The doctor, who had been listening to the old priest, was becoming more and more
irritated. "If they were all that happy," he said, "how was it that thousands of them died of starvation? Wasn't it a case of allowing a few prisoners, specially picked ones, to go to your Easter service? Just for effect. And your dates are all wrong. I can swear to it that no prisoners were allowed to go to church in 1942. It was only afterwards, after Stalingrad that the Germans started on all those tricks to get the surviving war prisoners to join the Vlasov Army."
The priest had, of course, been taken in by the Germans, especially by the fact that they were opening churches that had been closed for fifteen years or more. But what was the purpose of this German church policy amongst people whom they were determined to
starve out anyway? Was it not a case of trying to create as much mental confusion as possible among the Russians? The curious thing was that the churches did become
centres of "Russianism", despite the clear anti-Soviet stand taken—at least at first—by some of the priests, and despite the Germans' expectation that the churches would be centres of anti-Soviet propaganda.
[Some Nazi officials had serious suspicions from the start about the churches exercising an undesirable "nationalist" influence on the Untermenschen. On the other hand, certain German generals, e.g. Guderian, later spoke selfrighteously of the satisfaction they had in allowing the Russians in occupied towns to open their churches. Guderian is, however, careful not to say a word about the death from starvation that thousands of war prisoners and also thousands of civilians suffered in towns like Orel which, in 1941-2, were under the direct jurisdiction of his (Guderian's) own troops.]
Some other strange characters had been active in Orel during the two years of the
German occupation. The schools (except a small number of elementary schools and a
school for juvenile spies—like the one I had already heard of in Kharkov) were closed.
The bitterness among adolescents, who had been pampered under the Soviets, was
particularly acute. The teachers—even of the schools that had been closed—were ordered to attend the lectures of an individual who spoke Russian with a queer accent, and called himself Oktan. His lectures were called a "course in pedagogical re-education". Oktan also edited a Russian-language paper in Orel called Rech, in which the gist of his
"lectures" was published. Its subjects were "The Russian is uncreative by nature and is destined to obey orders"; "The revision of the Russian historical past"; "What an Aryan must be like". In the paper he preached a "total revaluation of cultural values"; Tolstoy was declared to be a worthless writer; Russian music was deprecated, and Wagner
declared the greatest musical genius of all time. Needless to say, not all teachers were
"invited" to Oktan's lectures; many had been arrested, while others had fled.
The general impression was that in the victorious days of 1941-2, the Germans had a
number of nondescript Russian adventurers and hangers-on who were preparing to play
some still undefined part in the Germanisation of a purely-Russian area like Orel.
There were also other lunatic happenings. There were some people of German descent
who had lived at Orel for generations. They were sent to Lodz to have blood-tests taken to see if they were real Aryans.
Another memorable impression of Orel was the condition of the railways. I had never
seen such thorough destruction before. In the Stalingrad area, only six months before, the destruction was still primitive, and could be easily repaired. But here, in the Orel area, the Germans had used a special engine which, as it went along, destroyed both rails and
sleepers. To use any railways in these newly-liberated territories, the Russians had to rebuild them practically from scratch.
On September 1 I also went to Kharkov, which the Russians had recaptured in their
sweep towards the Dnieper. This was a hideous experience; for, as we travelled at night in a number of jeeps from Valuiki to Kharkov, one of them struck a mine and three of our travelling-companions were killed—Kozhemiako and Vasev of the Foreign Office press
department, and a young captain, Volkov, whom I had already met at Stalingrad. Only
the army driver, though slightly injured and almost insane with shock, survived.
Kozhemiako had had both legs blown off and died within an hour without regaining
consciousness.
[Vasev was a well-meaning but dull little man, but Kozhemiako, an exceptionally
handsome young Leningrad man, had, despite a basic hardness of the "Stalinite" official, a charming manner and a great sense of humour. He spoke perfect English, though he had never been abroad. Had he lived he would almost certainly have rapidly climbed to the top of the diplomatic ladder.]
At dawn, after the other two bodies had been found—one of them had been hurled fifteen yards off the road—we continued our grim journey. It was then that we crossed the
fearfully devastated country north of Belgorod where some of the fiercest fighting in the Battle of Kursk had taken place in July. "Not a live spot", as the Russians say, was to be seen for miles around, and the air was filled with the stench of half-buried corpses.
Belgorod had suffered less from shelling than one would have expected, and there were many people around. The rich farm country between Belgorod and Kharkov was,
however, cultivated only to the extent of about forty per cent—which was different from the Western Ukraine. But in 1943 this area was already very near the front line, and the Germans didn't bother.
Kharkov had suffered some additional damage since I was last there in February, but, apart from the massacre of 200 or 300 Russian wounded in a hospital by SS-men when
they recaptured Kharkov in March, the Germans had behaved with greater restraint than during the first occupation. They were nervous, and what shootings were done were done in secret—no more public executions. But people were still rounded up in the street and sent to Germany. From May onwards, the German manner had softened considerably,
and the Ukrainian papers published on May 2 an official Order on the better treatment of Russian war prisoners; here too, it was part of the policy of getting them to join the Vlasov Army.
