Stalin's War of Extermination: 1941-1945, Planning, Realization and Documentation

By Joachim Hoffman (first published in German in 1999, English 2001)

 

022--As can be proven, with certainty, that the German-Soviet war—considered by Hitler to be inevitable following the fateful Molotov mission in November 1940 just barely preempted a war of conquest that was planned and prepared under high-pressure by Stalin, even more historical facts can be demonstrated today. This is confirmed by ever more historical evidence today. Thus, it was not just Hitler, as a certain school of contemporary historiography would continue to have us believe, but Stalin, who, from the very outset, in his political and military leadership of the Red Army, employed methods of outrageous brutality that vastly surpassed anything that had ever previously occurred. A myth was widely disseminated in Germany of the alleged possibility of waging "humane" warfare, and that this possibility only vanished due to Hitler's alleged refusal to consider humane methods of waging war. This myth is refuted by the fact that practically in the first days of the war, the members of the Red Army were systematically goaded toward violence and were, furthermore, incited to feelings of infernal hatred against all soldiers of the invading enemy armies. The collision between two dictatorially led socialist military powers obviously left little room, from the very beginning of the war, for considerations of humanity. Nor was there even respect for the laws and provisions of the International Conventions—which were, moreover, recognized by the German Reich, while the Soviet Union had strictly refused ratification.

 

The Germans also committed crimes in the Soviet Union, responsibility for which rests chiefly with the executive bodies lead by Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler. These crimes have been described repeatedly and thoroughly, and today the facts are known almost into every detail. The crimes of the Soviets, on the other hand, are consciously and methodically relegated to oblivion, since no "comparison" may be permitted under any circumstances. Yet the drawing of historical comparisons—the showing of connections, relations of cause and effect, and parallels—nevertheless constitute the inescapable duties of truthful historical research; to do otherwise is to pander, consciously and deliberately, to a one-sided picture of historical events.

 

The present volume, based largely on previously unknown documents and archive sources of German and Soviet origin, therefore—uninfluenced by so-called "taboos and intellectual prohibitions"—deals quite consciously with the methods of waging war on the Soviet side of the Eastern Front. This description therefore relates chiefly to Soviet crimes, but does not lose sight of, or ignore, crimes committed by Germans in a misuse of the name of the German nation. Distinctions must, however, be made in any case, and propaganda exaggerations must be reduced to their actual kernel of truth. The present publication, taken as a whole, therefore, must be conceded a greater value than that of a contemporary school of historiography that fundamentally consists of ignoring Soviet methods of waging war—either deliberately, or simply out of ignorance. That the findings will not meet with universal approval is to be expected, and also appears quite natural in view of the explosive nature of the contents. An accurate appraisal, however, will be unable to deny that the author has, nevertheless, striven for objectivity; it must also be conceded that it takes courage to express uncomfortable historical truths in the Federal Republic of Germany today. Above all, it will be impossible to doubt the author's feelings of sympathy for the Russian people, a sympathy that totally pervades his other books on the history of the German-Soviet conflict.

 

The point of departure of the present description is, as stated above, the fact—which is now indisputable—that Hitler, through the initiation of hostilities, just barely preempted a war of aggression prepared by Stalin. This indisputable scholarly fact is the rock upon which the hopes of our ideologues, in the truest sense of the word, are wrecked. Their arguments are null and void, but their doctrinaire blindness, nevertheless, remains. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all authors who have spoken out, regardless of persecution, and, in some cases, vitriolic personal attacks, thus contributing to the final breakthrough of historical truth. These authors include, among others, Dr. Heinz Magenheimer, Lecturer at the National Defense Academy of Vienna; Professor Dr. Werner Maser of Speyer; Viktor Suvorov of Bristol; Dr. Ernst Topitsch, Professor at Graz; Professor Dr. Dr. phil. Alfred Maurice de Zayas at Chicago and Geneva; and, finally, Profesor Dr. Dr. Gunther Gillessen who, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has always given evidence of a balanced appraisal, which is as proper as it is astute, of this historical controversy, thus doing the cause a great service. A far-reaching concurrence of opinion links me to the late, but well-known author of relevant books, Dr. Alexandr Moiseevich Nekrich, who died in 1993; Dr. Nekrich was a political officer in the Red Army during the war (one of the then much-scorned "Jewish Bolshevist Commissars"), who, after his forced emigration from the USSR, was active at Harvard University, not least of all in regard to the "controversy of the preventive war." The present publication originated during my thirty-five year tenure at the German Military Historical Research Office (then Freiburg, today Potsdam), specializing in the general topic of Stalin and the Red Army. I am indebted to the head official, Brigadier General Dr. Gunter Roth, for the sympathetic liberties he permitted me. In addition, I would like to thank my official colleague, Mrs. Karin Hepp, who successfully carried out negotiations for me in Moscow, as well as Mrs. Elke Selzer, who helped prepare the present manuscript, just as she did with my work on the Caucasus, and completed both with great reliability. In contrast to the spirit and letter of "freedom of research" as proclaimed under the German Basic Law, it is, unfortunately, advisable today to have many passages of a historiographical text revised for "criminal content" prior to publication—an almost disgraceful situation. This awkward task was undertaken, tactfully and amicably, by Court VicePresident Johann Birk of Freiburg; heartfelt thanks in this regard are due to him at this point. Sincere thanks are also due to the head archive director, Colonel Dr. Manfred Kehrig, who kindly wrote the preface.

 

026--The imperialistic power politics inherent in the Soviet political system from the very beginning—but not given due attention by the public—also found striking external expression in the governmental coat of arms (gosudararstvennyj gerb) of the USSR, which was still current in 1991. The symbolism of this state coat of arms consists of a hammer and sickle menacingly and crudely encircling the whole world, surrounded by the following inflammatory words in several languages: "Proletarians of all Countries, Unite!" What is so poignantly made evident here is the goal, openly proclaimed by both Lenin and Stalin, of world domination by Soviet Communist power, or, as they called it, the "victory of Socialism all over the world." It was none other than Lenin who, on December 6, 1920, stated in a speech that what was involved was to exploit the conflicts and contradictions between the capitalist states. To "incite" the capitalist states "against each other," and "of using the knives of scoundrels, like the capitalist thieves, against each other," on the grounds that "when two thieves fall out and fight, the honest man laughs last. As soon as we are strong enough to overthrow capitalism completely, we will immediately grab them by the throat." "Victory of the Communist revolution in all countries is inevitable" he declared on March 6, 1920. "Victory will be ensured in the not-too distant future."

 

Stalin was early devoted to this principle of Bolshevism, which was proven by his well-known speech before the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (b) in July 1925. At that time, Stalin declared: "Should the war begin, we will not stand by inactively; we will enter the war, but we will enter as the last belligerent. We shall throw a weight on the scales that should be decisive." This "Stalin Doctrine," as Alexandr Nekrich has shown with admirable clarity, and regardless of statements to the contrary, was never abandoned .It retained its force, and the effort to "incite fascist Germany and the West against each other," as stated by author Viacheslav I. Dashichev, became a genuine idee fine with Stalin. In 1939, when the Red Army found itself increasing in strength due to a rapidly growing gigantic armaments program, Stalin believed that the time had come to intervene as a belligerent in the crisis of "world capitalism." Both the British Ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps, and the American Ambassador, Laurence F. Steinhardt, warned that Stalin wanted to bring about a war, not only in Europe, but in East Asia as well, as early as 1939. Recently revealed documents of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindeo offer sufficiently clear information in this regard ."The conclusion of our agreement with Germany," according to the Narkomindel on July 1, 1940, to the Soviet Ambassador in Japan, "was dictated by the desire for a war in Europe." In regard to the Far East, a telegram from Moscow to the Soviet Ambassadors in Japan and China on July 14, 1940, accordingly states: "We would agree to any treaty that brought about a collision between Japan and the United States." Undisguised in these diplomatic instructions is the mention of a "Japanese-American war, which we would gladly like to see." M. Nikitin transcribes Moscow's attitude with the following words: "The Soviet Union, for its part, was interested in distracting British and American attention from European problems, and in Japanese neutrality during the period of the destruction of Germany and the 'liberation' of Europe from capitalism."

 

On August 19, 1939, there was a surprise secret meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee, which included the participation of the members of the Russian section of the Communist International. During the meeting Stalin announced, in a programmatic speech, that the time had now come to apply the torch of war to the European powder keg. Stalin declared flatly that "if we accept the German proposal for the conclusion of a Non-Aggression pact with them," it was to be assumed that "they would naturally attack Poland, and the intervention of France and England in this war would be inevitable." The resulting "serious unrest and disorder" would, as he remarked, lead to a destabilization of Western Europe, without "us," i.e., without the Soviet Union, being initially drawn into the conflict. For his closest comrades, he drew the conclusion, already proclaimed in 1925, that, in this way, "we can hope for an advantageous entry into the war." In Stalin's vision, a "broad field of activity" now opened up for the development of the "world revolution." In other words, for the achievement—which had never been abandoned—of the Sovietization of Europe and Bolshevik domination. He concluded with the call: "Comrades! In the interests of the USSR—the homeland of the workers—get busy, and work so that war may break out between the Reich and the capitalistic Anglo-French bloc!"

 

As the first stage for the achievement of imperialist domination, Stalin designated the Bolshevization of Germany and Western Europe. The Non-Aggression pact, with the momentous additional secret protocol, was concluded between the representatives of the Reich's government and the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics four days after this secret speech, on August 23, 1939.

 

The speech by Stalin of August 19, 1939, was obtained by the French Havas agency from Moscow by way of Geneva from an "absolutely reliable source." It was published as early as 1939 in volume 17 of the Revue Du Droit International. Remarkably, the authenticity of the speech is disputed with extraordinary zeal by Stalinist propagandists and their blind adherents right up to the present day. However, in an interview under the hypocritical headline "A Mendacious Report from the Havas Agency" in the official party newspaper Pravda on November 30, 1939, Stalin himself denied the speech. The mere fact that Stalin felt personally and immediately compelled to publish an official denial reveals the extent to which he felt he had tipped his hand. Only in extraordinary cases did Stalin ever allow himself to consent to personal interviews.

 

Viktor Suvorov has proved that the authorities of the Soviet Union, such as members of the Central Committee, marshals, generals, professors, academicians, historians, and ideologists, have wracked their brains, and, with truly ardent zeal, have attempted to prove for fifty years that no meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee ever took place on this particular August 19 at all. The whole tissue of lies finally collapsed on January 16, 1993 in a single day, when Stalin's biographer Professor Volkogonov confirmed in Izvestia "that a meeting had indeed taken place on the date in question, and that he himself had held the minutes in his hands."

 

The historian Ms. T. S. Bushueva, during the course of a scholarly evaluation of Viktor Suvorov's books, which had been distributed in editions of millions of copies, found the text of the speech by Stalin. The speech, which had long been known, was discovered in the secret depths of the former Special Archives of the USSR, apparently prepared by a member of the Comintern. She made it available to the Russian public for the first time in the periodical Novyi Mir in December 1994. This epoch-making speech by Stalin is also contained in the published edition of the minutes of…

 

030--…summarizing his research results and said: "Analysis has shown that the text, regardless of any possible distortion, originates from Stalin, and must be considered one of the most important documents in the history of the Second World War." That Stalin, as will be ascertained, will be transformed into the principal warmonger must be conclusively acknowledged on the basis of all the following circumstances, and the whole chain of subsequent events." According to Viktor Suvorov, August 19, 1939, was the date upon which Stalin started the Second World War (since this was the day Stalin ordered a surprise attack against the Japanese 6th Army at Khalkhin Gol). Professor Lev Kopelev made a similar statement on December 24, 1994; his phraseology is different, but no less clear: "In 1939, the World War was continued by the Hitlerite and Stalinist realms... on a new and monstrous scale."

 

Russian historians today have long seen an immediate connection between August 23, 1939, and June 22, 1941. The August 23, 1939, Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler enabled Stalin to achieve his initial goal. Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union, recalled that Stalin was "convinced that the Pact would enable him to wrap Hitler around his little finger." "We have tricked Hitler for the moment," was Stalin's opinion, according to Nikita Khrushchev. The August 23, 1939, Non-Aggression Pact encouraged Hitler to attack Poland and, as a result just as Stalin expected—a European war broke out. The Soviet Union participated as an aggressor, beginning on September 17, 1939, without, of course, incurring a declaration of war from the Western powers. The leader responsible for Soviet foreign policy, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Molotov, spoke before the Supreme Soviet on October 31, 1939. He said: "A single blow against Poland, first by the Germans, and then by the Red Army, and nothing remained of this misbegotten child of the Versailles Treaty, which owed its existence to the repression of non-Polish nationalities." It was the express wish of Stalin that nothing should remain of the national existence of Poland.

 

Through the waging of aggressive war against Poland and Finland; through the extortionate annexation of the sovereign republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and through the threat of war against Romania, the Soviet Union, as a result of its treaties with Hitler, expanded its territory by 426,000 square kilometers. This territory was approximately equivalent to the surface area of the German Reich in 1919. In so doing, Stalin tore away the protective buffer states on his Western border while significantly improving his base for deployment toward the West. In Stalin's view, it was now time for the next step, and indeed the conditions for it were favorable. Germany's political and strategic situation, regardless of initial German military achievements, was considered in Moscow to be critical. Decisive victory in the war with England was increasingly receding into the distance. Standing behind Great Britain, with growing certainty, was the United States of America. German forces were scattered all over Europe, locked in a single front against Great Britain stretching from Norway to the Pyrenees. On the other hand, Germany's inability to fight a protracted war in terms of economics was very well-known in Moscow. The German Reich was becoming exceedingly vulnerable in regard to the possibility of being cut off from vital petroleum imports from Romania. Detailed studies of the German economic and armaments situation in these circumstances gave rise to a belief in Moscow that Germany was lapsing into a condition of hopeless military inferiority. That the Soviet leadership was "afraid of Germany and its armed forces" has been proven by M. Nikitin to be a fiction of Stalinist historiography. During these circumstances in late 1940, while the strategic military situation for Germany and its Axis partner, Italy, was becoming increasingly more difficult, Stalin—through Molotov in Berlin on November 12-13, 1940—transmitted the delivery of a demand. The demand boiled down to an expansion of the Soviet "sphere of influence" that was to include Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Greece, i.e., all of southeastern Europe, and, in the north, Finland—with which a peace treaty had only been solemnly concluded in March of that year. A so-called "Swedish question" was also raised. The Soviet Union, in other words, was now demanding a dominant position in all of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. Furthermore, it demanded the creation of bases on the outlets of the Black Sea as well as discretionary passage through the outlets of the Baltic (Great Belt, Small Belt, Sund, Kattegat, and Skagerrack). The Reich, engaged in a struggle for its existence, would be hemmed in simultaneously from the north and south.

 

These demands, delivered in the midst of an increasingly difficult military situation, were so provocative that they left the Germans, as a practical matter, only one alternative: to submit to subjugation or to fight. These demands amounted to a deliberately calculated provocation in which the psychological motive is of principal interest, because it reveals the extent to which Stalin must have believed himself to be utterly safe in terms of his military superiority at that time. If Stalin had really been afraid of Hitler, as he repeatedly allowed the German Embassy in Moscow to believe, he would hardly have provoked the Germans in a manner that, in the view of Ernst Topitsch, amounted to a "summons"—a thinly disguised demand for subjugation. That Molotov, in the days of his mission to Berlin, was in constant, intensive telegraphic contact with Stalin, proves beyond a doubt that he was acting on Stalin's direct instructions.

 

035--Even assuming the admitted order of magnitude, the Red Army, on June 22, 1941, possessed a five- to six-fold superiority in tanks, a five- to six-fold superiority in aircraft, and a five- to ten-fold, and perhaps even greater, superiority in artillery pieces. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that the mass production of modern weapons was really just gearing up. A huge increase in production figures was not only scheduled, but was actually achieved during the last six months of 1941, despite huge losses in industrial capacity as a result of the German conquest of Soviet territory.

