Jewish commanders before the Great Patriotic War. To the 70 anniversary of the Victory

The war with the German Nazis was approaching, and the Second World War was already raging in Europe, and the Red Army followed the Wehrmacht victories with alarm. However, due to the situation, the repression attacked by the commanding staff, and the cloyingly friendly attitude towards the German fascists, no one dared to impartially analyze the course of hostilities in the West, predict the dynamics of future battles and develop a plan of effective measures in anticipation of the inevitable war with the Germans.

The military failures of the Red Army in the war with Finland, where it had a tremendous advantage over the enemy in numbers, and was able to achieve a limited victory only at the cost of huge losses, were directly related to the campaign of repression in the USSR, the number of victims of which, according to some, exceeded seven million people . These people were shot or died in the camps of the Gulag in the period from 1937 to 1940 year.
In those years, up to 80 percent of military leaders, ranging from the battalion commander and above, were arrested and at least 40 thousands of them were shot. But mostly they were experienced and skillful military commanders. Among them, Jews, including those holding key positions in the military hierarchy, are 159 people, which is almost 95 percent of their total number.
Unfortunately, I do not have data on the Jewish commanders, who were not killed immediately, but sent to penal servitude in the Gulag. It seems that there were a lot of them, because during the years of repression they did not spare the Jews, exterminating and transferring almost everyone who distinguished himself in the Civil War.
Nevertheless, by the beginning of the war with the Germans, Jewish commanders still remained in the Red Army. There were their 28 people: Colonel-General Stern, Lieutenant-General Smushkevich, 24 Major General and 2 Rear Admiral. All of them received these ranks in May 1940, when generals and admirals were installed in the USSR.

Before the German invasion, the Jewish commanders held the following positions: Head of the Red Army engineering troops — Leonty Zakharovich Kotlyar, Chief of Staff of the Kharkiv District — Vladimir Yakovlevich Kolpakchi, Army Commander — Yudel Leontievich Gorodinsky, Deputy Commanders of the Armies: Alexander Alekseevich Burgaft, Grigory Alekseevich Zemseevich Zemzayevich Gordeinsky; Markovich Krupnikov, army chief of staff - Zinovy ​​Zakharovich Rogozny, commanders of mechanized corps: Mikhail G. Khatskilevich, Semen Moiseevich Kri Voshein and Mikhail Lvovich Chernyavsky, commanders of rifle corps: Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky, Iosif Grigorievich Rubin and Rafail Khmelnitsky, head of artillery of the army - Yakov Isaakovich Brood, chief of staff of the corps - Lev Samoilovich Berezinsky, commanders of rifle chr. Lazar Efimovich Fishman, commander of the aviation division - Zinoviy Maksimovich Pomerantsev, head of the tank school - Mikhail Lvovich Gorriker, head of the air defense zone - Grigory Koblents, initial to the Operations Division of the Air Staff of the Red Army - Boris L. Teplinsky, Head of Technical Department of the Navy Staff - Alexander G. Orlov, commander of the Novorossiisk naval base - Alexander Alexandrov, the commander of the Riga naval base - Pavel Trainin.
In addition, the brigades were commanded by 46 Jews in the rank of colonel and lieutenant colonel, the regiments were 63 Jews in the rank from colonel to captain inclusive.
But Colonel-General Grigori Shtern and Lieutenant-General Yakov Smushkevich during the German invasion languished in the Lubyanka cellars, being subjected to continuous beatings.

How many Jews were at the front

21 June 1941, the Dortmund code signal was received at the headquarters of the German army groups, and at exactly three hours and thirty minutes three huge streams on the front from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathians poured across the USSR border. The Second World War came to the Soviet Union, whose leader Stalin was one of the main culprits of its beginning. The war continued for the peoples of the USSR for more than four years, brought great destruction and casualties.
According to pre-war censuses, the population of the USSR numbered about 200 million people. Considering that almost three years before 70 millions were in the occupied territory and could not be drafted into the army, and taking into account that we did not know the true death toll, the USSR’s “mobilization tension” even now can be determined only very roughly.
Such a term in staff practice is called the percentage, compiled by the intended contingent of the total population of the country. Taking into account the time of occupation, “mobilization tension” in the USSR averaged a little more than 20 percent, thus exceeding the standard for a developed state by half.

