1-276-513 - Art Media/Heritage Images

Russians serving in the German Army, Eastern Front, 1941-1945. Detail from a German propaganda poster. Three soldiers of the Russian National Army of Liberation, a unit commanded by Bronislaw Kaminsky and deployed to fight Soviet partisans and pacify occupied territory. The brutal relish with which they set about their task was notorious. In all an estimated million Soviet soldiers fought on the German side during the Second World War. Some, like Kaminsky's men, were volunteers, but many were prisoners captured in the initial German invasion for whom fighting on the side of the Nazis was preferable to the appalling conditions in POW camps or as slave labour.