16 August 1941 year
The Red Army received secret order No. 270—on the elimination of traitors who attempt to surrender to the enemy.
Can we tolerate cowards in the Red Army who desert to the enemy and surrender to him? No, we cannot! If these cowards and deserters are given free rein, they will quickly disintegrate our army and destroy our Motherland. Cowards and deserters must be exterminated.
The order came at the end of the second month of the war, when Wehrmacht troops had advanced hundreds of kilometers into the country. Leningrad was 150 kilometers away, Moscow about 300.
The document signed by Stalin and his deputies is far from legalistic and is rich in expressive turns of phrase.
Units and subdivisions that have been surrounded by the enemy must fight selflessly to the last opportunity, protect their equipment like the apple of their eye, break through to their own through the rear of the enemy troops, defeating the fascist dogs
Commanders and political officers who tore off their insignia during battle, attempted to surrender, or sought refuge in the rear were equated with "malicious deserters." They were subject to execution on the spot, and their families were arrested.
Order 270 obliged every soldier who found himself surrounded by the enemy to demand from his superior officer “to fight to the last opportunity to break through to his own.”
And if such a commander or a part of the Red Army soldiers, instead of organizing resistance to the enemy, prefer to surrender, they will be destroyed by all means, both ground and air, and the families of the Red Army soldiers who surrendered will be deprived of state benefits and assistance.
The order was read out in all units of the Red Army. Its publication was prohibited until until 1988 year.
Attempts to justify those who surrendered were met with military censorship, which held that the surrender was the prisoners' own fault. The idea that the Supreme Command had miscalculated in allowing such a situation to arise was not considered.
Almost a fifth of Soviet soldiers who returned from captivity were convicted of collaborating with the Germans, and millions of people passed through filtration camps.
