By mid-August 1941, the has lost millions of men, killed, wounded or captured in the encirclements of Barbarossa. Whole generals surrender; German propaganda displays high-ranking prisoners, including — a notorious case — , Stalin's own son, captured in July. German leaflets dropped over the Soviet lines vaunt the good treatment of captives in order to hasten surrenders.
For the Soviet dictator, this haemorrhage and these surrenders threaten the very cohesion of the front. Stalinist doctrine and terror tolerate neither retreat nor capitulation, and the crisis forces a decision on the degree of repression to inflict.
Stalin and the Stavka must decide the sanction: confine themselves to the usual military penalties against deserters; issue a merciless order equating any captured soldier with a traitor and punishing even his relatives; or rely on encouragement and patriotic propaganda rather than on terror. The choice engages the relationship of the Soviet state to its own soldiers.
How should Stalin respond to the mass surrenders of the Red Army?
Stalin issues an order equating any captured man with a traitor and punishing his entourage. In his eyes the situation called for a response of unprecedented harshness, striking not only the fugitives but their families. Order No. 270, of 16 August 1941, declares 'traitors to the motherland' the commanders and commissars who surrender, orders them shot on the spot, and provides for the arrest of the families of captive officers and the withholding of assistance from the families of captured soldiers. Combined with the blocking detachments (which fire on fugitives) and the summary tribunals, it institutes a terror intended to forbid any surrender. The measure stiffens Soviet resistance — it becomes more dangerous to surrender than to fight — but at the price of additional suffering for the prisoners and their families, doubly victims of the enemy and of their own state. Order No. 270 illustrates the brutality of the Stalinist system in the war, mirroring the crimes of the occupier.
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