In October 1941, German forces reached the small town of Lokot, near Bryansk in western Russia. The area had a peculiar history under Soviet rule, serving as a settlement zone for people banned from major cities. Among them was Bronislav Kaminski, a chemical engineer of mixed Polish and German descent, exiled there and nursing a deep hatred for the Soviet state.
When the Germans arrived, Kaminski and a local physics teacher, Konstantin Voskoboinik, offered their services. They proposed organizing a civilian administration and a police force to fight Soviet partisans gathering in the forests. The Germans accepted, and Voskoboinik was appointed head of the district with a police force of about 200 men who helped persecute and kill civilians suspected of loyalty to the Soviet government.
In January 1942, Voskoboinik was fatally wounded in a partisan raid, and Kaminski took command. Over the following year, the Germans granted him extraordinary autonomy. His territory, which eventually covered eight districts, became known as the Lokot Autonomy or Lokot Republic, a self-governing collaborationist enclave with its own administration, courts, newspapers, and a military police force answering only to Kaminski.
The enclave was not merely a German puppet. His administration dissolved the hated Soviet collective farms, returned land to families, reopened schools, and kept grain prices lower than in German or Soviet-controlled territories. In an area long used to house exiles and former camp prisoners, the promise of liberation from Bolshevism earned Kaminski's administration a degree of genuine local support.
That support was also tied to killing. The local system's newspaper promoted the destruction of "Bolshevik Jewry," and Kaminski's militia shot the region's Jewish population on its own initiative, without waiting for German orders. Kaminski named the militia the "Russian People's Liberation Army," or RONA.
In autumn 1942, he imposed conscription on the local population, and the militia swelled into a brigade of about 14 battalions and nearly 8,000 men, reinforced with recruits from Soviet prisoners of war. Remarkably, it was equipped with captured Soviet tanks such as T-34s and KVs, plus artillery and armored cars left behind by the Soviets during the great encirclements of 1941. By 1943, the force numbered 12,000 men, making it the largest collaborationist formation of its kind in occupied Soviet territory.
The brigade's purpose was made clear through its operations. Working alongside German forces in the Bryansk forests, RONA took part in large anti-partisan sweeping operations where the line between fighting guerrillas and massacring civilians was deliberately erased. Villages suspected of harboring fighters were burned, their inhabitants shot or deported for forced labor, and official counts of killed "bandits" were inflated with the bodies of farmers and their families. According to the most conservative postwar estimates, Kaminski's formation was responsible for killing up to 10,000 civilians during its time in the east.
Discipline within the brigade was maintained through terror. Kaminski survived repeated assassination attempts and responded with public executions by hanging. German officers passing through Lokot reported bodies hanging from gallows outside his headquarters. When one regimental commander tried to defect to the partisans with his men, Kaminski allegedly flew to the regiment's headquarters, strangled him, and killed others in front of the assembled troops.
The brigade's time in the Lokot region ended with the German defeat at Kursk in summer 1943. As the front moved west, Kaminski ordered the evacuation of not only his soldiers but also the civilian population loyal to him. By the end of August, about 30,000 people, including 10,000 to 11,000 fighters, were moved to the Lepel area in Belarus, where the brigade resumed operations against partisans alongside the Dirlewanger unit, again leaving thousands of dead civilians and burned villages behind.
In January 1944, Heinrich Himmler personally awarded Kaminski the Iron Cross in recognition of his efforts for Nazi Germany. In June 1944, the brigade was formally incorporated into the Waffen-SS and renamed the Waffen-Sturm Brigade RONA. As the Soviet summer offensive, Operation Bagration, shattered the German Army Group Center, the brigade retreated again, gathering at the SS training camp at Neuhammer, now in Poland, with ranks between 3,000 and 7,000 men.
The SS planned to build a full division from these remnants, the 29th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (Russian No. 1). Himmler signed the order for its creation on August 1, 1944. By coincidence, that was the same day the Warsaw Uprising broke out, and events immediately overtook the plan.