 

On the tangible basis of a huge and increasingly rapid development of military arms production, the Red Army had unilaterally generated a bold doctrine based exclusively upon a theory of military aggression.  It was characteristic of this military doctrine that the concept of a "war of aggression" as well as that of "unjust war," became obsolete as soon as the Soviet Union entered hostilities as a belligerent. Lenin stated that what counted was not who attacked first or who fired the first shot, but rather, the causes of a war, its aims, and the classes that waged it. To Lenin and Stalin, any attack by the Soviet Union, against any country at all, was automatically a purely defensive war from the very outset. In addition, it was also a just and moral war under any circumstances. The distinction between preventive attack and counterattack was, furthermore, abandoned.

 

037--After the outbreak of the war, the Germans obtained a great deal of information about the extent to which the members of the Red Army and Soviet Navy were indoctrinated with the conviction of the invulnerability of the forces of the Soviet Union. Soviet Lieutenant Colonel of the General Staff Andrushat (39th Infantry Corps) had taken advantage of an opportunity to switch over to the German side and described the massive propaganda efforts. These had already taken place on April 25, 1941, and made a deep impression on the troops. Andrushat said: "The political commissars continually stressed that the war would be fought on foreign territory, never our own... the Soviet Union would always win, because it has innumerable allies behind the front of any enemy... Because of the statements of the political commissars, the Red Army believed itself the best in the world. It could therefore never be defeated by anyone. The prevalent mood was one of enormous over-estimation of our own capacities."'

 

Again and again, other Soviet officers made similar statements even after the outbreak of hostilities. Major Filippov (29 Infantry Corps), for example, reported on June 26, 1941, that the "prevalent opinion among the troops was that the Red Army could not be beaten. Colonel Liubimov and Major Mikhailov (both of the 49 Armored Division) made similar statements on August 4, 1941, referring to the "universally prevalent belief' "that the Red Army was the best armed and trained in the world, and was therefore invincible. Major Ornushkov (11 Armored Division) was also "firmly convinced that the Russian Army could not be beaten." On August 6, 1941, Ornushkov stated: "According to the propaganda intended for the Red Army, the Russian people could have complete faith in the Red Army. Military periodicals, the press, movies, and radio all constantly stressed the huge expansion of the Armored and Air Forces."

 

041--German experiences were quite similar. In Posen on May 6, 1943, a lecture by the Foreign Armies East Branch of the General Staff of the Army to the I c Service (The I c was the designation for the third (hence "c") staff officer to the chief of staff of a division, corps, army, or army group, and was in charge of intelligence.) stressed that "interrogations of prisoners of war are the most reliable, and often the sole, way to obtain information on a really solid basis." Anyone who has ever done comparative research on prisoner of war interrogation records is always astonished at the extraordinary testimonial force that must be attributed to these documents.

 

044--Finally, Stalin's biographer, Colonel General Professor Volkogonov, accurately reproduced the speech given by Stalin culminating in "military threats against Germany," accusing Bezymensky indirectly of mendacity. According to Volkogonov, Stalin was "candid as seldom before, and spoke about a great many things that represented state secrets." It was, however, not so much candor as alcohol that had loosened his tongue, according to the Russian proverb "what's on a drunkard's tongue when he's drunk, is what's in his brain when he's sober." Since, as eyewitnesses report, he was already very drunk at that "late hour." Volkogonov summarized the speech of May 5, 1941, as follows: "The Vozhd (Leader) made it unmistakably clear: war is inevitable in the future. One must be ready for the 'unconditional destruction of German fascism."' "The war will be fought on enemy territory and victory will be achieved with few casualties."

 

The speech of May 5, 1941, in which Stalin revealed his aggressive intentions, was, however, only the sequel to a speech by "Comrade Stalin" on January 13, 1941, before high-ranking troop commanders and another speech on January 8, 1941 to high-ranking Air Force commanders, both held in the Central Committee, during which he had revealed quite similar thoughts. A few essential points may be taken from the captured diary of Major Murat of the NKVD (with the rank of Major General) of the staff of the 21st Army, who was killed at Lochvica. According to this, Stalin had spoken of a "cultivated enemy," i.e., Germany, after the manner of speech in use among the leadership of the Red Army at that time, and of "attack operations," which could begin when one possessed double superiority. "Two-fold superiority is a law—greater superiority is even better," said Stalin on January 13, 1941: "The game is approaching military operations." "When 5,000 aircraft have destroyed everything, we can attempt to traverse the Carpathians." The Balkans were the central object of Soviet planning on several occasions in the spring of 1941. The approximate manner in which these operations were imagined was soon revealed by the Soviet plenipotentiary representative in Belgrad. "The USSR will only react at the proper time," he stated in a lecture given by him in the spring of 1941: "The powers are scattering their forces more and more. The USSR is therefore waiting to act unexpectedly against Germany, in doing so, the USSR will cross the Carpathians, which will act as the signal for the Revolution in Hungary. Soviet troops will penetrate Yugoslavia from Hungary, advance to the Adriatic Sea, and cut Germany off from the Balkans and the Middle East."

 

Stalin and the Soviet leadership had received increasing numbers of reports on the "unwillingness of the German people to wage war," desertion in the German army, and "the defeatist mood in the Wehrmacht." "If Germany gets involved in a war with the USSR," German soldiers were alleged to be saying: "We will be defeated," and: "We don't want to fight, we want to go home." With the "growing proletarian movements in Germany," the "revolutionary crisis" appeared to be ripening, which, the "newspapers were writing about, the radio was talking about, and the theoreticians were discoursing upon," as Stalin's biographer Volkogonov described the atmo…

 

049--It was on May 20, 1941, fifteen days after Stalin's war speech before the graduates of the Military Academy of the Red Army, in which—and was obvious to everybody—Germany was designated as the enemy, and it was five days after Stalin had approved the plan, still to be further discussed, of the General Staff of the Red Army for an aggressive war against the Reich, that Kalinin gave a secret speech before the Party and Young Communist League (Komsomo) Officials of the Apparatus of the Supreme Soviet. Kalinin was the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and, therefore, Head of State of the USSR, one of Stalin's most dedicated accomplices, who, incidentally, also signed the order to shoot 14,700 Polish officers and 11,000 prominent Polish civilians. In this compromising speech, Kalinin revealed a few basic ideas of the policies and strategy of the Soviet Union.

 

Of course, the concept of the Stalin doctrine of 1925—which boiled down to entering the war with fresh armed forces in the event of the mutual exhaustion of the capitalistic states and, in the end, dictating his own conditions—was temporarily thwarted in 1940 due to the quick German victory in France. Kalinin directed the party cadres on the new course of his lord and master, which was that Communists were not to concern themselves with questions of ensuring peace, but should rather "concern themselves, above all else, in studying the advantages that may arise for the Communist party from events that only occur once in fifty years." Real Marxists must understand, according to Kalinin, and these are his actual words: "that the fundamental concept of the Marxist doctrine consists of deriving the greatest possible benefits for the Communist party from the tremendous conflicts within humanity."

 

Hence, communists, according to Kalinin, should encourage conflicts "whenever there is a chance of success"—whenever they promise special advantages and opportunities. "The best way to strengthen Marxism," the speech concluded, "consists of studying military matters; fighting with a weapon in your hand is even better." "War is a very dangerous businesses, bound up with sufferings," he then added, "but consideration should be given to the possibility of war when it is possible to expand Communism." Kalinin expressed satisfaction that the Soviet Union had succeeded in expanding the zone of Communism to some extent, with relatively few sacrifices. He also added that the expansion of the zone of Communism must continue, "even if it demands great efforts." Kretov, the chief of his Secretariat, summarized the main point of the speech by Kalinin, in thesis form. 65 Thesis No. 10 ran as follows: "The capitalist world, filled with great atrocities, can only be destroyed by the red hot steel of a holy revolutionary war."

 

The whole meaning of this speech by the head of state on May 20, 1941, was, according to Alexandr Nekrich, not concerned with national defense, but rather, with conquest, at "strengthening the power of Communism." As Kalinin expressed it, "which will perhaps be decisive to the entire process of historical events that follows." Could aggressive intentions have been any more clearly expressed in the atmosphere of May 1941 than when Kalinin called out in conclusion—"to the thunderous applause" of the auditorium—that "the army must think: the sooner the struggle begins, the better!"? On June 5, 1941, in a speech before students of the V I. Lenin Military Political Academy he repeated "The war will start when it is possible to expand Communism."

 

In addition to other members of the Politburo, among them for example Shcherbakov, Zhdanov repeatedly propagated Stalin's aggressive policy in May-June 1941. Thus, he called out in a speech before cinema technicians on May 15, 1941: "The people must be educated in the spirit of active, combative military attacks.  "When the circumstances permit," he added openly, "we will further expand the front of socialism." Expanding the "Front of Socialism" to the West, as Nikitin remarked, would, however, only be possible when Germany was smashed. A conference of the Chief Military Council of the Red Army of June 7, 1941, was headed by Zhdanov and dedicated to a topic chosen by Stalin: "The Task of the Political Propaganda of the Red Army in the Near Future." Zhdanov once again announced, with complete frankness: "We have become stronger. We can now set more active goals for ourselves. The wars against Poland and Finland were not defensive wars. We have already entered the path of a policy of attack.

 

The proceedings of May 5, 1941, and, as will be shown, of May 15, 1941, as well, are inseparably related to the speeches of Zhdanov and Kalinin. They bluntly reveal that Stalin had no interest in the maintenance of peace and in the defense of the Soviet State, as Stalinist propaganda and Stalinist apologists continue to allege, even today. On the contrary, they show that he worked militarily, politically, and through propaganda, with all his might, to begin a war of conquest.

 

057--Stalin, however, took great care not to sign documents of fatefully grave content. Colonel General Volkogonov has, however, left no doubt as to Stalin's knowledge of the General Staff Plan of May 15, 1941, and on July 29, 1990, in the Military History Research Office in Freiburg stated that Stalin "signed with his monograph" (i.e., initialed) the plan. Alexandr Nekrich says: "Stalin favored execution of the plan, but wanted to keep his own hands clean." Stalin always acted this way in decisive matters. An extraordinary document has also been found in the "Presidential Archives" (in the former archive of the Politburo of the Central Committee) in Moscow. This is the text of an interview prepared on August 20, 1965 by Marshal Vasilevsky, with a concurring comment by Zhukov, stating that "Stalin fully approves the principal theses of the 'considerations."' Timoshenko and Zhukov must have received Stalin's approval, since they immediately commenced execution of the plan; in which, according to Valeri Danilov as well, they drew up "extensive preparations" for an offensive war against Germany.

 

060--The General Staff plan of May 15, 1941, meant, in terms of one central point, a deviation from previous doctrine: an enemy offensive was no longer to be answered with a devastating blow. Rather, the Red Army was to preempt enemy attack, which was, at this point, still purely hypothetical, since the armored shock forces of the German Armies East were deployed on the eastern border for the first time only on June 3, 1941. Since the great devastating blow was intended to introduce the "military policy of attack operations" ordered by Stalin on May 5, 1941, and, as Kalinin revealed on May 20, 1941, this really involved a political aim, i.e., of "expanding the zone of Communism," which meant expanding the power of the Soviet Union, it was, therefore, a purely offensive war, a war of conquest, not a preventive war that was being prepared, similar to the manner in which Hitler—although for different reasons—planned an offensive war of his own.

 

069--The admission of a crass underestimation of the Red Army is also found in Dr. Goebbels's diaries. Looking back, he noted on August 19, 1941: "We obviously quite underestimated the Soviet shock power and, above all, the equipment of the Soviet army. We had nowhere near any idea of what the Bolsheviks had available. This led to erroneous decision-making..."

 

The Reich Minister for Enlightening the People and Propaganda expanded upon how difficult it had been for Hitler to make the decision to attack the Soviet Union to start with, adding: "But if the worries of the Fuhrer due to our inaccurate estimate of Bolshevik potential were so great as it is... and caused him such nervous strain, it would have been far worse if we had had a clear picture of the real extent of the danger!"

 

Hitler, Goebbels added, was now very indignant: "that he had allowed himself to be so deceived by the reports from the Soviet Union over the potential of the Bolsheviks. Above all, his underestimation of the enemy armored and air forces caused us extraordinary problems in our military operations. He has suffered a great deal over this. It was a very serious crisis..."

 

Hitler made statements that fully confirm this testimony. In the Fuhrer main headquarters on April 12, 1942, Hitler frankly admitted that he had been deceived in regard to the strength of the Red Army, when he declared that the Soviets had: "surrounded everything relating to their army with enormous concealment.

 

086--The consciousness of Soviet strength combined, at the same time, with a knowledge of the difficult political-strategic situation in Germany, which could not, as was well-known, fight a war on two fronts, led to the decision that has been called the "kernel of Bolshevism" ever since the time of Lenin. Namely, that it was important to exploit a unique historical opportunity and bring about a so-called "revolutionary war of liberation," thus vastly expanding the power of the Soviet State, as crudely illustrated by the symbolism of the Soviet governmental coat of arms. Stalin and Kalinin, as well as other high officials such as Zhdanov, openly propagated Soviet imperialism in several of their speeches in the spring of 1941. In November 1940, the feeling of a growing superiority had given Stalin the occasion to make demands in Berlin which, at any rate, made one thing quite plain: he saw no danger in Germany at that time. The Red Army had taken up offensive deployment on the Western border with overwhelming forces which were not organized for defensive purposes even as it became evident that, for its part, Germany was also preparing an attack.

 

It is today proven beyond a doubt that Stalin was very closely informed about the German offensive. As early as 1966, Soviet Defense Minister and Marshal of the Soviet Union Grechko made it quite clear that perhaps some front-line troops may have been surprised by the German offensive, but not the Soviet government and Red Army leadership."' Remarkably, Khrushchev, in addition to other military officers, left no doubt in this regard when he declared: "No one who has the most minimal political understanding can believe that we were surprised by an unexpected and treacherous attack."' One cannot speak of a "German sneak attack," as Colonel Filippov recently put it. Stalin's feelings of superiority was, furthermore, so great that he thought himself capable of defeating "any surprise attack by Germany and its allies at all... and to destroy the attacker."' The President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Kalinin, expressed this conviction in a lecture before the V I. Lenin Military Political Academy on June 5, 1941, openly assuring his listeners: "The Germans intend to attack us... We are waiting for it! The sooner they do that, the better, since we will then wring their necks once and for all time."

 

With such an attitude, neither Stalin nor the Politburo itself, on June 22, 1941, doubted even for a moment that they would be successful in dealing Hitler the defeat that he deserved. General Sudoplatov, Chief of the Reconnaissance Service, even spoke of the "Big Lie of a panic in the Kremlin." Stalin was not surprised on June 22, 1941, but, on the contrary, as Colonel General Volkogonov stresses, the shock set in only several days later, i.e., when the illusions evaporated and catastrophe was looming on the front line, a catastrophe in which it finally became clear that the Germans were, nevertheless, superior in combat."

 

If Stalin's arrogance applied in the event of defense against enemy attack, then it applied equally to his own general offensive plans. In 1990, Colonel Karpov said with reference to the General Staff Plan of May 15, 1941: "In the early grayness of a May or June morning, thousands of our aircraft and tens of thousands of our cannons would have dealt the blow against thickly concentrated German troops, whose location was known to us right down to battalion level—a surprise even more inconceivable than a German attack on us,"

 

Stalin, the General Staff, and the GUPPKA, in any case, expected an easy victory by the Red Army. They expected that the huge offensive they were planning would end with the complete destruction of the enemy with only a few Soviet casualties. As for Hitler and the Germans, they had only a very incomplete notion of what the Soviets were preparing. When one considers the extent of these preparations, however, it becomes clear that Hitler under high pressure only barely preempted an attack planned by Stalin. June 22, 1941, was therefore pretty much the last date on which it would have been possible to initiate a "preventive war."

 

Colonel Petrov, a candidate in the historical sciences, expressed this in plain but accurate language on the anniversary of the victory on May 8, 1991, in a leading article of the official party organ Pravda: "As a result of the overestimation of our own possibilities and the underestimation of enemy possibilities, we drew up unrealistic plans of an offensive nature before the war. In keeping with these plans, we began the deployment of the Soviet armed forces on the western border. But the enemy preempted us."

