Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  There is evidence that on June 22, 1942, Zhukov and Beria, presumably under Stalin’s instructions, signed order No. 0078/42 for the deportations of all Ukrainians.17 Khrushchev said in his memorable speech that they avoided the fate of the others not because Stalin did not want to deport them but “only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, he would have deported them also.” Estimates of the Ukrainian population in 1945 were just under thirty-five million people. When Khrushchev said Stalin would like to have deported the entire Ukrainian nation, as the minutes of the meeting recorded, there was “laughter and animation in the hall.”18

  Ethnic cleansing as proposed on this scale was deeply shaming after the fact. The cruelties were unspeakable, and the scale of the calamity proposed defies the imagination.

  At the time the operations went ahead, NKVD units were celebrated for their cruelty. One trying to drive 730 Chechens through the mountains became bogged down and completed its mission by locking them all in a barn and setting it aflame.19 Others suffered the same fate when they were shut inside mosques and burned alive. Hospital patients were killed as a matter of course when they could not be moved, and children and others considered too sick to travel were shot out of hand.20

  Murad Nashkoyev, a Chechen journalist, described his family’s experience of being rounded up by the NKVD in February 1944. After he and his mother boarded the truck, the NKVD simply threw his baby brother in alongside them for the transport to the east: “In my cattle-truck, half of us died during the journey. There was no toilet—we just had to cut a hole in the floor, and that was also how we got rid of the corpses. I suppose we could have escaped that way, but the men did not want to leave their families. When we arrived in Kazakhstan, the ground was frozen hard, and we thought we would all die. It was the German exiles who helped us to survive—they had already been there for several years.”21

  Stalin wrote to congratulate the NKVD for the “successful fulfillment of state tasks in the North Caucasus.”22 When told there had been “abuses,” he agreed but did nothing, because he preferred more rather than less zealotry and it was far better to exceed quotas than to fall short.

  For Stalin and the Soviet system, the ethnic groups involved had shown themselves for what they really were, and that was much more than collaborators; they were “eternal enemies whom the war and occupation helped to uncover. They were the embodiment of the evil other, not accidental tourists trapped in a cataclysmic event. Their destruction was therefore not merely an act of defense but the execution of the will of history.”23

  These groups were singled out “on the basis of blood,” as one justly famous Russian account puts it, so no bother was taken to fill out questionnaires, and it counted for nothing if someone was a proven Party member, a hero of labor, or an ardent Soviet patriot.24

  The overriding factors that led to the “repression” were questions of loyalty or political reliability. The distrust of certain ethnic minorities, particularly the Germans and the Crimean Tartars, as well as the Chechens and Ingush, was magnified by the war. The concern was all the greater when Islam was the religion of a suspect group.

  Geography played a role in the case of the Caucasian and Crimean minorities, because they lived in a strategically important area and their religious beliefs and/or foreign ties made them untrustworthy. That they might reach across the border to link up with their brethren put them under suspicion of having divided loyalties.25

  Notwithstanding the Soviets’ brutal and often murderous practices, the regime held that victims of Communist ethnic cleansing could redeem themselves through work or service in the war. In fact, the deportations in wartime, as well as in the postwar period, involved mass death in many cases and deep suffering for the survivors. As well, the culture and way of life of many of these minorities were destroyed.

  Some were eventually allowed to return from exile, but only when the “thaw” set in after 1956. The scars inflicted on a number of these groups, like the Chechens, endure to this day.

