15. Vlasov’s Turn to Treason
After the Red Army beat back the Nazis from the gates of Moscow, Vlasov was put in charge of the 2nd Shock Army after its commander fell ill. However, Vlasov’s army got cut off and encircled as it advanced towards Leningrad, and was destroyed in June of 1942. Vlasov escaped temporarily, but was captured 10 days later. In captivity, he agreed to switch sides. Taken to Berlin, he and other Soviet traitors began drafting plans for a Russian provisional government and for recruiting a Soviet turncoat army. In 1943, Vlasov wrote an anticommunist leaflet, millions of copies of which were dropped on Soviet positions. Using Vlasov’s name, the Nazis recruited hundreds of thousands of Soviet defectors, forming them into a so-called Russian Liberation Army. However, although nominally under Vlasov’s command, the Russian Liberation Army was kept strictly under direct German control, with Vlasov exercising little or no authority.
His only combat against the Red Army took place while in charge of a turncoat division near the Oder river in February of 1945, during the war’s closing stages. Vlasov was then forced to retreat to German-controlled Czechoslovakia. There, in May of 1945, a few days before war’s end, Vlasov’s division turned coat once again, this time against the Germans and in support of a Czech uprising. At war’s end, he attempted to escape to the Western Allies’ lines, but Soviet forces caught him hiding under blankets in a car. Vlasov was flown to Moscow and held in its dreaded Lubyanka prison, where he underwent torture for months. He was tried for treason in the summer of 1946 along with 11 of his leading subordinates. All were found guilty and sentenced to death, and on August 1st, 1945, Vlasov and his fellow turncoats were hanged.