 

Finally, the Russian historian M. Nikitin should be mentioned who made a detailed analysis of the objectives of the Soviet leadership during the decisive months of May and June 1941. He summarized his research findings in the following words: "We once again repeat that the fundamental objective of the USSR consisted of expanding the 'Front of Socialism' to the greatest possible territorial extent, ideally to include all of Europe. In Moscow's opinion, circumstances favored the realization of this scheme. The occupation of large parts of the continent by Germany, the protracted futile war, the increasing dissatisfaction of the population of the occupied countries, the dispersion of the forces of the Wehrmacht on various fronts, the prospects of a conflict between Japan and the United States—all these factors were thought to give the Soviet leadership a unique chance to smash Germany by surprise attack, and to 'liberate Europe' from 'rotting capitalism.'

 

A study of the guiding documents of the Central Committee of the VKP (b), in Nikitin's view, "together with the data on the immediate military offensive preparations of the Red Army... unequivocally proves the intention of the Soviet leadership to attack Germany in the summer of 1941."

 

090--Soviet historical writing on the German-Soviet war is dominated by a propaganda claim that has been maintained with iron consistency to the present day regardless of all other considerations. This claim, that of so-called "Soviet patriotism," was first publicly made by Stalin on the twenty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution on November 6, 1944. Briefly, the claim is that the peoples of the Soviet Union, filled with "fervent and self-sacrificing Soviet patriotism", "ardent love of their Socialist homeland", "limitless dedication to the cause of the Communist Party", and "limitless faith in the ideals of Communism," "rallied around the Communist Party and the Soviet government," and merged together in a "burning hatred for the conqueror. The "moral-political unity of Soviet society," and the "unshakeable mutual friendship of the peoples of the USSR"—according to the stereotypical formula that was to be unceasingly repeated from that time onward—was alleged to have been "gloriously" confirmed and vindicated during the "Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union."

 

In regard to the Red Army, Stalinist propagandists never tired of asserting that every soldier in the Red Army was a "boundlessly devoted fighter for his Socialist homeland," motivated by "feelings of the highest dedication... to the task entrusted to him of defending the Socialist homeland." He was inspired by "the highest morals, magnificent resistance, courage, and heroism," in fulfillment of "the holy duty to defend the Socialist homeland," "for Party and government, for Comrade Stalin," and, therefore, prepared to fight to the last bullet and the last drop of blood "for our Socialist homeland, for our honor and freedom, for the mighty Stalin." As late as October 1991, regardless of all evidence to the contrary, at a time when Comrade Stalin had long since been unmasked as a criminal against humanity, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Deputy Chief of the Institute for Military History of the Defense Department in Moscow, Major General Dr. Khor'kov, at an International Conference on "Operation Barbarossa" organized by the Military Historical Research Office of the Bundes-wehr in Freiburg, nevertheless, felt entitled to speak of the "will to resistance of the Soviet people and Soviet army" on June 22, 1941, of the "mass heroism of the Soviet soldiers," of the "mass heroism, courage and steadfastness" alleged to have been exhibited by the Red Army from the very outbreak of hostilities, at all times, everywhere, and without exception.' If such statements are accepted without objection, and even applauded, by audiences with some claim to factual knowledge and professional acumen, what can be expected of the general public, whose historical knowledge is largely based upon the superficial reports dished out by an almost ignorant, but politically clearly committed journalism?

 

Anyone with any knowledge of Russian military history is aware of the high quality of Russian military spirit, the oft-proven bravery and steadfastness of Russian combatants during attack and, most especially, in the defense of their native country. The Germans in 1941 frequently underestimated the great degree of love of homeland and country always felt by the Russian people and Russian soldiers. German documents prepared after the outbreak of the war mention innumerable examples of the fact that many Soviet soldiers, for whatever reasons, continued their dedicated and self-sacrificing resistance in many localities until they were killed. Such examples are, however, deceptively and unreliably generalized by Soviet propagandists while consciously and deliberately ignoring everything not in accordance with the propaganda image of Soviet heroism. The question, nevertheless, arises: why would Russian soldiers—not to mention other soldiers conscripted from the oppressed peoples of the USSR—fight "to the last bullet and the last drop of blood" for the same terroristic regime that had inflicted the most atrocious sufferings and privations upon its own citizens and peoples?

 

Stalin himself was initially blinded by illusory misconceptions as to the strength and cohesiveness of the Red Army. Days after the invasion, he was paralyzed by shock but had no illusions in this regard. He accurately attributed the collapse of the front, not only to a failure of leadership, but above all, to a disinclination to fight on the part of the troops of the Red Army. To Stalin, there was only one way to inspire Soviet soldiers with "Soviet patriotism" and to generate the frame of mind that is still referred to, even today, as "mass heroism." This was the same method that had hitherto always proven effective and upon which Stalin's entire system was based: the infliction of the greatest possible compulsion and terror, combined with an endless propaganda campaign intended to ensure political sway. On July 3, 1941, Stalin dared for the first time after the German attack to make a radio address to the peoples of the Soviet Union. In manifold repetitions, he skillfully revealed the conclusion at which he had just arrived: "There must be no place in our ranks for grumblers and cowards, panic mongers and deserters. "4 In this speech, his first of the war, Stalin said: "We must wage a relentless struggle against all forms of subversion behind the front, against deserters, panic mongers, and rumor mongers; we must annihilate all spies, subversives, and enemy paratroopers. All those that harm the national defense through panic mongering and cowardice must be handed over to courts martial without regard to persons... The Red Army, Red Navy, and all Soviet citizens, must defend every inch of our Soviet territory. We must fight to the last drop of blood for our cities and villages."

 

The leadership apparatus of the Red Army immediately transposed these desiderata of a general nature into orders intended to give Soviet soldiers only one choice: to fight or die.

 

The Main Administration for Political Propaganda of the Red Army (GUPPKA), under Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis, pulled out all the stops to hammer into every "individual soldier" "the speech of the Leader of the Peoples, the President of the State Defense Committee, Comrade Stalin, as well as an awareness of the tasks that lie ahead of us." The corresponding watchwords were issued in a series of directives and orders, such as Order No. 20 of July 14 ,Order No. 081 of July 15, 1941, and other fundamental orders. All these orders complied with the slogan of defending "every foot of the Soviet homeland," as expressed in the familiar formula, "to the last drop of blood" and "the last breath." Unauthorized "withdrawal from positions," "leaving the battlefield," and "permitting oneself to be captured," were declared "crimes against your people, against the Soviet homeland and government." "Subversives, panic mongers, cowards, deserters, and the spreaders of provocative rumors" among the "soldiers, commanders (officers), and political fellow-workers" were henceforth to be opposed with a "ruthless struggle," the "most brutal and severest countermeasures," and "merciless" persecution.

 

Just what this was to mean in practice was soon revealed on June 26, 1941, when a soldier in the 131 "Mechanized Division of the Red Army was bayoneted to death before the assembled troops for his failure to carry out an insignificant order. "May all traitors to the homeland receive similar treatment," stated the writ, prepared in the form of an order. The command authorities, emulating the Main Administration for Political Propaganda, naturally hastened to announce similar cases. They specified names for the purpose of general deterrence and selected those from the plethora of executions that now became everyday occurrences. Order No. 1 to the troops of the Southwest Front on July 6, 1941, announced the executions of Red Army soldiers Ignatovsky, Vergun, Koliba, and Adamov. The Commander-in-Chief, Colonel General Kirponos, Member of the Military Council Mikhailov, and Deputy Chief of Staff General Trutko, in a joint proclamation, stated menacingly: "At times such as these, deserters who betray their comrades, who forget their service oath, deserve only one sentence: the death sentence, accompanied by contempt and expulsion from our ranks."

 

The West Front was also purged upon (the former People's Commissar for Defense) Marshal of the Soviet Union Timoshenko's assumption of the position of the arrested Commander-in-Chief, General of the Army Pavlov at the end of June. On July 6, 1941, order No. 01, jointly signed by Timoshenko and Member of the Military Council, Army Commissar Mekhlis, was announced to the troops of the Western Front, and was intended to serve as a warning to the entire leadership corps, including all officers down to the rank of platoon leaders." It was announced that Captain Sbirannik, Military Doctor 2nd Rank Ovchinnikov, Military Doctor 2nd Rank Behavsky, Major Dykmann, Battalion Commissar Krol, and an adjutant to a departmental chief of the Front Staff, Berkovich, had been handed over to a court martial "for conspicuous cowardice" and "treason."

 

Prikaz (Order) 02, issued to the troops of the West Front on the following day, July 7, 1941, and, likewise, signed by Timoshenko and Mekhlis, continued the intimidation of the military leadership." On this occasion, it was announced that the Inspector of Engineers of the Red Army, Major Umanets, had been handed over to a court martial "for failure to obey a combat order, and for treason." Umanets' crime consisted of a failure to blow up the bridges over the Berezina near Borisov in time to prevent them falling into German hands. This order was brought to the attention of all officers of the West Front down to the rank of platoon leaders, as well as to all officers on the endangered Southwest Front and the troops of the NKVD. On July 8, 1941, Timoshenko, whose Military Council now included the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of White Russia, Ponomarenko, in addition to Mekhlis, issued Order No. 03, which was intended as a cautionary warning for the troops of the West Front. This deterrent order announced the sentences handed down by courts martial against the Commander of the 188h Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Colonel Galinsky, and Battalion Commander Cerkovnikov. The "crime" of these two officers simply was that the Germans had succeeded in capturing part of the military equipment of the anti-aircraft regiment near Minsk during a surprise attack on July 26, 1941.

 

This ruthless intervention by the former People's Commissar for Defense (Timoshenko) was intended to set an example and was soon emulated by command agencies on all levels, such as, for example, the 20 'Army, under Lieutenant General Kurochkin, who announced to all units, by Order No. 04 of July 16, 1941, that he had ordered the Commander of the 34th Armored Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Liapin, the Battalion Commander of the 33r Armored Regiment, First Lieutenant Piatin, and the Deputy Commander of the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 17th Armored Division, Captain Churakov, handed over to a court martial "for cowardice and for engendering a mood of panic." This was equivalent to a death sentence. Marshals of the Soviet Union Voroshilov and Budenny were, of course, no less zealous than their colleague Timoshenko. The same was true of General of the Army Zhukov, who was feared in the Red Army for his brutality. In his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the West Front, Zhukov gave an order on October 13, 1941, that all "cowards and panic mongers" were to be shot on the spot. Soviet military tribunals were there simply to ensure that the sentences were carried out. Order No. 0 179 of November 19, 1941, of the Commander-in-Chief of the 43rd Army, Major General Golubev, threatened that all "cowards" would be "killed like dogs."

 

As early as July 10, 1941, Stalin demanded that the "treacherous" commanders of the Northwest Front who had withdrawn before the enemy would be held to account. Holding the entire Front Staff of the Army Corps and Divisions responsible for this "ignominy," he issued orders that all "cowards and traitors" were to be dealt with on the spot. Voroshilov, assigned by Stalin as new Commander-in-Chief of the Northwest Front, as well as Member of the Military Council, Zhdanov, one of Stalin's closest confidants in the Politburo, transformed this order into action. Order No. 3 of July 14, 1941, demanded that all "commanders (officers) and soldiers" who withdrew from the front line were to be hauled before a court martial and sentenced to death, or simply "annihilated on the spot." Continuing in this line of reasoning but further enriched with insults was Order No. 5 of July 16, 1941, issued by the Commander-in-Chief of the Southwest Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Budenny. On July 13, 1941, the President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Kalinin, placed the lawful sanction for the execution of death sentences passed by courts martial upon a broader basis. Executions of officers, political workers, and soldiers in the Red Army, in large numbers—both with and without a legal verdict—had long been an everyday occurrence, but Stalin once again intervened to spread the terror even further.

 

Stalin decided to make an example of the demoted and arrested Commander-in-Chief of the West Front, General of the Army Pavlov and his staff, thus sending a shock through the entire Red Army and distracting attention from Stalin's own responsibility for the collapse of the West Front. He ordered death sentences against General of the Army Pavlov as well as against the Chief of Staff of the West Front, Major General Klimovskikh, the Chief of Signal Communications of the Front Staff, Major General Grigoriev, and the Commander-in-Chief of the 4th Army, Major General Korobkov. The judgment, signed by the President of the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the blood-stained army jurist Ul'rikh, was correspondingly drawn up upon Stalin's instructions, presented to Stalin, and approved without any formal court proceedings. Such was the usual practice of Soviet justice as dispensed by Soviet courts martial.

 

On July 16, 1941, on his own responsibility as President of the State Defense Committee, Stalin issued Order No. 00381 announcing the forthcoming sentencing of the above mentioned generals to the Red Army, as well as the sentencing of the Commander of the 41st Infantry Corps, Major General Kosobutsky, the Commander of the 60 Mountain Infantry Division, Major General Shalikhov, the Regimental Commissar, Kurochkin, the Commander of the 30th Infantry Division, Major General Galaktionov, and the Regimental Commissar, Eliseev. The defendants were accused of "cowardice, failure to supervise, incompetence, lack of organization, abandonment of weapons to the enemy, and unauthorized withdrawal from a position." That these accusations were not entirely without justification is clear from Order No. 001919 of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, apparently signed on September 12, 1941, by Stalin and the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal of the Soviet Union Shaposhnikov, that contains a revealing passage: "There are numerous elements on all fronts who desert to the enemy, throwing away their weapons upon the first contact with the enemy and taking others with them... at the same time, the number of decent commanders and commissars is not very great."

 

Stalin would hardly have made such an admission if it were not true. The institution of the military commissars and politruks, reintroduced on the same date, July 16, 1941, for the supervision of the troop leaders of all ranks, is additional proof of just how unreliable the political attitude and morale of the Red Army were in fact believed to be. That the NKVD troops made no exceptions is revealed by the example of the 23 Motorized Infantry Division of the Operational NKVD troops. On July 12, 1941, the Political Deputy (Zampolit) of the Divisional Commander and Chief of the Department for Political Propaganda of the 23rd Motorized Infantry Division of the NKVD, Regimental Commissar Vodiakha, by Order No. 02/ 0084, drew the attention of all subordinate formations and units to examples of "failure to understand the nature of the Patriotic War of the Peoples of the Soviet Union against the German fascists. Regardless of the military program for the "activity of the Soviet peoples and its glorious Red Army," set forth on radio on July 3, 1941, by the "Leader of the Peoples," Comrade Stalin, there were, in Vodiakha's words, "persons among the ranks of our fighters, and even in the leadership, who voice doubt as to our victory, expressing defeatist opinions, praising the alleged power of the German fascist army, repeating fairy tales about the excellent provisions in the German Army, and even expressing doubt as to the veracity of our press." Such talk constituted a "hostile, extremely harmful influence, aiding and encouraging the enemy."

 

098--Three generals were once again used to set a deterrent example: the Commander-in-Chief of the 28 Army, Lieutenant General Kachalov (who had, in reality, been killed on August 4, 1941, by a direct hit with an artillery shell near Starinka, and whose soldierly death was exploited for purposes of intimidation); the Commander-in-Chief of the 12 Army, Major General Ponedelin (who had been captured while severely wounded); and the Commander of the 13' Infantry Corps, Major General Kirillov. These three generals were accused of having permitted themselves to be captured by the German fascists "in a cowardly manner," thus committing the crimes of desertion and violating their service oath. This accusation was in fact directed, not at these generals alone, but at all members of the army military councils, all commanders, political officials, members of special operations groups, regimental and battalion commanders, and practically every soldier in the Red Army who failed to allow himself to be killed for "Comrade Stalin" on the foremost front line. "All cowards and deserters must be annihilated," Stalin repeated. He now ordered that all "commanders and political leaders,... who flee from the enemy, or allow themselves to be captured,... are to be considered evil deserters, as violators of their service oath, and traitors to their country," and "must be annihilated on the spot." On August 25, 1950, following five years of investigation after their release from German captivity, the Generals Ponedelin and Kirillov ought to be sentenced to death by the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR and subsequently shot. All "superiors and Red Army officers" who allowed themselves to be captured instead of fighting to the death would be annihilated by all "means, both terrestrial and aerial." Overcrowded German prisoner of war camps such as Orel and Novgorod-Severkij were thus attacked and bombed by the Soviet Air Force. That the Soviet government recognized no Soviet prisoners of war, but rather, only traitors to the Soviet homeland, had become general knowledge during the Finnish Winter War at the very latest. Every Soviet citizen was familiar with the reprehensible extension of liability to all members of a family for the crimes of one member. All members of the Red Army were once again expressly warned that the families of all officers and political workers who surrendered would be arrested, while the families of all Red Army soldiers who surrendered would lose "all State support or assistance." The practical application was far worse in most cases.

