THE INDIAN LEGION Originally formed in April 1943 as the 950th Indian Infantry Regiment of the Wehrmacht, this unit was composed of captured Indians who had fought with the British in North Africa. In November 1944 the unit was transferred

Chapter 2 LEGION The Pomors became emboldened and joined the Slavic-British Legion, formed by General Edmund Ironside. Russians, Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, Czechs, Estonians and even Chinese served in the legion. It was assumed that in 3–4 months the Russians would begin fighting, and the British

TURKESTAN LEGION The package from the Foreign Ministry of the Third Reich in a solid departmental envelope with the appropriate stamps and marks was delivered to the designated Berlin address by courier. From this it followed that the recipient with an oriental surname in ministerial offices

P launched Operation Ball Lightning - this is the name of the book published by Tatknigoizdat and telling about the feat of the servicemen of the 825th battalion of the Idel-Ural legion, who on February 23, 1943, having arrived in the Vitebsk region as part of fascist punitive detachments, raised an armed uprising and crossed on the side of the partisans. Among the legionnaires was Chelny resident Mukhamed Galeev.

One of the authors of the book, which tells about the little-known history of the Great Patriotic War, was a former Chelny resident, now the head of the department for relations with public organizations Tatars of the near and far abroad of the Executive Committee of the World Congress of Tatars Rustem Gainetdinov.

In a conversation with us, he said that he became interested in this topic back in 1989, when he worked in Naberezhnye Chelny:

— The book’s author team includes the famous writer Rafael Mustafin, MGIMO professor Abdulkhak Akhtamzyan, Colonel General Mansur Khakimov, journalist Rafis Izmailov and me. In 1989, a well-known person in the city, Samuil Lurie, contacted the Chelny KGB department. He worked at Kamgesenergostroy, and after retiring, he became an active local historian. At that time, I was involved in the rehabilitation of repressed people, and his father worked as the chief engineer of the Kyiv power plant, was repressed and shot in 1941. Lurie came to us and studied my father’s case.

And back in the 70s and 80s, he took search teams from Chelny school No. 28 to places of military glory. And during one of his trips to Belarus, he saw in the Vitebsk museum a report from a partisan commander about the transition of Tatar legionnaires to our side. He copied it by hand and in 1989, when he was already at an advanced age, he brought me this document. He said: “This is a very valuable thing for the history of your people, which shows the Tatars from the most worthy side.”

In 1990, using this document, I published an article in the newspaper “Soviet Tataria”. But then the attitude towards the legionnaires was as traitors to the motherland, a wave of criticism came at me, saying, why are you rehabilitating traitors? At that time, some legionnaires were still alive, they turned to the KGB with a request for rehabilitation, but then the time was such that this issue was not even raised...

—Have you continued your search?

— Yes, I made a special trip to Kazan, met with veteran security officers who dealt with these issues, picked up several cases from the archive, and went to a conference in Belarus. And in 2005, he published his article about the transition of legionnaires to partisans in the magazine “Gasyrlar Avazy”. Then I went to Belarus four more times, looking in the archives for lists of those who crossed over. We carried out this work together with a group of Moscow scientists, which included Abdulkhak Akhmatzyan and Mansur Khakimov.

By the way, for the first time facts about legionnaires began to be collected in the 60s, when the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus Panteleimon Ponamarenko, who during the war years was the chief of staff of the partisan movement, came to our republic. It was he who first reported that there was such a thing interesting fact transition of an entire battalion and was surprised that we were not interested in this issue. In 1967, Rafael Mustafin began to study the fate of Musa Jalil. He went to Vitebsk, met with partisans, participants in the transition, and wrote the first material - his book, published in 1974, was the first to talk about this transition.

— There are versions that Jalil himself was involved in this uprising.

- Yes, long years this transition was associated with the personality and activities of the poet, but it is now known for certain that at that time he was near Berlin and had no direct relation to this uprising. On the contrary, this transition greatly influenced Musa Jalil. He realized that in this way, by preparing an uprising within the legion from within, he could bring maximum benefit to his homeland.

— What is the history of the appearance of the Idel-Ural legion?

— In August 1942, Hitler signed an order to create the Volga-Tatar, or, as the legionnaires themselves called it, the “Idel-Ural” legion. A total of seven combat battalions were formed, numbered from 825 to 831. Between eight and ten thousand legionnaires served in them. This is relatively little. According to Doctor of Historical Sciences Iskander Gilyazov, during the war, from 700 thousand to one million Soviet citizens, mostly prisoners of war, served in the German army. Historians are best known for the fate of the 825th battalion in connection with its transition to the side of the partisans.

