Andrey Vlasov - Final Days

Final Days

Vlasov was taken into American captivity and held in a city in Tirol. He and his generals continued talks with the British and the Americans, explaining the principles of their liberation movement and trying to persuade the western Allies to grant asylum to its participants. The Allied commanders were divided on the issue; some were sympathetic but afraid of angering the Soviet Union and of disobeying their western Allied political leaders, who were still co-belligerents with Stalin.

On May 12, 1945, returning from talks with Captain Richard Donahue, an American Armor Company Commander from the 37th Tank Battalion, Vlasov's car was surrounded by Soviet troops. Vlasov's American escort did not resist as Vlasov was arrested. Vlasov, along with many of his anti-communist Russian and other men, was forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities sent Vlasov to Moscow, where over the course of a year he was held in the Lubyanka prison. A summary trial held in the summer of 1946 and presided over by Viktor Abakumov sentenced him and eleven other senior officers from his army to death for treason. The twelve men were hanged on August 1, 1946. These were among the last death sentences in the Soviet Union carried out by hanging (later a group of Cossack leaders allied with the Germans, including Pyotr Krasnov, Andrei Shkuro, and Helmuth von Pannwitz, suffered the same fate).