made the decision to shift the “center of attention” to Kyiv. On September 20, 1941, during fierce battles near Poltava, Potapov was captured. There is information that Hitler himself talked to Potapov, trying to convince him to go over to the side of the Germans, but the Soviet general flatly refused. After his release, Potapov was awarded the Order of Lenin, and later promoted to the rank of colonel general. Then he was appointed to the post of first deputy commander of the Odessa and Carpathian military districts. His obituary was signed by all representatives of the high command, which included several marshals. The obituary, naturally, said nothing about his capture and stay in German camps.

The last general (and one of two Air Force generals) captured by the Germans was Aviation Major General Polbin, commander of the 6th Guards Bomber Corps, which supported the activities of the 6th Army, which surrounded Breslau in February 1945. He was wounded, captured and killed. Only later did the Germans establish the identity of this man. His fate was completely typical of all those who were captured in recent months war.

Division Commissioner Rykov was one of two high-ranking commissars captured by the Germans. The second person of the same rank captured by the Germans was the commissar of the brigade, Zhilenkov, who managed to hide his identity and who later joined the Vlasov movement. Rykov joined the Red Army in 1928 and by the beginning of the war was commissar of the military district. In July 1941, he was appointed one of two commissars assigned to the Southwestern Front. The second was Burmistenko, a representative communist party Ukraine. During the breakthrough from the Kyiv cauldron, Burmistenko, and with him the front commander Kirponos and the chief of staff Tupikov, were killed, and Rykov was wounded and captured. Hitler's order required the immediate destruction of all captured commissars, even if this meant eliminating "important sources of information." Therefore, the Germans tortured Rykov to death.

Major General Susoev, commander of the 36th Rifle Corps, was captured by the Germans dressed in the uniform of an ordinary soldier. He managed to escape, after which he joined an armed gang Ukrainian nationalists, and then went over to the side of the pro-Soviet Ukrainian partisans, led by the famous Fedorov. He refused to return to Moscow, preferring to remain with the partisans. After the liberation of Ukraine, Susoev returned to Moscow, where he was rehabilitated.

Air Major General Thor, who commanded the 62nd Air Division, was a first-class military pilot. In September 1941, as division commander long-range aviation, he was shot down and wounded while conducting ground combat. He went through many German camps and actively participated in the resistance movement of Soviet prisoners in Hammelsburg. The fact, of course, did not escape the attention of the Gestapo. In December 1942, Thor was transported to Flussenberg, where he was shot in January 1943.

Major General Vishnevsky was captured less than two weeks after he assumed command of the 32nd Army. At the beginning of October 1941, this army was abandoned near Smolensk, where within a few days it was completely destroyed by the enemy. This happened at a time when Stalin was assessing the likelihood of military defeat and planning to move to Kuibyshev, which, however, did not prevent him from issuing an order for the destruction of a number of senior officers who were shot on July 22, 1941. Among them: the commander of the Western Front, Army General Pavlov; Chief of Staff of this front, Major General Klimovskikh; the chief of communications of the same front, Major General Grigoriev; Commander of the 4th Army, Major General Korobkov. Vishnevsky withstood all the horrors of German captivity and returned to his homeland. However, his further fate is unknown.

In general, it is interesting to compare the scale of losses of Soviet and German generals.

416 Soviet generals and admirals died or died during the 46 and a half months of war.

Data on the enemy appeared already in 1957, when a study by Foltmann and Müller-Witten was published in Berlin. Dynamics deaths among the Wehrmacht generals there was one. Only a few people died in 1941–1942. In 1943–1945, 553 generals and admirals were captured, of which over 70 percent were captured on the Soviet-German front. These same years accounted for the vast majority of deaths among senior officers of the Third Reich.

The total losses of the German generals are twice the number of dead Soviet senior officers: 963 versus 416. Moreover, in certain categories the excess was significantly greater. For example, as a result of accidents, two and a half times more German generals died, 3.2 times more went missing, and eight times more died in captivity than Soviet generals. Finally, 110 German generals committed suicide, which is an order of magnitude more than the same cases in the ranks of the Soviet army. Which speaks to the catastrophic decline in the morale of Hitler’s generals towards the end of the war.