 

It was typical of Stalin, and characteristic of conditions in the Red Army, that the dissemination of fear and terror, rather than appeals to much-famed "Soviet patriotism," was now considered the most suitable manner in which to induce members of the Red Army to fight for their "Socialist homeland." This was made even clearer during the crisis of 1942, when Soviet soldiers of all ranks were once again directly addressed in menacing language by Stalin, regardless of the system of terror that had been perfected in the meantime. Following the occurrence of a potential breakthrough by German assault troops into the interior of the country in July 1942, German documents spoke of "panicky" and "uncontrolled retreat" on the part of Soviet troops. On July 28, 1942, Stalin, in his capacity of People's Commissar for Defense, issued Order No. 227, amounting, in practice, to a cruder version of Order No. 270 of August 16, 1941. Order 227 unequivocally recalled that "panic mongers and cowards" were to be liquidated on the spot or handed over to military tribunals for sentencing. In the "Red Army of Workers and Farmers"—which was, nevertheless, simultaneously supposed to be inspired by "ardent Soviet patriotism" and "mass heroism"—the lower ranking officers, such as platoon leaders and company chiefs, in addition to all battalion and regimental commanders, and especially all generals, divisional and corps commanders, army commanders-in-chief and their military councils, military commissars and political leaders, not to mention the broad mass of soldiers, were suspected of being capable of "treason to the homeland" and threatened with the severest punishment.

 

101--Post-Soviet historical literature, which had no choice, so to speak, but to sacrifice Stalin—calling many of his criminal measures by their proper name—continues to racks its brain in support of certain Stalinist historical propaganda allegations. Among those that may not be questioned are: the myth of the "cowardly, treacherous, fascist surprise attack upon the unsuspecting, peaceful Soviet Union"; the formula of the "great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union," which did not exist in that usage; not to mention the unquestioning "Soviet patriotism" and "mass heroism" of the soldiers of the Red Army. Stalin's terrorization orders, such as, for example, Order nos. 270 and 227, are invariably described as a continuation of the unjustified repression of the 1930s, once again directed against the innocent. These orders are alleged to have resulted in unjustified damage to the Soviet war effort, just as if there had never been any large-scale "treason to the homeland" at all.

 

An analysis of the relevant documents, however, leads to a different conclusion. Stalin was concerned, not only with finding scapegoats for the disasters at the front—for which he himself was, after all, responsible—but also with compelling Soviet soldiers to fight under the threat of ruthless terror. Only through the dissemination of fear and terror did Stalin believe it possible to stabilize the front at a time when all the reports described a collapse in morale among the troops of the Red Army, although examples to the contrary should, of course, also be cited over and over again. A personal directive by Stalin on September 12, 1941 stated that the "infantry divisions of all fronts" contained "numerous panic mongers and regular hostile elements who throw away their rifles upon the first contact with the enemy, screaming 'we are surrounded!"' "The result of this... is that the division takes flight, and that our equipment is abandoned on the spot." Stalin, furthermore, admitted that "the number of consistent and steadfast commanders and commissars is not very great." This was an accurate description of the situation as revealed by the documents of high command authorities from the summer and the fall of 1941.

 

103--The "ignominious phenomena of desertions and treason to the homeland" repeatedly admitted in Soviet documents must be evaluated against the underlying fact that members of the Red Army could not be prevented from deserting en mass to the Germans, regardless of any threat of punishment. One and a half million Soviet soldiers of all ranks were in German captivity by the middle of August 1941, over 3 million by the middle of October 1941, and 3.8 million by the end of 1941. A total of 5.25 million Soviet soldiers and officers were captured during the course of the war. During the initial phase of hostilities, the German command authorities reported "that large sections of the enemy no longer exhibit any strong will to fight," however, soon afterward they observed, that "the enemy units are now offering stiffer or more embittered resistance." Nevertheless, the latent tendency of Soviet soldiers to allow themselves to be captured or to run away never entirely vanished at any time during the war.

 

106--The Soviet Union is the only state in the world ever to have declared the captivity of its soldiers to be a serious crime. The military oath, the article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code and other regulations, such as the Interior Service Regulation) and the "Infantry Combat Provisions of the Red Army" left no doubt that allowing oneself to be taken prisoner would inevitably be punished by death as "desertion to the enemy," "flight to a foreign country," "treason," and "desertion." "Captivity is treason to the homeland. There is no more reprehensible and more treacherous act," the regulation stated: "But the highest penalty—shooting—awaits the traitor to the homeland." Stalin, Molotov, and other leading officials, such as Madame Kolontay, repeatedly and publicly declared that the Soviet Union only recognized the existence of deserters, traitors to the homeland, and enemies of the people.  This attitude toward prisoners of war should be borne in mind if one wishes to understand a tactical maneuver engaged in by Moscow starting in July 1941, which has caused fundamental confusion right down to the present day.

 

109--The second method consisted of detailed descriptions of the horrible pangs of torture or of the "horrible deaths by torture" inevitably suffered by Red Army soldiers in capitalist captivity. Drastic examples were set forth, in particular, from the struggles against the "White Finnish bands," the "Finnish cut-throats," the "White Finnish scum of humanity." The Finns were said to have directed all their efforts to "practicing unprecedented torments upon prisoners of war and the wounded, burning the wounded alive, as on the Island of Lassisaari, burning out their eyes, cutting open their stomachs,

 

110--The Political Administration had another and, this time, truly convincing argument ready for anyone who failed in their eagerness to believe the official presentation of proof. "A disgraceful fate awaits anyone who surrenders out of fear, thereby betraying the homeland," the authorities stated menacingly: "Hate, contempt, curses from family, friends, and the people as a whole, followed by a shameful death." The text of the agitation manual describes the example of two Red Army men who, upon returning from Finnish captivity, were said to deserve and to have received "just retribution" for their "treason" and "violation of their service oath" "before the Soviet people." A court martial was alleged to have sentenced the two soldiers to death by shooting for "treason to the homeland," as "monsters," and "loathsome souls," on the grounds that a "traitor to the Socialist homeland has no right to live on Soviet soil." The circumstances, in reality, were somewhat different. Repatriated Soviet prisoners of war were never individually indicted following the conclusion of peace with Finland on March 12, 1940. Rather, they were indiscriminately and summarily arrested by the NKVD, solely on the grounds of their military captivity, and were never heard from again, having been shot to the last man.

 

112--Propaganda intended to make Red Army soldiers believe that they would inevitably be killed in German captivity 15 began with the outbreak of the war and may be observed as early as June 23, 1941. The central task of the political apparatus was to stimulate and intensify the fears of captivity and was continued onward with iron consistency throughout the war. The emphasis was not upon mere shooting, but rather, continued the propaganda line of the Finnish Winter War. German soldiers were accused of "bestial tortures," "horrible mutilations," "torturing prisoners to death," "cutting off their fingers, ears, and noses, putting out their eyes, and ripping out their spinal columns before shooting their prisoners." Scattered throughout the documents are references to alleged atrocities that no political tract or lecture, no "meeting," no "obrascenie" of political workers, no frontline newspapers could fail to feature in 1943. For purposes of enhanced credibility, gross falsification was resorted to. Thus, as early as July 1941, photographs of Poles and Ukrainians shot by the NKVD by the thousands in the prisons of Lemberg were produced as alleged "proof' of atrocities committed against prisoners of war by German soldiers. There were other methods. German prisoners of war were shot and left lying on back roads to provoke reprisals against Soviet prisoners of war, that, in turn, it was hoped, would detract from the "inclination of soldiers in the Red Army to desert." 18 Some German command posts showed signs of falling for such a trap. The High Command of the Wehrmacht, however, put an early stop to this, and prohibited reprisals on the grounds that "it would only unnecessarily increase the bitterness of the struggle."

 

Members of the Red Army were constantly reminded of the alleged fate of Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity with such penetrating force that such propaganda could not remain entirely without effect. Thus, the German command authorities repeatedly reported that, as a result of systematic repetition by their "officers and commissars," the belief became widespread among soldiers in the Red Army that the Germans "killed all prisoners," that "we shot all Russian prisoners of war, even torturing them beforehand." It was discovered that, for one part, the "simple souls" among Soviet soldiers expected to be shot.

 

113--It is widely known today that, under the terms of Hitler's notorious "Commissar Order", political officers of the Red Army were shot as alleged non-combatants by the German Security Police and SD and, at least to some extent, by German troops—although in relatively small numbers, and in the face of increasing reluctance. It, nevertheless, appears necessary to remark in this connection that similar actions were also committed by the Soviets: members of the Wehrmacht known to be members of the NSDAP, particularly officers, were immediately shot. Colonel Gaevsky of the Soviet 29th Armored Division, on August 6, 1941, even testified to the existence of an order from the Superior Army (4 or 10'), commanding that "lower-ranking officers should be shot because these officers must be assumed to be dedicated follows of Hitler."

 

German captivity was naturally characterized by differing methods of treatment, as may be shown by a brief survey. For example, the German army, by decree of the Quartermaster General, Major General Wagner, on July 25, 1941, even released Soviet prisoners of war of Ukrainian nationality and, soon afterward, of White Russian nationality as well, in their homelands in the occupied territories. According to Russian data, 292,702 prisoners were released in the zone of the High Command of the German Army before the action was stopped on November 13, 1941, while 26,068 prisoners were released in the zone of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. At a time when the Panzer Group 3, for example, released the 200,000th prisoner of war, Driuk, home with praise, and other units were acting similarly, the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD were engaged in the physical liquidation of "intolerable elements," particularly, politically and "racially" undesirable persons. Even some members of the peoples of Turkestan and the Caucasus, very often the most irreconcilable enemies of the Soviet regime, fell victim to these liquidations, singled out only for their exotic appearance as the prototypes of an erroneously conceived "Asiatic" or "Mongol" Bolshevism. Tragically, just these same minority groups were considered worthy by the High Command of the German Army since winter of 1941/42 to join the newly formed national legions of Turkestanis, Azerbaijanis, North Caucasians, Volga Tatars, Georgians, Armenians, or Kalmuck Cavalry Corps as fellow combatants and soldiers of equal rights, wearing the German emblem of sovereignty—the swastika in the talons of the eagle—on field gray uniforms.

 

That the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity in the winter of 1941/2 was indeed terrible is generally well-known. Hundreds of thousands of them perished from hunger and epidemics during those winter months in what has been justifiably been called a "tragedy of huge proportions." There were, however, many different reasons for this mass mortality. A lack of familiarity with the peoples of the East, human indifference, or even ill will engendered by political resentments, particularly on subordinate levels, may have all played a part. In a greater sense, however, it was not so much ill will as the logistical inability to provide food and housing for millions of often totally exhausted prisoners of war under the harsh conditions of the eastern winter of 1941/2. The German field army, engaged in a life and death defensive struggle, was suffering from severe deficiencies following the near total collapse of the transportation system. Comparatively speaking, it may be said that the mortality rate among Soviet prisoners of war in Finnish captivity amounted to almost one third of the total of men captured .It is simply contrary to historical truth to blame the competent Quartermaster General of the German Army General Staff for the conditions of the prisoners of war or to attempt to relate any losses to Hitler's so-called "policy of extermination" in the East. It was the Quartermaster General of the General Staff of the German Army that, by the decrees of August 6, October 21, and December 2, 1941, to the Wehrmacht Military District Commanders, established food rations in quantities sufficient to maintain the life and health of all prisoners of war in the occupied territories, including the regions of the Ukraine and the Eastern territories, as well as Norway and Romania.

 

As early as June 24, 1941, prisoners stated that the reason for their stubborn resistance was that the following was "drummed" into them: "l . If Soviet troops evacuated a position and withdrew, political commissars immediately shot them. 2. If they deserted, the Germans would immediately shoot them. 3. If they were not shot by the Germans, they would be immediately shot as soon as the Red Army retook the position, in which case, their property would be confiscated and their relatives also shot." These statements reveal the hopeless situation in which Soviet soldiers found themselves entrapped.

 

117--Concerning what happened to the guilty, the reports agree in their particulars: picking up and reading German leaflets was punished by death .Red Army soldiers were shot for this, everywhere, without judgment by court martial, and, if possible, in front of the assembled troops. "Possession of a German leaflet by a Soviet soldier is punished by court martial, in most cases by shooting," the Commander of the 27 Infantry Corps, Major General Artemenko, bluntly admitted in September 1941.

 

119--The "strictest countermeasures" were now threatened. "The arrest of all persons coming from areas occupied by German troops, detailed interrogations with the objective of obtaining a confession, and handing the guilty parry over to court martial"—which was the equivalent to shooting him. High-ranking officers in the Soviet 6th and 12th Armies, including Lieutenant General Muzychenko, Lieutenant General Sokolov, Major General Tonkonogov, Major General Ogurtsev (6 Army), Major General Ponedelin, Major General Snegov, Major General Abranidze, and Major General Proshkin (12 Army), testified on August 16, 1941, that "soldiers having escaped from German captivity were immediately shot." According to the testimony of the Commander of the 196 Infantry Division, Major General Kulikov, returning officers only received a minimum of ten years imprisonment in a labor camp for "residence on the territory of the enemy. In addition, all Soviet soldiers who escaped the collapse of the fronts and the encirclement battles and broke through to their own troops were subjected to severe persecution. According to Major General Grigorenko, encircled troops were greeted with orders of execution: "Soldiers and officers, members of supply units, infantrymen, fliers... tank crews... artillerymen... were all shot; the next day, those who had shot them could themselves be encircled by the enemy and might well suffer the same fate as those shot by them yesterday."

 

Only the absence of a continuous front and the collapse of uniform leadership are believed to have saved literally "hundreds of thousands" of soldiers from a senseless policy of extermination.

 

The Soviets also used another—psychological—means to prevent flight forward by Red Army soldiers: the principle, well-known to every resident of the Soviet Socialist Republics, of revenge and reprisals against family members. German interrogation records unanimously reveal the anxiety with which captured Soviet soldiers contemplated this type of "revenge by their Soviet rulers," i.e., that their family members "would be banned to Siberia or shot." What is more, the "group of relatives subject to the severest reprisals," according to the testimony of a captured First Lieutenant, was "interpreted very broadly." First Lieutenant Filipenko, First Ordinance Officer of the Staff of the 87th Infantry Division, on June 27, 1941, testified to the existence of a Soviet law "according to which the relatives of captured or deserting soldiers would be held responsible, i.e., would be shot." A summary report on prisoner of war interrogations in the German XXIII Army Corps of July 30, 1941, states: "The officers live in constant fear that their relatives will be shot by the GPU if they are captured." This was also the impression of aircraft crewmembers Lieutenant Anoshkin, Second Lieutenant Nikiforov and Sergeant Smirnov: "If it is discovered that a flier has been captured by the Germans, his family will answer for it, either through banishment or through the shooting of individual members of the family. This fear of reprisals is what prevents most desertions."

 

124--It should be clear by now that the Red Army rested upon two pillars: the military leadership apparatus, and the independent political apparatus. The latter had its own official channels and was subordinate to the Chief of the Main Administration for Political Propaganda (GUPPKA; after July 1941, the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army) under the notorious Commissar First Rank Mekhlis. Another institution, working in secrecy, was all the more dangerous: the NKVD terror apparatus, which had nothing to do with the Red Army in terms of organization, but took its orders from the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs under Beria. The ruling system of the Soviet Union was based on the simple principle that anyone who failed to believe Soviet propaganda soon experienced Soviet terror. In the Red Army, terror was institutionally extremely well provided for.

 

128--…of the war, relating to the working methods of this criminal organization, is in order at this point. The Chief of the Counter Intelligence Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Admiral Canaris, presented a report in July 1941 concerning an inspection of the Soviet Embassy building in Paris, i.e., an extra-territorial diplomatic installation. According to the report, it was discovered that a GPU headquarters had been installed in a side wing of the Paris Embassy, with facilities for "torture, executions, and for the destruction of corpses," something quite unique in the diplomatic history of civilized states. The report assumes that "the bodies of several white Russian generals who mysteriously disappeared in Paris a few years ago were destroyed here."

