Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  one considers that Hungary was Hitler's first and last satellite, and that the

  Hungarian troops behaved abominably at Voronezh, on the Don, at Orel, Chernigov

  and Kiev... The 300 million dollars' reparations (200 to the Soviet Union, 100 to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) spread over six years, are generous... Territorially, Hungary returns to her 1937 frontiers, and Hitler's Vienna Award of 1940 is thus

  cancelled... Hungary must now take part in the war against Germany... Meantime,

  the Soviet troops are completing the liberation of Budapest.

  Budapest fell at last on February 13. 110,000 prisoners were taken, among them Col.-

  Gen. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch. Eleven panzer divisions—which might have served a better

  purpose elsewhere— were now thrown into Hungary, since Hitler was eager to save

  Vienna at any price. After the fall of Budapest the Germans launched a strong counter-offensive and the Russians even lost some ground. It was not till the end of March that both Tolbukhin and Malinovsky could say that the German counter-offensive had spent

  itself. On March 29 the Russians crossed into Austria; on April 4, Malinovsky captured Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia and, on the 13th, after a week's heavy fighting inside the city, Malinovsky and Tolbukhin occupied Vienna.

  A novel feature of the Vienna fighting was the announcement by Tolbukhin that rank-

  and-file Nazis had nothing to fear. All kinds of other surprising phrases began to appear in the Soviet press at the time: "The Viennese are helping the Red Army, and they fully understand that the Soviet Union is not fighting against Austrians."

  "The Austrians' hatred for Prussianised Germany has deep historic roots..." And, after the fall—or "liberation" as it was called—of Vienna, the Soviet press was full of pleasant little stories of how the Russian soldiers went on pilgrimages to the grave of their favourite composer, Johann Strauss "who had written the music for the film The Great Waltz". Wreaths were also laid on the grave of Beethoven.

  Meantime Yeremenko had taken the place of Petrov as commander of the 4th Ukrainian

  Front, and the sweep through Czechoslovakia also gained in momentum. On April 26,

  Malinovsky entered Brno, the capital of Moravia. However, in the end, neither he nor Yeremenko was destined to liberate Prague. On the very last day of the war, it was

  Konev's tanks which made a spectacular breakthrough to the city from Saxony in the

  north, just as street fighting in Prague was becoming serious and the danger of the city's destruction was growing from hour to hour. The part played in the Prague fighting by the Vlasov troops, who deserted their German masters and went over to the Czech Resistance movement makes one of the strangest stories of this phase of the war; but, for a long time, neither the Russians nor the Czechs liked it mentioned.

  By the middle of April, with the Russians deep inside Austria and Czechoslovakia and the Western Allies sweeping across Western and Southern Germany, and Zhukov, Konev

  and Rokossovsky holding the Oder Line, the time was ripe for the final attack on Berlin.

  A short digression is called for, however, on the tricky subject of Russian policy towards Germany when the Red Army began to occupy German territory. After all that the

  Germans had done— and horrors like the destruction of Warsaw and the extermination

  camps at Maidanek and Auschwitz were still fresh in every soldier's memory—there was no sympathy at all for the German people. No doubt, there was much respect for the

  German soldier, but that was different. Having fought the Germans for nearly four years on Russian soil, and having seen thousands of Russian towns and villages in ruins, the Russian troops could not resist their thirst for revenge when they finally broke into Germany.

  Ever since Russian troops had been on German soil, some rough things had been going

  on. In the first flush of the invasion of Germany, Russian soldiers burned down numerous houses, and sometimes whole towns—merely because they were German! (I was to see

  this later, for instance in a large East Prussian town like Allenstein. The Poles who had taken over the city—now re-christened Olsztyn—were furious at all the repairing and

  rebuilding they had to do in a town which had originally fallen almost intact into Russian hands). There was also a great deal of looting, robbery and rape. The rape no doubt

  included many genuine atrocities; but as a Russian major later told me, many German