[There is an account of Vlasov himself in the Memoirs of Ilya Ehrenburg (Novyi Mir, January 1963) who met him in the spring of 1942, shortly before he was taken prisoner by the Germans. Vlasov was a man of boundless personal ambition and one of Stalin's
favourite generals. He was rapidly rising to the top of the Red Army hierarchy, when the Germans captured him. His dazzling military career in Russia was at an end and
Ehrenburg believes that Vlasov was sufficiently ambitious and cynical to see a great future for himself only in the event of a German victory. The Germans formed an Army, which he commanded, of "volunteers" from among the Soviet soldiers they had captured.
It is certain that a high proportion of these were virtually conscripted by the "join or starve technique". After the war, Vlasov was captured by the Americans, handed over to the Russians and hanged. Many Vlasovites remained in Western Europe, but those who
were handed over to the Russians or caught by them were in most cases sent to camps
and not amnestied until after Stalin's death. A number of special studies of the
"Vlasovites" have been written in the USA, notably Soviet Opposition to Stalin by George Fischer (Harvard U.P., 1952) and several chapters in German Rule in Russia by Alexander Dallin (London, 1957).]
During the April-to-June lull the Ukrainian papers under German control spoke high-
mindedly of "Two Great Nations Preparing". Some German soldiers were beginning to speak with regret of Germans and Russians bleeding each other white for the ultimate benefit of the British and Americans. However, during the first three days of the Battle of Kursk, the German-run papers sounded triumphant; but their tone soon changed.
GERMAN CRIMES IN THE SOVIET UNION
Orel was the scene of numerous German crimes, and the wooded Orel and Briansk areas
were notorious for their Partisan activity. It therefore seems timely and appropriate at this point to deal briefly with these two aspects of the war in Russia: (a) German crimes and (b) the Partisans.
In a book on the Soviet-German war of 1941-5 the crimes and atrocities that the Germans committed in the vast areas they occupied between 1941 and 1944 should, on the face of it, hold a very important place. But if one dealt with them in great detail the book would be in danger of assuming altogether impossible proportions. The subject is, indeed, vast.
At the Nuremberg Trial, in particular, selected crimes and atrocities were discussed rather repetitively, but by no means exhaustively; and even these "selected" crimes committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union occupy a large proportion of the twenty-two volumes of the trial record. There can be no question of trying to summarise here the findings of the Nuremberg Trial even briefly—let alone all the other trials of war criminals. If the main aspects of German misdeeds are enumerated here, it is, above all, as background to the numerous examples cited in the course of the narrative of German behaviour in
Russia—and in Poland, for that matter. Insofar as these crimes can be classified at all, we find that, at Nuremberg, they fell roughly into the following categories:
(1) There was the general Untermensch "philosophy" which underlay the German attitude to the Russians, a "philosophy" illustrated by Field-Marshal von Reichenau's instructions for the Army's conduct in 1941 on Russian territory, or by Himmler 's
famous Poznan speech in which he said, "I am not interested in the slightest if 10,000
Russian females die of exhaustion digging an anti-tank ditch for us, provided the ditch is dug". Or else, there are the "realistic" utterances by Hitler, Goering and others to the effect that for all Germany cares, thirty million Russians may die of starvation in a very short time, and that it is not the business of the Germans to feed either the civilian population or the war prisoners. Millions of war prisoners and probably millions of
civilians died as a result of this policy, especially in the first two years of the war.
Although some Nazis like Rosenberg drew a distinction between the Russians—who
were the arch-enemy—and the Ukrainians and other nationalities—who were to become
some sort of protégés of the Reich—men like Erich Koch, the Reich Commissioner for
the Ukraine, had no use whatsoever for any such fine distinctions, and his administration of the Ukraine was dictated by the usual Nazi Untermensch approach.
(2) There were special orders, such as the "Commissar Order" under which commissars (or, in practice, any recognisable communist, Jew or other suspect, for that matter) were not to be treated as war prisoners, but simply shot. Several generals tried after the war to explain that this order was largely "theoretical", since it was not applied by the German Army. This is a gross overstatement, or a quibble, since the "commissars" were, as a rule, taken over by Himmler's SD before the other prisoners were sent to camps under Army
jurisdiction. Another order, called "Kugel" (i.e. Bullet), which was rigorously applied to the Russians, provided for the shooting of any war prisoners who had attempted to
escape, or were suspected of any kind of clandestine activity in camps.
(3) There was the deportation to Germany of nearly three million Russians, Belorussians and especially Ukrainians as slave labour. The treatment of these was much worse than that of the forced labour from most other countries.
(4) There were the indiscriminate shooting of hostages and "suspects" in occupied territories, people who might in any way be connected with the partisan movement or the Soviet underground; particularly in Russia and Belorussia numerous villages were not only burned down, but their inhabitants, including women and children, simply
exterminated. As has often been observed, there was, in the Soviet Union, not one Oradour, or one Lidice, but hundreds. In every Soviet town and city there were Gestapo headquarters, where various atrocities and tortures took place, and everywhere there were crowded prisons; before the Germans left the prisoners were usually indiscriminately murdered.
