Ivan Kononov

Ivan Nikitich Kononov (2 April 1900 – 15 September 1967) was a Soviet Red Army commander who became one of the earliest and most prominent Cossack military collaborators with Nazi Germany following the 1941 Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. After building a successful career in the Soviet army, Kononov defected to the Wehrmacht in August 1941. Authorized by the German command to form a Cossack unit, he raised an auxiliary force by recruiting from prisoner-of-war camps. Eventually expanding to a battalion, it became a key asset in Germany's punitive rear-security campaigns in occupied Belarus in 1942 and 1943. In the summer of 1943, Kononov's unit, expanded to a regiment, was integrated into the 1st Cossack Division (later XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps) and deployed to Yugoslavia. Before the Cossack collaborationist formations surrendered to the British in Austria in May 1945, he escaped into the American occupation zone in Germany. Kononov thus evaded the subsequent forced repatriation of Cossacks to the Soviet Union, eventually immigrating to Australia under an assumed identity. In the postwar era, his legacy was distorted by a romanticized 1961 biography, General Kononov, authored by a former subordinate. Kononov died in 1967.