On August 4, a combat regiment of the brigade, between 1,600 and 1,700 men with a handful of tanks and guns under Kaminski's chief of staff, Ivan Frolov, was ordered into Warsaw as part of a pacification force under SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth. Their assigned task was to clear the Ochota district, held by a few hundred lightly armed insurgents. Militarily, they failed. The attack was delayed because the men were busy looting abandoned houses, and when it finally began, they advanced only a few hundred meters.
What followed in Ochota was not fighting but slaughter. Over the following days, RONA troops killed thousands of Polish civilians and raped women in numbers that shocked even the German command. During the three weeks of what became known as the Ochota massacre, about 10,000 residents of the district were killed. Thousands more were herded into a detention camp at the former Zieleniak market, where prisoners were robbed, women were raped, and hundreds were executed by firing squad.
The brigade's conduct drew condemnation even by SS standards in Warsaw. The German commander in Warsaw, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, later gave this assessment: the brigade had no military combat value whatsoever, as officers and soldiers lacked even basic tactical understanding. He described Kaminski's men hauling carts loaded with stolen jewelry, gold watches, and gems. Seizing a supply of liquor mattered more to the brigade than controlling a position on the same street. Every attack stopped immediately as units dispersed into looting gangs.
Kaminski himself took part in the plunder, claiming the spoils would go to what he called the "Russian Liberation Fund." By the end of August, German commanders had had enough. They pulled the brigade out of the city after it had achieved nothing and lost about 500 men. The remnants of RONA, now infamous even among SS formations, were reassigned to the Kampinos Forest to help seal off Warsaw.
There, an artillery battery and an infantry battalion were attacked by about 80 Polish partisans while stationed in the abandoned village of Truskaw. Nearly 100 RONA and German SS personnel were killed in the midnight attack. The survivors, many reportedly too drunk to fight, fled in chaos, leaving their weapons behind.
By that time, Kaminski himself was already dead. A few days earlier, he had been summoned to a German conference in Łódź but never arrived. The story given to his men was that Polish partisans had ambushed and killed him on the road. In truth, he had been executed by firing squad on SS orders, with his death described as a partisan attack. His usefulness was exhausted, and his brigade had become an embarrassment.
Bronislav Kaminski, the warlord of the Bryansk forest, was killed at age 45 on August 28, 1944, by the regime he had served faithfully. His death ended the plan to create a RONA division. As the Eastern Front moved west again, surviving soldiers and their accompanying civilian refugees were scheduled for evacuation south, but the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising at the end of August left them stranded on railway lines near Racibórz in southern Poland.
In autumn 1944, the remnants, perhaps 2,000 men, were finally handed over to the Russian Liberation Army under General Andrei Vlasov, another collaborationist force fighting alongside Nazi Germany, and integrated into one of its divisions. The fates of these men varied greatly afterward. Some were returned to the Soviet Union after the war and executed by firing squad. Among them was Ivan Frolov, who had led Kaminski's men in Warsaw and was sentenced to death by a Soviet court in 1946.
Some brigade members who returned to the Soviet Union formed rebel groups around the Lokot area. These groups gradually degenerated into what they had always been, criminal organizations, until the last major group was eliminated in 1951. Antonina Makarova was among the last identified associates of Kaminski's brigade and its crimes. A young woman who served as an executioner in Lokot, she was credited with executing at least 168 people and possibly many more. She was tracked down, tried in 1978, and executed the following year, more than three decades after the war ended.
Kaminski's brigade left behind almost nothing but the dead. It built no state worthy of the name, won no battle of lasting importance, and was ultimately disowned even by the SS that had armed and honored it. Today it is remembered for one thing above all else. Among all the units the Germans unleashed on civilians in occupied Europe, few matched the brutality of the men who claimed they were liberating Russia.