Sorge’s agents had contacts with senior politicians and thus had information about Japan’s foreign policy. Hotsumi Ozaki, who copied documents for Sorge, had a close relationship with the Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe. It was easier and less dangerous to collect intelligence about Germany’s plans in Japan than from inside Germany. That is why the Soviets sent Sorge to Japan while there were other Soviet spies operating in Germany. In Tokyo, he worked with the German embassy and Ambassador Eugen Ott and even had an affair with Frau Ott. He provided the Red Army with intelligence about the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan. He also had foreknowledge about the Pearl Harbor attack.
The German Army, though disciplined, was ill prepared. The Blitzkrieg that had worked so well in France was not as effective in Russia. The Germans had produced weapons that worked well in Western Europe but they failed in the intense cold of the Russian winter. However, since Stalin was unprepared for an invasion, they had not blown up the bridges, blocked the roads or constructed any kind of defensive infrastructure, which compensated for Germany’s logistical challenges. The Soviets inadvertently provided the Germans with the very materials they lacked. If the Soviets had been more defensive, the Germans would never have reached Moscow. 1232
The generals assumed control and diverted the army to Moscow’s factories instead of the petroleum and mineral-rich Ukraine. Defeat of Moscow would mean glory for the generals. The Soviets counterattacked which changed the war’s course. Hitler planned a quick victory, but it now turned into a prolonged war. Had the army functioned according to his strategy, the Soviets would have surrendered. The military aristocrats survived the lengthy war and managed to produce their own versions of history, which included portraying Hitler as a deranged amateur who lost the war because he rejected their experienced military advice. They also managed to escape the international court at Nuremburg. They spent their post-war lives in relative comfort, largely due to their published versions of the conflict, which of course, concealed their own ineptitude. They were no different from the politically appointed generals of other countries. 1233
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union remained in effect until Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin could then come in and pretend to emancipate European countries occupied by Germany. He knew better than Hitler did “that a war is won by the side which enters it last and not by the one which goes into it first.” Stalin blamed Hitler for initiating the war and the compliant media, aligned with Soviet apologists and supporters, agreed. After the war, the media readily exposed the German’s crimes while largely ignoring the more egregious crimes of the Allies who had allied with Stalin against Germany. 1234
Ilya Ehrenburg, the key Soviet propagandist, defined his psychopathic attitude in one sentence, “Murders must be committed for the well-being of mankind.” He perfectly represented Stalin’s agenda after Germany attacked the Soviet Union. He was what one person called “German Baiter, No. 1.” On June 22, 1941, he wrote, “They plundered happy peace-loving France. They enslaved our brother nations, the highly cultivated Czechs, the valiant Yugoslavs, and talented Poles. They raped the Norwegians, Danes, and Belgians.” On July 4, after Stalin’s war speech of the day before, he wrote, “We have millions and millions of faithful allies.” Despite positive reports from French officials about the German Army, on July 14, he wrote, “The Nazi murderers and gangsters marched on the boulevards to plunder and rob the nation of France, murdering children and starving the population to death with rations of only fifty grams (two ounces) of bread per day.” On March 5, 1942, he wrote, “They entered Russia drunk on the blood of the Poles, French, and Serb, the blood of old people, maiden, and small children.” 1235 In 1939, Moscow had severed their relationship with the Czechs despite treaty obligations that required the Soviets to give assistance. 1236
In May 1943, there were many who joined the German armed forces to fight against the Soviet Red Army. They included ninety Russian battalions, 140 independent rifle companies, ninety non-Russian troops like the Georgians and the Tartars, and more than 400,000 unarmed auxiliaries joined the Germans. There was a Cossack division and as many as 500,000 former Soviets that joined with the Germans to fight Bolshevism and the Communist partisans. As soon as the war began, captured Russian officers regularly counseled the Germans, telling them that “the establishment and formal recognition of a Russian national state with its own army of liberation was essential to overthrow the Stalin regime.” 1237
Dr. Gustav Hilger, the author of The Incompatible Allies: A Memoir-history of German-Soviet Relations, 1918-1941, and a German diplomat, chief advisor to Ribbentrop on Soviet affairs, interviewed numerous Russians who served with the German military. He was an interpreter during the negotiations for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Hilger spoke with three influential Russian prisoners in August 1942, one of which was General Andrei Vlassov who told Hilger, “Soviet government propaganda has managed to persuade every Russian that Germany wants to destroy Russia’s existence as an independent state… The Russian people’s resistance can only be broken if they are shown that Germany pursues no such objective, but is moreover willing to guarantee Russia and the Ukraine… an independent existence.” 1238
Stalin’s Forced Labor Camps
Lenin turned the monastery buildings in the Solovetsky Islands into the Solovki Special Purpose Camp, a forced labor camp for political prisoners which operated between 1923 and 1939. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who the Soviets incarcerated (1945-1953), referred to the camp as the “mother of the GULAG.” From August 11, 1937 to December 24, 1938, the Soviets executed over 9,500 citizens, more than 1,100 from the Solovki camp. In 1939, because of imminent warfare, the Soviets transformed the camp into a naval base as it was close to Finland’s border.
