The great majority of them were loyal to the Romanov family, going all the way back to Catherine the Great. Their superior horsemanship, proficiency with the saber, and colorful uniforms defined them. They had lived in clans that were designated by the name of the nearest major river, i.e., Don Cossacks, Kuban Cossacks, Ural Cossacks.
Traditionally, the Cossacks derived mostly from the area of southern Ukraine. The Cossacks: a Privileged Military Class Thousands of ordinary Soviets became partisans in the German military. Millions were displaced, and millions were killed. A significant number of Soviet citizens, including many of the Cossacks, therefore greeted the invading Germans as liberators. Stalin ruthlessly expanded the collectivization program into an offensive against the peasantry. Minority nationalities inside the Soviet Union, including the Cossacks, were among those cruelly victimized during this period, especially those who posed resistance. The height of the Stalinist repression, the Great Terror, occurred in the late 1930s just prior to the German invasion. The Eastern Front war dragged on for four years and was characterized by unprecedented ferocity and loss of life, not only due to the war itself, but also to starvation, disease, slave-like working conditions, and the vast ethnic cleansing occurring under both Stalin and Hitler for different reasons. The Blitzkrieg into Russia, featuring panzer armor divisions, was initially successful but ultimately failed. The German Armed Forces High Command, the OKW, had originally counted on a 12-week war against the staggering Soviet Union, but under Joseph Stalin, the Soviets rallied and came back stronger than ever. The German field marshals and generals share in the blame for the debacle that was to come in the East. He was both right and wrong as it turned out, and thus Adolf Hitler was not the only German who had underestimated the Soviets.
An estimated four million Red Army soldiers were captured by the Germans during the six months after the launching of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941. Indeed, the chief of the German General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, wrote, “The Russians have lost this war in the first eight days! Their casualties-in both men and equipment-are unimaginable.”