Italian soldiers.
POA/ROA soldiers.
Experiences on the Eastern Front (excerpts from Voices from the Third Reich: An Oral History)
Between 1942 and 1944, millions of Axis soldiers and personnel were awarded the Eastern Front Medal (Winterschlacht Im Osten) to recognize dedicated service through the fierce Russian winter. Those awarded the medal sometimes wryly referred to it as the “Frozen Meat Medal”. The ribbon accompanying the medal was colored white, red, and black - symbolizing snow, blood, and death - or the Eastern Front in a nutshell.
The German people were being told that only the cold winter was to blame for the disaster, and not the Russian army. Well, it was just as cold on the other side. The Russians… knew what was at stake: their homeland.
When we marched into the Soviet Union, we were initially looked upon as liberators and greeted with bread and salt. The farmers shared the little they had with us.
Oh God, only four days ago I saw the dead of another one of our companies. I saw the poked out eyes, the severed genitals, the horrible, tortured, distorted faces. Anything but that. The Russians don’t differentiate between SS and tank troops yet.
We were very careful not to come too close to the Russians. We were as afraid of them as they were of us. We didn’t even want to take any Russians as prisoners. In fact, we were more relieved than anything else when they escaped.
… when the furs did finally arrive at the front, they turned out to be ladies’ fur coats… The regulation army boots were totally inadequate for this kind of winter. When your feet swelled and the boots were frozen, your toes were gone - frozen off.
I’d hardly gotten out of the plane when I discovered strange heaps under an iced-up tarpaulin… This tarp covered an entire heap of dead soldiers who couldn’t be buried because the ground was frozen-rock solid.
On the night of January 10, both my hands and feet froze… My fingers were so swollen that they looked like blood oranges. After two days, my fingernails and skin came off with my gloves.
I was wounded once, in Russia…. A comrade next to me had his hand blown off. He jumped half a meter for joy because it meant that for him the war was over.
… at the end of the war we had 800,000 Soviet volunteers in the German army. Sometimes people maintain that all these volunteers were pressed into service. That, of course, is incorrect… There was no family in the Soviet Union which had no suffered under Stalin.
The very anti-Slavic Hitler, at first, refused to sponsor Russian forces, though he allowed the idea to circulate in propaganda as a means of discrediting the enemy. In 1944, however, he consented to the formation of the Russian Liberation Army, which was primarily made up of either white émigrés, who were generally opposed to the Soviet Union and the communist ideology, or POWs, who simply wanted out of the camps. Another earlier group, the S.S. Stumbrigade R.O.N.A., was absorbed into the Liberation Army. After the war ended, many of the soldiers were sent to prison camps; the primary organizer, Andrey Vlasov, along with other collaborators, were tried and hanged in 1946.
In captivity I joined the anti-Nazi League of German Officers because I believed it would be the best way to end the war quickly, while something could still be saved.
Conversely, anti-Nazi groups (made up of Germans) also collaborated with the Soviet Union; most significantly, the National Committee for a Free Germany. Most of the members were POWs disillusioned with Nazi Germany and the failing war effort, and accordingly, the number of members rose sharply after the crushing defeat at Stalingrad. The League of German Officers, to which Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus belonged, eventually merged with the committee. Like the Russian Liberation Army, this group was used largely as a propaganda tool.