Fraternal collaboration between prisoners of war

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The Brotherly Cooperation of Prisoners of War ( Russian Bratskoje Sotrudnitschetswo Wojennoplennych , BSW ) was an anti-fascist resistance group , which essentially consisted of Soviet prisoners of war and slave labor in southern Germany.

The BSW was formed in early 1943 in a POW camp for officers in Munich-Giesing around the POWs Roman Petruschel , Karl Osolin and Michail Kondenko and the Soviet secret service officer Josef Feldmann , who had been recruited under a false name to organize prisoners of war as "foreign workers". Which is under the leadership of Osolin and Feldmann organization had to organize the goal prisoners of all nationalities, the recruitment of Soviet POWs to the Vlasov Army to prevent sabotage the German war effort, and to cooperate with German resistance groups and together with them the allied troops to support.

The BSW managed to organize hundreds of (almost exclusively Soviet) prisoners of war and also forced laborers in Munich and the surrounding area, Württemberg and Baden, and to establish contacts with other groups of prisoners of war and the like. a. in Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg and to cooperate closely with the Munich resistance group Anti-Nazi German Popular Front . The BSW was able to achieve some successes in the area of ​​resistance against Vlasov's recruiters, helping people to flee and working to improve the living conditions of prisoners of war and forced laborers.

At the end of 1943 the Gestapo succeeded in smuggling a spy into the BSW , and at least 383 suspected members were arrested in a subsequent wave of arrests . The leadership of the organization and many other members, a total of 92 people, were murdered in the Dachau concentration camp on September 4, 1944 , and a further 38 members a little later in the Mauthausen concentration camp .

literature

  • Wolfgang Benz / Walter H. Pehle (ed.): Lexicon of the German resistance. Frankfurt am Main 1994. ISBN 3-596-15083-3 .
  • Josif A. Brodskij: The living fight. The organization Fraternal Cooperation of Prisoners of War (BSW) . Berlin 1968.
  • Ulrich Herbert: Foreign workers. Politics and practice of the "deployment of foreigners" in the war economy of the Third Reich. Berlin / Bonn 1985. ISBN 3801250288 .
  • Roland Maier: The smashing of the resistance organization "Brotherly Cooperation" (BSW). In: Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier: The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern. Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-89657-145-8 , p. 366f.
  • Alfred Streim: Soviet prisoners in Hitler's war of extermination. Heidelberg 1982.