Im Hause der Nationalsozialisten, Lublin
[Meeting, Thursday, July 20, 1944. Speaker from the Reich, Party Comrade Geyer, in the House of National Socialism, Lublin.]
One wondered what kind of cheerful news the Partei-Genosse had to tell the Maidanek murderers a couple of days before the Russians entered Lublin, and while most of the Germans must have been busy packing up. It was also the day of the bomb that had failed to kill Hitler...
The Chopin Warehouse was like a vast, five-storey department store, part of the
grandiose Maidanek Murder Factory. Here the possessions of hundreds of thousands of
murdered people were sorted and classified and packed for export to Germany. In one big room there were thousands of trunks and suitcases, some still with carefully written-out labels; there was a room marked Herrenschuhe and another marked Damenschuhe; here were thousands of pairs of shoes, all of much better quality than those seen in the big dump near the camp. Then there was a long corridor with thousands of women's dresses, and another with thousands of overcoats. Another room had large wooden shelves all
along it, through the centre and along the walls; it was like being in a Woolworth store: here were piled up hundreds of safety razors, and shaving brushes, and thousands of pen-knives and pencils. In the next room were piled up children's toys: teddy-bears, and celluloid dolls and tin automobiles by the hundred, and simple jigsaw puzzles, and an American-made Mickey Mouse... And so on, and so on. In a junk-heap I even found the
manuscript of a Violin Sonata, Op. 15 by somebody called Ernst J. Weil of Prague. What hideous story was behind this?
On the ground floor there had been the Accounts Department. Letters were strewn all
over the place; mostly letters from various SS and Nazi organisations to the "Chopin Lager, Lublin", asking to be sent this and that. Many of the letters were orders from the Lublin SS and Police Chief: on November 3, 1942 a carefully-typed letter instructed the Chopin Lager to supply the Hitler Youth Camp, Company 934, with a long list of articles including blankets, table linen, crockery, bed-linen, towels, kitchen utensils, etc. The letter specified that all this was wanted for 4,000 children evacuated from the Reich.
There was another list of articles for 2,000 German children who required "sports shirts, training suits, coats, aprons, gym shoes, skiing boots, plus-fours, warm underwear, warm gloves, woollen scarves". The department store was euphemistically called
"Altsachenverwertungsstelle, Lublin" (Lublin Disposal Centre for Second-hand Goods).
There was also a letter from a German woman living in Lublin asking for a pram and a complete layette for her newborn child. Another document showed that in the first few months of 1944 alone eighteen railway wagons of goods from the Lublin warehouse had
been sent to Germany.
The joint Russo-Polish Tribunal investigating the Maidanek crimes sat in the building of the Court of Appeal at Lublin. It included many leading Polish personalities—the
President of the District Court, Czepanski; Professor Bielkowski (whom I had already met); a round stout prelate, Father Kruszinski, Dr Emil Sommerstein, the leading Jewish member of the Lublin Committee, and a former Sejm deputy, and Mr Witos, the
Commissioner for Agriculture. That these people were not Russian stooges could be seen from the eagerness with which one of the members insisted on telling the foreign press that the Russians had arrested 2,000 AK men in the Lublin District. In an introductory speech, the Polish president of the tribunal gave the history of Maidanek camp, a lurid catalogue of all the various ways in which people were tortured and killed. There were SS-men who specialised in the "stomach-kick" or the "testicle-kick" as a form of murder; other prisoners were drowned in pools, or tied to posts and allowed to die of exhaustion; there had been eighteen cases of cannibalism in the camp even before it had officially become, on November 3, 1943, an extermination camp. He spoke of the chief of
Maidanek. Obersturmbannführer Weiss, and his assistant, a notorious sadist, Anton Thumann, and Mussfeld, the chief of the crematorium, and many others.
Himmler himself had twice visited Maidanek and had been pleased with it. It was
estimated that 1,500,000 people had been put to death here. The big fry had, of course, fled, but six of the small fry—two Poles and four Germans—had been caught, and, after a trial, they were all hanged a few weeks later.
