Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  "Gestapo" Müller, a division chief of the Central Board of Reich Security (RSHA). The latter was "responsible for the measures regarding the treatment of Russian war prisoners," i.e. executions.

  [GMWC, vol. I, pp. 278 ff]

  Lahousen: The purpose of the conference was to examine the orders received on the treatment of these prisoners... The substance of these orders dealt with two groups of measures. First was the killing of Russian commissars. Second was the killing of those elements who, according to the special segregation by the SD, could be

  identified as Bolshevists or as active representatives of the Bolshevist attitude to life... General Reinecke explained that the war between Germany and Russia was

  unlike any other war. The Red Army soldier... was not a soldier in the ordinary

  sense, but an ideological enemy. An enemy to the death of National-Socialism, and he had to be treated accordingly.

  Lahousen then said that Reinecke, a good Nazi, was not satisfied with the "ice age"

  mentality of some of the officer corps. On behalf of Canaris he (Lahousen) protested against these executions, and particularly against their taking place publicly. They had a terrible and devastating effect on the morale and discipline of the German troops.

  Moreover, this kind of thing could only increase the Russians' resistance to the utmost.

  Müller rejected my arguments. The sole concession he made was that the

  executions ... should not take place in the sight of the troops, but in a secret place...

  The SD Einsatzkommandos were in charge of singling out persons in camps and in p.o.w. assembly centres, and of carrying out the executions... The sorting out was done in the most arbitrary way: Jewish or Jewish-looking or other racially-inferior types were picked for execution, or else they were picked according to their

  "intelligence".

  Reinecke held that the Russians were different from others, and should be treated differently from Western p.o.w.'s. The camp guards should have whips, and should

  have the right to resort to firearms if necessary.

  Lahousen then said:

  The greater number of prisoners remained in the theatre of operations, without

  proper care... Many of them died on the bare ground. Epidemics broke out and

  cannibalism manifested itself.

  In the circumstances, he said, Hitler ordered that no Russian war prisoners were to be brought to Germany.

  Asked to what extent the Wehrmacht was responsible for the ill-treatment of Russian war prisoners, Lahousen said:

  The Wehrmacht was involved in all matters which referred to the war prisoners,

  except the executions, which were carried out by the commandos of the SD and the

  RSHA. The victims were selected before the rest were taken to Army camps.

  Except that some generals at Nuremberg tried to argue that it was difficult unexpectedly to have to feed so many p.o.w.'s, there is nothing to show that the Army did anything to oppose the policy of extermination of the Russian war prisoners, at least during the first twelve or eighteen months of the war.

  More than that: some of these "gentlemanly" German generals were consciously starving the Russian war prisoners. At the Nuremberg Trial, apart from the famous Reichenau

  order issued at the beginning of the Russian campaign, there was also an order from

  Field-Marshal von Manstein, containing the following:

  The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated... The German soldier comes as

  the bearer of a racial concept. [He] must appreciate the necessity for the harsh

  punishment of Jewry... The food situation at home makes it essential that the troops should be fed off the land, and that the largest possible stocks should be placed at the disposal of the homeland. In enemy cities, a large part of the population will have

  to go hungry. Nothing, out of a misguided sense of humanity, may be given to

  prisoners-of-war or to the population, unless they are in the service of the German Wehrmacht.

  [ TGMWC, vol. 21, p. 72. Emphasis added]

  It is these kind of gentlemanly orders, not from Himmler, or Hitler, but also from the generals which are responsible for the starving to death of probably over two million war prisoners during the first year of the war.

  Although, in the end, Manstein had to admit at Nuremberg that he had signed the order, he began by saying that it had "escaped his memory entirely ".

  [Ibid., p. 73.]

  No doubt much else had escaped his—and his fellow-generals'—memory "entirely", including the Army's frequent and very close co-operation with the Einsatzkommandos and other professional killers.

  It was not till well into 1942 that the surviving Russian war prisoners began to be looked upon as a source of slave labour. Thus, Field-Marshal Milch thought it "very amusing"

  that 30,000 Russians should have to man the German anti-aircraft guns against British and American planes.

  It was towards the end of 1942, also, that the Germans started a form of blackmail against the surviving Russian war-prisoners: either go into the Vlasov Army or starve.

  But there were many who would not serve Vlasov; and many of these, including high-

  ranking Soviet officers, were to be found towards the end of the war at Dachau and

  Mauthausen, alive or dead—mostly dead. It was also Russian prisoners who, more than

  any other nationality, were given the privilege of Aktion Kugel.

  This was one of the numerous methods of dealing with "undesirables". A "K" (i.e.

  Kugel) prisoner was taken at Mauthausen to the "bathroom". This bathroom in the cellars of the prison building near the crematorium was specially designed for both shooting and gassing. The shooting took place by means of a measuring apparatus,

  the prisoners being backed towards a metrical measure with an automatic

  contraption releasing a bullet in the neck as soon as the moving plank determining his height touched the top of his head. If the transport consisted of too many Kugel

  prisoners, no time was wasted on measurements and they were exterminated by gas

  laid on in the "bathroom" instead of water.

  [TGMWC, vol. 3, p. 207.]