During the Great Patriotic War, 78 Soviet generals were captured by the Germans. 26 of them died in captivity, six escaped from captivity, the rest were repatriated to the Soviet Union after the end of the war. 32 people were repressed.

Not all of them were traitors. Based on the Headquarters order of August 16, 1941 “On cases of cowardice and surrender and measures to suppress such actions,” 13 people were shot, another eight were sentenced to imprisonment for “improper behavior in captivity.”

But among the senior officers there were also those who, to one degree or another, voluntarily chose to cooperate with the Germans. Five major generals and 25 colonels were hanged in the Vlasov case. There were even Heroes of the Soviet Union in the Vlasov army - senior lieutenant Bronislav Antilevsky and captain Semyon Bychkov.

The case of General Vlasov

They are still arguing about who General Andrei Vlasov was, an ideological traitor or an ideological fighter against the Bolsheviks. He served in the Red Army from Civil War, studied at the Higher Army Command Courses, advanced through career ladder. In the late 30s he served as a military adviser in China. Vlasov survived the era of great terror without shocks - he was not subjected to repression, and even, according to some information, was a member of the district military tribunal.

Before the war, he received the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Lenin. He was awarded these high awards for creating an exemplary division. Vlasov received under his command an infantry division that was not distinguished by any particular discipline or merit. Focusing on German achievements, Vlasov demanded strict compliance with the charter. His caring attitude towards his subordinates even became the subject of articles in the press. The division received a challenge Red Banner.

In January 1941, he received command of a mechanized corps, one of the most well-equipped at that time. The corps included new KV and T-34 tanks. They were created for offensive operations, and in defense after the start of the war they were not very effective. Soon Vlasov was appointed commander of the 37th Army defending Kyiv. The connections were broken, and Vlasov himself ended up in the hospital.

He managed to distinguish himself in the battle for Moscow and became one of the most famous commanders. It was his popularity that later played against him - in the summer of 1942, Vlasov, being the commander of the 2nd Army on the Volkhov Front, was surrounded. When he reached the village, the headman handed him over to the German police, and the arriving patrol identified him from a photo in the newspaper.

In the Vinnitsa military camp, Vlasov accepted the Germans’ offer of cooperation. Initially, he was an agitator and propagandist. Soon he became the head of the Russian liberation army. He campaigned and recruited captured soldiers. Propagandist groups and a training center were created in Dobendorf, and there were also separate Russian battalions that were part of different parts of the German armed forces. The history of the Vlasov Army as a structure began only in October 1944 with the creation of the Central Headquarters. The army received the name “Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia.” The committee itself was also headed by Vlasov.

Fyodor Trukhin - creator of the army

According to some historians, for example, Kirill Alexandrov, Vlasov was more of a propagandist and ideologist, and the organizer and true creator of the Vlasov army was Major General Fyodor Trukhin. He was former boss Operational Directorate of the North-Western Front, professional General Staff. Surrendered himself along with all the headquarters documents. In 1943 Trukhin was the head training center in Dobendorf, from October 1944 he took the post of chief of staff of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. Under his leadership, two divisions were formed, and the formation of a third began. In the last months of the war, Trukhin commanded the Southern Group of the Committee's armed forces located in Austria.

Trukhin and Vlasov hoped that the Germans would transfer all Russian units under their command, but this did not happen. With almost half a million Russians who passed through the Vlasov organizations in April 1945, his army de jure amounted to approximately 124 thousand people.

Vasily Malyshkin – propagandist

Major General Malyshkin was also one of Vlasov’s associates. Finding himself captured from the Vyazemsky cauldron, he began to collaborate with the Germans. In 1942, he taught propaganda courses in Vulgaida, and soon became assistant to the head of training. In 1943, he met Vlasov while working in the propaganda department of the Wehrmacht High Command.

He also worked for Vlasov as a propagandist and was a member of the Presidium of the Committee. In 1945 he was a representative in negotiations with the Americans. After the war, he tried to establish cooperation with American intelligence, even wrote a note on the training of Red Army command personnel. But in 1946 it was still transferred to the Soviet side.

Major General Alexander Budykho: service in the ROA and escape

In many ways, Budykho’s biography was reminiscent of Vlasov’s: several decades of service in the Red Army, command courses, command of a division, encirclement, detention by a German patrol. In the camp, he accepted the offer of brigade commander Bessonov and joined the Political Center for the Fight against Bolshevism. Budykho began to identify pro-Soviet prisoners and hand them over to the Germans.

