Can someone help me find a apparent Soviet order order that was apparently declassified that stated Soviet forces were to dress is Wehrmacht uniforms and commit crimes to blame it on them. I don’t know if it’s true and am trying to find out

by Quinnthespin
Jon_Beveryman

I'm certainly not aware of any such order. Off the cuff, this reads like a Nazi apologist conspiracy theory, so I'm immediately skeptical. It also runs quite contrary to the absolutely massive scale of German war crimes in occupied territory; a handful of Soviet troops dressed in Wehrmacht uniforms would have been a drop in the pail compared to the rampant everyday criminality of the Nazi occupiers. The Soviets, at least internally, seem to have been quite dedicated to accurately documenting Nazi war crimes - see for instance Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman's The Black Book of Soviet Jewry. A secret order for Soviet troops to commit fake war crimes seems completely nonsensical, when even within the first 6 months or so of the war the mass violence in the occupied territories was common public knowledge in the Soviet military and citizenry. We know for an absolute fact that these crimes could not have exclusively been a Soviet plot, because Nazi soldiers wrote freely of them in their diaries and letters home. Furthermore, the state of communications from Soviet command to areas behind German lines was extremely poor during the initial period of the war, so at the very least these crimes cannot plausibly be blamed on partisans or disguised Soviet troops. We have to also ask - why would such a thing be done? Dedicating troops to this mission would have been an absolute waste of manpower, and it's not as though the Soviets needed to fabricate anything to convince the world that they were the victims of an aggressive invasion - lend-lease aid from the Western Allies began practically immediately after the invasion.

Conclusion: This 'document' is almost certainly a Nazi apologist fabrication.