Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  In the next few days I was told by the military authorities at Uman that the total losses the Germans had suffered in the week since Konev's March 5 offensive were: over 600 tanks (250 of them in good condition), 12,000 lorries (most of them destroyed), 650 guns and fifty ammunition and supply stores. In a week the Germans had lost about 20,000 dead, but only 25,000 prisoners; they were still desperately avoiding being taken prisoner. The Russian losses also had been heavy during the breakthrough attempt, but very light since then, with the Germans on the run.

  I also remember a very revealing talk I had with an air force colonel during that week at Uman—revealing, because his attitude to the Western Allies—now in March 1944—was

  so much warmer than what one had found in the Red Army before. He talked of the way

  the air force was supplying the army, as it was advancing "towards Rumania" (the words

  "Rumania" and "Mamalyga" were on every soldier's tongue in that part of the world)

  [Mamalyga is maize porridge, the staple diet among poorer Rumanians; these were

  condescendingly referred to as mamalyzh-niki. i.e. mamalyga-eaters.] ,with food, ammunition and petrol; and then he said:

  "The German air force is much weaker now than it used to be. Very occasionally they send fifty bombers over, but usually they don't use more than twenty. There's no doubt that all this bombing of Germany has made a lot of difference to the German equipment, both in the air and on land. Our soldiers realise the importance of the Allied bombings; the British and Americans, they call them 'nashi' —that is 'our' people... A lot of the German fighters now have to operate in the west and we can do a lot of strafing of

  German troops, sometimes even without much air opposition." And he added: "Those Kittyhawks and Airocobras are damned good—not like last year's Tomahawks and

  Hurricanes—which were pretty useless. But here we mostly use Soviet planes, especially low-flying stormoviks which scare the pants off the Germans..."

  The Turbulent Town of Uman— Dostoevskian Bishop and other odd characters

  In a way, the small town of Uman was a microcosm of the whole Ukraine. Its population had dropped from 43,000 to 17,000. To live here for a week was to see something of

  nearly every aspect of Ukrainian life under the German occupation—except heavy

  industry of which there was none for many miles around. Uman was the centre of a large rural area, one of the richest in the Ukraine, noted for its wheat, sugar-beet, maize, fruit and vegetables. Like many other towns in the Ukraine, its population before the war had been about one-quarter Jewish; now you did not see a single Jewish face in the streets.

  Half the Jews had escaped to the east in 1941, but the 5,000 who had stayed—children and all—were herded one night into a big warehouse: all the windows and doors were

  boarded up and hermetically sealed, and all of them died of suffocation within a couple of days. The Ukrainians in the town did not talk much about it: they seemed to look upon it as rather a routine matter under the Germans. There were now partisans in the town, and there had been a Soviet underground during the occupation. There had also been various kinds of collaborators, and Ukrainian nationalists, and, strangely, the Red Army was still often referred to as "the Bolsheviks" or "the Reds", as though they were something extraneous to this turbulent part of the Ukraine, with its old Petlura and Makhno

  traditions.

  [Petlura, head of an ephemeral Ukrainian nationalist "Government" in 1918, and Makhno, head of a peasant anarchist movement during the Civil War, were both

  notorious for their banditry and anti-Semitic pogroms. Petlura was assassinated by a Jew in Paris in 1928.]

  But the biggest obsession was deportation. Nearly 10,000 young people from Uman had

  been deported as slave labour. Only few had escaped by joining the partisans, not strong in this part of the Ukraine.

  The day we arrived Uman presented a fantastic sight. One large building in the centre of the town was still smouldering. The streets were crammed with burned-out German

  vehicles, and were littered with thousands of papers, trodden into the mud: office records, private documents and letters, photographs, and also whole bundles of well-printed

  coloured leaflets in Ukrainian exalting the "German-Ukrainian Alliance". One said

  "Down with Bolshevism" and showed a manly hand in a green sleeve tearing down a red flag with the hammer-and-sickle; another showed a German soldier shaking hands with

  another person in an unrecognisable pearl-grey uniform. "Our alliance will give happiness to all the nations of Europe"; still another called "Oath to the Fatherland"

  showed a crowd of gallant horsemen raising their arms to heaven and swearing: "None will lay down his arms while our Ukraine is enslaved by the Bolsheviks "

  [ These leaflets were apparently part of one of the half-baked attempts to set up an anti-Russian and pro-Nazi "Ukrainian Army" along Vlasov lines. These attempts came to little, and it was not till the end of 1944, when Bandera, Melnik and other Ukrainian

  "nation-

  alists" were liberated by the Germans, that they encouraged something of an anti-Soviet guerrilla war in the Western Ukraine, which was to last till 1947. There had, of course, been isolated anti-Soviet guerrilla bands before that, some independent of the Germans. It was one such band that assassinated General Vatutin near Kiev in March 1944. At the

  end of the war, a number of SS officers took part in this Ukrainian guerrilla war against the Soviets. Bandera was released by the Germans in September 1944 and Melnik a

  month later. (See Dahin, op. cit., p. 624.)]