 

132--Generally, it is true to say that the inhumane treatment of the Soviet soldiers differed from the treatment meted out to the Soviet civilian population in the combat zone only in its perfection. Stalin had given the watchword on July 3, 1941, when he demanded that "not one kilo of wheat, not one liter of gasoline" should be left to the enemy, and that "all valuable property... that cannot be transported" should be destroyed, "without exception." This was further intensified in regard to the civilian population by Soviet radio on July 7, 1941. All rolling stock, all stocks of raw materials, all stocks of fuel, every kilo of wheat, every head of livestock, were to be destroyed. Implementation of the newly proclaimed principle of destruction meant deliberate, unquestioning destruction of the basic necessities of life for the civilian population. It also meant that the population would be exposed to the foreseeable consequences of the partisan war, which was begun at this same time, and which was illegal under international law—i.e., the danger of severe reprisals by the Germans and German-allied troops.

 

As early as June 29, 1941, the Council of the People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the VKP (b) gave instructions that all forces of the "Soviet" population were to be mobilized in the struggle against the Germans, and that an extensive people's war was to be organized in the enemy hinterland .The face of this "people's war" is representatively revealed, in addition to many similar worded proclamations, 22 by a directive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of White Russia of July 1, 1941, communicating the following data relating to the incipient "partisan movement:" "Every link to the enemy hinterland must be destroyed, bridges and streets must be blown up or damaged, fuel and food warehouses, vehicles and aircraft must be burned, railway catastrophes must be arranged, all enemies must be exterminated: they must receive no rest either day or night; they must be exterminated everywhere, wherever they are surprised, they must be killed by any means that comes to hand: axes, scythes, crowbars, hay forks, knives..., you must not shrink from using any means in the extermination of the enemy: strangle them, hack them to death, burn and poison the fascist scum."

 

According to the testimony of the captured partisan Kozlov on October 1, 1941, the member of the Central Committee of the Party, Kazalapov from Khol'm, also demanded that German soldiers and wounded be "further tortured by mutilation prior to shooting."

 

It was not only the partisan units and partisan groups, some of them recruited by force from among the male population under the threat of being shot, that now began an illegal guerrilla war in crass violation of the letter and spirit of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare. The entire civilian population was irresponsibly drawn in, as revealed by a proclamation directed at all residents of "enemy-occupied territory" by the Commander-in-Chief of the West Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Timoshenko, and with him, Member of the Military Council, Bulganin, on August 6, 1941. The "workers, farmers, and all Soviet citizens" were ordered to "attack and destroy German rear connections, transports, and columns, burn and destroy bridges, tear down telegraph and telephone lines, set fire to houses and forests." "Beat the enemy, torture him to death with hunger, burn him with fire, destroy him with bullets and hand grenades... to carry out the destruction of bridges in the rear of the enemy, use mostly local means, use expedients involving explosives... burn warehouses, destroy the fascists like mad dogs." All very easily said by persons who knew that they were in safety; the people would suffer the consequences. No army in the whole world would have tolerated such actions without the severest reprisals.

 

The inhumane attitude of both Stalin and his regime toward their own population was revealed perfectly when the German troops began to withdraw in 1943, with Soviet troops gradually regaining the previously occupied territories. The Red Army troops were everywhere followed by border troops and NKVD troops to secure the hinterland; these were responsible for taking "Chekist measures" to purge "all territories liberated from the occupant," particularly cities and inhabited areas, "from enemy elements and their lackeys," from "enemy agents and other hostile elements," to "normalize" and "restore" the situation and create a "revolutionary order" behind the front line. What this meant in practice is revealed with sufficient clarity by the actions of the Soviet security corps: the shooting of all inhabitants and residents, without regard to age or sex, having maintained at least bearable relations with the German occupation authorities or German soldiers. Hundreds of thousands now fell victim to NKVD purges, an order of magnitude that compares, and may even exceed, the victims of the Einsatzgruppen of the German Security Police and SD.

 

A terrible fate awaited the Caucasian peoples of Kalmucks, Karachays, Chechens, Ingushs, Balkars, parts of the Karbardinian people, as well as the Tatars of the Crimea for their collaboration with the German occupation authorities. Following the initial, far-reaching waves of bloody purges, these people, on the order of Stalin, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKP (b), and the State Defense Committee (GKO) of 1943/1944, were torn from their ancestral residences and deported to concentration camps in the barren regions of Siberia, and to north of the Polar circle, or to central Asia. They were dispersed, stripped of all national identity, and treated, immediately and practically, like convicts. Tens of thousands fell victim to this "mass crime"—so-called by Khrushchev in 1956, although he was personally involved. This crime was carried out using methods that were as treacherous as they were cruel, with the usual accompanying phenomena of executions and the systematic dispersion of families. These actions clearly constituted the crime of genocide according to the 1948 Genocide Convention, ratified by the USSR (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

 

Anyone prepared to act as mercilessly against his own civilian population would naturally show no mercy to one's own soldiers. This is revealed by many characteristics. A common crime in the Red Army, for example, was the self-infliction of wounds by soldiers just prior to serious attacks in order to avoid combat. As a rule, the self-mutilators, who were found in all sections of the army, were shot. This may be seen from the records in all cases, either with or without judgment by a court martial, which was irrelevant under Soviet conditions. The number of sentences handed down for self-mutilation, already considerable as early as June 1941, increased rapidly in 1942, almost doubling on the Kalinin Front, the Southwest Front, and the North Front between January and May 1942, and increased by the factor of nine on the Northwest Front over the same time period. It was not the fact that there were "sometimes hundreds of self-mutilators" in the "etappe," i.e., the field hospitals and military hospitals to the rear, but rather the fact that few such cases were being reported on the furthermost front line, in the first-aid stations (PPM) and medical battalions (MSB), that motivated the intervention by the Military Public Prosecutor's Office of the Red Army under Corps Jurist Nossov, on July 18, 1942. Nossov's Order No. 0110 instructed the military public prosecutors of the Fronts and Armies not just to take action afterward, as had been done previously, but rather to hand over a few self-mutilators, sentence them to death and shoot them immediately, during the attack preparations or just after the attack began, "in front of all assembled personnel," to achieve the maximum degree of deterrence .In this instance as well, the "mass heroism" and "Soviet patriotism" of the Red Army was the result of intimidation. In contrast to conditions in the German Wehrmacht, where soldiers were only suspected of so-called self-mutilation in exceptional cases, the broad mass of soldiers in the Red Army was suspected of self-mutilation from the very outset . According to Order of the People's Commissar of Defense No. 111 of April 12, 1942, signed by Lieutenant General Khrulev, even wounded or sick soldiers lying in medical installations were to be indicted and prosecuted as self-mutilators.

 

The slaveholder mentality and the system of contempt for human life peculiar to the Soviet Union is clearly demonstrated by the methods of attack commonly practiced by the Red Army, i.e., the tactic of the "human steam roller," guided, according to Major General Grigorenko, by the "inhumane slogan" of "Spare No Human Life." Colonel General Volkogonov has combed thousands of operational documents of the Supreme Commander Stalin; not a single one of them contains any hint that saving lives, achieving the established objective at minimum cost, or avoiding unprepared frontal attacks was of any importance at all. Quite the contrary: Stalin demanded successful assaults "at any price in casualties"; for example, in one order, he compelled "even Colonel General Yeremenko and Lieutenant General Gordov to spare no manpower, and to shrink from no casualties." "Casualties, casualties en masse," were indifferent to Stalin, and simply didn't matter if only the desired success could be achieved." According to Volkogonov, Stalin led his armed forces to victory "at the price of horrendous losses." Why is it, asks Volkogonov, "that our losses were up to three times as high as those of the enemy? This was an underestimate, since, according to Finnish experiences during the Winter War, Soviet losses exceeded Finnish casualties—at a "conservative estimate"—by the factor of five: "Soviet infantry was driven en masse against Finnish positions without any regard for losses." Authors from the Soviet era, then drawing to a close, confirmed this assertion by stating, very much to the displeasure of the Stalinist Voenno-istoriceski zhurnal (4/1991), "that our army suffered losses in the past war that were five times higher, and even more, than those suffered by the army of the Hitlerites."

 

The whole system of Soviet contempt for human life also found expression in the manner in which the personnel was treated, which was compulsorily conscripted from the recaptured territories starting in 1943. It must be recalled in this regard that the population of the Caucasus, the Cossack regions at Terek, Kuban, and the Don, as well as in the southern Ukraine, had generally maintained good relationships with the Germans 6ofrom the Soviet point of view this was an attitude of treason and hostility. The compulsory conscription of all men of military age immediately after the recapture of this region therefore formed part of a mass punishment campaign, undertaken collectively against the population, as well as an act of revenge. As revealed by Order No. 052 from the 3r Guards Army of February 23, 1943, as well as by the statements of Major Genshtaba Zhilov of the staff of the 58 Army, the mobilization of the male population after the first uncontrolled recruitments was left to the front-line units of the corps and divisional commanders, who were thus given an easy opportunity to make up for the heavy losses suffered by their units. In practice, local commanders were assigned to summon the local male population under threat of severe punishment. They then systematically began to comb the cities and localities with the help of the Special Departments of the NKVD and other NKVD agencies for "military age" male personnel. All persons caught were ruthlessly drafted "the same night." All males up to the age of fifty, and in some cases, sixty, were considered able-bodied and liable for military service. Basically, all youths born as late as 1927, and in some cases, 1928, i.e., sixteen year olds, and, in some cases, fifteen year olds, were drafted, in various divisions by falsification of their birth dates. In accordance with the Stalinist principle that no one was unfit for military service, only the "obviously sick and cripples" were rejected; the handicapped were, nevertheless, drafted as "fit for service" in many cases. Depending upon their classification, the young people were immediately assigned to the front units or to punishment units, so that, according to one source, "the punishment companies consist mostly of young people, and the youngest age groups."

 

Usually poorly trained, or not trained at all, sometimes still wearing civilian clothing, poorly armed and insufficiently provisioned, these men were immediately thrown into the struggle at the foremost front lines and driven into German machine gun fire. The German command posts repeatedly described the manner in which the Soviets—for example, on the Taman peninsula and elsewhere—drove their units forward against fully fortified and defended German positions, without reconnaissance or preparation, wave after wave, with "extraordinarily high losses." An unnamed Soviet political officer with the rank of captain also very accurately remarked in his diary on March 4, 1943: "In the region... the young people... are mobilized and immediately sent into combat as cannon fodder." In the unanimous opinion of Soviet deserters and prisoners of war: "The extremely high losses naturally suffered by these untrained replacement troops who had no interest in fighting for the Soviet Union, and were trapped between the front line and the blocking commandos, were deliberately accepted, since the Soviet Union had no desire to keep these fascist-contaminated elements that therefore constituted a danger to the morale of the Red Army."

 

The German troops took account of this inhumane and illegal method, at least, insofar as armed civilians were treated as prisoners of war rather than guerrillas if they were captured in fighting formation next to regular soldiers of the Red Army.

 

In reply to Churchill's well-known "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, Stalin, in a foreign interview published in the party newspaper Pravda on March 14, 1946, stated that the Soviet Union, "in the struggle against the Germans, and, additionally, as a result of the German occupation and the conscription of the Soviet population for forced labor, irretrievably lost approximately (okolo) seven million people," i.e., both military and civilian personne1. The seven million figure was later further inflated for propaganda purposes—several times during the following time period. Thus, Member of the Politburo and Stalin Party doctrinaire Suslov, in 1965, increased the figure to 20 million, ° a figure that was obligatory throughout the Brezhnev era, while the total number of military and civilian deaths in the USSR was increased to 27 million by Soviet State President Gorbachev on May 9, 1990. Of these, 8,668,000 were members of the armed forces, including members of the Interior Troops, the Border Troops, and Security Agencies (gosbezopasnosti)." One year later, on the evening before the anniversary celebrations, on June 21, 1991, a Soviet historian, Professor Dr. Kozlov, ventured to assert: "The USSR suffered 54 million war dead. A comparison of obviously speculative casualty figures will hardly produce reliable results. Furthermore, as the Austrian military historian, University Lecturer Dr. Magenheimer, accurately stated: "The suspicion arises that many of the civilian losses must be attributed to the reprisals, liquidations, and deportations of the Stalinist system, not least of all to the compulsory repatriations during and after the end of the war in 1945, all of which took place at the express will of Stalin."

 

It was Stalin who—at the end of the war, by order to the Commander-in-Chiefs of the 1S and 2n White Russian Fronts, the 1St, 2nd 3,and 4Ukrainian Fronts, as well as to "Comrade Beria, Comrade Merkulov, Comrade Abakumov, Comrade Golikov, Comrade Khrulev, Comrade Golubev"—personally demanded the creation of gigantic NKVD camps with a capacity of one million persons for "former prisoners of war and repatriated Soviet citizens." Regarding the number of military dead in particular, it should be recalled that the Soviet Union was at war with, or had attacked, not only the German Reich between 1939 and 1945, but the following states as well: Poland, Finland, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Iran, Bulgaria, and Japan. Although Colonel General Volkogonov estimates Soviet losses at two or three times higher than those of the enemy, these same losses, "at a conservative estimate," were in fact five times higher than those of the enemy during the Winter War with Finland alone. If the ratio rose even higher between 1941 and 1945, then the reasons for it must be ascribed primarily to the Soviets.

 

The Soviet Union did not recognize the Hague Convention, and never ratified the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention, in order to prevent Soviet soldiers from saving their lives by permitting themselves to be captured. Prisoners of war were fundamentally considered "traitors" and "deserters," and were to be annihilated by all means, both aerial and terrestrial; they were therefore deliberately subjected to bombing attacks by the Soviet Air Force against German prisoner of war camps. In terms of cause and effect, therefore, the Soviet Union was itself responsible for the casualties among prisoners of war; this is, furthermore, the opinion of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Of course, this only exculpates the Germans insofar as German treatment of prisoners of war did not result from indifference or ill will, but was rather dictated by the force of circumstances. The individual and mass executions, which were common in the Red Army throughout the war, also caused heavy losses among Soviet soldiers. The numbers are difficult to determine, but generally they must have been enormous. Finally, the barbarism of Soviet methods of attack cost huge numbers of human lives. These massacres, coldly calculated by the Soviet leadership, set the Red Army apart from all other armies in the world, including the German army. One need only recall, for example, the seriousness with which theories relating to the most economical methods of infantry attack in terms of human life were discussed in the German army, even before the First World War, and that blind frontal assaults against enemy positions prepared for defense were considered to be almost prohibited at that time.

 

Regardless of all countermeasures, over 3.8 million Soviet soldiers surrendered to the Germans by the end of 1941, and a total of 5,245,000 during the entire war. According to the official Soviet definition, all these men were "traitors," and "deserters." Two million of them perished primarily during the first winter of the war from hunger and epidemics. Large numbers were also shot by totally deluded German Security Police and the SD .A million Soviet soldiers, nevertheless, did volunteer for military service on the German side, permitting themselves to be armed for combat against the Soviet regime by the Germans. Under the circumstances, the question arises: how can one possibly speak seriously of a "Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union"? Furthermore, what is the justification for the stereotypical allegations of "mass heroism" and "Soviet patriotism" of the Red Army when the most reprehensible methods of compulsion were required to drive Soviet soldiers into combat? "I repeat that the military defeat was the result of the unwillingness of the Red Army to fight," wrote former Lieutenant Oleg Krasovsky of the 16th "Kikvidze" Infantry Division in regard to the events of 1941.  Krasovsky was later adjutant to Major General of the ROA, Blagoveshchensky, and until his death in 1993, he was Editor in Chief of the almanac Veche, published by the Russian National Association. According to Lieutenant General Professor Pavlenko, the basic questions of the German-Soviet war continue to be "unscrupulously falsified" by Soviet historiography. It appears that these falsifications include, first and foremost, the propaganda myth of "Soviet patriotism" that continues to be a feature of historical literature on the German-Soviet war to this very day.