In 1943, Bessonov was arrested, the organization was disbanded, and Budykho expressed a desire to join the ROA and came under the control of General Helmikh. In September he was appointed to the post of staff officer for training and education of the eastern troops. But immediately after he arrived at his duty station in Leningrad region, two Russian battalions fled to the partisans, killing the Germans. Having learned about this, Budykho himself fled.

General Richter – sentenced in absentia

This traitor general was not involved in the Vlasov case, but he helped the Germans no less. Having been captured in the first days of the war, he ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Poland. 19 agents testified against him German intelligence, caught in the USSR. According to them, from 1942 Richter headed the Abwehr reconnaissance and sabotage school in Warsaw, and later in Weigelsdorf. While serving with the Germans, he wore the pseudonyms Rudaev and Musin.

The Soviet side sentenced him to capital punishment back in 1943, but many researchers believe that the sentence was never carried out, since Richter went missing in the last days of the war.

The Vlasov generals were executed by the verdict of the Military Collegium Supreme Court. Most - in 1946, Budykho - in 1950.

THE FATES OF PRISONED SOVIET GENERALS

(Based on materials from V. Mirkiskin.)

During World War II, 5,740,000 Soviet prisoners of war passed through the crucible of German captivity. Moreover, only about 1 million were in concentration camps by the end of the war. The German lists of the dead showed a figure of about 2 million. Of the remaining number, 818,000 collaborated with the Germans, 473,000 were killed in camps in Germany and Poland, 273,000 died and about half a million were killed en route, 67,000 soldiers and officers escaped. According to statistics, two out of three Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity. The first year of the war was especially terrible in this regard. Of the 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans during the first six months of the war, about 2 million were dead or exterminated by January 1942. The mass extermination of Soviet prisoners of war even exceeded the rate of reprisals against Jews during the peak of the anti-Semitic campaign in Germany.

Surprisingly, the architect of the genocide was not a member of the SS or even a representative of the Nazi Party, but just an elderly general who had been in military service since 1905. This is Infantry General Hermann Reinecke, who headed the department of prisoners of war losses in the German army. Even before the start of Operation Barbarossa, Reinecke made a proposal to isolate Jewish prisoners of war and transfer them into the hands of the SS for “special processing.” Later, as a judge of the "people's court", he sentenced hundreds of German Jews to the gallows.

83 (according to other sources - 72) generals of the Red Army were captured by the Germans, mainly in 1941-1942. Among the prisoners of war were several army commanders and dozens of corps and division commanders. The vast majority of them remained faithful to the oath, and only a few agreed to cooperate with the enemy. Of these, 26 (23) people died for various reasons: shot, killed by camp guards, died from disease. The rest were deported to the Soviet Union after the Victory. Of the latter, 32 people were repressed (7 were hanged in the Vlasov case, 17 were shot on the basis of Headquarters order No. 270 of August 16, 1941 “On cases of cowardice and surrender and measures to suppress such actions”) and for “wrong” behavior in captivity 8 generals were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. The remaining 25 people were acquitted after more than six months of verification, but then gradually transferred to the reserve.

Many of the fates of those Soviet generals who were captured by Germans are still unknown. Here are just a few examples.

Today, the fate of Major General Bogdanov, who commanded the 48th Infantry Division, which was destroyed in the first days of the war as a result of the Germans advancing from the border to Riga, remains a mystery. In captivity, Bogdanov joined the Gil-Rodinov brigade, which was formed by the Germans from representatives of Eastern European nationalities to carry out anti-partisan tasks. Lieutenant Colonel Gil-Rodinov himself was the chief of staff of the 29th Infantry Division before his capture. Bogdanov took the position of chief of counterintelligence. In August 1943, soldiers of the brigade killed all German officers and went over to the side of the partisans. Gil-Rodinov was later killed while fighting on the side of the Soviet troops. The fate of Bogdanov, who went over to the side of the partisans, is unknown.

