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Originally Posted by Kolargol
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Russian liberation army was a try to resist communist and only partner in that were Germans. Every country in war had collaborators. It is just important how big is population supporting that idea. They were recruited from German occupied territories of Russia.
Russian volunteers who enlisted into the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) wore the patch of the Russian Liberation Army, an army which did not yet exist but was presented as a reality by Nazi propaganda. These volunteers (called Hiwi, an acronym for Hilfswilliger, roughly "volunteers") were not under any Russian command or control; they were exclusively under German command carrying out various noncombat duties. Soon, several German commanders began forming small armed units out of them, primarily used in combating activities of the Soviet partisans.
Adolf Hitler allowed the idea of the Russian Liberation Army to circulate in propaganda literature so long as no real formations of the sort were permitted. As a result, some Red Army soldiers surrendered or defected in hopes of joining an army that did not yet exist. Many Soviet prisoners of war volunteered to serve under the German command just in order to get out from Nazi POW camps which were notorious for starving Soviet prisoners to death.
The ROA was organized by former Red Army general Andrey Vlasov, who tried to unite anti-communist Russians opposed to the communist regime in the Soviet Union. The volunteers were mostly Soviet prisoners of war but also included White Russian émigrés (some of whom were veterans of the anticommunist White Army during the Russian Civil War).