On December 14, 1926, three recently-released prisoners who had spent three years in Solovki wrote to the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party, complaining about its destitute conditions. Upon their incarceration, they were healthy but upon release, they were “invalids, broken and crippled emotionally and physically” and now “close to the grave.” They referred to the “arbitrary use of power and the violence… in all sections of the concentration camp… saying that it was “difficult for a human being even to imagine such terror, tyranny, violence, and lawlessness.” They cited the incarceration, without oversight and due process, of thousands of innocent prisoners, peasants and workers, who were still there. 1239
They said that prisoners die like flies, in a slow and painful death. These were poor workers who, after the October Revolution, had committed petty crimes to save their families from starvation. Counterrevolutionaries and profiteers, with “full wallets,” have established a reign of terror at the camp, “agents and collaborators of the State Political Directorate,” while the “penniless proletariat dies from hunger, cold, and back—breaking work,” from 14-16 hours a day. These agents line up the prisoners outside, naked and barefoot at 22 degrees below zero and keep them there for as long as an hour. In one example of abusive punishment for some infraction, guards forced the prisoners to eat their own feces. The former prisoners reiterated that while there were some guilty people in the camp most of them were innocent victims now suffering under the “autocratic power of petty tyrants… who have power over life and death.” The former prisoners asked the Committee to “improve the pathetic, tortured existence of those who are there who languish under the yoke of the OGPU’s tyranny, violence, and complete lawlessness.” 1240
In 1928, Vyacheslav Molotov, a member of the Presidium and of the Secretariat, became the First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party. In mid-winter, Molotov directed Stalin’s relocation program wherein the Soviets herded thousands of families into railcars and transported them to uninhabited areas of Siberia, the Urals, or Kazakhstan. Upon arrival, the soldiers threw the people out into the cold. Several years later, Molotov, when asked, admitted that they had re
located twenty million. The collectivization and starvation of 1932-1933 took the lives of millions of people, just from famine alone. Cannibalism thrived in the USSR during that gruesome period. Meanwhile, Stalin was selling millions of tons of the people’s grain each year in order to produce mass quantities of weapons. 1241
In 1931, the Soviet NKVD established a network of concentration camps called Dalstroy, especially for the mining of gold in the Chukotka region of the Russian Far East, often referred to as Kolyma on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk at the mouth of the river Kolyma. Over time, Dalstroy, under the jurisdiction of the central government, created approximately eighty Gulag camps throughout the Kolyma region, which increased to three million square kilometers by 1951. The Soviets, using forced labor, also exploited the local forests, coal, and other resources primarily for the internal needs of Dalstroy including building villages, roads, and inmate barracks. During two decades, several hundred thousand inmates labored in the mines and processed tons of gold each year for Stalin. In 1939, Dalstroy laborers mined 66.7 tons of gold on Kolyma. In 1913, before the Bolsheviks, workers mined only sixty-four tons of gold. The world’s annual average, from 1930 to 1939, was 803 tons which amounted to about twelve percent of the world’s gold production. This gulag gold was the foundation of the industrialization success. 1242
The Second Five-Year Plan (1933-1937) focused more on the industrial infrastructure of the country. The Third Five-Year Plan would conclude in 1942 with a huge output of military equipment. During these improvements, the USSR closed their borders to immigration and emigration. Government terrorism crushed all opposition and forced obedience. The authorities prohibited strikes and routinely incarcerated people for minor infractions. 1243 Overwork, starvation, malnutrition, accidents, exposure to the harsh climate, murder and beatings caused the death of thousands of inmates.