  women somehow assumed that "it was now the Russians' turn", and that it was no good resisting. "The approach," he said, "was usually very simple. Any of our chaps simply had to say: 'Frau, komm,' and she knew what was expected of her... Let's face it. For nearly four years, the Red Army had been sex-starved. It was all right for officers, especially staff officers, so many of whom had a 'field-wife' handy—a secretary, or

  typist, or a nurse, or a canteen waitress; but the ordinary Vanka had very few

  opportunities in that line. In our own liberated towns, some of our fellows were lucky, but most of them weren't. The question of more-or-less 'raping' any Russian woman just

  didn't arise. In Poland a few regrettable things happened from time to time, but, on the whole, a fairly strict discipline was maintained as regards 'rape'. The most common

  offence in Poland was 'dai chasy' —'give me your wrist-watch.' There was an awful lot of petty thieving and robbery. Our fellows were just crazy about wrist-watches—there's no getting away from it. But the looting and raping in a big way did not start until our soldiers got to Germany. Our fellows were so sex-starved that they often raped old

  women of sixty, or seventy or even eighty—much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight. But I admit it was a nasty business, and the record of the Kazakhs and other Asiatic troops was particularly bad."

  The posters put up in Germany, during the first weeks of the invasion, such as: "Red Army Soldier: You are now on German soil; the hour of revenge has struck! " did not make things any easier. Moreover, the press propaganda of Ehrenburg and others

  continued to be very ferocious indeed.

  Here are some samples from Ehrenburg's articles during the invasion of Germany:

  Germany is a witch... We are in Germany. German towns are burning, I am

  happy...

  The Germans have no souls... An English statesman said that the Germans were our

  brethren. No! it is blasphemy to include the child-murderers among the family of

  nations...

  Not only divisions and armies are advancing on Berlin. All the trenches, graves and ravines rilled with the corpses of the innocents are advancing on Berlin, all the cabbages of Maidanek and all the trees of Vitebsk on which the Germans hanged so

  many unhappy people. The boots and shoes and the babies' slippers of those

  murdered and gassed at Maidanek are marching on Berlin. The dead are knocking

  on the doors of the Joachimsthaler Strasse, of the Kaiserallee, of Unter den Linden and all the other cursed streets of that cursed city...

  We shall put up gallows in Berlin... An icy wind is sweeping along the streets of Berlin. But it is not the icy wind, it is terror that is driving the Germans and their females to the west... 800 years ago the Poles and Lithuanians used to say: "We shall torment them in heaven as they tormented us on earth"... Now our patrols stand outside the castles of the Teutonic Knights at Alienstein, Osterode, Marienburg...

  We shall forget nothing. As we advance through Pomerania, we have before our

  eyes the devastated, blood-drenched countryside of Belorussia...

  Some say the Germans from the Rhine are different from the Germans on the Oder.

  I don't know that we should worry about such fine points. A German is a German

  everywhere. The Germans have been punished, but not enough. They are still in

  Berlin. The Führer is still standing, and not hanging. The Fritzes are still running
, but not lying dead. Who can stop us now? General Model? The Oder? The Volks-sturm? No, it's too late. Germany, you can now whirl round in circles, and burn,

  and howl in your deathly agony; the hour of revenge has struck!...

  And, after visiting East Prussia, Ehrenburg wrote: "The Niezschean supermen are whining. They are a cross between a jackal and a sheep. They have no dignity... A

  Scottish army chaplain, a liberated prisoner-of-war, said to me: 'I know how the Germans treated their Russian prisoners in 1941 and 1942. I can only bow to your generosity

  now.'"