The four Germans—three of them SS-men—were professional killers; but it seemed a
little hard on the two young Poles, both of whom had originally been arrested by the Germans and had then "sold themselves" to them, in the hope of surviving.
[The interrogation of these men is described in my article, "First Contact with Poland", published in the Russian Review, No. 1. (Penguin Books. 1945).]
The press and radio in the West were still sceptical. Typical was the BBC's refusal to use my story, as was also this comment of the New York Herald Tribune at the time: Maybe we should wait for further corroboration of the horror story that comes
from Lublin. Even on top of all we have been taught of the maniacal Nazi
ruthlessness, this example sounds inconceivable...
The picture presented by American correspondents requires no comment except
that, if authentic [sic] the régime capable of such crimes deserves annihilation.
I saw a great deal during those days of the members of the "Lublin Committee"—
Obsöbka-Morawski, its chairman, General Rola-Zymierski, and several others. The New
Poland was still in its infancy, and less than one-quarter of Poland's territory had yet been liberated. No industrial centres, except Bialystok, mostly in ruins, had yet been
recaptured, and it was still too early to do any large-scale planning. For the present, the Committee was obsessed with some immediate problems, such as rationing in the towns, the creation of regular government jobs in Poland, so as to get people away from the hand-to-mouth existence they had led under the Germans, and the mobilisation of
conscripts into the Polish Army, despite the resistance coming from the AK men.
Osöbka-Morawski had seen Mikolajczyk in Moscow earlier in the month, and what
seemed to worry him most at the time was the support the London Polish government
was still getting from Britain and the USA.
There could be no question of an amalgamation between the London Government and the
Lublin Committee. "We are willing to accept Mikolajczyk, and Grabski, and Popiel and one more, and that is all" Osöbka-Morawski said. He added that the Lublin Committee could accept only the 1921 constitution, but London stuck to the "fascist" constitution of 1935. Unlike the Americans, Clark Kerr, the British Ambassador in Moscow, had told
him that he fully approved of the 1921 constitution—but it was just a bit awkward what to do with President Raczkiewicz.
"I was going to tell him where he could put him," Osöbka-Morawski said, and suddenly grinned like a schoolboy. "Anyway," he concluded, "the sooner we resume conversations with Mikolajczyk, the better for him; for time is working for us. We are anxious to come to a settlement, and that's why we offered him the premiership. But he had better accept soon, or the offer may not be repeated." (Which is precisely what happened.)
Chapter X RUMANIA, FINLAND AND BULGARIA PACK UP
Apart from Poland, the Red Army had a lot of other fish to fry. In that summer and
autumn of 1944 Hitler's satellites were collapsing one after the other, and it was
important to speed up the process. Below the surface, there was rivalry between the
Soviet Union and the British and Americans in the Balkans, and Moscow thought it
essential to occupy Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary as quickly as possible.
[ Some (perhaps over-suspicious) Russians attributed Churchill's wish to get the Red Army to capture Warsaw at any price to a desire to slow down its progress in south-east Europe.]
Events in Rumania followed upon one ano
ther with fantastic speed during that month of August 1944. Since the late spring the Russians had held a line running (west to east) from the Carpathian foothills across Moldavia and Bessarabia just north of Jassy and Kishenev, and then along the Dniester to the Black Sea some thirty miles south of
Odessa. The Moldavian sector was held by the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under Malinovsky, the Bessarabian sector by those of the 3rd Ukrainian Front under Tolbukhin, which also held an important bridgehead on the right bank of the Dniester just south of Tiraspol. Facing them, east to west, were the Rumanian 4th Army, the German 8th Army, the German 6th Army and the Rumanian 3rd Army, the whole, under the command of
General Friessner, forming Army Group Süd-Ukraine consisting of some fifty divisions, half of them Rumanian.
On August 20 both the Ukrainian fronts struck out with forces estimated by the Germans at "ninety infantry divisions and forty-one tank and three cavalry formations".
[ Philippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 259.]
