In addition to the major war criminals who stood trial at Nuremberg, millions of ordinary German soldiers fell into Soviet hands. For years there existed a wide discrepancy between the number that German sources claimed had been taken prisoner and the numbers which gradually made their way back to Germany in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1947 Molotov stated that over one million German prisoners had been repatriated and that a further 900,000 remained in the Soviet Union, but contemporary estimates put the number of German prisoners at three to four million. The not-unreasonable assumption was that most of the one million to two million unaccounted for must have died in Soviet captivity. The official Soviet figures of all prisoners of war taken were finally made available under glasnost. They revealed that for once Molotov was telling the truth. The Soviet Union took 2,388,000 German prisoners between 1941 and 1945, most of them in the last eighteen months of the conflict. Of these a total of 356,000 died, leaving a little over two million for repatriation. A further 1,097,000 were captured from the nationalities fighting at Germany's side, mainly Hungarians, Romanians and Austrians, of whom 162,000 died. Approximately 600,000 Japanese prisoners were also taken, of whom 61,855 died in captivity. It has to be assumed that most prisoners died from hunger, disease, cold and exhaustion. Like the unfortunate prisoners of the Japanese who perished building the Burma railway, German prisoners were set to work completing a major rail route from the Volga at Kuibyshev to Lake Baikal in Siberia.18
Conditions for German prisoners were poor at first until the authorities established an organization to cope with them, and many of the deaths must have occurred in the early months of neglect. The highest casualty rate among Japanese prisoners came in the first six months of captivity, after which conditions improved. The prisoners were eventually placed in rough camps of tents or huts with few facilities and little medical attention. German prisoners were permitted to keep their uniforms, and camp life was run by German officers. In most other respects they shared the same routine as the prisoners of the Gulag. They worked ten to twelve hours a day. Food consisted of 600 grams of bread daily and three helpings of potato soup; there was little or no meat, animal fats or vegetables. They were supposed to be paid one rouble a day for the work, but payment was said to be irregular. Local camp bosses often wound up with both the money and the food. They were not conditions designed deliberately to exterminate the occupants of the camps, for the labour power of prisoners was needed to rebuild the Soviet economy. Model prisoners, those who took the regular Communist propaganda and recruitment sessions seriously, were given anti-fascist courses and could be returned to the Soviet zone of Germany as Communist educators.19
Along with German and other Axis prisoners there came a stream of Soviet citizens. Over five million had been stranded in German-occupied Europe. Some of them were prisoners of war; several million were slave labourers. Others were voluntary exiles – Soviet workers who had helped the German army and moved west as it retreated, or soldiers of the Russian Liberation Army who fought all over Europe on Germany's side. For all of them the costs of repatriation exceeded anything imposed on the defeated Germans, even on those who laboured on the railways. For those who fought against the Red Army the verdict was treason. Thousands were shot where they were caught; others were shot as they returned. For those who survived to feed the relentless demand for labour there were sentences of ten to twenty-five years and the lifelong stigma of betrayal. They were sent to the northernmost camps of the Gulag, to dig out coal and minerals in conditions few prisoners could endure.
Their compulsory repatriation was agreed upon by the Allies at Yalta, and both the British and Americans stuck to the agreement even though they knew that repatriation meant certain death or captivity. The Western states were anxious not to alienate Stalin at a sensitive point in negotiating the post-war settlement of Europe; nor could they be certain that the Soviet Union would return all the former Western prisoners of war or slave labourers who had fallen into their hands in the advance into Germany unless they complied with Soviet demands for repatriation. Both of these were strong political arguments. There were also practical issues. The Soviet soldiers who fought on the German side were enemies and were treated as enemies. Cossack units had fought with a particular harshness against the Soviet population, with whom the British and Americans had been allied only weeks before. They were expensive to feed and hard to discipline, and, in the context of the war's end, the prospect of ridding the Western powers of the burden of supervising them was hard to resist, whatever moral qualms it has aroused since.
Less understandable was the Western willingness to meet the Soviet demand for the return of Russian émigrés who had fled the revolution and civil war and had never been Soviet citizens, or the forcible repatriation of Soviet workers and prisoners of war who had been compelled to labour in Germany against their will and were now, sensibly, fearful of what awaited them on their return. Many of the émigrés were citizens of other states, where they had settled in the 1920s. Some volunteered to fight against the Red Army, including Cossack generals who had led White forces in the Russian civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution. None wished to return to the Soviet Union; none was technically required to be repatriated under the Yalta agreements. Yet when the Soviet regime requested their return, hundreds were transferred by the British to the mercies of the Red forces from whom they had fled twenty-five years before.
The most notorious of the many cases of forcible repatriation was the return of 50,000 Cossacks, including 11,000 women, children and old men, in May and June of 1945. The Cossack host, led by the veteran White general, the hetman Peter Krasnow, now age seventy-eight, and the former White general, Andrei Shkuro, had retreated to western Austria, where it had surrendered to the British. Nomads of war, their families followed in their wake. The local British commanders were asked by the Soviet authorities in eastern Germany to hand over the entire group, including the émigré generals, who were not Soviet citizens. Who made the final decision to comply is still not known with certainty, although Churchill himself is strongly implicated. The British commanders on the spot were divided. Some knew that the Cossack host contained men, women and children who were not required to be shipped back; others wanted to solve the issue of captive Russians quickly. Rather than screen them all, the British authorities undertook to comply with Soviet demands.