  THE GULAG AT WAR

  The brutality of the regime toward its own people during the war spilled over into the Gulag concentration camp system. To avoid being overrun by the Wehrmacht in 1941, prisoners in the westernmost camps were sent to the east. An estimated 750,000 from 27 camps, 210 labor colonies, and 272 prisons were evacuated, and, as a recent account concludes sadly, “a significant proportion of them—though we still do not know the real numbers—never arrived.”26

  Many in the Gulag preferred to fight the Germans than to rot inside these camps and volunteered to serve in the Red Army. They were often refused, especially the “politicals,” but “ordinary convicts” were permitted to join up shortly after the outbreak of the war. Decrees on July 12 and November 24 freed more than 600,000 from the camps, 175,000 of whom were mobilized. According to a recent Russian account, which gives an optimistic spin to the harsh choices, they were “true champions of the USSR. They coped with their new military tasks, since the liberation of their homeland was their personal concern.”27 It adds that “after the fighting the people would have to be put back in this place.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the Gulag, gives a sobering picture of what was meant by being “put back in this place.” Many volunteers not only had to return to the Gulag but had their sentences extended.28

  It is next to impossible to study the turnover in the camps from the data now available, but simply focusing on the annual census of the corrective labor camps and colonies, one observes a slow decline from the high of 1.9 million in 1941, to 1.7 million the following year, to 1.4 million in 1943, and to 1.1 million in 1944. The numbers began going back up in 1945, to 1.4 million, and almost every year thereafter until 1952, the year before Stalin’s death, when they reached an all-time high of 2.5 million.29 Information on the gender of prisoners is available for 1943-45. The number of women in the camps and colonies stood at 17.3 percent in 1943, 24.9 percent in 1944, and 28.4 percent in 1945. The figures were higher than usual because of the large number of men who volunteered and were accepted for military service.30

  The plight of women in the Gulag camps is vividly described by Solzhenitsyn in what must rank as one of the most horrifying chapters in modern literature:

  Attractiveness was a curse. Such a woman had a constant stream of visitors on her bunk and was constantly surrounded. They propositioned her and threatened her with beatings and knives—and she had no hope of being able to stand up against it but only to be smart about whom she gave it to—to pick the kind of man to defend her with his name and his knife from all the rest, from the next in line, from the whole greedy queue, from those crazy juveniles gone berserk, aroused by everything they could see and breathe in there….

  And what about the women in the Kolyma? After all, women were extremely rare there and in desperate demand. It was better for a woman not to get caught on the work sites there—by a convoy guard, a free employee, or a prisoner. The Kolyma was where the expression streetcar for a gang rape arose. K.O. tells how a truck driver lost at cards a whole truckload of women, including K.O. herself, being transported to Elgen. And, turning off the road, he delivered them for the night to a gang of unconvoyed construction workers.31

  Some women resisted and even managed to kill the guards who tried to rape them, but mostly they either submitted or were beaten until they did. Sexually transmitted disease became endemic in the Gulag, particularly among ordinary convicts who were notorious rapists.32

  Stories of survivors like Solzhenitsyn are shocking. Sometimes in just a few lines, he conveys a horrific vision impossible to forget, like the “two unconvoyed girls who were caught running to see friends in the men’s column. The guard tied them behind his horse and, mounting his horse, dragged them across the steppe.” Solzhenitsyn says that not even the worst serf-owners in tsarist Russia would have killed in such a brutal way, but the Gulag guards “used to do it at Solovki.” In a footnote to the st
ory he wonders about the guard: “Who today will seek out his name? And him? Yes, and if one were even to speak to him about it, he would be astonished: What’s he guilty of? He was ordered to do it! So why did they have to go to the men anyway, the bitches?”33

  Conditions deteriorated in the vast Gulag during the war. As Solzhenitsyn writes, if food was short everywhere, the prisoners were on starvation rations. At the same time they were pushed to work harder and longer. The mortality rate went up. In just five years, from 1941 to 1945, official records show that 621, 637 died in Gulag camps. It would seem that these statistics do not include the deaths in the labor colonies. In any case, it would be prudent to regard these numbers as the minimal ones.34

  Regular inflows of new prisoners made up the numbers, particularly from the ethnic-cleansing operations. There was a steady influx of those charged with breaking article 58 of the criminal code, the notorious paragraph that could be stretched to catch almost anyone suspected of having anti-Soviet attitudes. Another source of new prisoners was directive 221, issued on June 22, 1941, with the aim of arresting “threats” to state security. Such crimes could include anything from “anti-Soviet agitation,” to being regarded as a “socially harmful element.” In the first ten months that this directive was on the books, 84,034 were arrested.35 The Gulag was also populated by some German prisoners of war who were declared “war criminals.” From 1943 onward many “suspect persons” from the areas liberated by the Red Army were picked up and consigned to the Gulag.

