"By powerful artillery fire, air strikes, and a wave of attacking tanks, we're supposed to swiftly crush the enemy."
- Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov
In 1936, under pressure from former Cossack descendants like Semyon Budyonny, it was decided to reintroduce Cossack forces into the Red Army. During the Second World War Cossacks found themselves on both sides of the conflict again, as most of the Nazi collaborators came from former White Army refugees. Red Army Cossacks fought on the Southern theatre of the front, where open steppes made them ideal for frontal patrols and logistics. A Cossack detachment marched on Red Square during the famous victory parade in 1945.
One notable group of those who fought for the Germans in the Wehrmacht was the XV Cossack Cavalry Corps under the German General Helmuth von Pannwitz in combat against the partisans in Yugoslavia. They surrendered to the British Army in Austria in 1945, hoping to join the British to fight Communism. There was little sympathy at the time for a group who were seen as Nazi collaborators and who were reported to have committed atrocities against resistance fighters in Eastern Europe. They were accordingly handed over to the Soviet Government, to be executed or imprisoned. At the end of the war, American and British commanders "repatriated" between 40 to 50 thousand Cossack Nazi collaborators to the Soviet Union. Many of these people had never been Soviet citizens. This event is commonly known as the Betrayal of the Cossacks or the Secret Betrayal.
Pictured here are a group of Russian Cossack Cavalrymen then deployed to the Eastern Front in 1942. Now in stock!
Release Date: July 2007 |
