10. A Last-Minute Change of Loyalty Failed to Save This Traitor From a Traitor’s End
Vlasov wrote an anticommunist leaflet in 1943, of which millions of copies were airdropped on Soviet positions. Using Vlasov’s name, the Nazis recruited hundreds of thousands of Soviet defectors for the so-called Russian Liberation Army. Although the Russian turncoats were nominally under Vlasov’s command, they were 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 1945, during the war’s closing stages. Afterward, he was forced to retreat to German-controlled Czechoslovakia.
In May 1945, a few days before WWII ended, Vlasov’s division turned coat once again, this time against the Germans and in support of a Czech uprising. At war’s end, he tried to escape to the Western Allies’ lines, but was captured by Soviet forces, who discovered him hiding under blankets in a car. He was flown to Moscow and held in its dreaded Lubyanka prison, where he was tortured 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 1, 1945, Vlasov and his fellow traitors were hanged.
