Cossack collaboration with Nazi Germany represents a complex and controversial chapter of World War II collaborationist movements. For Cossack émigré leaders, the German invasion offered an opportunity to overthrow Bolshevik rule and secure political autonomy. The German Wehrmacht and later the Waffen-SS had different motives. They eagerly bypassed Nazi racial ideology to fix severe manpower shortages. Driven by decades of state-driven "de-Cossackization" and the trauma of collectivization, tens of thousands of Cossacks joined the invading Axis forces beginning in 1941. In addition to voluntary recruitment in traditional Cossack lands, collaborationist atamans and German authorities relied heavily on the exploitation of Soviet prisoners of war.
During the war, Cossack forces evolved from auxiliary detachments into structured military and administrative entities. The Kazachi Stan militia and the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps were the largest combat formations, with political leadership concentrated in the Main Administration of Cossack Forces. Deployed in rear-area security roles, the Cossack combat formations carried out scorched-earth campaigns against civilian populations and partisan networks across Belarus, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Northern Italy. As the Axis fronts collapsed across Europe in 1945, the leadership believed that the alliance between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union would break and that they will be re-armed for a war against the Soviet Union. They raced into Austria to surrender to the British forces.
Presenting themselves as political refugees, over 45,000 combatants and civilian dependents surrendered in May 1945, but their fate had already been sealed. Facing a logistical crisis in a volatile border region, British authorities prioritized quick removal of hostile forces over humanitarian concerns. The forced repatriation program transferred the vast majority to Soviet custody. It included 3,000 deported non-Soviet "old émigrés" and violated the citizenship parameters of the Yalta Agreement. The handovers delivered the Cossack leadership to execution and the rest to the Gulag system and internal exile.
The historical memory of Cossack collaboration became a source of debate within Western Cold War circles and post-Soviet Russia. Surviving émigré leaders, aided by Western supporters, and publications like Vyacheslav Naumenko’s The Great Betrayal built a false narrative that focused almost exclusively on their status as supposed victims of "Western betrayal". The myth minimized or erased Cossack collaborators' integration into the Nazi security apparatus and their war crimes. Modern nationalist groups in Russia launched campaigns in the 1990s to formally rehabilitate executed commanders like Pyotr Krasnov and Helmuth von Pannwitz. The effort failed. Russian military courts upheld their convictions, barring them from historical vindication.
Background The mobilization of Cossack forces for the German war effort grew out of the political upheavals following the 1917 Russian Civil War. The Cossacks had served as a privileged military caste under the Russian Tsars. After the war, they faced destruction during the Bolshevik policy of "de-Cossackization". This policy involved mass expulsions, asset expropriation, and the formal abolition of the Cossack hosts. Repression intensified during forced collectivization and the famines of the 1930s. These actions left anti-Soviet sentiment throughout the Don, Kuban, and Terek regions. At the same time, a Cossack émigré community grew in Western Europe. This group aimed to restore traditional social order and waited for an opportunity to dismantle the Soviet state. When German forces invaded the USSR, many Cossacks viewed the Wehrmacht as a liberating force and a vehicle for retribution.
Early collaboration (1941–1942) The senior Cossack leadership greeted the launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 with immense enthusiasm. Driven by opportunism and anti-communist ideology, they viewed the German invasion as a divine intervention to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. They hoped for the restoration of their liquidated hosts, traditional land rights, and political autonomy. In exchange for a powerful sponsor capable of reversing decades of Soviet oppression, they willfully ignored Nazi racial animosity toward Slavic populations. Veteran White Army émigrés like General Pyotr Krasnov immediately issued public proclamations. He urged Cossacks inside the Soviet Union and across Europe to take up arms alongside the German Wehrmacht in a holy war against communism. Krasnov wrote: "I wish to state to all Cossacks that this is not a war against Russia, but against Communists, Jews and their minions who trade in Russian blood. May God help the German sword and Hitler!" Vyacheslav Naumenko, a Kuban Cossack leader, and , Ataman of the Terek Host, expressed similar sentiments.
Krasnov contacted Joseph Goebbels, the German Minister of Propaganda, and asked for permission to speak on Radio Berlin's Russian language broadcasts. From late June 1941 onward, Krasnov was a regular speaker on Radio Berlin's Russian-language station and delivered pro-Nazi, antisemitic speeches that portrayed the Soviet government as the rule of "Judeo-Bolsheviks" and the German forces advancing into the Soviet Union as liberators. However, the German authorities had no plans of utilizing Russian émigrés; on the eve of the invasion, they were put under travel restrictions and not allowed to visit the occupied Soviet Union until summer 1942. No role in organizing indigenous liberation movements or armed forces was envisioned for them.