Russia had accumulated massive treasures over hundreds of years and had huge gold resources. The churches, the monasteries, the museums, and palaces housed paintings, statues, books, antique furniture and jewelry. Homeowners had collected valuable treasures that they passed down through the generations. Stalin directed the confiscation of these valuables and also sold vast reserves of gold, diamonds, and platinum to the outside world. He robbed churches, monasteries, museums, libraries and the imperial vaults of everything that had value and exploited the natural resources. They constructed Dalstroy (1932-1933), consisting of eighty camps in the Kolyma region, to mine gold. 1244
During the depression, industrialists in America, Germany, Britain, and France sold their technology at decreased prices to the Soviets who had plenty of gold. The USSR was the world’s largest importer of western technology for their mines and factories. American engineers went to the USSR to design those factories, built by slave-labor. The developed countries sent cranes, tools, and equipment. With Americans’ help, the Soviets built huge industrial complexes, facilities that Americans were not building at home. Those factories could quickly shift from domestic production to mass manufacturing tanks for warfare. During the war, Uralvagonzavod (UVZ) is a Russian machine building company located in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, opened on October 11, 1936, and produced 35,000 T-34 tanks. They built the Chelyabinsk tractor factory, in the Urals, according to American designs and completely furnished it with equipment. This factory constructed the medium T-34 tanks, and also the IS and KV types. 1245
The Soviets allowed W. Averell Harriman, who would later be the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, to exploit the rich mineral deposits in Russia in exchange for capital equipment. 1246 While Americans were helping the elite Soviets to industrialize their Country, the desperate lives of ordinary Russian citizens remained the same. There was an increasing scarcity of the necessities of life such as clothing, furniture, cooking utensils or even matches. The government, with all of the confiscated treasures and natural resources, was too invested in preparing for warfare and industrialization to concern itself with the decreasing standard of living of the population. Russians stood in long lines hoping to buy what available goods there were. Stalin also used that gold to motivate Russian scientists and engineers to increase their efficiency and output. However, to save money, after he had exploited these well-educated individuals for all they were worth, he frequently accused and incarcerated those who he claimed were spies. Engineers were to design and build the best vehicles, planes, or bombers or else find themselves in a high-mortality gulag working as slave labor in the gold mines or cutting timber. 1247
The Germans in the Soviet Union
In 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, Stalin began developing plans to deport the entire population of Soviet Germans. In 1934, the NKVD compiled lists of all Soviet Germans in anticipation of their deportation if a military conflict occurred between Germany and the Soviet Union. They began partial deportations in the mid-1930s. Between 1933 and 1939, the Soviets closed 451 German-language schools with 55,623 students in Ukraine. In 1935, in an effort to destroy their culture, the government abolished eight of the fourteen German newspapers in Ukraine. On April 28, 1936, the government passed legislation to resettle 15,000 Polish and “politically unreliable” German Households from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). 1248 Henry Yagoda, head of the NKVD (1920-1936), according to Beatrice and Sidney Webb, was once the “Vice-Chairman of the Intelligence Department of the USSR for the United States.” 1249
The NKVD exiled 9,180 Ukrainian Germans and 35,820 Poles to labor settlements in Karaganda, to camps that operated from 1938 until 1947. Stalin’s show trials in 1938 targeted a vast number of Soviet Germans, whom they viewed as spies. On January 31, 1938, NKVD Chief Nikolai Yezhov reiterated the necessity of suppressing foreign spies and encouraged the mass arrests of Soviet Germans. By January 1, 1939, they had incarcerated 18,572 of them. On January 17, there were 1,427,232 German inmates, including 366,685 in the Volga German ASSR. Following the 1939 Great Terror, the Stalin regime continued the persecution of Soviet Germans. On March 26, the government eliminated the remaining seven German national raions (administrative divisions) in Ukraine. On July 13, the government closed the German Central-Newspaper in Moscow. By mid-1939, the only German institutions that survived were in the ASSR. 1250