  Russian prisoners were also used for freezing experiments and a variety of other

  entertainments devised by Himmler and some of the "scientists" of the Third Reich.

  The whole story of the Russian war-prisoners—second only, in the number of people

  involved, to that of the Jews—is so horrible that it is almost difficult to believe. The Russians themselves have never quoted any clear figures on the number of Soviet

  soldiers captured by the Germans; but when one considers that the total loss in human life has been put at twenty millions, the loss of some three or four million men who died in German captivity does not sound improbable. The following table compiled by

  Alexander Dallin on the strength of an OKW document for May 1944 is probably quite

  correct:

  In OKH custody in occupied Soviet

  In OKW custody in Germany and

  territory

  Total number of captured

  Of these, transferred from OKH to OKW area

  3,110,000

  Remaining under OKH control

  2,050,000

  Recorded deaths in p.o.w. camps and

  845,000

  1,136,000

  compounds

  Released to worker's or military status

  535,000

  Escapes

  Exterminations

  495,000

  Not accounted for

  Death and disappearance in transit

  Surviving as p.o.w.'s

  175,000

  This would mean that, except for the 800,000 "released" and the one million still alive, practically all the rest must be dead, i.e. over three millions.

  On the strength of other German sources, Dallin puts the figure by
the end of the war even higher. The total of Soviet war prisoners is put at 5,754,000, of whom 3,335,000

  were captured in 1941, 1,653,000 in 1942, 565,000 in 1943, 147,000 in 1944 and 34,000

  in 1945. These last four, and especially last three figures seem rather less probable.

  Where, in 1943, would the Germans have captured over half-a-million prisoners, not to mention the figures for 1944, let alone 1945?

  *

  What added to the tragedy of the Russian war prisoners was also that those who had

  joined the Vlasov army—mostly simply to save themselves from a slow death by

  starvation—were to be broken in mind and spirit even while the war was still in progress.

  Many became merely cynics and bandits, and when they returned to Russia, they were

  treated as criminals or near-criminals. But even the homecoming of those who had never joined Vlasov was far from always being an occasion for rejoicing. As Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in his Memoirs—

  In March 1945 my daughter Irina went to Odessa on behalf of the Red Star. British, French, Belgian war prisoners liberated by the Red Army were being repatriated from

  there. There she also saw a troop transport arriving from Marseilles with our own war prisoners on board, among them some who had escaped from German camps and some

  who had fought together with the French maquis. Irina told me that they were met like criminals, that they were isolated, that there was much talk of their being sent to

  camps.. ."

  [ Novyi Mir, 1963, No. 3, p. 138.]

  But that is a different story. Here we are concerned with German crimes in the Soviet Union. In addition to the innumerable German crimes against persons, there were also the German crimes against Soviet private and public property: the Germans had laid waste vast areas; in three years they had destroyed hundreds of towns and thousands of villages.

  If some villages and some cities like Kharkov, Odessa or Kiev were only partially, but not completely destroyed, it was only because their retreating armies had not had enough time to complete the work of destruction. In other cities, like Rostov, Voronezh or

  Sebastopol (as well as Warsaw)—to mention only a few of those I have seen myself—the destruction was very nearly 100 per cent.

  Chapter XI THE PARTISANS IN THE SOVIET-GERMAN WAR

  In the summer of 1942 they used to sell in Moscow a pocket-size book of 430 pages

  called The Partisan's Guide. 50,000 copies, it said, had been printed. It purported to deal with all the problems besetting a Partisan's life. Here were precise instructions, often with explanatory drawings, on the chief "tactical rules of partisan warfare"; on the use of firearms captured from the enemy; on the destruction of enemy tanks and planes; on the best ways of wrecking enemy troop-trains and motor transport, of killing enemy

  motorcyclists by stretching a wire across a road; on reconnaissance work; on camping and camouflage. An interesting, and, in a way, highly pathetic chapter was on

  "emergencies"—for instance on the kind of moss and bark that can be eaten when there is nothing else to eat. There was also advice on first-aid, hand-to-hand fighting, and on

  "how to live in the snow".

  The appendix consisted of a Russian-German phrase book: "Halt! Waffen hinlegen!"

  "Ergieb dich!" "Raus aus dem Wagen!" "Bei Fluchtversuch wird geschossen!"

  And then: "Sie lügen!" "Wo befinden sich deutsche Truppen?" "Wo noch?" "Wo sind Minen gelegt?"

  ["Halt! Lay down your arms!" "Surrender!" "Get out of the car!" "Anyone who tries to escape will be shot." "You are lying." " Where are the German troops?" "Where else?"

  "Where are the mines laid? "]

  The superficial impression the book made on the uninitiated reader was that the Russian Partisan was a sort of glorified boy-scout, and that although it must be difficult to "live in the snow" and not very satisfactory to eat moss and bark in emergencies, the Partisan's life was a wonderful life all the same.