Major General Dobrozerdov headed the 7th Rifle Corps, which in August 1941 was tasked with stopping the advance of the German 1st Panzer Group to the Zhitomir region. The corps' counterattack failed, partially contributing to the Germans' encirclement of the Southwestern Front near Kiev. Dobrozerdov survived and was soon appointed chief of staff of the 37th Army. This was the period when, on the left bank of the Dnieper, the Soviet command regrouped the scattered forces of the Southwestern Front. In this leapfrog and confusion, Dobrozerdov was captured. The 37th Army itself was disbanded at the end of September, and then re-created under the command of Lopatin for the defense of Rostov. Dobrozerdov withstood all the horrors of captivity and returned to his homeland after the war. His further fate is unknown.

Lieutenant General Ershakov was, in the full sense, one of those who were lucky enough to survive Stalin’s repressions. In the summer of 1938, at the height of the purge process, he became commander of the Ural Military District. In the first days of the war, the district was transformed into the 22nd Army, which became one of three armies sent to the very thick of the battles - to the Western Front. At the beginning of July, the 22nd Army was unable to stop the advance of the German 3rd Panzer Group towards Vitebsk and was completely destroyed in August. However, Ershakov managed to escape. In September 1941, he took command of the 20th Army, which was defeated in the Battle of Smolensk. At the same time, under unknown circumstances, Ershakov himself was captured. He returned from captivity, but his further fate is unknown.

The fate of Major General Mishutin is full of secrets and mysteries. He was born in 1900, took part in the battles at Khalkhin Gol, and by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he commanded a rifle division in Belarus. There he disappeared without a trace during the fighting (a fate shared by thousands of Soviet soldiers). In 1954, former allies informed Moscow that Mishutin held a high position in one of the Western intelligence services and worked in Frankfurt. According to the presented version, the general first joined Vlasov, and in the last days of the war he was recruited by General Patch, commander of the American 7th Army, and became a Western agent. Another story, presented by the Russian writer Tamaev, seems more realistic, according to which an NKVD officer who investigated the fate of General Mishutin proved that Mishutin was shot by the Germans for refusing to cooperate, and his name was used by a completely different person who was recruiting prisoners of war into the Vlasov army. At the same time, the documents on the Vlasov movement do not contain any information about Mishutin, and the Soviet authorities, through their agents among prisoners of war, from interrogations of Vlasov and his accomplices after the war, would undoubtedly have established the actual fate of General Mishutin. In addition, if Mishutin died as a hero, then it is not clear why there is no information about him in Soviet publications on the history of Khalkhin Gol. From all of the above it follows that the fate of this man still remains a mystery.

Major General Ogurtsov commanded the 10th Tank Division, which was part of the 15th Mechanized Corps of the Southwestern Front. The defeat of the division as part of the “Volsky group” south of Kyiv decided the fate of this city. Ogurtsov was captured, but managed to escape while being transported from Zamosc to Hammelsburg. He joined a group of partisans in Poland, led by Manzhevidze. On October 28, 1942, he died in battle on Polish territory.

Major General of Tank Forces Potapov was one of five army commanders whom the Germans captured during the war. Potapov distinguished himself in the battles at Khalkhin Gol, where he commanded the Southern Group. At the beginning of the war, he commanded the 5th Army of the Southwestern Front. This association fought, perhaps, better than others until Stalin made the decision to shift the “center of attention” to Kyiv. On September 20, 1941, during fierce battles near Poltava, Potapov was captured. There is information that Hitler himself talked to Potapov, trying to convince him to go over to the side of the Germans, but the Soviet general flatly refused. After his release, Potapov was awarded the Order of Lenin, and later promoted to the rank of colonel general. Then he was appointed to the post of first deputy commander of the Odessa and Carpathian military districts. His obituary was signed by all representatives of the high command, which included several marshals. The obituary, naturally, said nothing about his capture and stay in German camps.

Division Commissioner Rykov was one of two high-ranking commissars captured by the Germans. The second person of the same rank captured by the Germans was the commissar of the brigade, Zhilenkov, who managed to hide his identity and who later joined the Vlasov movement. Rykov joined the Red Army in 1928 and by the beginning of the war was commissar of the military district. In July 1941, he was appointed one of two commissars assigned to the Southwestern Front. The second was Burmistenko, a representative of the Ukrainian Communist Party. During the breakthrough from the Kyiv cauldron, Burmistenko, and with him the front commander Kirponos and the chief of staff Tupikov, were killed, and Rykov was wounded and captured. Hitler's order required the immediate destruction of all captured commissars, even if this meant eliminating "important sources of information." Therefore, the Germans tortured Rykov to death.

