Where the Iron Crosses Grow

During the Patriotic War, many Crimean Tatars betrayed the Motherland, deserting Red Army units that defended the Crimea and siding with the enemy, joining volunteer army units formed by the Germans to fight against the Red Army; as members of German punitive detachments, during the occupation of the Crimea by German fascist troops, the Crimean Tatars particularly were noted for their savage reprisals against Soviet partisans, and also helped the German invaders to organize the violent roundup of Soviet citizens for German enslavement and the mass extermination of the Soviet people.

The Crimean Tatars actively collaborated with the German occupation authorities, participating in the so-called “Tatar national committees,” organized by the German intelligence organs, and were often used by the Germans to infiltrate the rear of the Red Army with spies and saboteurs. With the support of the Crimean Tatars, the “Tatar national committees,” in which the leading role was played by White Guard-Tatar emigrants, directed their activity at the persecution and oppression of the non-Tatar population of the Crimea and were engaged in preparatory efforts to separate the Crimea from the Soviet Union by force, with the help of the German armed forces.

Stalin put Lavrentiy Beria, the sadistic head of the NKVD, in charge of the operation against the Crimea Tatars. Beria assembled a force of 32,000 NKVD troops in the rear of Tolbukhin’s 4th Ukrainian Front and waited for German resistance in the Crimea to be extinguished. On May 18, Beria’s NKVD troops moved to major Crimean Tatar settlements and began rounding up all the inhabitants at gunpoint. Most were given just a few minutes to gather a few items and then forced on to waiting trucks. In just three days, Beria’s troops rounded up more than 150,000 Crimean Tatars, who were assembled at the rail stations at Simferopol and Dzhankoy for rail transport to Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, all ethnic Crimean Tatar troops serving in either the Red Army or Crimean partisan brigades were separated and dispatched to forced-labor camps in the Soviet Gulag system. Some remote Tatar settlements were not rounded up until later in the month, and some people hid in the mountains, but by the end of May 1944 the NKVD reported rounding up 183,155 Crimean Tatars. Another 10,000 were found in subsequent operations. Stalin intended to “Russify” the Crimea and remove the Tatar presence once and for all, and their collaboration with the Germans became the pretext for massive ethnic cleansing. The Tatars referred to their forced deportation as the Sürgün (exile).¹⁶

A few Tatars escaped the Soviet dragnet. The Tatar leader Edige Kirimal was in Germany when the Crimea was liberated by the Red Army, and had the good fortune to fall into the hands of the Western Allies in 1945. A few others made their way to Turkey or the Near East. Yet the bulk of the Crimean Tatar population was removed from the Crimea, and their deportation was conducted under very harsh conditions, little different from German round-ups of targeted groups. At least 6,400 Crimean Tatars perished en route to the labor camps in Uzbekistan, and 30,000 died within the first year. Within 30 months, more than half of those deported – 109,000 Crimean Tatars – were dead from illness, starvation, and mistreatment in NKVD-run camps.