  It did not take very long for both the Party and the Command of the Red Army to realise that all this was going too far. The troops were getting out of hand, and, moreover, it was clear that, before long, the Russians would be faced with a variety of political and administrative problems in Germany which could simply not to be handled on the "anti-Marxist" basis that "all Germans are evil." The alarm, not so much over "atrocities" as over the totally unnecessary destruction caused by the Red Army in the occupied parts of Germany, was first reflected in the Red Star editorial of February 9, 1945:

  "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is an old saying. But it must not be taken literally. If the Germans marauded, and publicly raped our women, it does not

  mean that we must do the same. This has never been and never shall be. Our

  soldiers will not allow anything like that to happen—not because of pity for the

  enemy, but out of a sense of their own personal dignity... They understand that

  every breach of military discipline only weakens the victorious Red Army... Our

  revenge is not blind. Our anger is not irrational. In an access of blind rage one is apt to destroy a factory in conquered enemy territory —a factory that would be of value to us. Such an attitude can only play into the enemy's hands.

  Here was a clear admission that factories—and much else—were being burned down by

  Russian troops—simply because they were "German property".

  On April 14, Ehrenburg's hate propaganda was stopped by a strong attack on him in

  Pravda by G. F. Alexandrov, the principal ideologist of the Central Committee.

  According to Ehrenburg's post-war Memoirs this attack was launched on direct instructions from Stalin. Alexandrov's article, "Comrade Ehrenburg is Oversimplifying"

  took him up on two points: first of all, it was both un-Marxist and inexpedient to treat all Germans as sub-human;

  "Hitlers come and go, but the German people go on forever", Stalin himself had said in a recent speech; and Russia would have to live with the German people. To suggest that every German democrat or Communist was necessarily a Nazi in disguise was absolutely wrong. The article clearly suggested that there were now certain Germans with whom it would be necessary for the Russian authorities to co-operate. Secondly, Alexandrov

  objected to Ehrenburg's Red Star article two days before, called "That's Enough! " in which he had raged against the ease with which the Allies were advancing in the west and the desperate resistance the Germans were continuing to offer the Russians in the east.

  Ehrenburg had said that this was so because, having murdered millions of civilians, in the east, the Germans were therefore scared of the Russians, but not of the Western Allies, who were being deplorably "soft". They had, he claimed, even ordered Russian and Ukrainian slaves to go on working on German estates during the spring sowing.

  While agreeing with some of this, Alexandrov still said that Ehrenburg was

  "oversimplifying" the issue:

  At the present stage the Nazis are following their old mischievous policy of sowing distrust among the Allies... They are trying, by means of this political military trick, to achieve what they could not achieve by purely military means. If the Germans, as Ehrenburg says, were only scared of the Russians, they would not, to this day, go on sinking Allied ships, murdering British prisoners, or sending flying bombs over

  London. "We did not capture Königsberg by telephone," Ehrenburg said. That is quite true; but the explanation he offers for the simple way in which the Allies

  occupy towns in Western Germany is not the correct one.

  This sop to the Allies was no doubt still intended to be in the good Yalta tradition, but it was perhaps not meant to be overwhelmingly convincing. For, although there was to be genuine rejoicing, especially among soldiers and officers on both sides, when, on April 27, the Russian and American forces met at Torgau on the Elbe, and cut the German

  forces in two, and although there were friendly demonstrations outside the American

  Embassy on VE-Day in Moscow on May 9, there continued to be considerable distrust of the Western Allies. True, the Allies did not fall for Himmler's (or any other) "separate peace" offer, but no sooner had the Germans capitulated than the Russian press was already full of angry screams about "Churchill's Flensburg Government"—a government which, they later asserted, was not liquidated until the Russians themselves had taken a very strong line about this "outrageous business."

  [The "Government" under Admiral Doenitz—Hitler's "heir"— which continued to function at Flensburg, near the Danish border, as an "administrative organ" for some days after the capitulation. The encouragement allegedly given to it by the British was

  attributed by the Russians to the most sinister motives on Churchill's part.]

  But that is a different story. The most significant part of Alexan-drov's attack on

  Ehrenburg concerned the new official line on "the German people". Very suddenly the hate propaganda against "the Germans " was stopped. Ehrenburg was no longer allowed to write— at least not on Germany. His hate propaganda had served its purpose in the past, but now it had become inexpedient.