According to the report of the commissar of the 1st partisan detachment, Isak Grigoriev, to the commissar of the 1st Vitebsk partisan brigade, Vladimir Khabarov, dated March 5, 1943, “506 personnel arrived with weapons; 45 mm cannons - 3 pieces, heavy machine guns - 20, battalion mortars - 4, company mortars - 5, light machine guns - 22, rifles - 340, pistols - 150, rocket launchers - 12, binoculars - 30, horses with full ammunition, ammunition and food - 26". Later, legionnaires still arrived in separate small groups. A total of 557 people transferred.

— Was the transition of the Tatar battalion strategically important during the war?

- Huge! If we take it locally, it disrupted the general course of the German offensive against the partisans in the Vitebsk region and complicated their situation, since the partisans received unexpected reinforcements in manpower and weapons. But most importantly, he undermined the trust of the German authorities in the collaborators - the Germans began to fear sending legionnaires to the eastern occupied regions. Immediately after the uprising, ready to be sent to the Eastern Front, the 826th battalion was sent out of harm's way to Holland, to the area of ​​​​the city of Breda. The news of the success of the uprising spread widely among the legionnaires of not only the Tatar, but also other legions and, undoubtedly, intensified the struggle of the anti-fascist underground.

It must be emphasized that in order to perpetuate the feat of our fellow countrymen, on behalf of the first President of the Republic of Tatarstan M. Sh. Shaimiev, on November 10, 2009 in the Vitebsk region, in the area of ​​​​the transition of legionnaires of the 825th battalion to the partisans and the fighting of the 334th division, on behalf of the Republic Tatarstan, a memorial monument to the Tatars who fought in Belarus was opened.

— Yes, it lists 156 names with specified years and places of birth of these legionnaires. Data for another 50 people remains to be clarified. There are also your former fellow countrymen on the list: Zeyadinov Sadry(s) Zeyadinovich, born in 1914, from the village of Starye Gardali, Naberezhnye Chelny (now Tukaevsky) district, Galeev Me(u)khamed Sadykovich, born in 1910, who lived before the war in Naberezhnye Chelny at : st. Tsentralnaya, house 37. It turned out that neither their relatives nor the public knew anything about the fate of the majority of the people listed. Naturally, this work will continue. Belarusian archivists sent documents on another 300 sheets, just the other day I returned from Belarus, where I found another 15 names of legionnaires who died fighting on the side of the partisans already in 1944.

Taking this opportunity, I would like to address the Chelny residents with a request. The fact is that Samuel Lurie wrote two books of memoirs. They were typed by one of the girls who were part of the search party. I read these manuscripts, they are very valuable both for the history of Chelny and for understanding the life of the country. Lurie did not have time to publish them during his lifetime, but the manuscripts may have been preserved. If anyone knows anything about them, I would ask you to call the editorial office of Chelninskiye Izvestia.

The Nazis initially did not intend to form military units from citizens of the USSR - due to distrust of “racially inferior nations.” The history of the international SS legion “Idel-Ural” subsequently confirmed these fears - hundreds of collaborators surrendered during the existence of this unit Soviet troops or partisans.

Why did the Nazis trust Muslims?

The main ideologist of the NSDAP, Alfred Rosenberg, believed that the Turkic-Muslim peoples are closer to the Aryans than everyone else living in the territory Soviet Union and should hate the Russians, who had these ethnic groups under colonial dependence. The factor of adherence to Islam of future SS legionnaires also played an important role - the Nazis were very interested in this religion, trying to use it to benefit the Reich.

Why was the legion called “Idel-Ural”?

The SS Idel-Ural legion, created in the summer of 1942, was called the Volga-Tatar legion by the Germans. The name came from the failed Volga “mini-state” (state) of the same name, which they intended to create in Civil War on Russian territory. The Idel-Ural autonomy was to include the Ufa province and certain territories of six other regions.
The Idel-Ural legion, which consisted of seven battalions, included Tatars, Bashkirs, Volga and Ural peoples. The unit was replenished several times and, according to historians, over the entire history of its existence, about 25 thousand people passed through the Tatar legion.

Why did he fight so badly?