On 27 May 1945 the Cossack officers, including the elderly Krasnow, were told that they were to meet British Field Marshal Alexander for a conference on their fate. The invitation was a hoax, dreamed up by Smersh and communicated to the gullible British commanders. Smersh agents were allowed to enter the British zone to observe the transfer of the Cossack officers and joined in the recapture of the few who tried to flee. On May 29,1,475 Cossack officers were loaded into trucks and driven, not to a conference with Alexander, but a rendezvous with Smersh and the NKVD. On the way, a number of them committed suicide. The rest were placed in a wire cage at Spittal. The following day they were handed over to the Soviet security forces at Judenburg. They were taken away for interrogation, destined for oblivion or the camps. Krasnow and three other White generals were taken to the Lubyanka for special treatment, together with their families. Krasnow's son and grandson were interviewed by Nikolai Merkulov, Beria's deputy. He greeted them with the words: ‘For twenty-five years we've been waiting for this happy meeting with you! Victory is with us, with the Reds. As it was in 1920, so it is now…’20 Both were sent to the camps, where Krasnow's son died. For the aged Krasnow, and for the other Cossack leaders, there was the round of torture and humiliation to endure, the trial and death by hanging.
For the thousands of Cossacks still in British hands the sudden disappearance of their officers caused a growing panic. Some escaped into the hills, where they were hunted down by British and Soviet patrols and shot or recaptured. A few committed suicide, killing also their wives and children, rather than face the horrors of deportation. On June 1 thousands of Cossacks were crammed into
the barracks square at Peggetz to attend a religious service, when they were surrounded by British soldiers and forced, screaming and fighting, beaten by rifles and cudgels, into railroad cars. Twenty-seven died in the struggle. When they arrived at the handover point on the river at Graz the Cossacks were forced to cross the bridge to the waiting Smersh guards. One woman darted from the column and leaped onto the parapet of the bridge with her baby. She threw the child in the river; then jumped in herself. Some Cossacks had cut their own throats with knives or razor blades and bled to death on the trains. When they reached the Soviet side of the bridge they were forced into a camp surrounded by barbed wire. Their exact fate remains unexplained but it was almost certainly death for some, slave labour for the rest, state orphanages for the children.21
Similar treatment was meted out by the Soviet system to the millions of their citizens who became involuntary prisoners of the German war machine. These were not men and women who had joined with Germany or fought against their fellow citizens. They were men and women captured in battle or rounded up to be labourers in the many sweeps through the occupied territories. They included thousands of Soviet patriots, soldiers who were captured, wounded and helpless, or who fought until further resistance was hopeless. In many cases they were Soviet citizens who had refused every German or renegade entreaty to abandon their country and join the anti-Communist crusade. Unlike the Cossacks or the Vlasov soldiers, these were Soviet people who in many cases wished for repatriation.
Their treatment in practice differed little from the rough justice handed out to those who had deliberately chosen the German side. They were all, in the eyes of the Soviet regime, guilty of treason to the motherland. Order 270, published in 1941, made it clear that all prisoners taken by the enemy were to be regarded ipso facto as traitors. The penalty for ‘premeditated surrender’ was, according to Soviet regulations on military offences, death by firing squad.22 They were also the victims of an exaggerated and paradoxical socialist xenophobia. Stalin instructed Smersh that every attempt should be made to bring back all the Soviet people stranded in Europe because they were ‘undesirable witnesses against Communism’, contaminated by nothing more than their mere presence beyond the frontier.23 Every effort was made to restrict contact with foreign peoples of any kind, however innocent. In an exchange later with the film director Sergei Eisenstein over his film Ivan the Terrible, Stalin told him that Ivan's great strength as a leader was that he ‘championed the national point of view… he safeguarded the country against penetration by foreign influences’.24
The millions of Soviet citizens who returned in 1945 were, in Stalin's eyes, unclean, besmirched, potentially traitorous. They were treated accordingly, without welcome. They were placed in camps, sometimes in buildings vacated only recently by the victims of German confinement. They were surrounded by armed guards and isolated from the outside world. Their subsequent fate was eloquently recaptured by one of their number, an army lieutenant, whose manuscript account of his ordeal was written later in the 1940s after his escape to the West. He was taken prisoner at Orel in October 1941, after a bomb tore off three fingers of one hand and his unit had fought to a standstill. He knew what course he should have taken:
How it happened that I, an officer, a candidate for Party membership, failed to shoot myself as instructed and how I let myself be taken prisoner, I cannot explain. Perhaps the acute pain in my hand held me back, or maybe the utter exhaustion after eleven days of uninterrupted fighting had rendered me completely apathetic…
He was made to work in mines, then in an armaments firm near Hanover, where he was liberated by American troops in 1945. He was delighted to be returning home. Some of his fellow prisoners opted to stay in the West, but he regarded them as ‘absurd, pathological’. He arrived in the Soviet zone with hundreds of other returnees. The disillusionment was immediate. They were lined up, surrounded by armed guards, forced to tear off their epaulettes and subjected to a tirade from an officer who accused the men of treachery and the women of debauching themselves.25
