On June 22, 1941, the German army stormed across the Soviet border. Panzer tanks crushed dismantled checkpoints, and Luftwaffe bombers roared down on Brest, Minsk, and Lviv. Villages burned in their wake.
Behind the armored spearheads marched members of the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi mobile death squads. Together with local nationalists, they herded Jews and political commissars to freshly dug graves. Columns of Soviet prisoners stumbled west under rifle butts, and the German advance seemed unstoppable.
Amid the chaos, some of Stalin's subjects, driven by hunger, terror, or old grievances, decided the invader looked less like an enemy than a possible liberator. Among them rode thousands of Cossacks, descendants of steppe horsemen who still remembered the Bolshevik policy of systematic repression against them.
Swearing new oaths, they buckled German belts over traditional burka cloaks and turned their sabers against their own homeland. Yet their wager bought neither freedom nor peace. When the Red Banner climbed above the ruins of Berlin, Soviet vengeance rolled back across Europe.
The very Cossacks who once galloped beside German units were herded in turn toward eastbound trains and nameless Siberian camps. In a cruel twist of history, those who massacred Cossacks only a few days after the end of the war were not Soviets, but British soldiers.
The Cossacks were a frontier people shaped by the open steppe, by restless horses, and by a stubborn sense of freedom that had grown over centuries on the borders of the Russian Empire. They spoke many dialects and followed different religions. Yet they shared the habit of answering danger from any quarter with a quick raid and a fierce charge.
In 1917, when the Russian Empire and the Romanov dynasty fell, most Cossacks fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. The civil war left their villages burned, their herds scattered, and their loyalties torn. With the end of the civil war came a policy the victorious Bolsheviks called decossackization.
Collective farms replaced clan pastures. Cossack officers were shot or imprisoned, and entire groups of people were deported eastward to other parts of the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1930s, many young men of Cossack origin wore Red Army uniforms, but the memory of the whip, expulsion, and prison trains was deeply in their minds.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Poland soon found itself fighting a two-front war when it was invaded by the Soviet Union from the east on September 17. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on September 28, and one day later, in accordance with the secret protocol of their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned the country.
On June 22, 1941, when the German invasion swept across the western border of the Soviet Union, Cossack conscripts were also rushed to the front. They scouted through marshes and forests, guarded broken bridges, and sometimes charged the enemy with sabers. Ancestral pride helped many of them fight stubbornly, but it could not cancel hunger, exhaustion, or the long distrust of communist rule.
Few soldiers forgot that their fathers had been branded as class enemies by the Soviets barely two decades earlier. In the end, many of them decided to make a pact with the devil. They deserted and joined Nazi Germany in its brutal war in Eastern Europe.
In the summer of 1941, a shock passed through the Soviet command when Major Ivan Kononov, commander of the 436th Infantry Regiment, rode across the lines and offered his whole unit to the Germans. He wrote about his decision after the war, saying that he and his regiment went over to the side of the Germans completely and voluntarily, having agreed beforehand that the Germans would help and would not interfere with the organization of armed anti-communist liberation forces from the people of the Soviet Union.
His men were Cossacks, and they persuaded other prisoners of war that a second Russian civil war was now possible. By the end of August 1941, almost 70,000 horsemen and foot soldiers had taken the same leap. Another 50,000 Cossacks joined them by October 1942. By that time, the German army had established a semi-autonomous Cossack district from which the Cossacks could be recruited.
They did not volunteer because they admired the swastika. They volunteered because they could no longer trust Stalin to let them live in peace after the shooting stopped. One of the other reasons that led to the decision to join the Germans was the conditions in the prisoner of war camps. Soldiers in German captivity were dying of malnutrition or forced labor, or were murdered by German guards. Fighting on the side of the Germans offered the hope of survival, even at the cost of joining the devil.
The Germans also promised the Cossacks the creation of an autonomous Kazakia on the lower Don, the region of southern and southwestern Russia, including free farms, churches with open doors, and above all the right to carry arms and the possibility of serving under their own officers. In 1942, these promises sounded like salvation.
However, the reality was far different and more sinister. The Cossacks served in the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, but also in the SS, and they were part of the cruel fighting against partisan units and civilian populations in German-occupied Europe.
The Cossacks fought in the Balkans against Tito's partisans on mountain ridges above the Drina River, patrolled the Istrian coast, and later screened the retreat through northern Italy. Their horses could climb goat tracks where lorries stalled, and they often arrived behind a stubborn village before dawn to cut off the escape road for civilians before a German attack.
They also participated in direct attacks against civilian populations. On October 12, 1943, the first Cossack cavalry division was dispatched against Yugoslav partisans in the Fruška Gora mountains. In the operation, the Cossacks, aided by 15 tanks and one armored car, captured the Serbian village of Beočin, where a temporary partisan headquarters was located. Many villages were burned, including a monastery on Fruška Gora, and around 300 innocent Serbian villagers were killed.
When this division was deployed in the territory of Croatia, it quickly established a reputation for undisciplined and ruthless behavior, not only toward the partisans but also toward the civilian population. Near the town of Brod, among others, the Cossack cavalry regiments committed rapes and carried out executions.
