Photograph of Trawniki Men at Belzec Killing Center

German-led forces attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. They gained control over large stretches of Soviet territory within months. They also took millions of Soviet soldiers prisoner.

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) chose to collaborate with the Germans after they were captured.¹ Facing starvation, disease, and abuse in POW camps, many Soviet POWs saw joining German forces as their only way to survive.² Others chose to collaborate out of genuine support for the Nazi cause or out of opposition to the Soviet government. Others hoped to profit from German authorities’ persecution of Jews and other civilians in the occupied Soviet Union. Collaboration was most common among groups deemed more acceptable by Nazi racial ideology, such as ethnic Germans, people from the Baltic states, and Ukrainians.³

Soviet POWs’ collaboration with German forces took different forms. Some prisoners acted as informants within POW camps, denouncing Jews, Communists, and others targeted for execution under Nazi policies.⁴ Other POWs worked as translators or camp guards. Some prisoners volunteered to serve alongside the German military in battle.⁵ Still other POWs became guards in the Nazi concentration camps and killing centers.

The featured photograph shows a group of guards at the Belzec killing center in 1942. They appear at ease and in good spirits, posing in front of a building bearing the emblem of the SS.⁶ The man on the right, not in uniform, is likely German.⁷ The men on the left were from the ranks of the so-called “Trawnikis”—a group of about 5,000 men mostly made up of Soviet POWs who were trained as camp guards at a special SS site in the village of Trawniki in German-occupied Poland.⁸ The Trawnikis helped the SS murder more than 430,000 Jews at Belzec, most by gassing.⁹ In total, Trawniki men participated in the murder of nearly 1.5 million Jews and 50,000 Roma¹⁰ between spring 1942 and fall 1943 at Belzec and two other killing centers—Sobibor and Treblinka.¹¹

The Trawniki men played an essential part in the killing process. They guarded victims on their way to the gas chambers and operated the captured Soviet tank engines that fed toxic fumes into the chambers. These men occupied a unique position under Nazi rule—having once been targets of persecution and murder as Soviet POWs, they then became perpetrators in the mass murder of Jews and Roma.¹²

The Trawniki men in this photo have never been identified and their fates are unknown. If they survived the war, they were likely forcibly returned to the Soviet Union. Surviving POWs were subjected to interrogation by Soviet secret police. Those determined to have collaborated were usually imprisoned or executed.¹³ Some collaborators managed to flee to the West and live for decades without being discovered.¹⁴

Mark Edele, Stalin's Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4.

For more on the desperate conditions in Soviet POW camps, see the related items in Experiencing History, Drawings by Alexei Mikhailovich Pankin and Memoir of Fedor Fedorovich Khudaikov.

Members of ethnic minorities who had been repressed by the Soviet government were more likely to collaborate with German forces. See Bob Moore, Prisoners of War: Europe: 1939–1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 270.

See the related items in Experiencing History, "Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars" and Interview with Lev Manevich for more on German policies targeting Communist and Jewish soldiers in the Soviet army.

Few of these units saw actual combat because the Germans feared that the prisoner-soldiers would desert back to the Soviet side. See Edele, Stalin's Defectors, 130.

For another photograph that appears to capture camaraderie among those carrying out mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust, see the related source in Experiencing History, Photograph of Police Battalion 101 Celebrating Christmas.

The Germans did not provide the Trawniki men with a single distinct uniform. Most wore old Soviet or Polish uniforms that had been dyed black; the men in this photo appear to be wearing the latter. See Peter Black, "Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 25, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 12.

Trawniki was also a concentration camp for Polish Jews. For more on the training camp, see Black, "Foot Soldiers," 7.

Robert Kuwalek, Death Camp at Belzec (Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2016), 74.

To learn more about the Nazi persecution and genocide of Roma and Sinti, see the related Experiencing History collection, Roma and Sinti in Nazi Germany.

See Yitzhak Arad, The Operation Reinhard Death Camps: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

Black, “Foot Soldiers,” 43–45; and Edele, Stalin's Defectors, 132–137.

Seth Bernstein, Return to the Motherland: Displaced Soviets in WWII and the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023), 128–131.

One of the most infamous was John Demjanjuk, who was convicted of serving as a guard at Treblinka and sentenced to death by an Israeli court in 1988, although his conviction was overturned in 1993. He was later convicted of serving as a guard at Sobibór at a trial in Germany in 2011, although he died before the appeals process was completed. See Lawrence Douglas, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great War Crimes Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

All 12 Items in the Soviet POWs in German Captivity Collection

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