The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

Well over 100,000 served, with widely differing degrees of enthusiasm and effectiveness, in General Vlasov’s Russian Army of Liberation, and in a ‘Cossack’ corps fighting partisans on Soviet territory and later in Yugoslavia and Italy. The Ukrainian police and concentration camp guards achieved a terrible reputation for cruelty. Himmler also turned to conscripting Latvians, Estonians, ethnic Caucasians and even Bosnian Muslims into Waffen-SS formations. He also formed a Ukrainian division in 1943, but it was called the SS Galicia Division so as not to provoke Hitler’s anger. A hundred thousand Ukrainians volunteered, of whom only a third were accepted.