Thread: Soviet Partisans

On 18 July 1941, the Central Committee issued instructions for the conduct of “partisan war” and the Party apparatus, the Komsomol, the NKVD and the Red Army were all involved in organizing the movement. The initial results were meagre and scattered, but the long arm of Soviet authority was at least re-emerging. The population was increasingly squeezed between German and Soviet-partisan pressures, but anti-German feeling was growing and the idea of a "patriotic war" was intensifying. Senseless, self-defeating and brutal German occupation policies, mass-murder rampages and vicious anti-partisan actions steadily alienated the population. The first public hanging of a partisan had already taken place.

Below, Soviet partisans in 1941 taking the oath to “work a terrible merciless revenge upon the enemy”. The partisan and his family swore to die rather than surrender. Stalin overcame his deep suspicion of irregular warfare, and his speech of 3 July called for the organization of partisan units. Partisans like these, young and old, men and women, were not a serious fighting force at the start of their existence as they lacked arms and supplies.

A meal for Red Army soldiers in the enemy rear. Many Red Army soldiers and Party officials had been marooned behind German lines and soldiers from retreating units escaped into woods. Here, a Red Army unit is receiving help from the local population. Eventually, NKVD officers and Party and Komsomol members were infiltrated through German lines to organize and support partisan units.

Partisans laying demolition charges. In the early stages of partisan warfare, the mission of partisan units in the immediate and deep German rear was to slow the German advance, where possible sabotaging the German communication network. Soviet partisans also attacked German supply dumps, sabotaged equipment and hid farming equipment in the forests.

The hanging of Soviet partisans in the Moscow region. The German authorities reacted savagely from the outset to partisan warfare, or Bandenkreig. Partisans and their supporters, or suspected supporters, were liable to instant death. The most brutal reprisals were authorised at the highest level, even by Hitler himself. The German hostage order stipulated that 50-100 hostages should be shot for every dead German soldier. This was the opening scene in an expanding war of terror and murder.

The first public execution in German-occupied Russia was the hanging of Masha Bruskina on 26 October 1941. Masha was the precursor of thousands who were rounded up and publicly hanged with placards round their necks, intended to be an example to the rest of the population.

Partisans on the move in the forests and swamps that typically formed partisan hideouts. Partisans faced an appalling existence, living in constant fear of betrayal to the Germans, who could buy informants for a handful of marks. Spies and traitors were executed by partisans as a matter of course. In some areas, partisans were given food and shelter, in others they were betrayed or killed. The population came off worst when trapped between two sets of reprisals, the German and Soviet authorities.

German soldiers hang Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a member of the Komsomol, a volunteer for active service, who was sent behind German lines as part of a sabotage unit. She was taken prisoner while attempting to blow up a German ammunition dump. She was stripped and tortured to the extent that even some German soldiers were sickened. Covered in blood and half dead, she was taken to the gallows with a placard around her neck denouncing her as a partisan. Zoya posthumously became a decorated Hero of the Soviet Union and an inspiration for poems and films.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, mutilated. On New Year’s Eve, drunken German troops pulled her body off the gallows and stabbed and hacked it. During the night, local inhabitants ran a terrible risk by taking the mutilated corpse away and digging a grave in frozen earth.

Public hangings such as these became more frequent, even routine. Bodies were left hanging in public places as a deterrent to members of the resistance, partisans and those displaying “anti-German” sentiments or committing “anti-German” acts. A man was hanged, suspected of having punctured German tyres. He was hanged along with another, unknown man. Both were left hanging for three days in full view. No one was allowed to cut the bodies down.

A grieving Russian mother. As the extent and reality of the German atrocities became widely known throughout Russia, the will to resist stiffened and the “patriotic war” became in reality a “people’s war”, but the cost to soldier and civilian alike was horrendous, as this mother attests.