This statistic is absolutely necessary in this essay to finally check with the figures in the hands of such a widespread statement of anti-Semites: Soviet Jews, as well as non-Soviet, did not take part in hostilities against the German fascists. While the Nazis killed millions of their fellow tribesmen, Soviet Jews hid from the front in all ways, they "sat in Tashkent", and the Russians and others rescued their brothers and liberated their homeland. The Jews, they say, are self-seekers and cowards, they do not know how to fight and are afraid of a fight, even when it comes to their own salvation. Such, in general terms, are common in Russia, and not only there, the views of anti-Semites and many other ignorant people on the role of the Jews in World War II.
In this book, such a role is reviewed and analyzed on the basis of documentary archival information and statistical calculations. It is necessary to start, starting from, first of all, the number of the Jewish population of 5,2 million, who lived in the USSR before the war. The number of Jews who managed to escape, having left the Germans inland, together with those who had previously lived there, amounted to about 2,4 million people. It is this figure that we will take as a point of reference.
According to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in Podolsk, during the Soviet-German war there were about 501 thousands of Jews in the army, including 167 thousands of officers and 334 thousands of soldiers, sailors and sergeants. Consequently, the "mobilization tension" of Soviet Jews averaged 20 percent. In other words, in the army during the war years every fifth Jew served, including all: men and women, children and old people. And if we compare this level of participation in an armed struggle with a general indicator, then it will not yield to it. Consequently, the Jews of the Soviet Union performed their military duty during the war not with less stress than the rest of the population.
So, the tales that the Jews did not fight, hid from the front, are completely refuted by the objective data of the army archive and are typical Judeophobic slander.
There is one more anti-Semitic statement, with the help of which they are trying to devalue the obvious fact of the mass participation of Jews in hostilities. The spiteful critics say that the Jews were not on the front line, they supposedly were fighting in the rear areas, they were not soldiers, sergeants and officers in combat units. The Jews, they say, in the army were cooks and hairdressers, artists, musicians and quartermasters, rear men, staff rats, at best doctors in hospitals. And so the Jews at the front did not suffer losses, all their victims from the fascists begin and end with those who, like cattle for slaughter, were driven into extermination camps. This, by the way, is also confirmed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the second volume of the book “Two hundred years together.”
This fabrication is also completely refuted by the number of irretrievable losses. According to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, during the war years, killed in battles, died from wounds and diseases, 198 went missing thousands of Jewish servicemen. This is 39,6 percent of their total. Such losses cannot be incurred while sitting in the rear in warm places. This is another confirmation that the Jews fought in battle formations, on the front lines, in the same positions as the rest of the warriors.
You can also compare the irretrievable losses of Jewish soldiers and officers with the same losses of the Soviet armed forces as a whole. According to the certificate of the General Staff and the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation called “The balance of the list of personnel of the USSR Armed Forces during the Great Patriotic War”, the irretrievable losses are equal to 8 millions 668 to thousands of servicemen. In relation to their total number during the war years, this amounts to slightly more than 25 percent. So let's compare the irretrievable losses, common and Jewish - 25 and 39,6! These dry and seemingly inexpressive figures testify irrefutably: the Jews fought bravely and selflessly, and the very fact of their relatively high combat losses suggests that they were not in the rear, but on the front line.
But there are other questions: how did the Jewish warriors fight the Nazis, what was the level of their combat skills, for you can fight in different ways? Maybe the Jews died because of their military incompetence? And who were they in this war, what military professions had, what positions did they occupy? Were there high-ranking commanders among the Jews, generals, whose decisions and actions determined the fate of battle and battle?
From the book "The Jewish shield of the USSR"