by Douglas Boyd
Like most Poles, Anders had no illusions about Stalin’s intentions after the war, having already personally suffered as a prisoner in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. He warned Churchill that the Red Army advancing into Poland was systematically arresting all Poles in the occupied areas who had shown any resistance to the Germans on the grounds that they might also resist the Russian occupation of their country. Many of them were never seen again. Churchill then assured Anders that Britain would not abandon its Polish allies. It was a promise that was not kept by Britain’s post-war governments.14
So, Stalin had good reason to think that, after the withdrawal of the British, French and US troops from the western zones of occupied Germany and Austria, the Soviet-occupied zones under their Communist governments controlled in Moscow were bound to subvert, and come to dominate, the western zones when reunified with them, changing the political shape of Europe for ever.
On that balmy autumn night in Sochi, it seemed to the vozhd that he was bound to be the victor in the most momentous game of chess to be played out in the twentieth century.
Although it was too late to save the European satellite states from a half-century of state terror, Stalin’s intention to grab Turkish territory and the Dardanelles was blocked by President Truman’s secretary of state informing the Kremlin that such a move would be resisted by the Western Allies even at the risk of starting a third world war. Similarly, when Stalin announced that he was not going to withdraw Soviet occupation forces from northern Iran, he was told in plain language that this would not be accepted by the West. On both occasions he gave way. As Winston Churchill remarked at the time, ‘There is nothing [the Soviets] admire so much as strength.’15
Notes
1. S. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, the court of the Red Tsar, London, Phoenix 2004, p. 524
2. Russia sold its North American colony to the United States in 1867 for $7.2m
3. For more detail see Boyd, Kremlin, p. 174
4. The full story is told in D. Boyd, De Gaulle, the man who defied six US presidents, Stroud, The History Press 2014
5. Quoted in D. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, London, Collins 1981, p. 64
6. Boyd, De Gaulle, p. 176
7. L. Rees, Behind Closed Doors, London, BBC Books 2008, p. 130
8. T. Hickman, Churchill’s Bodyguard, London, Headline 2005, pp. 167–74
9. Boyd, Kremlin
10. He wished, understandably, to remain anonymous
11. Rees, Behind Closed Doors, p. 345; also Boyd, Kremlin, pp. 160–2
12. There were several, of which the longest lived were the Cheka, from the initials of Chrezvychaynaya Kommissiya or Special Commission for combating counter-revolution and sabotage 1917–22; Obedinyonnoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskiye Upravleniye (OGPU) or United State Political Administration 1922–34; Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennykh Dyel (NKVD) or National Commissariat for Internal Affairs 1934–46; Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Dyel (MVD) 1946–54 and Komityet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosty (KGB) or Committee of State Security 1954–89
13. Boyd, Kremlin, pp. 159–64
14. Rees, Behind Closed Doors, pp. 294–5
15. M. Copeland, The Real Spy World, London, Sphere 1978, p. 201
PART 2
THE STASI IN GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
3
DEUTSCHLAND UNTER RUSSLAND
Most European national anthems invoke the protection of the Christian God for a sovereign, or declare the ideals of a revolutionary state. Since 1841, the German national anthem, set to music by Haydn, was a claim to own territory west to east ‘from the Meuse to the Memel’ and south to north ‘from the Adige to the Belt’. This has something to do with the origin of the German word for war, Krieg, which is the root of kriegen, meaning ‘to get’ [territory for expansion of the Fatherland, called Lebensraum under Hitler]. However, since the first line is Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, meaning, ‘Germany above all’, it ought to have been changed in May of 1945 to Deutschland, Deutschland unter Russland, at least for the vast stretches of the former Third Reich that lay under Soviet occupation.
Before the guns had fallen silent, on 27 April 1945 Soviet aircraft flew the ‘Ulbricht Group’ of several dozen Moscow-trained German Communists led by Walter Ulbricht to an airfield inside the perimeter of Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s First Byelorussian Army Group to the east of Berlin. A few days later the ‘Ackermann Group’ of German Communists were flown to the First Ukrainian Army Group south of Berlin, commanded by Marshal Ivan Konev. These several dozen puppet functionaries had orders not to set up immediately a Communist government to rule the Soviet Zone of occupation – which would have alarmed the Western Allies – but to lay the ground for the installation of an apparently democratic government, after the Russian zone of occupation had been completely purged by the Soviet administration. On 9 May 1945 – one day after the official end of the war in Western Europe – peace was officially declared between the USSR and those, mostly bombed-out, bewildered and hungry, inhabitants of the Reich who had survived the consequences of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s ill-timed decision to invade the USSR in June 1941.
