As defeat after defeat rolled back the Eastern Front in 1944, Himmler at last decided to turn the surviving two million Russian prisoners of war held by the Germans into an anti-Soviet army. After spending three years trying to work these men to death in slave labour camps, this was an amazing change of heart. Three million of these men had already died from neglect, and the survivors were becoming increasingly desperate. The approaching Soviet armies offered little prospect of liberation to captured Russian soldiers, whom Stalin had already declared to be traitors.

The Russian Army of Liberation

The former Red Army general Andrei Vlasov was persuaded by Himmler in July 1944 to tour prison camps to recruit men for a so-called Russian "army of liberation". He eventually raised two divisions out of Russian prisoners and men transferred from two Waffen-SS divisions recruited for security duties in Russia. They briefly saw action on the Eastern Front in the final months of the war. They retreated to Prague and then turned on the German garrison in the city to help Czech resistance fighters who had risen in revolt. The change of heart did not do them any good, and the US Army eventually handed them over to Russia after the war, where the majority were executed, including Vlasov.

Yugoslav recruits

Contrary to popular legend, the Waffen-SS did not recruit Don Cossacks. These were formed by the army and transferred to the Waffen-SS for administrative purposes only in August 1944. The XV Cossack Corps did fight alongside Waffen-SS units in the Balkans during 1944. In spite of being able to overrun Yugoslavia in a matter of weeks in April 1941, the Germans were never able to subdue the country's population. Tito's communist partisans were an aggressive force, and by 1944 some 20 German divisions, albeit not frontline units, containing 700,000 troops were tied down fighting a brutal guerrilla war. Rather than divert German soldiers from the frontline for this task, it was decided to recruit local men to fight against Tito to capitalize on the region's age-old ethnic and religious divisions. As the war progressed, the need to increase recruitment to these units became critical.

Muslim divisions

Eventually two divisions of Muslim soldiers were recruited from the region, which is today known as Bosnia, but under German rule was part of the Croatian Nazi puppet state. Himmler tried to make the units of the 13th Handschar and 23rd Kama Divisions follow the traditions of the old Muslim units of the Hapsburg Empire, which had ruled the region before World War I. Former Hapsburg officers were recruited to lead these new units. Ethnic Albanian Muslims were also recruited in 1944 into their own division, 21st Skanderbeg, named after the national hero of the Albanians. In addition, in a bid to use them to undermine British rule in the Middle East, Himmler drafted the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to oversee these divisions' religious practices. This, if anything, shows the depth to which Himmler had sunk to fill out his Waffen-SS divisions.

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