Boris Alexandrovich Schteifon

Boris A. Schteifon before 1920

Boris Alexandrovich Schteifon ( Russian Борис Александрович Штейфон ; December 6 ^{. Jul} / 18th December  1881 ^{. Greg} in Kharkov , Russian Empire - 30th April 1945 in Zagreb ) was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army , who later as general of the Russian anti-communist white Army and served as the commander of the Russian Protection Corps in Serbia during World War II.

Life

Boris Schteifon was born in Kharkov (now in Ukraine ) in 1881 . His father was a Jewish merchant who had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and his mother was the daughter of a Russian Orthodox deacon . He graduated from the Junker Infantry School in Chuguev , one of the leading schools in the Imperial Russian Army, and was a lieutenant of the 124th Infantry Regiment in Voronezh . He experienced his first fighting during the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905, in which he was injured by a concussion. He was also recognized five times for bravery and excellence and received the Order of St. Vladimir along with other orders. He was promoted to lieutenant in September 1905 . In 1911, Schteifon graduated from the Imperial Military Academy of the General Staff with the rank of captain. He was then assigned to Russian Turkestan and in 1914 was a staff officer of the 2nd Turkistan Army Corps.

With the beginning of the First World War , Schteifon served on the Caucasus Front against the armed forces of the Ottoman Empire . He was deputy chief of intelligence on the staff of the Russian Caucasian Army and was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1915. He played a key role in the Battle of Erzurum under General Nikolai Yudenitsch and was awarded the Order of St. Anne and the Order of St. George for conducting secret service operations . In January 1917 he was appointed chief of staff of the 161st Infantry Division and in August of that year he was appointed head of the Finnish 3rd Infantry Division. In 1917 he was promoted to colonel .

White generals in Bulgaria, 1921. Seated far right: Boris Alexandrovich Schteifon next to Alexander Pavlovich Kutepov

After the October Revolution and the collapse on the Russian front, Shteifon returned to his hometown of Kharkov , where he led an underground organization to recruit officers for the volunteer army . In the autumn of 1918 he reached the headquarters of the volunteer army in Ekaterinodar . In April 1919 he became chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division of the Volunteer Army and, from July, commander of the 13th Infantry Regiment. By the end of the year, he worked throughout Ukraine as well as parts of Poland and Romania. In January 1920, Schteifon was promoted to lieutenant general.

However, with the growing collapse of the White Movement , he was forced to evacuate to Poland with his men and then came to the Crimea to continue active service under General Pyotr Wrangel . He evacuated to Constantinople with the remains of Wrangel's troops and arrived at the Gallipoli camp for Belarusian refugees. On April 25, 1921, he was made responsible for the exiled 1st Army Corps and transferred to Bulgaria. In 1922 the Bulgarian government expelled Shtefon and he found refuge in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes . Shteifon, who lives in Belgrade, took an active part in the officers' union, but was dismissed by General Wrangel for disobedience. In the 1920s and 1930s, Schteifon published a number of military tactical and historical works and became a professor of military science.

After the occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by the National Socialist German Reich in April 1941, Schteifon was offered a position as Chief of Staff of the Russian Protection Corps in Belgrade on September 12 at the initiative of the former Russian General Mikhail Skorodumow , and three days later he became its commander. Until the spring of 1944, the main task of the Russian Protection Corps , which was composed mainly of former soldiers of the Russian Imperial Army and the White Army, was to protect certain places and areas from the communist partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito and from the Soviet Union and were also supported by Great Britain later in the war; In 1944 the corps was actively engaged in the fight against Tito's partisans. From September 1944, after Romania and Bulgaria, previously allied with Germany, had switched sides and regular units of the Red Army had advanced into the Western Balkans, the corps also fought against the regular Soviet troops in Serbia and later in today's Croatia.

He died on April 30, 1945 in the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb. Some sources suspect that he committed suicide. He was buried in Ljubljana , Slovenia , in a German military cemetery (Block VIII, Row 6, Grave 16).

literature

Books

• Emigranti iz Rusije u kulturnom i znanstvenom životu Zagreba . ISBN 953-7130-36-3 (Croatian).
• Russkiǐ korpus na Balkanakh. OCLC 976722812 (Russian).