Made up of soldiers who conducted “unauthorized retreats,” former POWs deemed untrustworthy, and Gulag prisoners, the Red Army’s penal units carried out some of the most terrifying assignments on the Eastern Front, such as storming German machine-gun nests. Alexander Pyl’cyn led his penal company in the Soviets’ massive offensive in the summer of 1944, the Vistula-Oder operation into eastern Germany, and the bitter assault on Berlin in 1945. He survived the war, but 80 percent of his men did not.