 

149--Following the "settlement"—naturally assumed to be "final"—of the "Polish question" from the Soviet point of view, the Soviet regime, in Stalin's words, had wished to proceed with a solution of the "problem" of the Baltic States, by way of the agreement of August 23, 1939. That is, it began to put massive pressure upon the sovereign republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, regardless of any existing treaties, to throttle their independence through the relentless application of political terror and threats of military force.

 

According to the German-Soviet Treaty of August 23, 1939, Finland was also deemed to lie within the Soviet "sphere of interest," doubtlessly destined for a fate similar to that of Poland and the Baltic States. However, the unprovoked Soviet attack upon Finland, in violation of international law, had taken an unexpected turn as a result of stubborn Finnish resistance. The Soviet government, to avoid the threat of involvement by the Western powers, had abandoned its objectives in regard to Finland and had been temporarily-satisfied with the annexation of large chunks of territory in the Karelian peninsula. On the basis of the German-Soviet agreement of August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union had adopted a similarly hostile attitude to Romania in the spring of 1940. The High Command of the Soviet 12 Army, which was concentrated on the Soviet-Romania border, and the Mechanized Cavalry Group under Lieutenant General Cherevichenko had been ordered to initiate a surprise attack against Romania on July 26, 1940. Upon the urgent advice of Germany, the Bukarest government submitted to the Soviet ultimatum demanding the relinquishment of the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina to the Soviet Union, thus avoiding the outbreak of military conflict.

 

The immediate result of Stalin's agreement with Hitler, therefore, had been that the Soviet Union had waged aggressive wars against Poland and Finland; that, in partnership with Germany, the Soviet Union had destroyed the sovereignty and independence of the Polish nation; that Romania had been forced to relinquish enormous territories under threat of war; and that the Soviet Union had destroyed the independence of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania under the direct or indirect use of force, and had incorporated these nations into the Soviet empire. Poland had been described by the Soviet government as a matter of exclusive concern to the Soviet Union and Germany, fundamentally rejecting the right of the Western powers and Great Britain to intervene in Polish affairs. According to Moscow, Britain and France had been alleged to enjoy "undivided rule over hundreds of millions colonial slaves," thus forfeiting the moral right to speak of the "freedom of peoples." The traditional justification for the declaration of war upon Germany by the Western powers, therefore, had been merely a pretext intended to conceal true motives and objectives. The latter, in turn, had consisted of nothing more than the mere desire to maintain the antiquated balance of power in Europe, created at Versailles and of advantage to the Western powers alone, the elimination of which had been the true intent of the German-Soviet treaty—according to Stalin. The only concern of the Western powers had been to eliminate Germany as the most dangerous competitor on international markets.

 

Britain and France had been branded by the Soviet Union as the instigators of an imperialistic war, and had been alleged to be responsible for its continuation and expansion. Molotov, in a speech before the Supreme Soviet on October 31, 1939, had called the alleged motive of the Western powers for continuing the war against Germany (the struggle against "fascism," which was by all possible means also actively engaged in by the Soviet Union until 1939, then stopped, and then suddenly recommenced in 1941) a meaningless and criminal piece of stupidity and cruelty. According to Pravda on September 30, 1939, it was "a crime against the peoples, committed by provocateurs and politicians without honor." Stalin, summarizing the official opinion, had told Pravda in an interview on November 29, 1939: "l. It was not Germany that attacked France and Britain; rather, it was France and Britain that attacked Germany, therefore assuming the responsibility for the present war; 2. Following the outbreak of hostilities, Germany made peace proposals to France and Britain; the Soviet Union publicly supported the German peace proposals, because it believed, and still believes, that a rapid end to the war would radically alleviate the situation of all countries and peoples; 3. The ruling classes in France and Britain insultingly rejected Germany's peace proposals and all Soviet efforts for a rapid end to the war. These are the facts."

 

The partnership and complicity between Hitler and Stalin had been revealed, not only by the fact that the Soviet Union had acted as an active partner in the violent transformation of territorial conditions in Eastern Europe, but by the provision of Soviet political, economic, and military support to the German Reich in its struggle against the Western powers. Soviet maritime assistance to the German naval war effort against Britain; the sabotaging of the French war effort by the French Communist Party at the bidding of Moscow; uninhibited Soviet efforts to sanction the situation created in Europe by the German success at arms under the terms of international law; and, finally, huge Soviet strategic economic deliveries to the German Reich—all of this is sufficiently well-known so that it doesn't require repetition. A few remarks are, nonetheless, called for at this point simply to typify the attitude of the Soviet regime.

 

From the Soviet point of view, the Western powers alone had desired a continuation of the war. The occupation of Denmark and Norway by German troops in the spring of 1940 had therefore been considered a justified countermeasure against the expansion of the war into northern Europe desired by Great Britain and France. On April 9, 1940, Molotov had formally advised the Reich Government of the Soviet understanding of what Molotov called the "defensive measures... forced upon Germany," simultaneously wishing the Germans "complete success." The official Communist Party publication and largest-circulation newspaper in the USSR, Pravda, as well as the government newspaper Izvestia, and the trade union newspaper Trud, had commented upon German actions in Scandinavia by stating that Britain and France had "invaded" the neutral waters of the Scandinavian countries to undermine Germany's military position. In view of the fact that the Western powers were said to be "violating the sovereignty of the Scandinavian countries," and were expanding "the war to Scandinavia," any discussion of the legality of the actions forced upon Germany was said to be "laughable."

 

155--The most important of these men, however, was Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (Erenburg), the principal war propagandist of the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg cannot simply be dismissed as a man of "great criminal energy," an "instigator of homicide," or even a "psychopath," or as a man of pathological talent. Criminal or psychopathic tendencies in no way exclude literary and journalistic talent. These gifts, linked with a deficient love of truth and a lack of all moral scruples, in any event, permitted him to become the most important instrument of anti-German hate propaganda. The political agitation and opportunistic refinement with which, for many years, he skillfully adapted to changing circumstances while concealing the past, including his own past actions, after the death of his lord and master Stalin, as revealed in his novel The Thaw and his memoirs Goda, Lyudi, Zhizn (Years, People, Life), have gained him a degree of credit that is not to be underestimated, and that has endured down to the present day in the nations of the West. The Federal Republic of Germany is no exception to this rule. It is disturbing to witness the degree to which Western intellectuals misjudged the world of the Soviets—or, perhaps, how little they wished to understand it—apart from the frivolity with which they abandoned all standards of decency and morals.

 

For example, the publisher of the West German edition of Ehrenburg's memoirs, Kindler, undertook it upon himself to suggest, in regard to the publication of certain passages, that Ehrenburg's hate propaganda was simply a repetition of the "Goebbels-Lie." Similarly, as late as 1991, for example, the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) Faction of the District Representative Assembly in Berlin-Schoneberg filed an application to pay respects to Ehrenburg's "creativity," cultivating the memory of the great writer and journalist within the scope of an exhibition on "Russians in Schoneberg." On the occasion of Ehrenburg's one hundredth birthday in 1991, leading German newspapers never tired of commemorating his honor, stressing his effervescent literary spirit, describing him as a master of satire, a "seeker for the origins of evil," while admiring his "grandiose, panoramic depictions." One searches in vain for a single word relating to Ehrenburg's criminal effectiveness during the war, an effectiveness that had such terrifying consequences for countless German men, women, and children. Walter, the author of a commemorative article in the arts section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, glossed over this aspect of Ehrenburg's activity in a single, dry sentence, asserting that Ehrenburg was "one of the most active" and—somewhat deceptively—"most remarkable war propagandists," a trivialization that drew a sharp rebuke in the same newspaper by a noted expert, Heinz Nawratil, author of the work Vertreibungsverbrechen an Deutschen (Expulsion Crimes against Germans). Who Was Ehrenburg?

 

Born in Kiev in 1891 as the son of a Jewish beer brewer, Ehrenburg acknowledged his Jewish origins all his life and, as he himself wrote: "I am a Jew and proud of _it.,, 17 Averse to regular training, he dedicated himself, even as a schoolboy, not so much to his homework assignments of his humanities oriented secondary school, but rather, to roaming around in the political underworld of his native Russia. As a so-called "sixteen-year-old Bolshevik revolutionary," he emigrated to Paris to lead the unsteady existence of a homeless, rootless intellectual from that time onward. He was a man with a profound and lifelong aversion for all men with an honorable calling and an ordered bourgeois existence. As a cafe literary hack in Paris until 1917, he was a regular guest of the Closerie des Lilas, where he "sat and wrote, all day, every day." Attracted by the Russian revolution, he traveled to Moscow in 1917, where he fell out with the new Soviet rulers, and once again attempted to settle down in Paris. Expelled by the French police, he took up lodgings in the disordered atmosphere of Berlin until 1924, where, having entered Soviet service in 1921, he apparently earned his living as an employee of the Soviet press and, in particular, as an informer and agent for the notorious GPU (Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye; State Political Administration), the Soviet secret police. Returning to Moscow and then again returning to Paris, he was assigned to Spain during the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent and agitator from 1936-1939. He stayed once again in Paris in 1939-1940, then, after the German invasion of France, he traveled to Berlin, where the nature of his assignment remains unclear, and finally took up residence in Moscow.

 

Ehrenburg first attracted international attention through various publications in the 1920s, including the political novel Neobychajnye pochozhdena Khulio Khurenito i ego uchennikov (The Unusual Adventure of Julio Juarenito and his Pupils), dealing with the defeat of the bourgeoisie by revolution during the First World War. The book contains an axiom of Bolshevik wisdom, summed up in the sentence: "Murders must be committed for the well-being of mankind." In his work Padenie Parizha (The Fall of Paris), published in 1941, Ehrenburg once again gave free rein to his lifelong "hatred for the well-tempered French bourgeoisie," describing, under the impression of his experiences in Spain, the causes for the defeat of France in 1940, from the point of view of the Soviet class conflict. As the well-deserved reward for this welcome propaganda hack job, Ehrenburg was granted the highest literary distinction that the Soviet Union had to offer: the Stalin Prize First Class. Hardly inferior to the last-named production in its "effectiveness upon the masses in terms of contemporary history" was the political novel Burja (The Storm), published in 1946, also honored with the Stalin prize. Ehrenburg's talents, his unscrupulousness, his knowledge of foreign countries, and not least his proven compliance, predestined him, as no other, to handle the principal propaganda challenges facing Stalin in 1941.

 

With the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, Soviet propaganda, in a sense, was caught in its own trap. It was not very difficult to awaken feelings of hostility against "fascists"—anti-fascist agitation had never really stopped since 1939, and was being carried on covertly. In addition, there was the outdated doctrine that "German workers and farmers" were the natural enemies of "fascism," which had, moreover, only succeeded in seizing power in Germany "with the help of the magnates of the Ruhr and the social traitors." According to this theory, Hitlerite Germany confronted "yet another Germany." According to this theory, the "workers and farmers" in the Wehrmacht would refuse to fight against the "homeland of the Workers," the Soviet Union, as soon as they "learned the truth." This explains the crudity of Soviet propaganda on the front line during the opening phase of the war—propaganda that was absolutely not understood by German soldiers, filled as it was with phrases resembling those of the first Soviet leaflets: "German soldiers! Who profits from the war against the Soviet Union? The capitalists and the lords of the manor!" This produced no effect at all.

 

"True hatred of the Wehrmacht" as Ehrenburg admitted, was "unknown" in the Red Army "at the beginning" of the war.  Clear-cut conditions needed to be created if "criminal fraternization" on the battlefield was to be avoided or, even worse, Red Army soldiers were to be prevented from surrendering to the Germans en masse. What Stalin wanted was "hate, hate, and more hate"—not only against "fascism," but against everything German, according to Lieutenant General Vlassov, who was present when Stalin directed a request in this sense to Beria in the Kremlin after the battle of Kiev. The propagandistic preconditions for such hatred had long since been created. One need only recall inflammatory productions such as the 1938 Moscow film production of Alexander Nevsky, with the screenplay written by Pyotr Pavlenko, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, and music by Sergei Prokofiev. The challenge, however, was much broader than this.

 

During the opening days of the war, Ehrenburg was informed by Deputy Foreign Commissar Losovsky of the decisive significance accorded by Stalin to foreign propaganda in Great Britain and the USA. The member of the Politburo responsible for these matters, Shcherbakov, now gave him the major official assignment of writing for the Western Allies "on a daily basis." Guided by Stalin's definitive instructions as much as by the hate feelings emanating from his depraved mind and warped psychology, Ehrenburg began an activity that, as he said himself, no longer had anything to do with literature, even in the Socialist interpretation of the term. In fact, from now on, he wrote one or more, and often up to five articles per day, every day, for the government newspaper Izvestia, the parry newspaper Pravda, and, in particular, the Army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda, but also wrote for other Soviet newspapers, and—under various guises—pro-Soviet newspapers in foreign countries. Krasnaya zvezda formed the principal active basis for the excessive degree of political propaganda required for the Red Army. Articles from this newspaper were hammered into the heads of Soviet soldiers with stifling monotony: "We went to bed with Ehrenburg's articles at night, and woke up with them in the morning." Ehrenburg's name, as stated on September 21, 1944, was known to every Red Army soldier: "The Soviet people regard him as one of their best writers and their greatest patriot."

 

The Soviet troops, often before attacks, to enhance their fighting spirit were given, not liquor right away, but "Ehrenburg's articles were read to them before the start of battle." These articles repeated the same basic theme in innumerable variants, i.e., the Germans were not human beings and needed to be pitilessly exterminated. The generalization of this stereotype, though naturally corresponding to the desires of the Soviet government, apparently raised doubts on several occasions, even in the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg was sometimes asked how he could constantly write about one and the same thing, the non-humanity of the Germans. "Can they really be such butchers?" asked the people of Moscow in the summer of 1944. The novelist Grossman, himself a committed spokesman of Soviet war propaganda, reproached Ehrenburg, to say the least, for failure to distinguish between Germans, "fascists," and "Hitlerites." Objections were also raised in Western countries. When, for example, the pro-Soviet Swedish newspaper Goteborgs Handelstidingen began to print Ehrenburg's articles in 1942, not only did the German government intervene, but other Swedish newspapers, such as Stockholms Tidningen, Goteborgs Morgonpost and Aftonbladet, protested as well. Dagposten wrote: "Ehrenburg beats all records for intellectual sadism. Why should we refute these filthy lies and prove that Ehrenburg accuses the Germans of things that are everyday occurrences in the Red Army?"

 

It is not true that Ehrenburg's articles, some of which were translated into the English language, were received with approval everywhere in Great Britain and the USA. In 1945, for example, a well-known New York magazine called for a protest against the "cruelty of Soviet writers such as Alexei Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg." On October 26 and November 23, 1944, Ehrenburg was publicly compelled to reply to a Lady Gibb, of Great Britain, who had written to him as follows: "You call forth a very, very old evil in the hearts of the Russian people, i.e., the desire for revenge after the victory has been won. This old, old, evil ... brings the victors no blessings... We are very anxious to see you place your great talents in the service of Russia on behalf of a just and lasting peace, which can never be based on self-righteousness and the lust for revenge."

 

Soviet propaganda, which at this time was already quite busy defending enormous Soviet territorial acquisitions, began to put massive pressure upon Lady Gibb, in an attempt to nip any impulse of justice and humanity in the bud. Ehrenburg answered in the hate-filled tones of an "un-human," quoting from the alleged letter of a Lieutenant Zinchenko, who was said to have written in shock: "My mother is religious too, and in the name of religion she asks, 'kill the Germans with my blessings."' "One must not pity a wild beast," said Ehrenburg, "rather, one must destroy it... that is the opinion of our people, dear Lady."