Major General Susoev, commander of the 36th Rifle Corps, was captured by the Germans dressed in the uniform of an ordinary soldier. He managed to escape, after which he joined an armed gang of Ukrainian nationalists, and then went over to the side of the pro-Soviet Ukrainian partisans, led by the famous Fedorov. He refused to return to Moscow, preferring to remain with the partisans. After the liberation of Ukraine, Susoev returned to Moscow, where he was rehabilitated.

Air Major General Thor, who commanded the 62nd Air Division, was a first-class military pilot. In September 1941, while commander of a long-range aviation division, he was shot down and wounded while conducting ground combat. He went through many German camps and actively participated in the resistance movement of Soviet prisoners in Hammelsburg. The fact, of course, did not escape the attention of the Gestapo. In December 1942, Thor was transported to Flussenberg, where he was shot in January 1943.

In general, it is interesting to compare the scale of losses of Soviet and German generals.

416 Soviet generals and admirals died or died during the 46 and a half months of war.

Data on the enemy appeared already in 1957, when a study by Foltmann and Müller-Witten was published in Berlin. The dynamics of deaths among Wehrmacht generals was as follows. Only a few people died in 1941-1942. In 1943-1945, 553 generals and admirals were captured, over 70 percent of them were captured on the Soviet-German front. These same years accounted for the vast majority of deaths among senior officers of the Third Reich.

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The case of General Vlasov

They are still arguing about who General Andrei Vlasov was, an ideological traitor or an ideological fighter against the Bolsheviks. He served in the Red Army since the Civil War, studied at the Higher Army Command Courses, and moved up the career ladder. In the late 30s he served as a military adviser in China. Vlasov survived the era of great terror without shocks - he was not subjected to repression, and even, according to some information, was a member of the district military tribunal.

In January 1941, he received command of a mechanized corps, one of the most well-equipped at that time. The corps included new KV and T-34 tanks. They were created for offensive operations, but in defense after the start of the war they were not very effective. Soon Vlasov was appointed commander of the 37th Army defending Kyiv. The connections were broken, and Vlasov himself ended up in the hospital.

In the Vinnitsa military camp, Vlasov accepted the Germans’ offer of cooperation. Initially, he was an agitator and propagandist. Soon he became the leader of the Russian Liberation Army. He campaigned and recruited captured soldiers. Propagandist groups and a training center were created in Dobendorf, and there were also separate Russian battalions that were part of different parts of the German armed forces. The history of the Vlasov Army as a structure began only in October 1944 with the creation of the Central Headquarters. The army received the name “Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia.” The committee itself was also headed by Vlasov.

Fyodor Trukhin - creator of the army

According to some historians, for example, Kirill Alexandrov, Vlasov was more of a propagandist and ideologist, and the organizer and true creator of the Vlasov army was Major General Fyodor Trukhin. He was the former head of the Operations Directorate of the North-Western Front and a professional general staff officer. Surrendered himself along with all the headquarters documents. In 1943, Trukhin was the head of the training center in Dobendorf, and from October 1944 he took the post of chief of staff of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. Under his leadership, two divisions were formed, and the formation of a third began. In the last months of the war, Trukhin commanded the Southern Group of the Committee's armed forces located in Austria.

Vasily Malyshkin – propagandist

Major General Alexander Budykho: service in the ROA and escape

In 1943, Bessonov was arrested, the organization was disbanded, and Budykho expressed a desire to join the ROA and came under the control of General Helmikh. In September he was appointed to the post of staff officer for training and education of the eastern troops. But immediately after he arrived at his duty station in the Leningrad region, two Russian battalions fled to the partisans, killing the Germans. Having learned about this, Budykho himself fled.

General Richter – sentenced in absentia

This traitor general was not involved in the Vlasov case, but he helped the Germans no less. Having been captured in the first days of the war, he ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Poland. 19 German intelligence agents caught in the USSR testified against him. According to them, from 1942 Richter headed the Abwehr reconnaissance and sabotage school in Warsaw, and later in Weigelsdorf. While serving with the Germans, he wore the pseudonyms Rudaev and Musin.

