On July 12, 1943, in the Soviet town of Krasnogorsk, a group of German prisoners of war founded the National Committee for a Free Germany, an organization dedicated to overthrowing the Nazi regime. It was led by former Wehrmacht officers who had been captured on the Eastern Front, including Colonel Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, a decorated German general who had commanded troops at Stalingrad.
By 1944, over 600 German officers and 40,000 German enlisted men had joined the Free Germany movement. They published anti-Nazi propaganda, broadcast radio messages to German troops on the Eastern Front, and in some cases, took up arms against their former countrymen. The most dramatic action by Free Germany fighters came during the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, when German defectors fought alongside the Polish Home Army against the SS.
Accounts from Polish partisans describe German-speaking soldiers who knew the city streets intimately and fought with a ferocity the Polish fighters had never seen from anyone, let alone a former enemy. These were men who had seen the worst of the war on the Eastern Front and had decided that the only way to save their country was to fight against the regime that had destroyed it.
After the war, the men of Free Germany were treated as traitors by the West and as assets by the Soviets. The officers were held in Soviet custody until 1950 and then returned to East Germany. The enlisted men who survived were sent back to West Germany, where many were arrested for treason. None of them ever spoke about their service to the press. One former officer, interviewed in 1987, said only, We did not fight for Stalin. We fought because if we did not, the war would never end.