Wilfried Karl Strik-Strikfeldt

Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt was a Baltic German officer and Nazi sympathizer. During World War II he assisted in recruitment for the German Russian Liberation Army, and had a pact for many years with the Russian General Andrey Vlasov, who had built up the Russian Liberation Army, and who negotiated repeatedly with the German SS leaders at the end of the war. Vlasov was interrogated in Moskva after the war and sentenced to death by hanging in 1946.

Strik-Strikfeldt fought on the Russian side during World War I. He later worked for four years with the International Red Cross and Nansen service to support the starving in Russia. From 1924-39 he lived in Riga, working as a representative of German and British companies. At the end of 1939 he was repatriated to Germany (Poznan). In 1941-45 he became a translator and officer of the German army.

In December 1944 one of Gehlen’s officers visited Strik-Strikfeldt and asked him to help accommodate units of the Russian Liberation Army in the Posen area. Strik-Strikfeldt tried to squirm out of the offer and Gehlen arranged for him to take sick leave in Pomerania where he wrote up a rough draft history of the Vlasov movement that would later serve as the basis for his 1970 book Gegen Stalin und Hitler: General Wlassow und die russische Freiheitsbewegung (Against Stalin and Hitler: Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement). After World War II Strik-Strikfeldt lived in Oberstaufen, Germany.