The Soviet side sentenced him to capital punishment back in 1943, but many researchers believe that the sentence was never carried out, since Richter went missing in the last days of the war.

The Vlasov generals were executed by verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. Most - in 1946, Budykho - in 1950.

During the Great Patriotic War, 162 generals of the Red Army died in battle. Here are some examples of the heroic death of senior commanders. Among the high-ranking generals, at the beginning of the war, the commander of the Southwestern Front, Hero of the Soviet Union, Colonel General M. Kirponos, died. Front troops fought heavy defensive battles in Right Bank Ukraine. Defensive actions on important operational-strategic lines and directions were combined with counterattacks. During the Kyiv operation, despite the fact that Kirponos, Vasilevsky, Shaposhnikov and Budyonny insisted on the immediate withdrawal of troops from Kyiv, permission to retreat from the operational pocket around Kyiv was not given by Headquarters. By September 14, 4 were surrounded soviet armies. Kirponos M.P. died while leaving the encirclement. The life of army generals, commander of the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front and commander of the troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front, I.D. Chernyakhovsky, ended with a soldier’s death. , two young talented commanders.

At the beginning of 1942, Zhukov G.K. began to attack Vyazma with the forces of P.A. Belov’s cavalry corps. and the 33rd Army of Lieutenant General Efremov M.G. The offensive was not properly prepared, for which Efremov M.G. is to blame. no, only front commander Zhukov. February 4, 1942 “... the enemy, having struck at the base of the breakthrough, cut off the group and restored the defense along the Ugra River,” Zhukov wrote. Until July, having nine armies at his disposal, Zhukov was unable to connect with this part of his front, which was fighting surrounded near Vyazma. But according to the directive of the Headquarters, this was the main blow that the Western Front was supposed to deliver. For two and a half months, without tanks and artillery, units of the 33rd Army of Lieutenant General Efremov fought in a ring, longer than Paulus’s army in the Stalingrad cauldron. Efremov M.G. repeatedly appealed to the command of the Western Front and even twice to Stalin with a request for permission to break through on his own. In April 1942, near Vyazma, Stalin personally sent a plane for General Efremov, which the general refused to board: “I came here with the soldiers, and I will leave with the soldiers.”

Headquarters finally gave permission to leave the encirclement, which was too late - the personnel were exhausted, having eaten all their boiled waist belts and the soles of the boots they found. Ammunition has run out. The snow was already melting. The soldiers were wearing felt boots. During the breakthrough, General Efremov was seriously wounded (received three wounds), lost the ability to move and, not wanting to be captured, shot himself. The Germans were the first to find Efremov’s body. Having deep respect for the courageous general, they buried him with military honors. The Armed Forces have lost a brave warrior and a talented commander. Of the 12 thousand people, 889 fighters emerged from the encirclement. On July 18, parts of Belov’s corps broke out of encirclement in a roundabout way.

Hero of the Soviet Union, Major General Shepetov I.M. - commander of the 14th Guards Rifle Division as part of the 57th Army of the Southern Front, which fought near Kharkov, on May 26, 1942, when leaving the encirclement, he was wounded and captured. For anti-fascist agitation in the Hammelburg prisoner of war camp, I.M. Shepetov, betrayed by a traitor (Major General Naumov), was captured by the Gestapo and thrown into the Flossenburg concentration camp (Germany). Here, for attempting to escape, the courageous general was executed on May 21, 1943. Lieutenant General Ershakov F.A., the former commander of the 20th Army, flatly refused to cooperate with the Nazis and died while being transported from the “special facility” from a broken heart. Major General Ogurtsov S.Ya., former commander of the 49th Rifle Corps, escaped from the stage and joined the Polish partisan detachment, fought bravely and died in battle with the Nazis.

In total, during the Second World War, 83 Red Army generals were captured in German captivity. The survivors, 57 generals, were deported to the Soviet Union after the Victory. Of these, 32 people were repressed (7 were hanged in the Vlasov case, 17 were shot on the basis of Headquarters order No. 270 of August 16, 1941 “On cases of cowardice and surrender and measures to suppress such actions”) and for “wrong” behavior in captivity 8 generals were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. The last 25 people were acquitted after more than six months of verification, but then gradually transferred to the reserve.