As the same writers say:
The avalanche had now been set in motion and nothing could stop it on its way to
the Rumanian interior. It was all the easier for the enemy since half the divisions of Army Group Süd-Ukraine were Rumanian, and the Russians deliberately struck their first blows at them. But it was not till August 22 that the full extent of the catastrophe could be measured... With its sixteen divisions the German 6th Army
was trapped in the Kishinev area and the Rumanian 3rd Army along the Black Sea
coast. In the general confusion no one did anything to blow up the bridges across the Pruth and the Danube and, for the Russians the road was now clear to Bucharest
and the Dobrudja.
This roughly corresponds to Russian accounts of the same operation which, within a few days, was to knock Rumania straight out of "Hitler's war". As General Talensky told me in 1945:
"The Germans holding the line north of Jassy were worried, for this was our road to the Rumanian oil and to the Balkans. They concentrated here practically all that was left of the Rumanian Army, which now formed part of the German Army Group Süd-Ukraine.
The Germans had strongly fortified their lines though, in fact, they were pretty sure that the Central Front was engaging all our attention, and that there was little to fear for the present.
[ This is corroborated by German evidence showing that, in July, a number of strong
German formations were moved from Rumania to other parts of the front. See Philippi
and Heim, op. cit., p. 260.]
"So our attack of August 20 came like a bolt from the blue... By August 23 fifteen German divisions were trapped. Unlike the Rumanians, who either offered no resistance or even (in a number of cases) turned against their 'allies', the Germans resisted fiercely at first; some 60,000 were killed, but, in the end, we bagged 106,000 prisoners, among them two corps commanders, twelve divisional commanders and thirteen other generals. Two
corps commanders and five divisional commanders were found dead. We also captured
or destroyed 338 planes, 830 tanks and mobile guns, 5,500 guns and 33,000 trucks... It was a classically-done job."
Nearly the whole of the German 6th Army was destroyed; but most of the German 8th
Army hastily retreated west to the Carpathians.
Jassy had been captured on the 22nd and Kishenev on the 24th; during the following
week the Russians overran the whole of eastern Rumania, and on the 30th Malinovsky's troops triumphantly entered Bucharest and the oil capital of Ploesti. Little more than a week later Tolbukhin was overrunning Bulgaria.
Meantime the political unrest that had been growing in Rumania for months past came to a head. Antonescu, whose last hope rested in the German and Rumanian forces holding
the Jassy-Dniester Line, had had an inconclusive last meeting with Hitler on August 5, and although he urged Hitler to send several panzer formations to Rumania, the Führer still did not think the situation in Rumania desperate, and still imagined that Antonescu had the Rumanian Army behind him. The total lack of enthusiasm for fighting the
Russians shown on August 20 by the Rumanian troops came as a shock to Hitler, and this was to be followed by an even greater shock three days later when King Michael
appointed General Sanatescu head of the Government and had both Ion Antonescu and
Michael Antonescu interned at the Palace.
On August 25, the Soviet Foreign Office published a statement recalling its earlier
statement of April 2 that the Soviet Union did not intend to change "the social order in Rumania" and saying that the Rumanian Army could keep its arms if it were ready to fight the Germans and Hungarians. The Rumanian troops must help to liquidate the
Germans; this was the only way in which military operations in Rumania could rapidly end and the essential conditions be created for an armistice between Rumania and the Allies.
Two days later it published another Note saying that the Armistice terms which had been rejected by Antonescu, had now been accepted by King Michael and General Sanatescu.
It further said that Bucharest was now being firmly defended by the Sanatescu
Government against the Germans, and that the German Military Mission, with General
Hansen at its head, had been interned. The King's Declaration announcing a change of government and a change of policy had caused great rejoicing in Bucharest. The
Germans, however, were wreaking vengeance on the city by bombing and shelling it. In the Carpathians and in Transylvania Rumanian troops were now known to be fighting the Germans. In Transylvania the Germans were planning to set up a puppet government
under Horea Sima.
