Reseña del libro "The Return (en Inglés)"
Over a million captured Russian soldiers fought in Hitler's armies against their own country, motivated by the desire to liberate it from that other great dictator of the time, Joseph Stalin. Originally the scheme was a propaganda ploy by the intelligence services of the Wehrmacht, but the response among the Russian POWs became so overwhelming that some German field commanders became convinced that just such a real army could make a decisive difference on the Eastern front; however, every attempt to create one ran into fierce objection of the Fuhrer, who refused to compromise his racist ideology that the Slav was subhuman.At the end of the war, the democracies submitted to the demands of Stalin that the "traitors" be sent back to Soviet justice along with their wives, children, and about six million other Russian civilians, who had been abducted to work in German industries. Knowing what awaited them at the other end, these Russians resisted violently as they were loaded under the point of American and British bayonets into the same cattle cars that had been liberated from the Nazis. Rather than go east, many committed suicide or matricide.Two colorful personalities emerge from this saga. A career military man of the Junker class, Helmuth von Pannwitz, became so captivated by those he commanded that he adopted their folkways, rituals, and values and became the only non-Cossack ever to be elected "field atman" in the three-hundred year history of those people. So strong were his ties to the Cossacks that this German general freely chose to be repatriated with them to a certain death in Russia. The other towering personality, Andrei Vlasov, was a product of the Soviet system, rising as a young Red soldier during the Civil War to become one of Stalin's favorite generals. Personally appointed by Stalin to save Moscow from the Germans, he was decorated as "a hero of the state." Given the suicidal mission of raising the siege of Leningrad, he was captured by the Germans and then interrogated by a captain of the Wehrmacht intelligence, who had been sent to find for an appropriate propaganda tool. The relationship between the two soldiers from opposite sides moved from mutual manipulation to true friendship, and in the process each was changed. Cover: "The Betrayal of the Cossacks at Lienz, Austria" by Sergey Grigoryevich Korolkov, 1957
