The Russian People's Labour Party (; ''Russkaya trudovaya narodnaya partiya'', RTNP), or Russian National Labour Party, was a

collaborationist Wartime collaboration is cooperation with the enemy against one's country of citizenship in wartime. As historian Gerhard Hirschfeld says, it "is as old as war and the occupation of foreign territory". The term ''collaborator'' dates to the 19th ...

organisation, formed by the administration of Oflag XIII-B POW camp from the imprisoned Soviet Russian members of the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People ...

in 1941. All "party" activities were overseen by German counter-intelligence (''

Abwehr The (German language, German for ''resistance'' or ''defence'', though the word usually means ''counterintelligence'' in a military context) ) was the German military intelligence , military-intelligence service for the ''Reichswehr'' and the ...

''). p. 386 Its stated political aims were;

"''With the help of the Germans, the Soviet authorities were to be overthrown. Private property was to be restored, and a state with a
democratic republic A democratic republic is a form of government operating on principles adopted from a republic and a democracy. As a cross between two similar systems, democratic republics may function on principles shared by both republics and democracies. Whil ...
an regime was to be established.''"

The party program was published in November 1941 (according to some accounts, on the November 7th anniversary of the

October Revolution The October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Historiography in the Soviet Union, Soviet historiography), October coup, Bolshevik coup, or Bolshevik revolution, was the second of Russian Revolution, two r ...

), and was distributed among the prisoners. In August 1941, a Committee for the Struggle Against Bolshevism was established which would form the basis for the RTNP. The party was founded in a

German Army The German Army (, 'army') is the land component of the armed forces of Federal Republic of Germany, Germany. The present-day German Army was founded in 1955 as part of the newly formed West German together with the German Navy, ''Marine'' (G ...

officer

prisoner-of-war camp A prisoner-of-war camp (often abbreviated as POW camp) is a site for the containment of enemy fighters captured as Prisoner of war, prisoners of war by a belligerent power in time of war. There are significant differences among POW camps, inte ...

('' Offizierslager''), located in

Hammelburg Hammelburg is a town in Bavaria, Germany. It sits in the district of Bad Kissingen, in Lower Franconia. It lies on the river Franconian Saale, 25 km west of Schweinfurt. Hammelburg is the oldest winegrowing town (''Weinstadt'') in Francon ...

. The known members of the "party" were: * Semyon Maltsev, ''President of the Central Committee of RTNP'' * Ivan Blagoveshchensky (1941), and later Fyodor Truhin, ''Head of the Military Department'' * Major A. P. Filippov, ''Head of the Intelligence Department'' * Sergey Sverchkov, ''Head of the Propaganda Department'' * Lieutenant colonels Lyubimov and Shatov, Colonels Petrov, Meandrov, Brodnikov, General M. V. Bogdanov. RNTP carried out propaganda work and published its newspaper ''Path of the Motherland'' (). In 1942, RTNP tried to establish contacts with the imprisoned

Yakov Dzhugashvili Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili ( – 14 April 1943) was the eldest son of Joseph Stalin, and the only child of Stalin's first wife, Kato Svanidze, who died nine months after his birth. His father, then a young revolutionary in his mid-20s, le ...

, but failed. The "party" also positioned itself as a sabotage-and-reconnaissance organisation, and it put forward various projects, including the formation of a volunteer anti-Soviet army, but none of them were accepted. The Nazis regarded RNTP rather as a tool to detect the unloyal prisoners (more than 2 thousand POWs were handed over to the Gestapo by the secret department of the "party"), and the existence of the organization was limited to the perimeter of the camp. In June 1942, due to a severe outbreak of typhus and numerous casualties, RNTP was dissolved, and 30 of its most active members were sent to propaganda school. It was later reorganised under '' Unternehmen Zeppelin'', and in August 1942, the number of active members was 120. RNTP officially ceased to exist in 1943.''Чуев Сергей''. Спецслужбы Третьего Рейха: Книга 2. 2003 г.Генерал Власов: история предательства: В 2 т. : В 3 кн.
Под ред. А. Н. Артизова, В. С. Христофорова. — М.: Политическая энциклопедия, 2015. ISBN 978-5-8273-1954-5

References

1941 establishments in Germany 1943 disestablishments in Germany Anti-communist organizations Defunct political parties in Germany Political parties disestablished in 1943 Political parties established in 1941 Russian collaborators with Nazi Germany Organizations of World War II {{Germany-party-stub