The very first major combat operation, “Ball Lightning,” with the participation of “Idel-Ural,” showed that the Nazis were sorely mistaken in attributing to Muslim collaborators ideological fortitude in the fight against Soviet power- in 1943, the Tatars, Bashkirs and Chuvashs sent to eliminate the Belarusian partisans rebelled, shot the Germans serving in the legion and the overwhelming majority went over to the partisans. Overall on Eastern Front Similar defections to the enemy’s side were very common in other units formed along national lines.
The remains of the Idel-Ural were transferred to Holland. But even there the Tatars rebelled. The legion was again reorganized and sent to France, where dozens of legionnaires also went over to the enemy’s side. In the end, the national unit was declared unfit for combat, and by the end of the war, the “Idel-Urals” performed only auxiliary security and construction functions for the Germans. “Idel-Ural” did not interact with the ROA of General Vlasov - the Muslims did not want to deal with the Russians: “he is on his own, and we are on our own.”

Musa Jalil: Idel-Ural legionnaire, “enemy of the people”, Hero of the Soviet Union

Famous Soviet poet Tatar Musa Jalil, whose name was discovered by his equally famous fellow writer Konstantin Simonov, was a member of the Idel-Ural legion. In one of the battles in June 1942, senior political instructor Jalil, seriously wounded in the chest, was captured. There he enlisted in the International Legion formed by the Nazis. He began to conduct underground work. In 1943, Musa Jalil was arrested by the Gestapo. A year later, in the Berlin prison Plötzensee, the underground fighter was guillotined.
At first, in his homeland, Jalil was classified as a particularly dangerous criminal. But when the Tatar poet’s poems, which he wrote while imprisoned, were published, the prisoner of Plötzensee prison was rehabilitated. Jalil was subsequently awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, streets and avenues in dozens of cities were named after him former USSR, poems from the “Moabit Notebook” cycle were included in the compulsory school curriculum. By the way, along with Jalil, another Tatar poet and writer, also an Idel-Ural legionnaire and an active underground fighter, Abdulla Alishev, was executed in Pletzensee.

On the same topic:

Volga-Tatar Legion of the SS: how the Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashs fought on the side of Hitler Volga-Tatar Legion of the SS: which representatives of the Soviet peoples fought for Hitler Who fought against the USSR in the Volga-Tatar SS Legion during the war How the Bashkirs fought against Napoleon

I. A. Gilyazov

LEGION "IDEL-URAL"

Introduction

The Great Patriotic War is gradually moving away from us into the distant past. This war, one of the bloodiest in human history, largely determined the course of subsequent historical events. It became a huge tragedy for millions of people. Its traces, perhaps, remain today in the souls of not only war veterans and those who survived the horrors of war while working on the home front, but they can probably be felt in the feelings of post-war generations, each of which in their own way is trying to understand the greatness and tragedy of this large-scale disaster. Therefore, the undying interest in modern military issues is obvious. historical science. It would seem that the topic of the Great Patriotic War has been studied far and wide by researchers. Thousands of monographs and articles have been published on the history of the war, and there are also major multi-volume studies.

And yet, war is such a multifaceted and multidimensional phenomenon that even after more than 60 years it is hardly possible to study every nuance of it with all scrupulousness and objectivity. There are also certainly subjects that have been little or insufficiently studied by researchers, the so-called “blank spots.” And indeed, for some time, topics in the history of war remained closed to study. on them in force political reasons was taboo. Historians could think about them to themselves, but they had neither the opportunity nor the permission to study them.

One of these problems is the very sensitive and ambiguously perceived topic of Soviet collaboration during the war years or the topic of military and political cooperation of a certain part of Soviet citizens with Germany - occupation authorities, Wehrmacht and SS, political institutions of the Third Reich. Obviously, many have heard about General Andrei Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Army, about the Eastern Legions created by the Nazis from prisoners of war of representatives of the Turkic-Muslim peoples of the USSR, including the Idel-Ural Legion. In Soviet times, these topics were mentioned in historical literature and journalism, but the information was, firstly, very dosed, and secondly, very unreliable. We should have formed the opinion that such military formations as the ROA or the Eastern Legions were pitiful, absolutely helpless appendages of the Wehrmacht, consisting entirely of traitors and renegades. If honest people joined them, then only with the clear intention of turning the weapons they received against the enemy. It turned out that the Eastern legionnaires then almost all defected to the partisans - in Belarus, Ukraine, France or Holland, that the Eastern legions initially opposed the Germans and resisted all attempts to use them in the fight against the Red Army or the partisans. But everything, it turns out, is far from so simple and smooth. Even if we pay attention only to quantitative indicators and remember that during the war there were at least 700,000 Soviet citizens in the German armed forces, mostly prisoners of war, the question naturally arises: how did this happen? Could there really be so many “traitors” and “renegades”? To explain all this as elementary betrayal would be to a large extent a simplification and trivialization of the problem. For all its painfulness and ambiguity, it should be looked at more broadly and unbiasedly.

