Dear friends, welcome to the channel the Eastern Front!
Today we will talk on a very important topic about why the Red Army captured not all Germans and
their allies, but unlike Germany, in the Soviet Union there were no written orders for doing so,
and everything was decided by unspoken rules. In the troops, German snipers very often did
not eliminate the target, but wounded in the stomach or kidneys so that the victim did not
die immediately but suffered, besides, the wounded fighter was used as bait,
because his colleagues or doctors who could also be shot would come to his aid. Therefore,
German snipers were not captured, but shot on the spot, allegedly while trying to escape.
The flamethrowers of the Wehrmacht were also not taken prisoner, as they used scorched earth
tactics and caused indescribable suffering to soviet soldiers. The German flamethrowers had a
pistol with them so that, if necessary, they could destroy the flamethrower and shoot themselves.
SS soldiers and officers were also extremely rarely captured, SS units were distinguished by
atrocities and inhumanity. They burned civilians alive in the occupied territories, carried out
racial cleansing and tortured people to death with extreme cruelty. Therefore, if there was
a situation when an SS man could be captured, he hastily cut off all the insignia and posed as an
ordinary Wehrmacht soldier. However, almost every SS man had a tattoo of a blood group under their
armpit and the soldiers of the Red Army knew it. Hungarians, also known as Magyars,
were allies of Hitler during the war and fought on the territory of the Soviet Union,
they also tortured the civilian population, so much so that after the liberation of another
village from the Hungarians, the Red Army soldiers were thrown into a cold sweat from what they saw.
The surviving people said with one voice that Hungarians were worse than any German,
so they were not captured often. The issue was resolved on the spot.
Traitors from the Russian liberation Army of General Vlasov were also not taken prisoner.
Although there were few clashes between Vlasovites and Red Army soldiers, after the surrender of
Germany, most of the Vlasovites moved to the American and British occupation zone in order
to avoid reprisals at home. But in accordance with the decisions of the Yalta Conference,
almost all of them were handed over to the Soviet authorities. As a result, as traitors
should be dealt with, the entire officer staff of the Russian liberation army was executed.
However, there were other cases when the Soviet soldiers deliberately did not capture soldiers of
the Wehrmacht. For example, Soviet intelligence found out that the painful execution of Zoya
Kosmodemyanskaya near Moscow was carried out by soldiers and officers of the 197th Infantry
Division, namely the 332nd Infantry Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ludwig Ruderer.
A real hunt has begun for the soldiers of the 197th Division of the Wehrmacht.
When the Red Army soldiers found out that this unit was in front of them, they fought with a
vengeance. The division was completely defeated in 1943 in the autumn battles near Smolensk.
The few surviving Germans reported that of the direct participants in the execution,
by the time of the defeat, several people remained alive.Among the belongings of one
of the killed officers the Red Army found five pictures of the execution of Kosmodemyanskaya.
The commander of the 197th Division, Ehrenfried Oskar Bege, was captured by
the Soviets and sentenced to 25 years. In 1955, he was handed over to the German authorities,
where the general was acquitted and released. Dear friends, that's all for today. It was Tim
and the Eastern Front channel. I wish you peace and health. See you.