In December 1944, while conducting operations against partisans, the Cossacks were accused of mass murders and rapes near the Croatian town of Virovitica. They also stole horses, pigs, and sewing machines. The Cossacks behaved like bandits and marauders, and their activities caused diplomats to intervene with a representative of the German military authorities in Croatia. The German representative later stated that reading the letter from the diplomats about the Cossacks' deeds made his hair stand on end.
German officers compared the Cossack units to the SS Kaminsky Brigade in the Warsaw Uprising. They not only raped women and killed people, but also plundered and burned towns suspected of harboring partisans and their supporters. While some victims, including women and children, were burned alive, the Cossacks used telegraph poles along the railroad tracks for mass hangings as a warning to the partisans and others.
In December 1944, the first Cossack cavalry division was transferred to the Waffen SS, the military branch of the SS, and reorganized until April 30, 1945, together with the second Cossack division. It became part of the newly formed 15th SS Cossack Cavalry Corps.
As Nazi Germany was collapsing, Cossack military columns with wagons full of women and children retreated through the Carinthian valleys into Austria. They wished above all else to surrender to British units. The Cossacks knew that they would not find forgiveness in the Soviet Union and that for defecting to the Nazis, they would face revenge in the form of the gulag or execution. Some believed they would be fighting against the Soviets once again, this time under the British banner.
On May 8, 1945, when the war officially ended in Europe, the Cossack units camped near Lienz and Villach in the southern part of Austria. They believed that Anglo-American hatred of communism would protect them until a new war restored their homelands. This belief, however, did not survive to the end of the month.
The fate of the Cossacks was decided a few months before the end of the war, during the meeting at Yalta in February 1945. During this meeting, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt signed a deal with Stalin that spoke of reciprocal repatriation. Every Soviet citizen liberated by the Western Allies was to be returned as soon as possible to the Soviet Union, whether he wished it or not. In this way, the Soviet regime got rid of a huge number of its opponents who had lived abroad during the entire interwar period and who hoped for the fall of the Bolshevik regime and a return to their homeland.
The beginning of the forced deportation of the Cossacks can be traced to the day when General Charles Keightley received orders on May 24, 1945. The general was told to hand over all captured Cossack officers to the Soviets, particularly the most senior, without exception. General Keightley signaled to his units that any Cossack resistance must be firmly suppressed.
On May 28, 1945, the British army arrived at Camp Peggetz in the Austrian town of Lienz, where there were thousands of Cossacks, including officers and generals. The British allegedly went to invite the Cossack officers to an important conference with British officials, informing them that they would return to Lienz by 6:00 p.m. that evening. Some Cossacks were worried, but the British reassured them that everything was in order. One British officer told the Cossacks, "I assure you, on my word of honor, as a British officer, that you are just going to a conference." However, no hard evidence exists for any such guarantees or promises from the British side.
When the Cossacks learned about their real destination, they refused to go. The British reaction was furious. For several minutes, British soldiers beat and kicked the Cossack officers, raining blows down on them with boots, rifle butts, and fists. Some of the victims were beaten senseless, and the British used the opportunity to prod them with their bayonets. This treatment proved effective, and loading commenced, including soldiers who were unconscious after the beating.
The British transported 2,046 disarmed Cossack officers and generals. The destination was not a conference with the British, but prison and death at the hands of Soviet officials. Some men broke ranks, willing to hang themselves rather than face a Soviet tribunal. Many, having regained consciousness after their brutal beatings, decided during the slow drive to the town held by the Red Army to commit suicide.
This was just the start of the Cossack deportations. In the Lienz encampment, the Cossack soldiers, now without officers, were told that they and their families would be returning to the Soviet Union. When the Cossacks roared that they would obey no command until their officers returned, British troops drove pickaxe handles and rifle butts into the crowd. A mountain of bodies rose. People at the bottom suffocated while those above screamed.
One priest tried to shield a group of altar boys. He was clubbed to the ground in his robe. Women held their children by the ankles as soldiers tried to pull them apart, knowing that separation meant Siberia, forced labor, and death.
By the end of the first week of June, cattle cars stood ready on the rail siding, their windows covered with wooden grills. Armored cars with machine guns followed each train to the Soviet zone border, for escape attempts did not cease even after the doors were bolted.
Official figures recorded 22,502 Cossacks, men, women, and infants, delivered from Austrian territory to Soviet hands between May 28 and June 15, 1945. About 700 died in the initial roundups, either by bullet, suffocation, or suicide. Several thousand Cossacks managed to escape and sought refuge in the mountains, where they were mercilessly pursued by the British, who organized large-scale manhunts with the help of Soviet special forces. During three weeks in June, 1,356 soldiers were recaptured. Most of them were shot.
The Cossack massacre and forced deportation formed only a small part of the forced repatriation of millions of Soviet citizens from Europe to the Soviet Union after the end of the Second World War. Some scholars believe that over 2 million Soviet citizens who were forcefully transported from Europe vanished in the gulag camp system, where only a few lived longer than five winters.
In the Soviet Union, the Cossacks who had remained loyal to the Soviets celebrated and marched in parades, displaying captured German standards beside portraits of Stalin. The state press denounced their defected cousins as traitors, bandits, and paid servants of fascism. Show trials opened in various Soviet cities, each ending with an execution or long sentences of forced labor in the gulags. This was the price to pay for collaboration with Nazi Germany during the war.