Traitors have existed at all times. Traitors to the homeland who did not keep promises were often considered dangerous criminals. For centuries, they have been subjected to capital punishment - executions. Nevertheless, they have always existed and will exist. After all, humanity continues to preserve among its qualities self-interest, a thirst for power and a willingness to renounce everything human for its own benefit.
Traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War
According to some historical data, about 1,000,000 Soviet citizens switched to the Wehrmacht during the Great Patriotic War. The largest caste among them is the policemen. These are the groups that the occupiers formed from among the local residents. Capturing settlements, having shot there the first families that came to hand - families of Red Army soldiers, civilians, they moved further inland.
Support for the new rules established by them was handled by employees of the auxiliary German police. Since the Germans had no idea about local realities, the composition of such groups from the local population was formed. People were always there for such work — traitors and traitors to the motherland entered it.
Police structure
Units from supporters of the new authorities were manned. All orders and orders were received by them from the German police departments. The councils in the occupied territories decided only on the functioning and recruitment of police groups. The groups themselves were completely dependent on the Germans and were called auxiliary. They accounted for 30% of all Soviet citizens who sided with the Reich.
They did not have a single uniform - it could be an ordinary Soviet uniform with a distinctive German sign. During the years of the Great Patriotic War, these traitors to the motherland were most despised by the Soviet people, which they deserved.
Who was in the police?
By 1943, about 70,000 Soviet citizens became police officers. This included a large number of ideological opponents of the Soviet authorities, convicts who wanted revenge for the civil war. There were those who wanted to stay afloat under any political regime, while mocking their neighbors, stuffing their pockets at their expense and reveling in grains of power.
For prisoners of war, joining the ranks of the police was sometimes the only way to escape from captivity and survive in the camp.
Some of the future policemen were threatened with reprisals against him or his relatives in case of refusal to join the police.
And the smallest category were members of underground organizations and partisan spies, who infiltrated the police and reported important data to Soviet commanders.
Being hated by the local population, the police added fuel to the fire, taking advantage of their position in order to properly rob their neighbors, get drunk and have a bite while others were suffering.
Redemption
When the Red Army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Wehrmacht near Stalingrad in 1943, these categories of citizens more and more often passed into the category of former traitors to the motherland. Those who did not have time to mark their participation in the mass shootings of compatriots became members of partisan detachments, seizing with them the weapons issued by the Germans.
There is evidence that about a fifth of the partisans were just escaped policemen.
Traitors to the motherland went back to the side of the USSR en masse. So, in August 1943, an entire army of 2,000 fighters, led by the former Soviet lieutenant colonel Gil-Rodionov, shot and killed all Germans and opponents of the Soviet regime and transferred to the partisans.
The lieutenant colonel died clutching a weapon while covering the breakthrough of a partisan detachment that was blocked by the Germans. More than half - about 1,500 people - his squad then died.
With the arrival of soldiers of the Red Army, punishments of traitors to the homeland followed. They were judged quickly and fairly. Most were shot on the spot. The escaped were pursued and destroyed by intelligence agencies.
Vlasovites
The lists of traitors to the homeland and the followers of the most famous traitor to the Second World War - Andrey Vlasov have been added to the lists.
The army, under his leadership, recaptured Solnechnogorsk from the Germans, liberated Volokolamsk. And then Vlasov was captured, where he began to give advice to the enemy about the most effective methods of fighting Soviet fighters.
And in the ranks of the Germans, he disgusted with his helpfulness. Himmler he was called a deserted boar, a fool, and Hitler disdained personal communication with him.
Vlasov organized the Russian Liberation Army, which included Russian prisoners of war. They attacked their compatriots and began to destroy partisan detachments and kill civilians.
Immediately after the victory over the Reich, the traitor was captured by the Red Army, delivered to Moscow, where he was immediately hanged.
Alternative opinion
According to some reports, Vlasov is not a traitor. Major General V. Filatov was of the opinion that Vlasov was a Stalinist spy agent. Having written a whole book about Vlasovism, he argued that Vlasov, who was in captivity, kept the party ticket until the last minutes, wore Soviet uniforms, was always independent and kept apart.
After the war
Of course, cases of betrayal were opened in the post-war period. A lot of data has been preserved about traitors to the homeland who harmed Soviet intelligence. One of the most famous cases is the case of Popov, GRU lieutenant colonel. He was also a member of the Second World War, and in 1951 he was sent to work in Austria. There he recruited foreign spies. Being separated from his wife, who remained in Tver with their children, he began an affair with a young prostitute Emilia Kokhanek.
Due to the costs of her work, she often contacted the local police, who were aware of her adventures. So the Russian intelligence officer became known to the Austrian authorities. Fearing to be exposed and experiencing a stormy romance, the scout found a way out in working for foreign intelligence in parallel with the Soviet one. He handed over to the United States a lot of valuable information about the USSR, also giving out state secrets about his homeland and Austrian intelligence.