  The Soviets had no extermination camps but killed hundreds of thousands and worked as many to death. There were rumors of a gas wagon in Moscow in the 1930s already mentioned, but there were also persistent stories in the 1970s that “gas chambers were operating in one Soviet camp from 1938 onwards.” This point is played down by the highly skeptical Gábor Tamás Rittersporn. However, dismissing the allegation because it did not fit the official theory of punishment and redemption rather overlooks the incredible number of people who were murdered by quota after not even having their file read. We will never know the full story of the Gulag, not least because not a single post-Soviet trial of the perpetrators has been conducted.36

  It is true that the Communists had nothing of the nature of Auschwitz or Treblinka. Soviet camps more closely resembled the Nazi camps inside wartime Germany, where prisoners were forced to work and were killed or died in the hundreds of thousands from maltreatment, undernourishment, or disease.

  The Gulag was uneconomical and wasteful. Most historians have concluded that the labor would have been more productive if it had been free, so that, quite apart from the cruelties and deaths it inflicted, the Gulag was “more of a financial burden than a generator of income.”37

  Stalin remained a firm believer in harsh punishments and also favored grandiose projects that could be built with massive forced labor. As long as he lived, the Gulag in all its horror could not be changed. Only after his death did it become possible to begin dismantling the utterly wasteful and morally disastrous system.

  PART TEN

  FINAL STRUGGLE

  35

  FROM STALINGRAD TO BERLIN

  The front page of the New York Times on February 1, 1943, carried the story of the defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and the capture of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus. Elsewhere in the east, the newspaper reported, the German forces were under severe pressure or in retreat. The USSR, aided by the Western Allies, was growing stronger by the hour.

  As we have seen, for Hitler and the German war effort, the devastating news from the eastern front was reinforced by near-simultaneous U.S. and British success in North Africa. The Battle of the Atlantic also reached a turning point in May 1943, with so many U-boats sunk that Admiral Karl Dönitz opted to give them new missions, away from the convoy routes, where they were being destroyed faster than they could be replaced.1 These disasters showed that the inexorable decline of the Third Reich was well under way.

  The Battle of Stalingrad had a particularly magical ring to it, because the city bore the name of the Red dictator himself. The climax there marked the beginning of the German retreat from Russia, and it would become infinitely worse than anything Napoleon and his grand army ever suffered. On the Soviet home front there was elation, and the doubts gave way to relief and hope. Soviet troops who survived Stalingrad became heroes and were sprinkled among Red Army units to spur them on.

  The change in Hitler’s fortunes was reflected in the attitudes of the millions of foreign workers in Germany. The police picked up one man for saying, “In the last while we’ve had to run around in rags, but soon you’ll have to run around in rags and we’ll put on the nice clothes.” French workers in the country could hardly conceal their glee that Germany was losing.2 The Nazi faithful needed a pep talk from their führer, and he summoned Reich leaders and Party gauleiters to his headquarters on February 7, 1943. Hitler’s adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, remembered his astonishment at how easily Hitler succeeded in leaving his paladins “obviously relieved” and believing the war was still winnable.3

  Hitler mentioned the conference held on January 14-24 at Casablanca between Roosevelt and Churchill, where the Allies first demanded unconditional surrender. He said that “liberated him” from all efforts to make a separate peace. As usual he claimed that “international Jews” were the driving force in all the enemy states. For Hitler—as well as for Goebbels, who recorded the remarks—it followed that they had to “eliminate the Jews not only from the Reich but from all of Europe.”4

