Worse Than Nazis: End of the Russian General Who Chose Hitler JJ

22 June 1941. German forces cross the   Soviet border and launch Operation Barbarossa,  the largest invasion in European history.   As armoured columns drive east, city after  city falls, and millions of Red Army soldiers   are taken prisoner.

Nazi propaganda presents  the invasion as a crusade against Bolshevism   and among those who welcome it is an elderly  former general of the vanished Russian Empire.  In his seventies, he throws his support behind  Adolf Hitler and calls on the Cossacks to fight   alongside Nazi Germany. Through speeches and radio  broadcasts, he portrays the Soviet government   as the rule of “Judeo-Bolsheviks” and presents  the advancing German forces as liberators.

Thousands answer his call and many are  eventually sent to the Balkans, where Cossack   formations become associated with reprisals,  plunder, and violence against civilians.  Four years later, as the Third Reich collapses,  he surrenders to British forces in Austria,   believing decades of exile will spare him from  Soviet justice.

Instead, he is handed over to the   Soviet Union, where his collaboration with Nazi  Germany will ultimately cost him his own life.  His name is Pyotr Krasnov. Pyotr Nikolayevich Krasnov was born on 22  September 1869 in Saint Petersburg, then part   of the Russian Empire.

He was raised in a military  family of the Don Cossacks, the largest of the   empire’s Cossack hosts, where service to the Tsar  was regarded as both a duty and a tradition. His   father, Nikolay Krasnov, was a lieutenant-general  of the Imperial Russian Army, while his   grandfather Ivan Krasnov was a general and writer.  Pyotr Krasnov graduated from the Pavlovsk Military   School in 1888 and was commissioned into the  elite Ataman Regiment of the Life Guards.

Alongside his military career, Krasnov also  established himself as a war correspondent   and author. He reported from the Boxer Rebellion  in China and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905,   travelling through Manchuria, China, and Japan.  His articles, which reflected both his admiration   for Japanese courage and his criticism of their  military leadership, attracted the attention of   Tsar Nicholas II and were later published as  a book with a support from the War Ministry.

During the First World War, Krasnov  commanded Cossack cavalry with distinction.   The collapse of the Russian state in 1917  carried him from the battlefield into politics.   When the Bolsheviks seized power in  Petrograd, today Saint Petersburg in Russia,   during the October Revolution, the overthrown head  of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky,   turned to Krasnov to retake the capital  from the Bolsheviks, and a small column of   Cossacks advanced on Petrograd. The attempt,  remembered as the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising,

collapsed within days and Krasnov was taken  prisoner by the communists. Leon Trotsky, one   of the key figures of the Bolshevik revolution,  released Krasnov only after he gave his word not   to take up arms against the new government  – a promise he broke almost immediately.  He made his way to the Don region of southern  Russia, the traditional homeland of the Don   Cossacks, where in May 1918 the assembly in  the city of Novocherkassk elected him Ataman,   the political and military leader of the  Don Cossack Host. The terms of his power

were dictated by the wider catastrophe. With the  Imperial German army occupying southern parts of   the former Russian Empire, especially Ukraine,  after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Krasnov looked   to Germany for arms and recognition, writing to  Kaiser Wilhelm II to proclaim the Cossacks the   friends of the Reich and to seek his protection.

The choice bought him guns but cost him his   standing in the wider anti-Bolshevik movement in  Russia. His alliance with Germany complicated his   relationship with the pro-Allied White commander  Anton Denikin and earned him lasting distrust   within a White movement formally committed to the  Allied cause in their fight against Bolshevism.   German money and rifles built Krasnov’s Don Army  to some forty thousand men by the middle of 1918.

He cleared the Bolsheviks from the Don and pushed  toward Tsaritsyn, now the city of Volgograd,   on the Volga river, hoping to open the road  to Moscow, but the offensive was thrown back.  Krasnov’s rule on the Don was also marked  by the violence of the Russian Civil War.   Under his leadership, the White Terror swept  across the region, targeting suspected supporters   of the Bolsheviks. Historians estimate that  between 25,000 and 40,000 people were killed.

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Now, let’s get into today’s story. When Germany was defeated in November 1918,  Krasnov’s foreign backing vanished and his   position weakened. The Allies, who had assigned  the Don to the British sphere, would arm only   Denikin’s Volunteer Army, and in January 1919 the  embargo forced Krasnov to acknowledge Denikin’s   authority over the White movement.

A month  later, having lost the confidence of his own   Cossacks in the contest for the atamanship,  Krasnov resigned and left Russia for good. He settled first in Germany and from 1923  in France, joining the great wave of White   Russian émigrés scattered across interwar  Europe. There the writer eclipsed the soldier.   Over some two decades of exile, he produced around  forty books: historical novels, war fiction,   and memoirs and became one of the most widely read  authors of the emigration, translated into many   languages. His trilogy ‘From the Two-Headed Eagle  to the Red Flag,’ was viewed by some as a deeply

antisemitic book that accepted ‘The Protocols of  the Elders of Zion,’ which is the most notorious   and widely distributed antisemitic publications  of modern times, as genuine and accused   “international Jewry” of inventing Communism. Antisemitism was not confined only to Krasnov’s   work of fiction.

