Russian diaspora, which made him an acceptable leader. He agreed to organise and head Cossack units out of White emigres and Soviet (mostly Cossack) prisoners of war, to be armed by the Nazis. The Nazis, in turn, expected Krasnov to follow their political line and to keep to a separatist Cossack orientation. Krasnov, who considered himself a Russian first and a Cossack second, was not in sympathy with Rosenberg's notion of establishing a Nazi puppet state to be called "Cossackia" in southeastern Russia. Rosenberg favoured an approach that he called "political warfare" to "free the German Reich from Pan-Slavic pressure for centuries to come". Rosenberg envisioned breaking up the Soviet Union into four puppet states and added Cossackia as the fifth puppet state in 1942. In September 1943, the soldiers of the newly-formed 1st Cossack Cavalry Division learned that their division would not, as expected be sent to fight on the Eastern Front, but would go to the Balkans to fight communist partisans. At the request of the division's commander, General Helmuth von Pannwitz, Krasnov travelled to address the division. Krasnov tried to assuage the wounded feelings of the Cossacks, who did not want to go to the Balkans, by assuring them that the fight against the Partisans was part of the same struggle against "the international Communist conspiracy" on the Eastern Front, and he promised them if they did well in the Balkans, they would ultimately go to the Eastern Front. On 31 March 1944, Rosenberg created a "government-in-exile" in Berlin for Cossackia headed by Krasnov, who, in turn, appointed ataman Naumenko of the Kuban Host as his "minister of war". The "government-in-exile" was recognized only by Germany. At a meeting with the Cossack separatist Vasily Glazkov in Berlin in July 1944, Krasnov stated that he did not agree with Glazkov's separatism but was forced under pressure from Rosenberg to appoint three supporters of Cossackia to important positions in the Cossack Central Office. In November 1944, Krasnov refused the appeal of General Andrey Vlasov to join the latter's Russian Liberation Army. Krasnov disliked Vlasov as a former Red Army general, who had defected over after his capture in 1942 and because as an old man, he was unwilling to submit to take orders from a much younger man. At the end of the war, Krasnov and his men voluntarily surrendered to British forces in Austria. All of them were