The Soviets built a huge factory, Uralmash, in Sverdlovsk, the industrial heartland of Russia because of its rich resources of iron and coal. During World War II, the Soviets relocated some very important producing facilities from the European part of Russia to safeguard them from the advancing Germans. Uralmash, a heavy machine production facility, is located in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The surrounding residential area where workers live is also called Uralmash. During World War II, the Soviets manufactured large-scale armored materiel at Uralmash. The Soviets constructed a tank factory in Stalingrad. They also built auto, motor, aviation, and artillery factories and often erected cities adjacent to these dozens of factories, all provided by American engineers and designers. 1251
The Disposition of Germans Living in the Soviet Union
Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Soviet’s large German population, especially the Volga Germans in the ASSR, greatly concerned the leadership. Stalin believed they would favor Germany over the USSR in the war. His unfounded fear determined the fate of those German minorities. When Germany invaded, Stalin instructed the NKGB to issue a directive ordering the arrest of all German Passport holders and individuals of German descent who are not Soviet citizens and who might be in possession of compromising material. Stalin resettled many Germans in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Siberia, and the Urals. The NKGB was also supposed to restrain any foreigners who were residing on Soviet soil. On July 25, the NKGB began an investigation of all former war prisoners from the camps in Germany, in addition to former soldiers of the German and Austrian armies who remained in the USSR. 1252
On August 15, the NKVD gave the Germans in the Crimean just three to four hours to prepare for relocation, via cattle trains, for which they could
only take 50 kg of possessions. On August 31, the NKVD began evacuating the Soviet Germans from the western regions of the USSR and then sought to remove the Germans from the Crimean peninsula. During the summer, the NKVD relocated 50,000 individuals from the Crimea ASSR by the end of August. They prohibited the people from taking clothes or food on the trains. 1253
Lavrentiy Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov recommended the punitive deportation of every Volga German in the ASSR. The Central Committee of the CPSU issued a deportation resolution to the NKVD on August 12, 1941. On August 27, Beria issued the order, Conducting the Operation of Resettling the Germans from the Volga German Republic, Saratov, and Stalingrad Oblasts. According to this order, 250 NKVD workers, 1,000 members of the workers militia, and 2,300 Red Army soldiers would undertake in military fashion, which they would begin on September 3, and complete on September 20. 1254
On August 28, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet stated, “According to trustworthy information received by the military authorities, there are among the German population living in the Volga area thousands and tens of thousands of ‘diversionists’ and spies, who, on a signal being given from Germany, are to carry out sabotage in the area inhabited by the Germans of the Volga.” 1255 The NKVD allowed each exiled family to take one ton of personal possessions and an unlimited amount of money and a month’s supply of food. Deportees who lived in cities could select someone to represent them in the sale of their home. The Soviet government appropriated all remaining property like farm equipment, grain, fodder, and livestock without compensation. In the first three weeks of September, the NKVD, Workers Militia, and Red Army herded all the ethnic Germans in the ASSR and other areas and transported them by truck and automobile to the closest train station. The Soviets crowded them into the filthy cattle cars as if they were livestock. The exiles, because of the conditions suffered disease and often death. After these deportations, the Soviet government dissolved the ASSR. 1256
The Ruling Elite Page 45