 

Ehrenburg could be quite assured of his job in any case. Even the alleged reprimand from an ideologue in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Alexandrov, published in a leading article entitled "Comrade Ehrenburg Is Oversimplifying," in the party newspaper Pravda on April 14, 1945, shortly before the end of the war, was nothing but a tactical subterfuge undertaken upon Stalin's direct instructions, and not directly against Ehrenburg personally, as he was immediately given to understand, but rather, simply to take propagandistic account of the changing political situation. Enjoying the unrestricted trust of Stalin—with a short hiatus in 1949—Ehrenburg was assigned to the countries of East and Central Eastern Europe as a sort of traveling salesman after the end of the war, with the important assignment of preparing for and solidifying a Communist takeover through agitation. The high value placed upon Ehrenburg's services by Stalin personally at this time, was revealed when the American Secretary of State, Byrnes, threatened to publish American correspondence reports relating to Soviet acts of violence and encroachment in Romania in 1945. Stalin is said to have dismissed these threats "with a contemptuous wave of the hand, 'Then I will send Ilya Ehrenburg to Romania and have him report what he sees. His word will carry more weight than the word of your man.'" As the Deputy—i.e., in reality the President, in the secret Soviet Communist ranking system—of the worldwide Soviet "World Peace Council," Ehrenburg was engaged in intensive international subversion in the following years. His many personal acquaintances and connections now revealed the extent to which left-wing intellectuals, and well-known personalities in the intellectual and political life of many countries, were prepared to degrade themselves, deliberately or foolishly, as lackeys of the Soviet regime. Even the former left-wing Center Party politician and German Chancellor Dr. Wirth did not disdain to have amicable dealings with Ehrenburg in Switzerland. Where Stalin prize winner Dr. Wirth is concerned, this comes as no surprise, since a "voluminous" CIA file entitled "The Background of Joseph Wirth" has traced his activities as a Soviet agent all the way back to the early 1920s.

 

To Ehrenburg, who was always a prolific writer, his output during the "Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union," in his own words, had nothing to do with literature, even as the word is interpreted in the Soviet Union; rather, it consisted of political agitation, i.e., incitement. Nearly three thousand of his leading articles and proclamations were collected in a three-volume anthology called Vojna (The War) between 1942 and 1944. Ehrenburg, however, did not appear to wish to be reminded of these writings at a later time. His memoirs, Goda, Lyudi, Zhizn, partly intended to conceal the past, discourse verbosely upon the personal legacy of those fateful years. Of his wartime articles, he said briefly: "What remains to me of those years? Thousands of articles of the same type, which, at best, may be of interest to a conscientious historian." The reasons for this modesty will soon be obvious to anyone who actually penetrates this material with the spirit of "a conscientious historian."

 

An analysis of this tidal flood of articles is also likely to awaken memories of another writer of somewhat similar articles, Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Franconia deprived of his offices for personal failings in 1940, and publisher of the inflammatory anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer, which was, one might add, broadly rejected even within the NSDAP for its low cultural level. Indicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-1946, Streicher was convicted and sentenced to death because, as stated in the grounds for the judgment: "Week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution." "A leading article in September 1938 was typical of his teachings, which termed the Jew a germ and a pest, not a human being, but 'a parasite, an enemy, an evil-doer, a disseminator of diseases who must be destroyed in the interest of mankind."' Streicher was alleged to have unmistakably called for an extermination of the Jews.

 

If Streicher was sentenced to death by hanging under Article 4 of the indictment (crimes against humanity) at Nuremberg—what can one say of Ehrenburg, who polluted the minds of the peoples of the Soviet Union (and the Western countries as well) with the poison of anti-Germanism, inciting people to active persecution and extermination of Germans—for years, "week after week, month after month," even day after day—not just in a remote local rag, but in the leading newspapers of the Soviet Union, under the highest official orders? If Streicher was "Jew Baiter No. I," then it seems not only justified, but even necessary, to call Ehrenburg "German Baiter No. l." "Stretcher was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews," wrote Ehrenburg in the capacity of trial observer at Nuremberg on December 13, 1945. As will be seen, and in more detail, Ehrenburg was in no way inferior to Streicher, but perhaps in many occasions even exceeded him in evil.

 

On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union, without lifting a finger, was suddenly freed from the camp of the aggressors, and was now numbered among the attacked, making her propaganda machinery available in order to cause former Soviet complicity with National Socialist Germany to be forgotten. This enabled the Soviet Union to be depicted as the defender of the "peace-loving peoples." The above mentioned Soviet complicity had included the following: on September 17, 1939, by prior agreement with the German Government, the Soviets attacked Poland; "bombarded," the regions east of Lemberg during the night; "dealt with" or "annihilated" "Polish troops"; "annihilated" "Polish infantry divisions and cavalry brigades"; "shot down" Polish planes; "captured" or "destroyed" war material and artillery; captured prisoners; took cities; "purged" or "mopped up" the battlefields, forests, terrain, and countryside "of the Polish army"; and "solemnly" accepted the transfer of the fortresses of Osowiec and Brest, as well as the city of Bialystok and other localities, from German troops. At Lemberg, 8,500 Polish soldiers, including 100 officers, fled toward the Germans to avoid capture by the Soviets—a wise decision—since they were treated according to the principles of the Geneva Convention instead of being shot in the back of the neck. The 15,000 Polish officers who fell into the hands of the Soviets and, in addition to these professional soldiers, thousands of "university professors, doctors, scientists, artists, secondary school teachers," "the flower of Polish society," "doing their duty as reservists," were shot by the NKVD near Katyn, at Kharkov, and other places on the orders, as is well-known, of Stalin, Kalinin, and other Soviet leaders. Of 250,000 Polish prisoners of war, 148,000 perished in the Soviet Union; of 1.6 to 1.8 million Polish civilian deportees, 600,000 perished in the Soviet Union; of 600,000 Polish Jews deported into the Soviet Union, 450,000 disappeared without a trace.

 

The Soviet government had accused the Western powers of starting an imperialistic war under the pretext of defending Poland; then accused them of expanding the war to Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The Soviets had provided propagandistic, diplomatic and, at least to some extent, military support to the German military campaigns, ostentatiously taking account of the changing facts of the situation to lull the Reich into security. As early as 1939, Moscow had severed relations with Czechoslovakia despite treaty obligations requiring Soviet assistance, then recognized the independence of the secessionist Republic of Slovakia. In May 1941, Moscow had withdrawn recognition from the exile governments of Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands, on the grounds that they no longer exercised sovereignty over their countries. Shortly afterward came the break with Greece, and then—in a manner that must have amazed "even the most experienced and callused observer of Soviet methods"—the break with Yugoslavia, whose integrity and independence had been recognized by Moscow hardly a month before, "even before the Germans had had a chance to open their mouths." Now, from one day to the next, this was all to be forgotten. Stalin, wrote Ehrenburg on February 8, 1942, "had no intention of attacking other countries... We built cities, we worked and studied... We educated human beings... while the Germans were building tanks"—this despite the six or eight-fold superiority in tanks enjoyed by the Red Army on June 22, 1941.

 

On January 4, 1945, Ehrenburg, Stalin's propaganda mouthpiece, wrote in regard to the policies of the Western powers of that time (but not, of course, the Soviet Union): "Europe and the world now recognize the lessons of this immoral policy in the ruins of Warsaw, the sufferings of Paris, and the wounds of London." During the Polish campaign, the Soviets had provided German aircraft with their positions in order to enable them to reach their objectives. Now the Germans were the sole "arsonists." "They dropped bombs on Warsaw and laughed themselves sick." The Soviet Union had treacherously attacked Poland from the rear on September 17, 1939. "We greet our Sister Poland," wrote Ehrenburg hypocritically on November 7, 1941, and on December 14, 1941: "The spirit of Chopin still lives in the cities of tortured Poland... The Poles say one to another: 'Beauty still lives. Poland still lives.'" "We want freedom for ourselves and for all nations," wrote Ehrenburg on January 1, 1942. "We do not want Poland to be a land of German galley slaves." In 1939-40, Moscow instructed the Communist party of France to sabotage the French war effort. After the capitulation of Compiegne, the Soviet government had congratulated the Reich Government and hastened to extend diplomatic recognition to the "French State of Vichy." Now, at a single stroke, Marshal Petain was called a paid traitor, the Judas of France. Ehrenburg now insulted Premier Paul Reynaud and Generals Weygand, Georges, and Gamelin as "capitulationists," referring to the Popular Front and the (treasonous) French communists, in particular, as the only true patriots. "The victories of Rostov and Kalmin were a death sentence to those who signed the cease-fire at Compiegne," wrote Ehrenburg on March 21, 1942.

 

German troops in France, as is well-known, were subject to the strictest discipline, as Andre Malraux admitted by his own accord. Malraux, a member of the French Communist Party until 1939, later a member of the Resistance, writer, and Minister under de Gaulle, stated that he had had "only good experiences with the German army, and only bad experiences with the Gestapo." Ehrenburg, nevertheless, wrote on July 14, 1941: "The Nazi murderers and gangsters marched on the boulevards" to plunder and rob the nation of France, murdering children and starving the population to death with rations of only fifty grams (two ounces) of bread per day. Soviet revenge was threatened for a trivial instance of property damage: "For the four spoiled jackets, you will exterminate 4,000 Germans who have trampled France." Ehrenburg summed up his attitude toward the Germans—whose Border Treaty and Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union had been valid until that very same date—in the following words, on June 22, 1941: "They plundered happy peace-loving France. They enslaved our brother nations, the highly cultivated Czechs, the valiant Yugoslavs, and talented Poles. They raped the Norwegians, Danes, and Belgians."

 

"German troops stagger like drunkards all over Europe: from Boulogne to Odessa, from Poland to Belgium, from Norway to Bulgaria," he wrote, turning up the heat, on May 2, 1942. And, just a few days later, on March 5: "They entered Russia drunk on the blood of the Poles, French, and Serbs, the blood of old people, maidens, and small children."

 

Ehrenburg was assigned to give propaganda effect to Stalin's war speech of July 3, 1941, and to proclaim the new program.' "We have millions and millions of faithful allies," he wrote on July 4, 1941: "All those who have lost their freedom and their country stand by our side: Czechs, Norwegians, French, Dutch, Poles and Serbs... Stalin's words will reach the city of trampled freedom, the subjected, but irreconcilable Paris. They will reach the farmers of Yugoslavia, the students of Oxford, the fishermen of Norway, and the workers of Pilsen. They will call forth new hope in the hearts of all peoples suffering under fascist barbarism. Stalin's speech will be heard by the people of London, who have experienced hundreds of barbaric air raids, by the miners of Wales and the weavers of Manchester... our Patriotic War will be a war for the liberation of Europe from Hitler's yoke."

 

At the cost of few propaganda phrases, the Soviet Union—which had been expelled from the League of Nations for attacking Finland, and had come close to a collision with the Western powers—now placed itself at the head of the countries drawn into the war, making herself their spokesperson. "All democratic countries" (naturally including the Soviet Union) "stand by us, all of progressive humanity is with us," stated a proclamation of August 10-11, 1941, issued at an "All-Slavic Meeting" of so-called intellectual workers, held in Moscow. "All of humanity is now fighting Germany," echoed Ehrenburg on August 24, 1941, without a side glance at the German military allies at war with the Soviet Union—Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia. "We want freedom for us and for all nations," he claimed on January 1, 1945. And to ensure that his protector and employer would not be forgotten among the flood of phrases, he added the following: "Long live the Soviet Union! May thy peoples live, thy gardens, thy children, thy Stalin!"

 

On November 6, 1941, the anniversary of the "victory of the Great Socialistic October Revolution" Ehrenburg took it upon himself to instruct the Allies in the style of Communist Party agitators, calling upon them to join the common struggle . "The defenders of Moscow contemplate with pride the firm fortress of London. Fame for Britain! ... We greet you, pioneers of freedom, the invincible people of France, we greet the Czechs... We greet the people of warriors, the Serbs... We greet the brave Greeks... We greet the untiring Norwegians... we greet the patient Dutch... we greet the hard-working Belgians... We greet our sister Poland... We greet the arsenal of freedom—America." To avoid all possible doubt that these peoples and countries were now to be indebted to the Soviets from that time on, he added: "Moscow is fighting... for you, distant friends, for humanity, for the entire world."

 

In 1930, no less a personage than Winston Churchill had written of the "plague bacillus" Lenin, compared to whom " ... no Asiatic conqueror, no Tamerlane or Ghenghis Khan" could be a match "in the destruction of men and women. To Churchill, the victories of Bolshevism had shifted "the borders of Asia for the conditions of the dark ages... from the Urals to the Pripet swamps." Russia was said to be frozen "in an endless winter of inhuman doctrines and inhuman barbarity." On January 29, 1941, Ehrenburg informed the peoples of the world that the "reprehensible scandal of Bolshevism"—in Churchill's words—had now raised a torch: "We have raised the torch to the sky... the torch of our culture, and the culture that we rightly believe to be the possession of all of humanity. It is the torch of ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth Century [i.e., the Enlightenment]—all that in humanity that has opposed slavery, stagnation, and atavism. Our struggle against Germany is guided by an illuminating moral principle... the principle of reason, spiritual purity, freedom, and dignity."

 

Such phraseology should be judged in light of the fact that, at the head of the Soviet Union, stood Stalin, "the greatest criminal of all peoples and times." Stalin with the help of creatures placed in power by him: Yagoda, Ezhov, Beria, Kruglov, Abakumov, Kobulov, Serov, Dekanozov, Merkulov, Canava and others—had erected a system of tyranny that could decide the "fate of any citizen in the country, without exception, at Stalin's own bloody whim."

 

Since July 3, 1941, at the latest, the Soviet Union claimed for propaganda purposes that it had been unprepared for the German attack, of which it had had no inkling. It was, therefore, waging a purely defensive war, pursuing no expansionist goals. The historical legend of the "treacherous fascist surprise attack on the unsuspecting, peace-loving Soviet Union" is demonstrably untrue, and has no basis in fact. Of the many Ehrenburg propaganda lies, only a few need be cited by way of example. November 23, 1944: "We do not need any 'living space."' November 30, 1944: "The world looks upon the Red Army as a liberator... [the Soviet Union] does not force its ideas on anyone." January 11, 1945: "We do not want to force our ideas or customs on anyone." May 24, 1945, after the victory: "We won the war because we hate wars of conquest."

 

As the end of the war approached, and the Red Army penetrated deep into the heart of Europe, the purely defensive protestations came to be increasingly admixed with offensive overtones. The Soviets, conscious of their enormous power, began to make political demands in the form of the propaganda phrase, drummed into the ears of the world, of the Red Army's great "Mission of Liberation. The first vaguely expansionist passages appeared in Ehrenburg's writings in October 1944, as Soviet troops crossed the German border into East Prussia. On October 12, 1944, Ehrenburg wrote: "We rescued European culture... our people is positively concerned with the fate of European culture. The Soviet land produces no isolationists." On April 12, 1945, Ehrenburg was even more overt: "It is time to say that the victories of the Red Army are victories of the Soviet system. We draw attention to the fact that it was our people which rescued Europe and the world from fascism." Or on May 17, 1945, he stated rather inartfully: "We rescued human culture, the ancient stones of Europe, its cradle, its working people, its museums and books. If Britain is destined to produce a new Shakespeare, if new Encyclopaedists appear in France... if the dream of a Golden Age is ever to become a reality, then this will happen because the soldiers of freedom marched thousands of miles to plant the banner of freedom, fraternity, and light. That is why Stalin's name is linked to the end of the night and the first dawn of happiness, not only in our country, but all over the world."

 

And on July 12, 1945, continuing in the same vein: "The Soviet Union rescued the peoples of Europe. Stalin shook everyone's conscience awake... we love Stalin."

 

According to Ehrenburg on January 10, 1946, the Soviet Union—which was even said to have decided the fate of Prague, Paris, and Rome—was "no longer a geographical and political concept, but rather, a moral concept" in the mind of the nations . In other words, therefore, it had become an ideal for all nations by virtue of its military victories, automatically deriving the right to intervene in the affairs of other countries as well. Stalin had no thought of "attacking other countries"; instead, he thought about "creating a new world," as Ehrenburg alleged on February 8, 1942.

 

Now that victory had been achieved, Stalin could begin to realize his dreams of a "new world," "a new Europe," a Europe—as Ehrenburg immediately claimed—in which "all the microbes of fascism" would be eliminated. Who, now, were the "microbes of fascism"? Henceforth, the "fascists" were no longer to be understood as merely German, the disciples of Hitler, but rather, all those who opposed Soviet designs for conquest and Bolshevization on any grounds whatever. This included all those whose understanding of the concepts of "government, reform, and progress" differed from that of the Communists—in particular, the hated bourgeoisie of all nations, the advocates of a State of Law according to Western traditions, the whole "spiritual underground of apparently normal people." Stalin had revealed the political objective; Ehrenburg and his ilk set to work to propagate it in their usual way.