The next day the officers were placed in a squalid hut and left without food for forty-eight hours. One by one they were summoned for interrogation. Half were shot out of hand. The other half were forced to change into tattered German uniforms. There followed a forced march for four days with almost no nourishment. They were loaded onto a freight train, over sixty to a car. The doors were opened only to allow the occupants to witness the execution of those who had been caught trying to escape. The trains arrived at a place twenty miles from Omsk. Here they were marched to camps with rows of wooden huts, where they joined the resident population of Gulag labourers and Axis prisoners. Those who could speak foreign languages were used as translators. The army lieutenant with the shattered hand who had waited for liberation with enthusiasm found himself indistinguishable from the enemy, working alongside Germans. They built new factories, filled with German machine tools seized as reparation. This particular project was christened New Germany. The lieutenant was lucky. He met a cousin who arranged false papers and a passage to the Soviet zone of Germany, whence he escaped to the West. Even this carried risks. Not until 1951 did the American Government permit political refugee status for Soviet defectors.26
Between 1945 and 1947, when the programme was completed, some 2,272,000 Soviet citizens were returned by the Western Allies to their homeland, many of them from as far afield as prisoner-of-war camps on the American west coast. Altogether, 5,457,856 were repatriated by 1953. Those found guilty of collaboration with the enemy, real or imagined, were sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal in Frankfurt an der Oder, where they were sentenced to be shot or to periods of forced labour. It has been estimated by Soviet historians that around one-fifth of all those who returned were executed or sentenced to the maximum twenty-five years in the Gulag.27 Others were sent to work with forced-labour units rebuilding the Soviet infrastructure or to exile in Siberia. Around three million men and women were sentenced to terms in the camps. Only about one-fifth of those who came back were allowed to return home, mainly old men, women and children. They were compelled to report regularly to the local NKVD office; those deemed fit for work had to put in two years' reconstruction labour. All those released had the words ‘socially dangerous' (sots-ial'no opasnyi) put on their record. They were denied access to higher education, or to jobs that carried administrative responsibility. They bore the stigma of collaboration or cowardice for years after 1945.
Stalin reserved the most grotesque fate, not for those who had fought against him, nor for those who had fallen into German hands and become ‘contaminated’ by contact with the outside, but for those he had worked with closely through four years of war, whose contribution to victory was unimpeachable. The victims included the greatest hero of the war, Marshal Zhukov himself. Stalin's motives were rational only in the warped terms of the political system he had fabricated since the 1920s. He wished after the war to restore his personal power, after several years of depending upon the loyalty and competence of others. In his eyes, and in the eyes of other Party bosses, the military leaders constituted a threat to the restoration of an unalloyed Soviet dictatorship. They were popular with the public; they were men of independent mind; theirs was the real victory of 1945. All of these were reason enough for Stalin to return after almost a decade to the crude terrorism of the purge.
Zhukov was the most prominent target in Stalin's sights. Stalin almost certainly respected, perhaps even liked, Zhukov. Towards the end of the war Stalin spoke to him with a disarming and unfamiliar frankness. They spent hours together discussing the war, or Stalin's family, or the future beyond the conflict. It was not personal antipathy that fired Stalin's plot to undo his powerful deputy and confidant, but simple reason of state. As early as 1943 the head of Smersh, Viktor Abakumov, who became in 1946 chief of the NKGB,* was ordered to monitor the telephone calls of all senior generals and marshals. A file was opened on Zhukov, filled up with comments which might later be used to incriminate
him. In May 1945, when Zhukov was appointed military administrator of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany, Beria succeeded in placing his deputy, Ivan Serov, as head of the civilian administration. He supplied both Beria and Stalin with a diet of defamatory intelligence on Zhukov, even with rumours that Zhukov was planning a military coup against Stalin himself.28
It is true that Zhukov did not help his own cause. He was not a modest man; he basked in the light of his military successes. In June 1945 he gave a press conference on the veranda of his villa at Wannsee in Berlin in which he took the opportunity to remind the wider world that he had played a major part, perhaps the major part, in the Soviet war – at Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, the Ukraine, Warsaw and Berlin. He appended a tribute to Stalin as an afterthought. He did not mention a single one of his military colleagues. Vyshinsky, who was present at the press briefing, interjected with what could only have been mischievous intent: ‘Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk, Warsaw and so on, right on to Berlin – pretty wonderful!’29 Zhukov seems not to have read the signals. A few months later Beria's case was complete. Zhukov was denounced by Stalin at a Kremlin meeting late in 1945 for claiming that he had won the war. He was summoned back to Moscow in April 1946 following a clash with Abakumov, who had been sent to Berlin to begin a purge of Zhukov's military organization.
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