  The "no-more-Ehrenburg" blow fell two days before the final Russian offensive against Berlin, which started on April 16, from the bridgeheads on the Oder. A week later, a special communiqué stated:

  The troops of the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Zhukov launched their

  offensive from the bridgeheads on the Oder with the support of artillery and

  aircraft, and broke through the defences of Berlin. They took Frankfurt-on-the-

  Oder, Wannlitz, Oranienburg, Birkenwerder, Henningsdorff, Pankow, Köpenick

  and Karlshorst, and broke into the capital of Germany, Berlin.

  At the same time, Konev's troops broke into Berlin from the south, after taking first Cottbus, and then Marienfelde, Teltow and other Berlin suburbs.

  On the 25th it was announced that Zhukov and Konev had made their junction north-west of Potsdam, thus completely encircling Berlin. On the same day, Pillau, the last German stronghold in East Prussia was taken.

  On May 2, after a week of the most dramatic battles—a week in the course of which

  Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves in Berlin —the city surrendered.

  Then, on the 7th, the whole German Army capitulated. Jodl signed the capitulation at Reims, and Keitel, the next day, in Berlin. Here the Russian signatory was Marshal

  Zhukov. To the Russians, the Reims capitulation had been a "preliminary" formality; only a relatively junior Russian officer was present. While Churchill was broadcasting the end of the war on May 8 at 4 p.m., the Russian radio was broadcasting its "Children's Hour"—a pleasant little story about two rabbits and a bird. In Russia, the end of the war was not announced until the early hours of May 9. In Russia VE-Day was a day later than in the West. For one thing, Prague had not yet been liberated. The Western Allies thought this a detail; the Russians did not.

  May 9 was an unforgettable day in Moscow. The spontaneous joy of the two or three

  million people who thronged the Red Square that evening—and the Moscow River

  embankments, and Gorki Street, all the way up to the Belorussian Station—was of a

  quality and a depth I had never yet seen in Moscow before. They danced and sang in the streets; every soldier and officer was hugged and kissed;
outside the US Embassy the crowds shouted "Hurray for Roosevelt!" (even though he had died a month before); they were so happy they did not even have to get drunk, and under the tolerant gaze of the militia, young men even urinated against the walls of the Moskva Hotel, flooding the wide pavement.

  [The British Embassy, being on the other side of the Moskva river, some distance from the main scene of mass rejoicing, was given only a few minor friendly demonstrations.]

  Nothing like this had ever happened in Moscow before. For once, Moscow had thrown all reserve and restraint to the winds. The fireworks display that evening was the most

  spectacular I have ever seen.

  Yet the one-day difference between VE-Day in the West and VE-Day in the East made

  an unpleasant impression; and at first minor, and then more serious squabbles began

  between the Allies almost before the ink of Keitel's signature had dried.

  There was the row over the "Flensburg Government"; there were rows over the repatriation of Soviet prisoners and other Soviet citizens, whose return was being

  delayed. An angry statement on the alleged breaches of the Yalta repatriation agreement was published by General Golikov, head of the Repatriation Commission. Above all,

  there was more trouble about Poland. Many seeds of unpleasantness were beginning to

  sprout...

  Chapter II YALTA AND AFTER

  The Yalta Conference of the Big Three, which was held three months before the collapse of Germany, has been described so often —notably by some of its participants, such as Mr Churchill, Mr James F. Byrnes and Mr Edward Stettinius—that no detailed account of that historic meeting is required here.

  [The conference took place between February 4 and 11. The delegations were lodged in three of the palaces outside Yalta—the Tsar's palace of Livadia, the Vorontsov Palace and Koreis—which had more or less survived the German occupation. They had to be

  fitted with new plumbing, and furniture had to be brought from Moscow.]

  Yalta has been described as the "high tide of Big-Three unity" and, at the time, its results were hailed with great praise in most of the American press. It was not until later, when the Cold War was in full swing, that Yalta was described as a "Munich" at which Britain and the United States had "surrendered to Stalin", largely, it was said, because, at the time of Yalta, Roosevelt was a "weary and sick man", who had allowed himself to be bamboozled and outwitted by the wily Russian dictator.