Three million Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine personnel were held in Soviet camps, thousands of miles away from their homeland, in Siberia and the Soviet Far North. These POWs lived under appalling conditions that were partly a revenge for the German camps in which between 1.3 million and 1.65 million Soviet POWs1 had been deliberately starved to death by their captors or allowed to die of exposure since the outset of Barbarossa. In addition, an estimated 600,000 surrendered Soviet officers and uniformed political commissars taken prisoner had been executed in defiance of the rules of war.2
German manpower was further reduced by the thousands more POWs held in other Allied countries. A half-million were in the USA. Some of those taken prisoner by British troops were in Canada and other faraway countries of the British Empire, but 162 camps in Britain held another quarter-million men. The author recalls his parents inviting two unrepentantly Nazi POWs to spend Christmas Day of 1946 in an English home, sharing the family’s very limited rations in response to an appeal by the local authorities. France held a quarter-million German prisoners and demanded more to be used as slave labour for repairing damage suffered during the occupation and liberation. Although Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower and General George C. Patton had reservations about handing over German POWs who were almost certainly going to be ill-treated in revenge, the US Provost Marshal’s department found a legal loophole by classifying 750,000 men taken prisoner after the end of hostilities not as POWs, but as ‘defeated enemy personnel’, who were not covered by the Geneva Convention of 1929. The men were taken from camps in the American zone and handed over to France, largely to excuse their captors from having to feed them from US resources. Held in wire cages with no shelter and grossly inadequate rations, thousands died from malnutrition, hypothermia and untreated disease.
The atrocities committed in Soviet territory by the Waffen-SS, the Allgemeine-SS and some Wehrmacht units killed thousands of civilians for no military reason. How many hundreds of thousands? There is no complete record. In addition, the non-combatant Einsatzkommandos massacred hundreds of thousands of Jewish and other civilian men, women and children. No records of this were kept, unlike in the Nazi concentration and death camps, where meticulous record-keeping was the order of the day. However, just now and again, information did leak out. For example, when a column of the armoured SS Division Das Reich hanged ninety-nine hostages in Tulle, France, on 7 June 1944, Major Kowatsch, the commanding officer, actually said to the Prefect of the town, ‘We hanged more than 100,000 at Kiev and at Kharkov. What we are doing here today is nothing for us.’3 It was therefore understandable, albeit deplorable, that the conduct of Soviet personnel in the final months of the drive into the Reich should include summary executions of soldiers and civilians of both sexes. Rape has always been, and still is, a ubiquitous feature of war between
different ethnic groups. Its victims in this case were an estimated 2 million German females ranging in age from infants to grandmothers; one in ten was estimated to have died during, or as a consequence of, the act.4
Many British-held German POWs did not return home until 1949, but few held as POWs in the USSR would return before 1953; hundreds of thousands of others never returned, although were known to have survived being taken prisoner.
In addition, even before the end of the shooting came the looting, both official and unofficial, throughout the Soviet-occupied regions of Germany, designated by the Four Powers ‘the Soviet Zone of Occupation’, as agreed by the Big Three conference at Yalta. Whole towns were emptied of household furniture, including flush toilets and electric radiators, which were loaded onto horse-drawn wagons destined for homes in villages without running water or electricity. Westerners attending the last three-power summit meeting at Potsdam in July–August 1945 blinked their eyes on seeing heating stoves, cookers and mattresses being loaded onto wagons by Soviet troops returning home. Under the official reparations programme approved at the Potsdam Conference, between a third and a half of East German industrial capacity was dismantled by German forced labour under Soviet supervision5 and removed to the USSR between the cessation of hostilities and the end of 1947, with 4,500 entire factories transported there. Some sixty major manufacturing companies were left intact, but under Soviet control.6 Although the justification was to replace industrial equipment destroyed in the fighting on Soviet territory, the machinery of many entire factories was still rusting beside remote sidings one and two decades later because nobody in Russia had the technical know-how to reassemble it and get it working – or because nobody knew where it had been dumped. The industrial viability of the Soviet zone and the German Democratic Republic, as it afterwards became, was seriously damaged by the excessive reparations. According to some sources, they represented between 15 and 16 billion dollars in value at the time.7
Yet, the satisfaction of revenge is so much greater when suffering is inflicted on sentient people, rather than inanimate things. Long after the initial killings and rape had ended, human victims continued to be hunted down in all four occupation zones. High on the list were Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS personnel who had gone to ground, members of the Allgemeine-SS, civilians who had held office in the administration of occupied territory, members of the Nationalistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei8 (NSDAP) – although this had been compulsory for many people – and grandfathers of 60 years and older who had been forcibly conscripted into the Volkssturm9 under threat of execution for foot-draggers. Sent into the front lines often without uniforms or weapons, the gallows humour of the last weeks of the war portrayed them as Germany’s most precious resource because they had ‘silver in their hair, gold in their teeth and lead in their legs’. Hitlerjugend youths of 16 and younger, accused of being ‘werewolf’ stay-behinds, were sentenced to between ten and twenty-five years in prison.10 German friends of the author in Wedding, a working-class and traditionally Communist Stadtviertel of Berlin, recounted how two terrified unarmed boys aged 15 had been chased by Russian soldiers up five flights of stairs in their apartment building and onto the roof before being flung to their deaths in the street below during the fighting of May 1945.