During the Berne Trial, held  in the Swiss capital of Bern in the mid-1930s   and centered on the forged ‘Protocols of the  Elders of Zion,’ Krasnov privately affirmed his   belief in the authenticity of this infamous  antisemitic forgery. His politics hardened   over the years into an uncompromising hatred of  Bolshevism and a contempt for the liberal West,   and as the 1930s wore on, he was drawn toward  the German radical right, seeing in the rise of   Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party the instrument  that might at last destroy the Soviet state.

In 1937, after several Russian White emigre  leaders in Paris had been assassinated by the   Soviet Secret Police – the NKVD, Krasnov moved  to Berlin where he believed he would be safer,   and declared his support for the Third Reich. The Second World War began on 1 September  1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Less than 2 years later, when Germany  invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941,   Krasnov, by then in his seventies, committed  himself to the cause without reserve. Upon hearing   of the launching of Operation Barbarossa, Krasnov  immediately issued a statement of support for the   “crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism” and declared: “I wish to state to all Cossacks that this is   not a war against Russia, but against Communists,  Jews and their minions who trade in Russian blood.

May God help the German sword and Hitler!  Let them accomplish their endeavour,   similar to what the Russians and Emperor  Alexander I did for Prussia in 1813.” Krasnov contacted Joseph Goebbels, the German  Minister of Propaganda, and asked for permission   to speak on Radio Berlin’s Russian language  broadcasts to deliver pro-Nazi speeches, which was   granted.

From late June 1941 onward, Krasnov was a  regular speaker on Radio Berlin’s Russian-language   station and delivered very antisemitic speeches  that portrayed the Soviet government as the rule   of “Judeo-Bolsheviks” and the German forces  advancing into the Soviet Union as liberators. In January 1943, Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi  minister for the occupied eastern territories,   appointed Krasnov to lead the Cossack  Central Office.

Rosenberg believed that   only a Cossack of genuine standing could inspire  recruitment where German officials had failed.   Although elderly and reliant on a cane, Krasnov  remained widely respected as a former ataman and   renowned novelist, and was chosen for the prestige  and authority his name carried.

Serving largely as   a figurehead and recruiter, he urged the Cossacks  to view the conflict not as a war against Russia,   but as a struggle against communists and  Jews, echoing the ideology of the Nazi regime. In September 1943, the soldiers of the  newly formed 1st Cossack Cavalry Division   learned that their division would not, as  expected, be sent to fight on the Eastern Front,   but would go to the Balkans to fight communist  Partisans.

At the request of the division’s   commander, Generalmajor Helmuth von Pannwitz,  Krasnov travelled to address the division.   Krasnov tried to assuage the  wounded feelings of the Cossacks,   who did not want to go to the Balkans, by assuring  them that the fight against the Partisans was part   of the same struggle against the international  Communist conspiracy on the Eastern Front, and   he promised them if they did well in the Balkans,  they would ultimately go to the Eastern Front.

The division in the Balkans quickly established  a reputation for undisciplined and ruthless   behaviour, not only toward the Partisans but  also to the civilian population, prompting   even Croatian pro-Nazi authorities to complain to  the Germans and finally to Adolf Hitler himself.   Besides raping women, killing people and  plundering and burning towns suspected of   harbouring partisans and their supporters,  the division used telegraph poles along the   railroad tracks for mass hangings as  a warning to the Partisans and others.

At the end of the Second World War in  May 1945 Krasnov and the Cossack host   surrendered to British forces in the valley of  the Drau, near the city of Lienz in Austria.   British officers gave assurances that the émigrés  among them, men who had left Russia decades   earlier and had never held Soviet citizenship,  would not be sent to the Soviet Union.

However,   these assurances were not honoured. Under the  repatriation agreed by the Allies at the Yalta   Conference, the Cossacks were handed over to  the Soviet Union. The officers were separated   from their men through deception, summoned to what  they believed was a conference, and then detained.   The camps were then cleared by force amid scenes  of resistance, despair, and suicide that became   known as the betrayal of the Cossacks. Krasnov was  delivered to the Soviets at the end of May 1945.

Pyotr Krasnov was charged with collaborating  with Nazi Germany during the Second World War   and for his role in the White  Terror during the Russian Civil War.   He was tried in Moscow by the Military Collegium  of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union,   alongside other Cossack and White commanders,  and SS-Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant of   the Waffen-SS Helmuth von Pannwitz, who  had led Cossack units in German service.

When Pyotr Krasnov was executed on  17 January 1947, he was 77 years old. His legacy remains contested. Russian courts  have refused to rehabilitate him, rejecting   attempts to portray him as a victim of Bolshevism  rather than a collaborator with Nazi Germany,   yet in parts of the Cossack and émigré world,  he is still honoured as an anti-Soviet martyr.

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