The Note then said that Mr S. Vinogradov, the Soviet Ambassador in Ankara [Later for many years Ambassador in Paris], had been informed by the Rumanian Minister there
that the new Rumanian Coalition Government was composed of the four principal parties led by Maniu, Bratianu, Petrescu and Patrasceanu, the last-named a Communist.
The Rumanian communication to Vinogradov also said that the government was willing
to accept the armistice terms, which provided, among other things, for a complete breach with Germany, for the Rumanian army now fighting against Germany, for the restoration of the Soviet-Rumanian border of 1940, and for compensation to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Government, on its side, subscribed to the cancellation of Hitler's "Vienna Award"
handing over to Hungary a large part of Transylvania.
For a week after the change of government in Rumania, the Rumanian troops held
Bucharest as best they could, though it does not seem that there were any large German forces around after the Jassy-Kishenev debacle. But there was much nuisance shelling and nuisance bombing of the Rumanian capital, and the people feared a German counter-offensive and an attempt to recapture Bucharest. It was therefore with some relief that most of Bucharest welcomed the Red Army on August 30. The Soviet press reported that the Red Army aroused feelings of "wonder and surprise" in Bucharest: the Rumanians were amazed at the quantity of heavy Russian equipment and could hardly believe at first that most of it was Soviet-made. "The courtesy is overwhelming," one Soviet reporter wrote. "No sooner does one of our comrades produce a cigarette than dozens of hands holding burning lighters are stretched out to light it for him". The communists were displaying posters everywhere welcoming "Maresalul Stalin, genialul comandat al armatei rosii". "And everybody is down on Antonescu", the Soviet press also reported.
The Dictator was still locked up in the Royal Palace.
In all these Soviet reports there was a note of condescension, sometimes a note of
contempt for all this "hearty cringing"; they made a distinction, however, between the
"sincere joy of the ordinary Rumanian people" and the half-hearted relief felt by the
"bourgeois loafers" in whom Bucharest abounded (and who would no doubt have preferred to see American and British t
roops).
For the first time the Russian troops were seeing a "real" Western capital, with shops, theatres, cafés and all the paraphernalia of the bourgeois way of life. This in itself, as we shall see, was going to raise something of a psychological and almost ideological
problem inside Russia.
At that stage the Soviet Government raised no objections to the composition of the new Rumanian Government and was in a hurry to conclude an armistice with Rumania;
however, before long, it began to bring strong pressure to bear on the "double-crossing elements" in the Rumanian "democratic bloc". Under Russian pressure Sanatescu was later replaced by General Radescu and, finally, by the much more pliable Petru Groza.
The very cordial Russian attitude to the young King, who at first was given a high Soviet decoration, also changed before very long, and later the terrible Mr Vyshinsky was sent down to Bucharest to bully the life out of him.
But that came later. Early in September the Rumanian Armistice Delegation arrived in Moscow. It was received in style—almost like representatives of a new Allied Power—
and lived in luxury at the Government Guest House in Ostrovsky Lane.
Although the delegation was headed by Prince Stirbea who, earlier in the year, had
established contact with the British in Cairo, most of the talking was done by the
communist leader, the new Minister of Justice, Mr Patrasceanu, a man of drive and
ability and great personal charm.
[He was later to be shot as a "Titoite".]
With him was his pretty young wife. Mme Patrasceanu was a product of French culture in Rumania; elegant, petite, vivacious, she evoked visions of the rue de la Paix. She would come to tea and cocktail parties given by British and American correspondents and would bring a whiff of Guerlain into the dingy rooms of the Hotel Metropole. With a playful grimace she would chatter about the "frightful" week in Bucharest before the Russians came, and when the Germans were dropping bombs on the city all the time. She said that King Michael was un très joli garçon and most intelligent; and she related how difficult life had been for her under the Fascist régime. "Of course, even our Rumanian Fascists aren't quite like the Germans; my husband was in a concentration camp, but I can't really say he was ill-treated; I could visit him and take him food parcels."
Russia at war Page 101