In the post-Soviet era, when historians were able to study the past more freely, when previously closed archives were opened, topics that had previously been vetoed attracted and are attracting special and intense interest. They also evoke an interested reaction from readers. And the problem of Soviet collaboration during the Second World War really began to be studied quite intensively. Especially a lot of historical literature is devoted to the personality of General Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Army - dozens of books, studies and collections of documentary materials have already been published. The history of the Eastern Legions is not ignored either.

So we can state with satisfaction that in a fairly short time, even a certain tradition has developed in the study of Soviet collaboration during the Second World War. There have been several different approaches in assessing this phenomenon. Particularly representative is the group of those researchers who, to a certain extent, continue the line of Soviet historiography and, without much doubt, equate collaboration with betrayal. But at the same time, there is an attempt in some studies to provide a more comprehensive and, in our opinion, more objective coverage of this problem.

This book is an attempt to examine the phenomenon of Soviet collaboration using the example of representatives of Turkic-Muslim peoples. Based on the sources at my disposal, I will try to present the course of historical events related to this plot, introduce the reader to its various aspects, and express my own opinions about the phenomenon of collaboration. The task of the historian in this case is not to act as an accuser or defender, but to strive to present the events that took place in the past as impartially and objectively as possible, without going to extremes. It is clear that from the heights of today it is quite easy to label and describe everything in two colors - black and white. And a war, especially one like the Second World War, is a phenomenon so complex that two colors are clearly not enough to represent all its sides. It should be borne in mind that when studying the past, we must have the broadest possible understanding of it, and not select from it only “winning”, heroic or convenient plots that at the moment seem “politically consistent” or “useful”.

This book is the result of work in archives and libraries in Germany. Of particular interest to me were the documentary materials of various institutions of National Socialist Germany, both military and civilian: materials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Eastern Ministry), the Main Directorate of the SS, the command of the Eastern Legions and various military formations of the Wehrmacht. The ideological orientation of this documentation was never lost sight of. These documents were the product of cruel totalitarian regime, therefore the need for a strictly critical approach to them was obvious to me. Alas, not all of the sources from the Second World War have survived; many were irretrievably lost. And yet, the available material allows us to reproduce with sufficient accuracy one of the large-scale military-political scams of the Third Reich - an attempt to organize military and political cooperation with representatives of the Turkic-Muslim peoples of the USSR and its results.

I express my gratitude to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung), which made it possible for me to conduct a targeted and in-depth search in German archives. I am very grateful to all the colleagues whose advice helped me in writing this work - the staff of the Seminar on East European History at the University of Cologne: its then director Professor Andreas Kappeler (currently the University of Vienna), Dr. Christian Noack (currently the University of Dublin), Dr. Guido Hausmann (currently University of Freiburg), and in addition, Professor Ingeborg Baldauf (Berlin), Professor Gerhard Simon (Cologne), Professor Adolf Hampel (Hungen), Dr. Patrick von zur Mühlen (Bonn), Dr. Sebastian Zwiklinski (Berlin) ). I remember with warmth and sadness my late colleagues Professor Gerhard Hepp (Berlin) and Dr. Joachim Hoffmann (Freiburg). Many colleagues in Russia also did not stand aside - I sincerely thank the writer Rafael Mustafin (Kazan), deputy chief editor of the “Book of Memory” Mikhail Cherepanov (Kazan) and former leader Center for Public Relations of the KGB of the Republic of Tatarstan Rovel Kashapov. Options for this study were discussed at meetings in Kazan state university, and valuable comments on the text were made by many colleagues in the departments of history of the Tatar people, history of Tatarstan, modern national history and historiography and source studies of KSU - Professor Mirkasym Usmanov, Professor Indus Tagirov, Professor Alter Litvin, Professor Ramzi Valeev, Professor Rif Khairutdinov, Professor Alexander Litvin , Associate Professor Valery Telishev, Associate Professor Zavdat Minnullin, Associate Professor Dina Mustafina. In addition, the observations of professors Nikolai Bugai (Moscow) and Ksenophon Sanukov (Yoshkar-Ola) were also very important for me.

Contemporaries of the events described helped me a lot; conversations with them made it possible to more vividly and imaginatively imagine what was happening. With sincere respect I remember the late lawyer Heinz Unglaube (Lauenburg), former head of the Tatar Mediation. I wish good health to Tarif Sultan (Munich), a former member of the “Union of Struggle of the Turkic-Tatars of Idel-Ural”, an outstanding figure in the Tatar post-war emigration.