In any war, these things happen in the heat of battle. What was different about the Soviet occupation of Germany was that, following at a safe distance behind the combat troops were detachments of Laventi Beria’s NKVD troops, whose function was to arrest, imprison, torture and/or execute any German persons who might resist Stalin’s plan to assume total power in the Soviet Zone. Perhaps surprisingly to readers unfamiliar with Kremlin paranoia, this included members of the KPD – the German Communist Party – who had endured years in Nazi hard-labour concentration camps as punishment for their political sympathies. The ‘crime’ for which they now had to be punished again was their suffering under the Nazis for membership of the KPD, which might enable them to return to political life, usurping positions of authority which Stalin reserved for his puppets who had spent the war years under strict control inside Russia.
After spending more than a decade in the USSR, where he survived Stalin’s purges that claimed the majority of KPD refugees, the veteran communist Erich Mielke returned to Berlin in 1945 with NKVD General Ivan Serov, based in the Soviet occupation forces’ HQ at the south-eastern Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. The chaos of the country to which he returned cannot now be imagined. In addition to all the men locked away in POW camps, some 13 million German-speaking people, mainly the elderly, women and children who had been expelled from East Prussia, Poland and Czechoslovakia were homeless refugees in what remained of the Reich.
Neither then nor later was much divulged about the way Mielke had spent the war years. It seems that this is because he was a much-decorated NKVD commissar attached to Soviet partisan bands, whose function was the interrogation and execution of captured German personnel – a story that would not win any votes in eastern Germany. Although initially given the comparatively lowly rank of police inspector, Mielke was ordered by Serov in 1947 to set up a secret police force closely modelled on the NKVD, which he knew so well. Called Kommissariat 5, it tracked down and arrested so many thousands of people with no Nazi connections, yet who might resist the implantation of a Stalinist state, that it was necessary to reopen eleven of the Nazi concentration and death camps, including Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, less than three months after the Allgemeine-SS guards had left. According to Soviet records the 122,000 Germans incarcerated there included many members of the anti-Nazi German political parties, over a third of whom died of starvation or disease during confinement.11
But where could all these people be ‘investigated’ and forced to confess at show trials, to terrify the rest of the population? Totalitarian states like to centralise everything but, after the carpet bombing by British and American air forces, the centre of Berlin was a wasteland of shattered buildings and piles of rubble – the rubble had gone but it was still a wasteland when the author was posted there during his military service thirteen years later. However, a couple of miles north-east of the devastated city centre at Hohenschönhausen a large complex of buildings was still standing, more or less intact. It had been used by the NSDAP Volkswohlfahrt welfare organisation as a canteen where thousands of bombed-out families were supplied with a hot meal every day.
Requisitioned by the NKVD and swiftly surrounded by a 3m-high palisade erected using forced labour, and with this topped by barbed wire and punctuated by searchlights and watch-towers, the site was designated Special Camp No. 3. At various times it held over 4,000 inmates, crammed into inadequate facilities with insufficient food or even blankets in the unheated buildings. The living conditions, the violence of the interrogations and the prisoners’ knowledge that a painful and unpleasant fate awaited them combined to kill off an estimated 3,000 people.12 Cartloads of bodies were dumped daily into bomb craters with no identification. Survivors were put to hard labour constructing a partly underground detention facility, known as ‘the U-boat’, where suspects could be held in extremely stressful solitary confinement whilst being ‘investigated’ under torture. The unheated cells had no windows and some were bare of any fittings except a high threshold so that they could be flooded with cold water, in which the prisoners had to sit or lie when no longer able to keep on their feet. Around the perimeter, bilingual notices in German and Russian warned passers-by that this was a forbidden zone, near which they should not linger.
Since all authority in the Soviet Zone was vested in Stalin’s occupying forces, these measures did not need to be sanctioned by any German law. Instead, NKVD proclamation 00315 dated 18 April 1945, required Soviet-occupied German territory to be ‘cleansed of spies, dissidents, terrorists, Nazi party members, police and secret service operatives, officials and other hostile elements’.13
The Russian zone of occupation that became the German Democratic Republic.
Hohenschön
hausen was the ideal place to extract false confessions from people who had committed no crime, but were considered ‘hostile elements’ by the NKVD, after which military tribunals sentenced them to from ten to twenty-five years’ hard labour – or death in some cases. The victims included some ex-Nazis, but also activists of German political parties including KPD – and also Soviet personnel accused by their own commissars of failing to toe the party line. Most were cleared of any crime after the German reunification in 1989. A fresh wave of arrests took place when the Soviet occupation authorities decided to eliminate the most popular left-wing party, the Socialist Democratic Party of Germany (SDP), by merging it on 21 April 1946 with the KPD in a new party called the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) or Socialist Unity Party. It was thought that the relabelling would avoid the embarrassment of Moscow being seen by the world as imposing a Communist government on its German satellite. In the ensuing elections, closely overseen by the Soviets in a very undemocratic manner, the SED claimed a massive majority, leaving a few seats in the new parliament for other parties, in a pretence of democracy. However, in Berlin, which was under Four-Power occupation after France was also allocated a sector of the capital and a zone of occupation carved out of the American and British sectors and zones, this manipulation was not possible. There, in free and secret votes, the SED polled less than half as many as the SDP.
