Nazi Germany's policy towards the education of Turkic-speaking Soviet prisoners of war during World War II

Starting from the 16th century, the Russians, who started to implement a policy of enlargement, occupied the regions where Turkic-speaking peoples such as Idil-Ural, Crimea, Azerbaijan and Turkistan regions lived intensely, and took many more regions under their rule until the 19th century. In the aforementioned regions, both the assimilation movements implemented during the imperial period and the korenizatsiia activities carried out by the Bolshevik administration after the Russian Civil War took place in a painful conditions. İn line with Adolf Hitler's order, in the Barbarossa Operation launched by the German Army against the USSR on 22 June 1941, some of the 3 million 800 thousand Soviet soldiers who were captured were also soldiers belonging to Turkic-speaking peoples. With the emergence of various factors in this regard, the Germans applied an education policy under the conditions of the period, and made use of the Turkic-speaking Soviet prisoners of war. The applied education policy, within the framework of different military troops was formed and they were assigned to different places on the battlefields for different purposes according to the needs, time and conditions. In this study, it has been tried to reveal Soviet soldiers belonging to Turkic-speaking peoples, who were captured in the Barbarossa Operation, what kind of a role they played in the war within the framework of the education policies implemented by the Germans. The outlines of the applied education policy were examined and of military troops formed later the activities of in the German Army were evaluated.