  He painted the alternatives facing Germany in typically apocalyptic terms: “Either we will be the master of Europe, or we will experience a complete liquidation and extermination.”5 Now was the time to mobilize the nation for the struggle ahead. Goebbels and Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production, were pleased that Hitler was finally ready to go all out. Goebbels announced the declaration of “total war” in a fire-eating speech to a packed house that was broadcast nationwide. Some citizens said it was a little late, but their general attitude was still supportive.6

  Hitler addressed the nation in a radio broadcast on January 30, 1943, the anniversary of the seizure of power. He blamed everything on the “conspiracy of international capitalism and Bolshevism,” behind which stood as always “international Jews.”7 In February he broke with the custom of an annual visit to Munich for the celebration of the Party’s founding and instead had a faithful Party comrade read a proclamation reeking of anti-Semitism. Hitler said his aim was the “destruction of the power of the Jewish world coalition.” He said the Jews in New York, London, and Moscow had made their designs clear: “We are determined to give them a no less clear answer. This struggle also will not be ended, as they think, with the extermination of Aryan humanity, but will find its end with the eradication of the Jews in Europe.” Their destruction had become his real war aim.8

  Goebbels wanted Hitler to get more involved on the home front and do walkabouts after bombings as Churchill did. Instead, the führer grew more reclusive and had to be coaxed back to Berlin to speak on the Heroes’ Memorial Day on March 21. In conversation with Goebbels the day before, he said that only brutal methods would make it possible to win in the east. He harped on his favorite themes, particularly his hatred of Bolshevism. He told Goebbels he felt like an old propagandist with their tried-and-true definition of earlier times: “Propaganda means repetition.”9

  The talk was supposed to transmit the message “the danger is broken,” but his words carried little conviction. He touched on his wartime obsessions, the Bolsheviks and the Jews, repeating his “prophecy” about the Jews—which was already well known everywhere in the country. The twist was that he now said the war would not end with the fall of Germany and its allies to Bolshevism—as the Jews allegedly hoped. Instead, those nations dominated by the Jews would be poisoned by Bolshevism and would ultimately find their end. The bombastic assertion was that the future belonged neither to the “Jewish-Bolshevik” nor to the �
�Jewish-capitalist” peoples, but to the “true community of the people” that was Germany and National Socialism.10

  Opinion researchers noted that citizens were left wondering whether the “last crisis” really had been overcome in the east, as Hitler claimed. They worried about whether the nation would be able to finish off the Soviet Union in the coming summer, but remained behind him.11 Their dream of the great eastern conquest was fading. However, that fantasy, so integral to Nazi ideology, was still intact for some people. The novelist Heinrich Böll, for example, who was anything but a hard-bitten Nazi, wrote his family from a field hospital in the USSR at the end of 1943. He yearned to return home, but added, “I still think often about the possibility of a colonial existence here in the east after a war that is won.” Evidently he shared Hitler’s dreams at least on that score.12

  Although several operations against Stalin were being planned for the future, the military situation after Stalingrad was, all factors considered, hopeless.13

  STALIN TAKES THE OFFENSIVE

  Stalin immersed himself in the details of military operations and had to be informed up to the minute. He gave tongue lashings to anyone who crossed him and brought the most fearsome warriors to tears, as he did with Zhukov. If he suspected a leader was not pushing hard enough or lacked courage, he was dismissed. That fate awaited General Ivan Konev, the commander of the western front, at the end of February 1943. He got a chance to redeem himself, however, and was fortunate he was not executed.14

  Stalin as military leader was not the genius he was painted during his lifetime, though Zhukov thought “he had a good grasp of the broad strategic issues.” Russian military historians have been harsher lately and claim that Stalin “came to strategic wisdom only through blood-spattered trial and error.” He was “utterly insensitive to the countless tragedies caused by the war,” and in his desire to inflict “the greatest possible damage on the enemy,” he gave no thought to the costs of his own troops. “The thousands and millions of human lives became for him cold, official statistics.”15