  Partisan (i.e. guerrilla) warfare in German-occupied territory held an important place in both government propaganda and actual military planning almost from the beginning of the war in 1941. Stalin, in his famous broadcast of July 3, 1941, called for a vast partisan movement in the enemy rear, and on July 18 the Central Committee of the CPSU issued a decree (postanovleniye) on "The Organisation of the Struggle in the Enemy Rear" which explained that it was essential "to create intolerable conditions for the invaders, to disorganise their communications, transport", etc., and calling on "Soviet clandestine organisations" in occupied territories to exert their utmost energies to that end. In popular propaganda much was made of historic precedents—the peasant bands in 1812 who

  harassed Napoleon's Grande Armée, and the numerous Soviet guerrilla bands who played so important a role in the Civil War-in Siberia, the Ukraine, and so on. A certain romantic halo was made to surround the partisan leader and his men, and in the grim summer and autumn of 1941 press, radio, theatre and cinema tried (rather feebly) to cheer up Soviet citizens with stories of more or less unbelievable partisan exploits in Belorussia and other occupied territories. In December 1941, at the height of the Battle of Moscow, Zoya

  Kosmodemianskaya, who became a partizanka behind the enemy lines and was publicly hanged by the Germans in the village of Petrishchevo near Moscow, was built up into a national heroine and a symbol. But Zoya, like many others, had been sent behind the

  enemy lines for some immediate "diversionist" purpose, and so was not typical of the proverbial partisan who, under German occupation, spontaneously rose on the spot against the oppressors of his country.

  Historically, the Russian partisan movement of 1941-4 is one of the most complicated and least thoroughly explored aspects of the Soviet-German war. To a large extent it is not only unexplored, but will remain, like the resistance movements in Yugoslavia,

  France and other countries, also largely unexplorable for the simple reason that all the participants of many partisan operations died, and there is nobody left to tell the story.

  Much misinterpretation also arose from the over-glamourisation and over-magnification of the partisan movement by Soviet propaganda during the early stages of the war. This exaggerated interpretation has its German counterpart: according to the current German version, partly supported by certain Americans, there was no partisan movement in the Soviet Union at first, since both in Belorussia and the Ukraine the population was

  thoroughly well-disposed towards the Germans, and it was only afterwards, because of German "mistakes", that an anti-German partisan movement developed at all.

  This is, of course, also a gross over-simplification. The truth is that in the grim months of 1941, following the invasion, everything in the vast newly-occupied territories was in a state of flux and chaos, and very little, if anything, had been done to organise a partisan movement in these parts of the country in advance. In Soviet jargon, no "material base"

  had been laid for it—no secret arms dumps, food stores, medical stores, etc., which

  would have constituted such a base.

  There were, especially in Belorussia, a considerable number of Russian officers and

  soldiers who had been originally encircled by the Germans, and were then hiding in the woods, still hoping to find their way to the Russian Front, living as far as possible on the help of the local peasantry, and finally forming themselves into partisan bands.

  The woods were also a place of escape for certain party and Soviet officials in

  Belorussian cities, for whom it was difficult to conceal their identity, for railwaymen and others who, having been caught by the Germans doing sabotage (or being suspected of

  such sabotage) had little alternative to "joining the partisans". But, for a long time, all this was sporadic and unorganised, and the Soviet authorities in Moscow, though liking to talk about the partisans and the role they were playing in the enemy rear, had much more immediate problems on their hands between the time of
the Invasion and the Battle of Moscow.

  In 1941, the partisans could wait. They required a considerable economic and

  organisational effort on the part of Moscow if they were to become effective at all.

  And although, in 1942, the partisan movement in the Ukraine, in the Leningrad province, in Belorussia, as well as in certain Russian areas like Smolensk and Briansk, began to be taken much more seriously than before, there is still little doubt that in the Black Summer of 1942 the partisans were again a long way down the Soviet party and military

  authorities' list of priorities.

  This is not to say that there was not a partisan movement of some importance in 1942, but it had not yet become the broad mass movement into which it was to develop in 1943.

  The contrast was, indeed, amazing, as many partisans have since written, between 1941, when they had nothing except some rifles and a few hand grenades, and 1943, when they had mortars and even some artillery. The lack of arms, much more than any goodwill

  towards the Germans, explains why there was no major partisan movement in 1941.

  Present-day Soviet historians distinguish between the more-or-less sporadic and still largely unorganised partisan movement in 1941-2 and the (mostly) highly-organised

  partisan movement of 1943.

  Thus, in his well-known history of the war, B. S. Telpukhovsky makes no big claims for the partisans in 1941:

  Already at the end of July 1941 there were 200 partisan detachments or groups in

  the Leningrad province. In September 1941 there were fifty-four such partisan

  detachments in the Orel province and thirty-two in the Kursk province.

  But he does not specify how large these "groups" and "detachments" were; they often consisted of only a few dozen men, or even fewer. He then says: "During the first period of the war the partisans chiefly destroyed small enemy garrisons, regimental

  headquarters, motorised columns, etc.", which suggests that their main activity was in the nature of smash-and-grab raids.

  True, during the Battle of Moscow, and often as a result of substantial units having been sent behind the enemy lines, partisan activity reached bigger proportions; thus, with 10,000 partisans operating in the enemy rear in the Moscow, Tula and Kalinin provinces, the attacks on German trains and motorised columns assumed a certain immediate