  Among all this rubble, in a vacant space between two houses, lay a dead German soldier

  —a young lad, of not more than eighteen, with the face of a sleeping child. But his belly had been crushed— probably by some vehicle in the mad stampede which had

  accompanied the Germans' panicky flight from Uman.

  A standing joke was one of a German general driving out of Uman on a rickety old farm tractor with a camel-like movement, one of the few vehicles able to cope with the deep mud.

  There were very few people in the streets of Uman that day; they still seemed frightened to come out after all the firing during the previous days, and there were no militia in the streets, but, instead, weird figures on foot or on horseback—men with high fur caps, with red ribbons attached. Many were wearing German army overcoats. These were partisans

  from the neighbourhood. I talked to some of them. One, a young fellow in a blood-

  stained German overcoat, told a long story of how he had been arrested and tortured by the SD; how he had then escaped to the partisans, how the Germans had then murdered

  his wife, who had stayed at Uman. He said this with an uncanny calm. "There were lots of traitors in this town," he said; "and the worst was the chief hangman of the SD, a bastard called Voropayev; but now the NKVD have got him under lock and key. We'll

  see that he gets hanged all right."

  Another of the partisans was a fat man, clean-shaven with a greasy cap on the back of his head: he might well have come straight out of a pub in Leeds or Manchester. He had

  worked at the railway depot at Uman as the chief liaison man with the partisans—"We are helping the Soviet authorities," he said, "to catch all the spies and traitors".

  *

  Major Kampov and I stayed at an improvised Russian officers' hostel, and saw a

  wonderful variety of people at Uman during that week. The house had been inhabited by German officers until a few days before, and a good search had been made for mines and booby-traps; one had been found inside the tinny old piano; if anyone had struck one of the keys, it would have popped off.

  The next day there were not only many soldiers, but also rather more civilians than before in the streets of Uman, with its small, nondescript, mostly ex-Jewish houses in the centre, and its more pleasant Ukrainian thatched cottages with gardens on the outskirts. I mixed wit
h a large crowd of civilians who had come to the main square for the military funeral of a Russian tank-crew. Almost the sole subject of conversation was deportation to

  Germany. Practically all the young people in the town had been deported. The technique of deportation varied from time to time; in some places, the Germans had started by

  offering tempting labour contracts; once a few dozen people had fallen for the offer, the rest were mobilised compulsorily. But there were ways of dodging deportation—if one

  was lucky and wealthy enough to be able to bribe a German doctor or a German official.

  There was much corruption among the Germans. Self-mutilation was also fairly

  commonly practised to avoid deportation.

  I also heard stories of Russian Cossacks serving under the Germans. They were a bad lot.

  A few days before the Germans evacuated Uman, some of these Cossacks—so the story

  went—were let loose, and looted part of the town, and raped several girls; they were said to have been wearing Red Army uniforms and the Germans said they were a Russian

  advance unit. One theory was that the Germans wanted the population to be terrorised at the thought of the Russians' coming, and to flee to the west.

  The Gestapo and SD had been very active in Uman. The Jews had all been murdered; but the Gestapo had also been active among non-Jewish civilians; later, I went to see the field outside the prison, and here were the fresh bodies of some seventy or eighty civilians whom the Germans had shot before leaving Uman. Among them were a lot of ordinary

  peasants and peasant women, suspected of, and imprisoned for, "partisan" activity; among the dead bodies I also saw a little girl of six, still with a cheap little ring on her finger. She must have been shot so that she wouldn't tell. I also saw the Gestapo H.Q.

  with hideous instruments—such as a hard-wood truncheon with which prisoners' hands

  were smashed during interrogation.

  We spent one evening at the Town Soviet. What a strange assembly of people were round the supper table! Mayor—i.e. Chairman of the City Soviet—Zakharov, a small palefaced man, with dark hair brushed back, had been one of the chief partisan leaders of the

  Ukraine. He had been wounded three times; here also was the former Bishop of

  Taganrog; and a doctor, a typical old-time intellectual, with a little beard and glasses, looking rather like Chekhov; and an elderly woman teacher, and a stout clean-shaven

  man in a semi-military tunic, who looked a typical Party man, but who declared himself to be a banker. "A banker!" I said, "how do you mean?" Yes, he was a banker all right; he was the head of the Moldavian branch of the Soviet State Bank; and now that the Red

  Army was beyond the Bug and would soon be in Bessarabia, he was expecting soon to

  take up his former duties again.

  The Mayor was not an Ukrainian, but a Russian. He had been appointed Mayor by the

  military—"subject to the population's subsequent approval." It made me wonder whether the Army did not prefer to see real Russians in responsible administrative jobs in large Ukrainian towns, immediately they recaptured them, rather than Ukrainians—who might

  be more tolerant of the frailties of Ukrainian human nature. Was it a coincidence that in Uman, and before that in Kharkov, and after that, in Odessa., the Mayor should have been a Russian? Yet, in the purely Russian town of Voronezh, the Mayor was an Ukrainian.

