On this date, August 16, 1941, Joseph Stalin issued Order No. 270. I will post information about this grand order from Wikipedia. It came before Order No. 227.
Joseph Stalin on Happiness Quote
Order No. 270, dated 16 August 1941, was issued by Joseph Stalin acting as People's Commissar of Defense. By the time of the order's issuance, German troops had achieved overwhelming successes in their advancement deep into Soviet territory. Their successful blitzkrieg strategy disorganized the Soviet defense system, led to encirclement of several Soviet divisions and even some armies and deteriorated morale of the Red Army's command staff. The command staff's morale was already low from the pre-war period as a result of Stalin's purges. The order was aimed primarily to raise command staff's morale, although in a very brutal manner.
In the preamble, the order gives examples of troops fighting in encirclement, as well as cases of surrender by military command.
The first article directed that any commanders or commissars "tearing away their insignia and deserting or surrendering" should be considered malicious deserters. The order required superiors to shoot these deserters on the spot. Their family members were subjected to arrest.
The second article demanded that encircled soldiers must use every possibility to fight on, and to demand that their commanders organize the fighting; according to the order, anyone attempting to surrender instead of fighting must be killed and their family members deprived of any state welfare and assistance.
The order also required division commanders to demote and, if necessary, even to shoot on the spot those commanders who failed to command the battle directly in the battlefield.
Commenting on that order, Stalin declared: "There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors."
A Rough translation is as follows:
Order No. 270: 16 August 1941
Not only our friends admit, but our enemies must also admit that in our war of liberation from (German-Fascist) Nazi invaders, that elements of the Red Army, the vast majority of them, their commanders and commissars conduct themselves with good behavior, courageously, and sometimes they are just heroic. Even those parts of our army, who by circumstance were detached from the army and were surrounded, maintain a spirit of resistance and courage, will not allow themselves to surrender, are attempting to inflict ever more damage to the enemy and out of the environment. It is known that the individual parts of the army that were surrounded by the enemy, used all means in order to cause damage to the enemy and break out of the encirclement.
Deputy Commander of the Western Front, Lieutenant Boldin, while in the 10th Army near Bialystok, surrounded by German troops, organized from left in the enemy's rear Red Army troops, who fought for 45 days behind enemy lines and made their way to the main forces of the Western Front. They destroyed the headquarters of the two German regiments, 26 tanks, 1049 cars, vehicles and staff cars, 147 motorcycles, 5 batteries of artillery, 4 mortars, 15 machine guns, eight machine guns, one airplane at the airport and a warehouse bombs.
More than a thousand German soldiers and officers were killed. On 11 August Lieutenant General Boldin Germans struck from behind, broke through the German front, and united with our troops, and led one of the military environment 1654 and commander of the Red Army, including 103 wounded.
Commissioner of the 8th Mechanized Corps brigade commissar and commander of Popiel 406 cn Colonel Novikov fight was taken out of the environment of the armed 1,778. In a bitter battle with the Germans, the group Novikov-Popel was 650 kilometers, causing huge losses the enemy's rear.
The commander of the 3rd Army, Lieutenant-General Kuznetsov and member of the Military Council of Army Commissar 2nd Rank Biryukov fought taken out of the environment 498 armed soldiers and commanders of the 3rd Army, and organized out of the encirclement of the 108th and 64th Infantry Divisions.
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