Hence the effectiveness of the penal battalions.
If I desert, a commissar executes me.
If I surrender, a TKSS executes me.
If I fight and get captured, the same thing will happen, so I will fight to the death.
If I fight to the death, I may just survive and get out of the penal battalion and its short rations.
I have found in my readings that the Spring of 1942 was very sobering for the average Russian soldier. The summer before, entire armies had surrendered, hundreds of thousands of men.
In the Spring a few escaped POWs had brought back the word that they had been kept in open pins during the winter and that they were all dead.
Resistance stiffened.