  In the Ukraine, with only small forests, the Mayor said, the partisans could operate only in small groups; the largest of the five groups he had organised were two of 200 to 300

  men each, operating in the Vinnitsa forests. They had their wireless receiving sets, and they multigraphed leaflets with Soviet war news for distribution in the towns and

  villages. They were short of arms, and as a general rule they accepted no one without arms; volunteers were told to join the Ukrainian police force, obtain as many arms and as much ammunition as possible, and then come back. The Vinnitsa partisans had had many bloody battles with both German punitive expeditions and Cossacks, and, compared with Belorussia and other more wooded parts of the country, their casualties were very heavy.

  Working round Uman was particularly difficult, because there were hardly any forests around here. Nevertheless, the five units had succeeded in derailing forty-three trains with military equipment in 1943 alone, and had other daring exploits to their credit.

  Being wounded in July 1941, Zakharov said, he had been unable to follow the Red Army, and had been taken prisoner by the Germans. But he escaped and came to Uman, which

  was already under German occupation; he had arrived in October 1941, and, since then, he had been "working for the good of his country." In 1942 he was arrested by the Gestapo and savagely beaten and injured in the spine; "so I know how the Gestapo question people". He was later released, and disappeared for a while, appearing afterwards at Vinnitsa, complete with a beard and priestly robes. For long intervals he would vanish to the woods where the partisans knew him as "Uncle Mitya".

  "It was a hard and grim life", he said, "they were merciless and so were we. And we shall be merciless with the traitors now." He spoke in a soft, rather tired voice. "It's no use crying in wartime," he remarked. "Though there were not many of us, we still managed to worry the Germans a lot; in the smaller towns and the villages round Vinnitsa, we would put up notices at night saying: 'You are the bosses from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.; we are the bosses from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and you are forbidden to come out of your houses.' And, by heaven, they usually obeyed the order; and when they didn't they were often sorry..."

  As for life in the town of Uman during the occupation it was, on a small scale, much what I had already seen in Kharkov—the virtual abolition of schools, and a great deterioration in the health services; the number of clinics was cut down by three-quarters. Most of the small workshops had disappeared with the killing of the Jews. The one important industry of the town, the large sugar refinery, had been destroyed by the Germans. It was urgent to restore it. In one respect though, it was very different from Kharkov; in this rich

  agricultural area, there was always sufficient food to keep people more or less alive.

  I asked Zakharov about the agricultural policy and administration.

  [ The best and most detailed account we have on the German agricultural policy in the Ukraine will be found in Alexander Dallin's German Rule in Russia. This shows that the underlying policy was exploitation pure and simple, and that the attempt to depart from the kolkhoz system and make other concessions to the peasants so that they should produce more were either very half-hearted or were sabotaged by Untermensch maniacs like Erich Koch, the German overlord of the Ukraine. What with future plans for

  colonising the Ukraine with Germans, the Ukrainian peasants' distrust of the Germans was complete.]

  On the whole, the Germans considered this part of the Ukraine very much their granary, and they had done all they could to keep agriculture going. They had not split up the farms; or rather, for propaganda purposes, they had, in some parts, distributed the land among the peasants on one collective farm in a hundred, with the implication that this would also be done on the other farms sooner or later. They had made various other

  promises, but no one trusted them, and meantime they stuck to the kolkhoz organisation as being the easiest to handle. The cultivation in the main had not been as thorough as before the war, because there weren't enough tractors, even with those the Germans had imported; the peasants often had to plough the fields with horses and even cows; but two things had assured a good sowing of winter wheat: the rubber truncheon of the German officials, and much more so, the solid belief that the Russians, and not the Germans, would reap the harvest in 1944... Revolting conditions existed in many villages. The starosta was appointed by the Germans—he might have been a good man, or a bad man, or simply a weak man; but above him there was always an SS chief. "There's one village I know," said Zakharov, "and it's not the only one
of its kind—where the SS man would order the starosta to supply him with girls every night, including young girls of thirteen or fourteen."

  "Here at Uman we had three Gebietskommissars in succession: the Gebietskommissar was the Chief for the civilian population. He was assisted by a number of SS officers.

  Then there was the Military Kommandatur; then there was the agricultural chief for the area, the Landwirtschaftsführer, a brute called Botke, who on his day off would go to the prison to watch, and take part in, the examination and torture of prisoners; he was a real sadist. The Burgomaster of Uman was a Volksdeutscher [ German-speaking and of German descent, though not of German nationality.] called Gensch, and he had an

  Ukrainian assistant called Kwiatkiwski. The police were composed of the Gestapo, the S.D., and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force. Into this they simply mobilised people; some of the Ukrainian police immediately escaped and joined the partisans, with the

  firearms they had received, or had managed to take. The Ukrainian policemen who have stayed behind—though the Germans tried to get most of them away, whether they wanted to or not—will be individually examined. Some of them undoubtedly worked for their

  country, though in German service; but those who were traitors shall be treated

  accordingly".

  "There seems to have been a lot of contradictory orders as regards Right Bank Ukraine,"

  the Mayor said. "I know of three orders: the first was 'don't destroy'—it came from Hitler himself at a time when the Germans were still confident they would recover all the