The Russian Protective Corps (, , / Ruski zaštitni korpus) was an armed force composed of anti-communist White Russian émigrés that was raised in the German occupied territory of Serbia during World War II. Commanded for almost its whole existence by Lieutenant General Boris Shteifon, it served primarily as a guard force for factories and mines between late 1941 and early 1944, initially as the "Separate Russian Corps" then Russian Factory Protective Group. It was incorporated into the Wehrmacht on 1 December 1942 and later clashed with the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans and briefly with the Chetniks. In late 1944, it fought against the Red Army during the Belgrade Offensive, later withdrawing to Bosnia and Slovenia as the German forces retreated from Yugoslavia and Greece. After Shteifon′s death in Zagreb, the Independent State of Croatia, on 30 April 1945, Russian Colonel Anatoly Rogozhin took over and led his troops farther north to surrender to the British in southern Austria. Unlike most other Russian formations that fought for Nazi Germany, Rogozhin and his men, who were not formally treated as Soviet citizens, were exempt from forced repatriation to the Soviet Union and were eventually set free and allowed to resettle in the West.
Background and formation
Before World War II In the Balkans there were approximately 15,000 White Russian émigrés in the Balkans - their families had fled there in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. General Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel relocated 25,000 of his Southern White Army to Yugoslavia through negotiations with the Yugoslav government in 1921. On 6 April 1941, Axis forces invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Poorly equipped and poorly trained, the Royal Yugoslav Army was quickly defeated. The Axis powers then dismembered Yugoslavia, with Serbia being reduced to its pre-1912 borders and placed under German military occupation. The Germans selected General Milan Nedić, a pre-war politician who was known to have pro-Axis leanings, to lead the collaborationist Government of National Salvation in the German-occupied territory of Serbia. Over the course of the uprising in Serbia in the summer of 1941, communist-led partisans killed approximately 300 Russian émigrés and injured many more, sometimes in acts of vengeance. In response, local Russians began to organize themselves into self-defense units. At the time, there were an estimated 10,000 Russian men within the former borders of Yugoslavia, the majority of whom lived in occupied Serbia.
The Russian Protective Corps, founded in Belgrade under the command of General Mikhail Skorodumov on 12 September 1941, was initially known as the "Separate Russian Corps" (; ). It was established by an order of the German Military Commander in Serbia, General der Flieger Heinrich Danckelmann, with the agreement of the Nedić regime. The key German personality involved in organising the Corps was Danckelmann's chief of staff, Oberst Erich Kewisch. Recruitment and screening of volunteers was carried out by Major General Vladimir Kreyter, a White Russian émigré in German service who was the head of the Russian Intelligence Office () in Serbia. The corps drew its initial manpower from émigré White Russians and officers of the Russian Imperial Army, which had been defeated by the Red Army in the Russian Civil War twenty years earlier. The émigrés had been living in occupied Serbia, and sided with the Germans because of their opposition to communism, and because they believed that their only hope of a non-communist Russia lay in a German victory in World War II. Skorodumov's concept of the Corps was that once the Corps had fulfilled its obligation to Serbia, the land that had taken its members in, they would go to Russia to fight. The force was renamed the "White Russian Factory Protection" () on 2 October.