Wehrmacht pragmatism Despite Hitler's restrictions on arming Soviet nationals, front-line necessity forced Wehrmacht commanders to recruit locally. Starting with the early fall of 1941, German field commands bypassed racial directives to integrate Cossack defectors and prisoners of war into security detachments. The Wehrmacht relied on these units for rear-area security, using them to guard supply lines and run sweeps against bypassed Soviet soldiers. Official approval arrived on 6 October from Eduard Wagner, the Quartermaster General, authorizing each of the Army Group Rear Area Commands (North, South, and Center) to establish a Cossack "hundred" (sotnia) for security duties.
A Cossack sotnia within the 221st Security Division was already operating in October 1941. Another early detachments was formed under the auspices of intelligence officers of Army Group Center Rear Area. It was led by the Soviet regimental commander Ivan Kononov, who crossed the frontline in Belarus in August 1941 and recruited a Cossack unit from POW camps. In mid-October 1941, the XIV Panzer Corps encountered Nikolai Nazarenko's Cossack militia attacking the Red Army from the rear near the Mius river. After an interview with General Gustav von Wietersheim, the Wehrmacht enlisted Nazarenko and his eighty surviving men as a reconnaissance battalion.
Following the trauma of Soviet de-Cossackization, many Cossacks initially welcomed German forces as liberators. In the areas with heavy Cossack population, such as the Rostov Oblast in the south of Russia in 1941 and the Kuban and North Caucasus in 1942 (Fall Blau), local Cossack leaders responded with spontaneous offers of armed collaboration to signal their allegiance. Cossacks were formed into self-defense detachment and given captured Soviet weapons. To encourage collaboration, the Wehrmacht allowed Cossacks to reopen churches and promised to restore traditional land rights and autonomous local governance. But the collective farms were never abolished, and initial enthusiasm waned. In general, the Cossack eagerness to serve the Germans was not as widespread as the Nazi propaganda claimed; most of the Cossacks chose wait-and-see approach, and neither collaborated nor actively resisted. As the German army abandoned North Caucasus and Kuban over the winter of 1942–1943, thousands of collaborators and their families left with them and moved to Kamenets-Podolsk in Ukraine and other locations.
To offset severe combat losses the Wehrmacht leadership turned to the systemic exploitation of Soviet prisoners of war held in German stalags (POW camps). Thousands of captured Red Army soldiers, both of verifiable Cossack descent and regular Soviet conscripts who falsely claimed Cossack identity, chose survival through collaboration. By April 1943, about 25,000 troops served in 20 Cossack regiments, ranging in size from 400 to 1,000 personnel, almost all of them former POWs. Only about half were actually Cossacks. They had suffered repression under the Soviet rule and were thus more reliable for the Germans. Vyacheslav Naumenko used his prestige to recruit Cossacks to fight for Germany. In March 1942, German policy towards Soviet POWs changed from letting them starve to death to exploiting them for their labor or their service. Starting in the spring of 1942, Naumenko toured the POW camps urging Cossack POWs to enlist in the Wehrmacht.
Cossack units proved efficient and more motivated than other collaborators. The military centralized and processed them through training installations such as Mielau, Poland, as part of its Ostlegionen (Eastern Legions) administration. German commanders valued these detachments because their mobility, horseback scouting, and language fluency made them effective for security operations and anti-partisan sweeps. By early 1943, the defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad and subsequent combat attrition forced a change in policy. In April 1943, Hitler authorized the consolidation of all Cossack detachments into a single military organization. This centralization led to the formation of the 1st Cossack Cavalry Division under German Major General Helmuth von Pannwitz. The move transitioned the Cossack forces from regional auxiliaries into a conventional combat division.
Auxiliary police units The German occupation authorities also channeled Cossack volunteers across Ukraine and occupied Russia into the Cossack Schutzmannschaft (auxiliary police) battalions. Operating within the chain of command of the Higher SS and Police Leaders, these auxiliary units enforced the administrative and racial edicts of the Nazi occupation apparatus. The Cossack Schutzmannschaft battalions guarded transit corridors and POW camps and policed rural communities. They served in occupied Poland and Soviet Union.
Administrative and governing structures The coordination and mobilization of Cossack collaborationist forces were managed through a fragmented network of competing Nazi state agencies, military commands, and émigré organizations. As the war progressed, the administrative apparatus evolved away from decentralized Wehrmacht front-line recruitment toward centralized political and security organs managed by the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Eastern Ministry) and later the Waffen-SS.
Institutional cooperation and rivalries
High-level collaboration between Cossack leadership and Nazi Germany was orchestrated by a mix of veteran White Army émigrés and freshly defected Soviet commanders, who sought to leverage German military power to secure long-term political autonomy. Prominent figures like General Pyotr Krasnov and General Andrei Shkuro operated at the highest administrative levels, working alongside the Alfred Rosenberg's Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Eastern Ministry). Despite initial reservations, the German setbacks of the winter of 1941 and 1942 led to ever increasing use of Cossacks auxiliary forces by the Wehrmacht. So that not to be left behind, Rosenberg jumped on the Cossack bandwagon and established the Cossack Central Office in mid-1942 to coordinate ideological propaganda and recruitment strategies. Krasnov became its head in January 1943.