PoW - The History Files

TODT ORGANIZATION

One of the most important specialized organizations of the Third Reich, the Todt Organization (OT), named after its director, Fritz Todt, was used for the construction of military and related sites, especially in occupied Europe. Labor service “volunteers” and private construction firms were first used by the OT in the building of the Siegfried Line in 1938–1939. During the war hundreds of thousands of foreign civilian workers, prisoners of war, and in places close to concentration camps, Jewish and other slave laborers were used to repair war damage and construct military-related projects. It was one of the few organizations in Hitler’s Reich to enjoy extensive administrative autonomy and worked all the more efficiently as a result.

VLASOV MOVEMENT

CATHERINE ANDREYEV

The Vlasov Movement (Vlasovskoye Dvizhenie), or Russian Liberation Movement, designates the attempt by Soviet citizens in German hands during World War II to create an anti-Stalinist army, nominally led by Lieutenant-General Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov (1900–1946), to overthrow Stalin. Vlasov gave his name to the movement and died for his role in it. He did not create the situation and had little influence over developments.

Vlasov has been interpreted both as a patriotic opponent of Communism and as a treacherous opportunist. The Vlasov movement illustrates the way in which Nazi policy towards the USSR was developed by the competing requirements of ideology and military expediency and the various agencies involved in policy.

WWII SOVIET WAR LOSSES

The Soviet experience of warfare was very different from that of its Allies, Britain and the United States. Large in territory and population, the Soviet Union was poorer than the other two by a wide margin in productivity and income. It was Soviet territory that Hitler wanted for his empire, and the Soviet Union was the only one of the three to be invaded. Despite this, the Soviet Union mobilized its resources and contributed combat forces and equipment to Allied fighting power far beyond its relative economic strength.

These same factors meant that the Soviet Union suffered far heavier costs and losses than its Allies. After victory, Hitler planned to resettle Ukraine and European Russia with Germans and to divert their food supplies to feeding the German army. He planned to deprive the urban population of food and drive much of the rural population off the land. Jews and communist officials would be killed and the rest starved into forced migration to the east.

The UVV armlet

In spring 1943 the Ukrainians who served in Wehrmacht and in some of the Schutzmannschaft Bataillonen were put together into Ukrainian Liberation Army (UVV). The former ‘hiwi’, some UPA members, volunteers from Eastern Ukraine, 200 persons from Vlasov Officers’ school in Saubersdorf and Soviet prisoners of war also became also the members of UVV.