Divizia Tudor Vladimirescu
The Divizia Tudor Vladimirescu ( German 1st Romanian Volunteer Division "Tudor Vladimirescu" ) was a military association set up during the Second World War that fought alongside the Soviet Red Army against the German Reich and its Romanian allies.
The armies of the Romanian Antonescu regime fighting alongside the German Wehrmacht had been repeatedly defeated and pushed back by Soviet troops since the Battle of Stalingrad , and the number of Romanian soldiers in Soviet captivity had increased steadily since the beginning of 1943. As early as 1943, the Soviet State Defense Committee had created a special apparatus at the headquarters of the Supreme Commander's Command , which had the task of setting up and training foreign military formations and, in addition to the Romanian division, also set up and trained a Polish volunteer division.
Romanian prisoners of war, emigrants and Moldovans formed a volunteer division on November 15, 1943 with the support of Romanian communists , which was named after the former Romanian national hero Tudor Vladimirescu . Brigadier General Nicolae Cambrea, imprisoned near Stalingrad, became the commander, and numerous communist political officers worked intensively on the communist re-education of former prisoners of war. As a mechanized (motorized) infantry division in the 2nd Ukrainian Front , the volunteer division passed its baptism of fire in August 1944 during Operation Jassy-Kishinev . In view of the Romanian defeat, the uprising broke out on August 23, 1944 , as a result of which the royal Romanian army switched sides and turned its arms against its previous German allies. From then on, the Romanian army, like the Romanian volunteer division on the Soviet side, took part in the battles for Transylvania and Hungary. A second volunteer infantry division formed in the spring of 1945 (division " Horia, Cloşca and Crişan " under General Lascăr ) was no longer used until the end of the war, but in August 1945 it was integrated into the regular royal Romanian army together with the first volunteer division , which became the Romanian People's Army after the overthrow of the monarchy and the communist transformation in 1948.
Individual evidence
- ↑ SA Tjuschkewitsch: History of the Second World War, 1939-1945 , Volume 12 (The results and lessons of the Second World War), page 310-314. Military publishing house of the GDR, Berlin 1982
- ↑ a b Christoph Kruspe, Jutta Arndt: Pocket Lexicon Romania . Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig 1984, pp. 201f.