page_title: Collaboration with the Axis Powers
section_title: Caucasus
hierarchical_section_title: Collaboration with the Axis Powers / Collaboration by country / Soviet Union / Caucasus
caption_attribution_description: Information added by Wikimedia users.English: Warsaw Uprising. Soldiers of Aserbeidschanische Feld-Bataillon I./111 - Azeri volunteer formation which fought on Germany's side. Polski: Żołnierze kolaboracyjnego azerskiego batalionu (Aserbeidschanische Feld-Bataillon I./111) sfotografowani w trakcie powstania warszawskiego.
context_page_description: Within nations occupied by the Axis powers in World War II, some citizens and organizations, prompted by nationalism, ethnic hatred, anti-communism, antisemitism, opportunism, self-defense, or often a combination, knowingly collaborated with the Axis Powers. Some of these collaborators committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, or atrocities of the Holocaust.
  Collaboration has been defined as cooperation between elements of the population of a defeated state and representatives of a victorious power. Stanley Hoffmann subdivided collaboration into involuntary and voluntary. According to Hoffmann, collaborationism can be subdivided into "servile" and "ideological"; the former is deliberate service to an enemy, whereas the latter is deliberate advocacy of cooperation with a foreign force which is seen as a champion of desirable domestic transformations. In contrast, Bertram Gordon uses the terms "collaborator" and "collaborationist", respectively, in reference to non-ideological and ideological collaborations.
context_section_description: Ethnic Armenian, Georgian, Turkic and Caucasian forces deployed by the Nazis consisted primarily of Soviet Red Army POWs assembled into ill-trained legions. Among these battalions were 18,000 Armenians, 13,000 Azerbaijanis, 14,000 Georgians, and 10,000 men from the "North Caucasus." American historian Alexander Dallin notes that the Armenian Legion and Georgian battalions were sent to the Netherlands as a result of Hitler's distrust of them, many of which later deserted. According to author Christopher Ailsby, the Turkic and Caucasian forces formed by the Germans were "poorly armed, trained and motivated", and were "unreliable and next to useless".
  The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the Dashnaks) were suppressed in Armenia when the Armenian Republic was conquered by the Russian Bolsheviks in 1920 and ceased to exist. During World War II, some of the Dashnaks saw an opportunity in collaboration with the Germans to regain Armenia's independence. The Armenian Legion under the leadership of Drastamat Kanayan participated in the occupation of the Crimean Peninsula and the Caucasus. On 15 December 1942, the Armenian National Council was granted official recognition by Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. The president of Council was Professor Ardasher Abeghian, its vice-president Abraham Guilkhandanian and it numbered among its members Garegin Nzhdeh and Vahan Papazian. Until the end of 1944 it published a weekly journal, Armenian, edited by Viken Shantn who also broadcast on Radio Berlin with the aid of Dr. Paul Rohrbach.
caption: Aserbaidschanische Legion in combat gear. The unit helped suppress the Warsaw Uprising, August 1944
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