(5) There was the specific German practice of exterminating the entire Jewish
population; these massacres were chiefly the work of special Einsatzkommandos under Himmler's authority, and practically all the generals claimed after the war "never to have heard" of these massacres, though they often took place under their very noses. The massacres of Jews were carried out on a vast scale; thus, at Babyi Yar, near Kiev, about 100,000 Jews—men, women and children—were massacred, not to mention countless
other cities, all the way from Krasnodar in the south, with its gas wagon which killed 7,000 people, or Kerch in the Crimea (where the Russians first discovered hundreds of bodies of both Jews and war prisoners) to Tallinn, in Estonia, in the north. To take the example of Tallinn, which I saw myself: there, in a place nearby called Klooga, I saw the charred remains of some 2,000 Jews, brought from Vilno and other places, who had been shot and then burned on great bonfires they themselves had been ordered to build and light. With the Red Army approaching, a small number of Jews had escaped this SD
massacre, and were there to tell the full story. I particularly remember the story told by one of the survivors: a "kindly" SD man, trying to comfort a weeping child, said to it:
"Aber Kleiner, weine doch nicht; bald kommt der Tod."
["My little one, don't cry like this; death will soon come". A very full and poignant account of this harrowing Klooga affair was given by John Hersey in Life Magazine in October 1944.]
And this is without mentioning the vast extermination camps like Auschwitz, Maidanek and many other where Jews (including many Russian Jews) were gassed, shot and
otherwise killed by the million.
[According to the unspeakable Ohlendorf, one of the Einsatzkommando leaders in Russia, giving evidence at Nuremberg, gas wagons had largely to be discontinued, since they
caused "spiritual shock" to the killers—not because they were full of corpses, but because the corpses were mixed up with a lot of excrement, produced by the victims in their death agony. This particular commando had murdered 90,000 people in a little over a year.]
(6) Next to the Jews in Europe, six millions of whom perished at the hands of the
Germans (and it took rather more than a handful of "bad" Germans to carry out all this
"work"), the biggest single German crime was undoubtedly the extermination by hunger, exposure and in other ways of perhaps as many as three million Russian war prisoners.
Many were shot, many died in concentration camps during the later stages of the war
(especially at Mauthausen), some were even used for vivisectionist and other "scientific"
experiments. The evidence is so vast and overwhelming that one can only pick at some of it at random.
Thus, at the beginning of 1942, Rosenberg, writing to Keitel, thought it scandalous that out of the 3,600,000 Russian prisoners, only a few hundred thousand were still fit for work, so appalling were the conditions in which they had been kept. Goering about the same time complained to Ciano of the cannibalism among Russian war prisoners, adding, as a great joke, that it was now going a bit far: they had even eaten a German sentry!
Hitler's policy during the pre-Stalingrad period was, clearly, to demonstrate the
Untermensch nature of the Russians, precisely by reducing them to cannibalism.
We have echoes of this contempt for the "subhuman" Russian war prisoners even in recent German writing, e.g. in that odious little novel, The Road to Stalingrad by Benno Zieser:
[Ballantine Books, New York, 1957, pp. 29-32.]
The Ruskies were completely debilitated. They could hardly keep on their feet, let alone perform the physical eff
ort required of them... Among them were mere kids,
as well as bearded old men who could have been their grandfathers. Without
exception, they all begged for a scrap of food or a cigarette. They whined and
grovelled before us... These were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human...
And then—
When we [threw them a dead dog] there followed a spectacle that could make a man
puke. Yelling like mad, the Russians would fall on the animal and tear it to pieces with their bare hands... The intestines they'd stuff in their pockets—a sort of iron ration.
And so on. Almost too nauseating to quote. And we know from countless other pieces of evidence that this is precisely the kind of thing that happened to hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of Russian war prisoners, especially before Stalingrad.
Thus, a Hungarian tank officer wrote soon after the war:
We were stationed at Rovno. I woke up one morning and heard thousands of dogs
howling in the distance... I called my orderly and said: "Sandor, what is all this moaning and howling?" "Not far from here," he said, "there's a huge mass of Russian prisoners in the open air. There must be 80,000 of them. They're moaning
because they are starving."
I went to have a look. Behind wire there were tens of thousands of Russian
prisoners. Many were on the point of expiring. Few could stand on their feet. Their faces were dried up and their eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Hundreds were dying every day, and those who had any strength left dumped them in a vast pit.
[Dr Sulyok. Deux nuits sans jour (Two Nights Without Day), p. 88 (Zurich, 1948).]
Apart from the deliberate starving of Russian war prisoners, there were also the
massacres. Some significant evidence on this score was produced at Nuremberg, for
instance by Erich Lahousen, of Admiral Canaris's Abwehr. He spoke, in particular, of two specially charming characters with whom he had conferred at the beginning of the war in Russia. One was General Reinecke, known as "der kleine Keitel"; he was Chief of the General Army Office belonging to the OKW; the other was Obergruppenführer
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