In 1958, the Soviet secret services finally stopped this, seizing the traitor. Two years later, he was convicted in Moscow, and then immediately shot. In the Western media, a portrait of him as a romantic hero-lover was painted. While in Moscow, in court, his wife approached him, calling him a scum.
About Penkovsky
The most productive traitor who betrayed the interests of the motherland was Oleg Penkovsky. Having gone through the entire Great Patriotic War, being a senior GRU officer, possessing unusually valuable qualities, later he will receive the title of the largest British intelligence officer in the USSR. He became an exemplary family man by marrying and having a daughter. Once at a Moscow party, a British spy spoke to him, who then rubbed his confidence in the officer. Then the Soviet officer admitted that he has long wanted to cooperate with foreign intelligence services. This was what the English intelligence officer needed.
In 1960, Penkovsky carried out the first transfer of documents constituting a state secret. By this act, he convinced Mi-6 of his own devotion. From that moment, he began to study for a foreign spy. For a year with little work, Oleg issued to the enemy more than 5,000 documents containing the secrets of the operations of the Soviet special services, tactics and plans of the USSR. More than six hundred intelligence officers of the USSR and more than 5 dozen GRU officers destroyed his leads. He also transmitted the content of the latest gossip about the Soviet elite.
Receiving a generous payment for his labors, the traitor to the homeland began to scatter with his big money, spending fortunes on his mistresses. At the same time, he carefully concealed his luxurious life abroad from his Moscow wife, who lived in poverty in her homeland.
He did not save his father, who needed money for treatment. The officer said that he had no money.
Pay
Soviet intelligence did not allow the traitor to have any more fun, and after a year of such a life she already went on the traces of his atrocities. They began to listen to it more thoroughly, to search it. When the truth was revealed, it shocked the entire intelligence of the USSR. He was immediately arrested along with an English spy friend who had recruited him. A friend was imprisoned for 8 years, but released a year later in exchange for a Soviet spy. And Penkovsky was shot. Although there is evidence that he was brutally tortured in a gas chamber.
How to punish traitors
Treason is a felony. If before the verdict was severe, what happens with the traitor, as they are called, a collaborator, now? History stores many cases of rather mild punishments for those who sold documents constituting a state secret abroad. So, in 1998, V. Tkachenko, convicted of this, received 3 years in prison.
In 1992, V. Baranov, recruited by American intelligence agencies, received thousands of dollars in rewards from them. Arrested with false documents, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison in Moscow.
How intelligence pursued traitors
History has preserved more interesting cases of the Soviet era and fair punishments of traitors to their country and relatives. One of them is the case of Tonka the Machine Gunner, a war criminal of the times of the Great Patriotic War, the executioner, who, with special cynicism, personally shot more than 1,500 of her fellow citizens, going over to the Wehrmacht.
Tonya Makarova was born in 1921, and found the war while in Moscow. She voluntarily went to the front.
Soon she was in the "Vyazemsky Cauldron", the infamous meat grinder for Soviet fighters who were surrounded by Germans. Then, only one soldier Fedchuk remained next to her. Together, they wandered through the forest, trying to survive. When the soldier left for his family, Tonya did not look for the partisans, stopping in the Lokot Republic. It was a whole settlement of Soviet traitors to the motherland under the control of the Germans.
Looking at them, she agreed to all their conditions, working there as a prostitute. When she was given a machine gun aimed at peaceful Soviet families who were defenseless in front of him, she shot them without any problems while being drunk. From that day she began to fulfill this duty, constantly shooting dozens of her compatriots. When several children managed to survive, as the bullets passed over their heads, the locals took them along with the corpses to the forest. There they were handed over to the partisans, and rumors spread about Tonka the machine-gunner, and a hunt was announced for her.
Having contracted a venereal disease, the girl soon sent to the rear of the enemy for treatment. She gets there fake documents right before the arrival of the Red Army and becomes an exemplary Soviet nurse. Soon she marries a past Red Army soldier and disappears.
Search
For thirty years, the executioner, who led the ordinary life of a Soviet citizen, was searched for by special services. When one day her brother went abroad and indicated his sister’s real name in the list of relatives, KGB officers finally came to her trail.
Several times secretly brought witnesses to her atrocities to her. After their unanimous confirmation that this is the same executioner woman, she was captured.
She confessed calmly to everything, refusing to communicate with her unsuspecting family. The wife hid the reason for the arrest from the front-line husband; he complained to all instances up to the UN, saving his wife. Then the investigators revealed to him the true reason.
There is information that a war veteran turned gray in one night. He, along with the children of Tony, disowned her.
Tonya until the last thought that her crime was not so serious and that she would not be dishonored in her old age. However, all requests for clemency written to her were rejected. And soon she was shot.