 

On May 17, 1945, a few days after the unconditional German surrender, Ermashev wrote: "The collapse of the Hitler Reich does not automatically liberate mankind from all the dangers with which the dark powers of fascism and reaction are still capable of threatening the world"

 

Ominous words as far as the future was concerned. Thus was announced a principal inclination of the Soviet regime: the urgent desire to see the "fascist criminals," "the war criminals," punished as severely as possible. An international show trial, organized on the tried and true Soviet model with the leading participation of the Soviet Union, was to exert a deterrent effect on all powers of "reaction," i.e., the potential opponents of Stalinist claims to domination, all of whom were described as "followers of Hitler and Mussolini."

 

In defiant language, speaking on February 8, 1945, Professor Tarle, the above mentioned Soviet historian, justified Stalin's claim to the right to shape "the future of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations" on the grounds of alleged past experiences, stating: "But the great role of the Soviet people is not yet over, even if it has freed humanity from the deadly German nightmare. The fifth column, although temporarily relegated to the shadows, is still alive in the world. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers still exist and are preparing to resume the task in which they were engaged for so long and, furthermore, so successfully in Europe. The European democracies—and not only the European democracies—will face a highly extraordinary struggle in the coming years, because fascism has not the slightest intention of abdicating... it will, however, once again face the same invincible obstacle: the Soviet Union, the Soviet people. The victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War has created a firm basis for the triumph of the world democracy. The immortal service of Stalin's strategy and of the fighters of the Russian army is that they have rescued world civilization. Those who understand that the struggle for freedom and democracy must continue, pending the complete moral and political defeat of fascism, even after the defeat of the Hitlerite war machine, look upon the USSR with profound confidence."

 

Stalin's expansionist intentions need hardly be expressed more clearly. This implied a continuation of the pattern of aggression that had begun with the pact of August 23, 1939, and that was now taking on a new shape—for the third time. Stephane Courtois, editor of the Black Book of Communism, has stated with unequivocal clarity: "As appears from numerous statements by Stalin, it was Stalin's firm determination and intention to thrust forward to the Atlantic Ocean. As early as 1947, Stalin told Maurice Thorez, at that time the General Secretary of the French Communist Party, that he would have preferred to see the Red Army in Paris than Berlin."

 

Thus he brilliantly confirmed the conclusion drawn by Professor Ernst Topitsch in his book Stalins Krieg, published in 1985. Thrusting through to the Atlantic, however, implied the imposition of Leninist-Stalinist domination as well. "Anyone who occupies a territory imposes his own social system as well," Stalin told Tito, a close confidant, and Dilas, a partisan leader, in 1945. "Everyone introduces his own system as far as his armies get. It cannot be otherwise." The invasion of the Anglo-American expedition forces temporarily put a stop to Stalin's ambitions in 1944. The following motto, considered valid until very recent times by "socialist" activists and the spiritual accomplices of "socialism" must be understood as implying a propagandistic preparation for an expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence that had never been abandoned: struggle against "fascism" as understood by the Soviets. According to this definition, anyone who opposes the aggressive designs of Soviet imperialism, is ipso facto a "fascist" or "Nazi," to be destroyed by any means possible, no matter how reprehensible. The Stalinist concept of "fascism" has even survived the Soviet Union itself, it is now generally used, for example, in the Federal Republic of Germany, as a defamatory smear word applied to political dissenters. Anyone attempting to use the Bolshevik "anti-fascist" fighting word in any way differing from the concepts of the Stalinists and their apologists and heirs in Germany, no longer need wonder at the repression that inevitably follows.

 

In reality, of course, Soviet propaganda began as early as spring 1945 to produce its effects far beyond the territories occupied by the Red Army. Hardly anyone saw this more clearly than Winston Churchill, who in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 warned that "far from the Russian frontier ... Communist Fifth Columns are established" representing a "growing peril" to peace and to "Christian civilization" as a whole.

 

172--A major element of Soviet war propaganda consists of the atrocities actually or allegedly committed by the Germans. Endlessly increasing numbers of accusations have been made, both with and without justification. If an accurate sense of proportion is to be maintained, these accusations must be considered in the context of extensive Soviet crimes against humanity. An effort must be made to separate the wheat from the chaff in any examination of the possible grounds for the Soviet accusations selected from among the multiplicity of examples cited, while simultaneously examining the political motivations that lie concealed behind the propaganda. The fact is that the Bolsheviks had themselves already killed many millions of innocent people long before the Germans ever had a chance to commit any crimes in the Soviet Union or German-annexed territories. Terror was a constant feature of the Soviet system, and was established immediately after the October Revolution. A terror intended to accomplish, not only the social, but often, the physical liquidation of entire classes: the extermination of the nobility, priests, and bourgeoisie, as well as the followers of non-Bolshevik socialist parties, such as the Menshevik and Social Revolutionaries, and the followers of the bourgeois parties such as, for example, the much-libeled Constitutional Democrats ("Cadets"). "Workers!" the party newspaper Pravda proclaimed on August 31, 1918: "The time has come to destroy the bourgeoisie!"' The slogan was duly put into effect: the People's Commissar for the Interior, Petrovsky, quoted by the governmental newspaper Izvestia on September 4, 1918, called for "mass executions... at the slightest resistance... No weakness or hesitation may be tolerated in the introduction of mass terror. On November l, 1918, Latsis, deputy head of the Cheka, gave orders to his organization for the elimination of "the bourgeoisie as a class." As stressed by Nicolas Werth in the Black Book of Communism, the merciless class warfare against whole sections of the population and entire professions acquired the features of true genocide. Both the extermination of the Cossacks—or "de-cossackization"—which began in 1920, and the extermination of the peasantry—or "de-kulakization" which began later, met the definition of genocide in terms of both objectives and implementation.

 

In a letter addressed to and intended only for the members of the politburo, years after the revolution, on March 19, 1922, Lenin remarked to Molotov: "The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we can shoot in this regard, the better." Winston Churchill's book Nach dem Kriege (After the War), published in 1930, quotes a statistical study by Professor Sarolea showing that the Bolshevik dictators had already murdered the following number of persons by 1924: "28 bishops, 1,219 priests, 6,000 professors and teachers, 9,000 doctors, 12,950 landowners, 54,000 officers, 70,000 policemen, 193,290 workers, 260,000 soldiers, 355,250 intellectuals and tradesmen, and 815,000 farmers."

 

Churchill continued: "These figures have been confirmed by Mr. Hearnshaw, of King's College, London, in his brilliant introduction to A Survey of Socialism. They do not, of course include the monstrous losses of human life among the Russian population having perished from starvation."

 

If this were possible even under Lenin—who was described by Churchill as a "plague bacillus"—then what was it like under Stalin, described by his biographer, Colonel General Professor Volkogonov, as a "monster" without equal in world history? Only a few of the principal phases of the Stalinist reign of terror need be recalled at this point. According to unanimously accepted opinions and demographic studies, between seven and ten million people died during the forced collectivization of agriculture that began in 1929 and the related, carefully planned and implemented "Holocaust by Hunger," or genocide of the Ukrainian people, which took place in silence between 1932 and 1933. The mass executions of so-called "Enemies of the People," which began in the very early 1930s, culminated in the delirium of the "Great Purge" of 1937-1939, with another five to seven million deaths either from execution by shooting or following deportation to GULags.

 

174--Nor should one forget the heavy losses in human life as a result of the deportations of the Volga Germans and the other ethnic Germans from the Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Caucasus organized by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKP (b) and the Council of the People's Commissars in 1941. These deportations were carried out under inhumane conditions and constituted the international crime of genocide just as much as the deportations of the peoples of the Kalmucks, Karachayers, Chechens, Ingushs, Balkars, certain segments of the Karbardinian people, as well as the Tatars of the Crimea, all of which occurred in 1943-44. Mention has already been made of the executive instruments of the Border Troops and Special Troops of the NKVD—comparable to the German Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD—which followed in the footsteps of the regular troops of the Red Army, carrying out "mass purges" of the populations in the reincorporated territories.  As stated above, hundreds of thousands of people were shot by the NKVD in the wake of the reprisals and purges that then began." According to detailed German investigations, no fewer than four thousand people, without regard to age or sex, were shot in the city of Kharkov in March 1943 alone, following the brief Soviet capture of the city.

 

177--The Black Book of Communism is of inestimable value in the intellectual situation of the year 1997: not that it provides fundamentally new information, or arrives at estimated numbers of victims equaling the estimates of earlier researchers. The estimate of "at least twenty five million victims" of Leninism-Stalinism, calculated by editor Stephane Courtois in his masterly introduction and accompanying comments, is only equal to the lower limits of past estimates. But the Black Book of Communism is a true compendium of Communist crimes against humanity, casting light on the spiritual darkness of the twentieth century. In this regard, it is comparable to the Gulag Archipelago by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and, like the latter work, has achieved an unexpectedly widespread distribution in a short time.

 

The findings of Stephane Courtois, like those of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in past years, are in accordance with the basic theme of the present book, which may be summarized as follows:

 

1. Soviet domination was only made possible by mass crimes. Any analysis of the Soviet system must consider mass crimes—methodical mass murder and other crimes against humanity—to have been a central feature of the Soviet system.

2. Both Lenin and Stalin were guilty of the social and physical elimination of all persons thought to represent open or covert opposition to Leninist-Stalinist rule.

3. Lenin and Stalin were guilty of creating the concentration camp system.

4. Lenin and Stalin were guilty of the deaths of at least 25 million people. In practice, mass murder was a constituent element of Bolshevik rule.

5. Hitler started the world war, but proof of Stalin's responsibility is overwhelming.

6. Stalin was an even greater criminal than Hitler, and was, in fact, the greatest criminal of the century.

 

The Black Book of Communism therefore strikes at the very heart of the Leninists-Stalinists. The physical extinction of a total of 100 million people—25 million by the socialist Soviet power structure alone—cannot simply be palliated on the pretext that Communism, in theory, consisted of an "ideology of liberation." The merest knowledge of the revolutionary figures who usurped absolute power in Russia by an act of violence in October 1917, simply to reduce their subjugated peoples to the condition of rightless helots, reveals the infamy of those who parrot the "anti-fascist" propaganda phrase still current today—that "Communism was initially based on a love of the people." One reason why the findings of the Black Book of Communism weigh so heavily is because the authors were personally sympathetic with Communism to some degree in the past, and perhaps still are today, and because editor Stephane Courtois is a "proven expert on Communism and a serious historian" who cannot be refuted with the usual hair-splitting and deceptive dialectics; he can only be personally defamed.

 

How humiliating it must be for the ideologues and demagogues—the so-called "anti-fascists," who presume to determine what free citizens shall or shall not be allowed to think—to see Courtois drawing historical parallels, making comparisons, and drawing up estimated calculations relating to both Communism and National Socialism, i.e., performing the natural duty of a historian without regard to "anti-fascist" taboos and distortions. Like Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Ernst Nolte, and Frangois Furet before him," Stephane Courtois holds the opinion that the presumed prohibition against "historical comparison" no longer applies: after all, to compare is to think. Not only is the comparison legitimate, but Courtois considers it the elementary precondition to historical understanding, in a manner similar to Albert Camus' postulation of the comparability of Communism and National Socialism in 1954. The pretexts offered by the "anti-fascist" opponents of all comparison between "racial genocide" and "class genocide," a comparison rightly undertaken by Courtois, have, in fact, always been truly disgraceful. This last taboo, this last desperate argument, is rendered obsolete by the proof that Lenin and Stalin not only committed gigantic acts of class murder, but also of racial mass murder—falling under the definition of "genocide" according to the "United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948." Even the left-wing ideological German weekly newspaper Die Zeit could not help featuring its several-page discussion of the Black Book of Communism under the devastating headline: "The Red Holocaust." Courtois believes that the concept of "uniqueness" and "singularity" doesn't apply, on the grounds that the Bolsheviks, in his view, committed the same, or very similar crimes as the "fascists"—almost the only ones whose crimes, in the absence of justification, continue to be harped upon today. The "fascist" method of procedure may have been different, but, as stressed by Courtois, there is no specificity for genocide. The Black Book of Communism makes it unmistakably clear that the crimes against humanity committed by Lenin and Stalin not only preceded those of Hitler by decades in terms of time, but exceeded them many times over in terms of scope, and, to some extent, in horror of execution. "The facts regarding Leninist and Stalinist Russia," writes Courtois, "make one's blood run cold."

 

As for the total number of victims of Soviet domination, the concurrence of opinion is that there was a true hecatomb, even if the data varies considerably and the real number of victims can perhaps never be determined. The Russian historian Medvedev, a former dissident of Jewish origin who drew closer to the Communists again in 1992, attempted, in 1989, to establish a total of 40 million victims of repression, nevertheless, arrived at a number of fifteen million victims based on his own research. The American historian Robert Conquest, after detailed analysis, suggested a total of 20 million victims under the Stalinist terror alone, but considers 10 million additional deaths to be probable. In Courtois's view, as stated above, Lenin and Stalin were the murderers of 25 million people. Soviet historian Professor I. A. Kurganov, in number 7 of the Moscow periodical Novyj Mir in 1994, on the other hand, proposed a total number of 66 million victims of Lenin-Stalin between 1917 and 1947, including "20 million deaths during the Second World War," a research finding confirmed in issue 63 of the Petersburg periodical Nashe Otechestvo in 1996 and mentioned by the historian V V Isaev. Nobel Prize winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn speaks of 40 million victims of "the constant interior war of the Soviet government against its own people." The number of 40 million people killed by the socialism of the Soviet Socialist Republics, has been mentioned several times, for example, in the Welt-Nachrichtendienst on June 30, 1993: "According to careful estimates, approximately 40 million victims fell victim to the dictator J. V Stalin"; this naturally leaves open the question of the total number of murder victims falling under Lenin's responsibility.

 

186--This controversy is being conducted less in the "official" literature than in rather remote publications, and is not a little influenced by official prohibitions against certain forms of thought and speech, suspiciously watched over by a system of political denunciation. The related prevention of free discussion of an important problem of contemporary history, no matter how unfortunate it may be today, will, of course, be ineffective in the long run. Experience shows that free historical research can only be temporarily hindered by criminal law as it exists in many European countries. Historical truths usually continue to exert their effects behind the scenes, only to emerge triumphantly at a later time. In regard to the problem of Auschwitz, moreover, it is not a question of "obvious" facts relating to the cruel persecution and extermination of members of the Jewish people, which is beyond discussion; rather, it is solely and merely the question of the killing mechanism utilized and the question of how many people fell victim to persecution. Major discoveries are emerging in this regard, to such an extent that many current preconceptions must inevitably be corrected.

 

194--If the Germans did not even know of the cruel events occurring behind their backs, events of which they would never have approved, then they cannot be held responsible. The main thing is that even if citizens of the Greater German Reich were involved in these crimes, it is no proof to the contrary; the Russian people, by the same logic, would have to bear responsibility for the mass murder of millions of people under the Soviets; the Georgian people could also be held responsible on the grounds that, in addition to Dzhugashvili (Stalin)—a Georgian—Beria, Dekanozov, Canava, Goglidze, Rukhadze, Karanadze, and other Georgians headed the murder apparatus as leading NKVD officials. To stretch the analogy a bit further, the Jewish people could also be held responsible because—as Sonja Margolina, an author of Jewish origin from the Soviet Union, stressed in her book Das Ende der Lugen (The End of Lies)—Jews in Bolshevism appeared, not only as victims, but as criminals, for the first time in history. That Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Yoffe, Krestinsky, Radek and innumerable other leading Bolshevik officials were Jews, is very well-known. The Central Committee that met in Smol'nyj in 1918 was popularly known as the "Jewish Central Committee"; according to Sonja Margolina, Bolshevik rule in the 1920s actually bore "certain Jewish features." "The fact that a significant proportion of the known Bolshevik party leaders were Jews..." as Nicolas Werth writes in the Black Book of Communism, "justified the equation of Jew = Bolshevik in the eyes of the masses." After all, Wolfgang Strauss, a Slavist and political journalist, refers to the ethnic breakdown of the principal Communist Party leaders during the period from 1918-19, in the appendix to the new edition of the well-known work by Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs, first published in New York in 1920, which shows the following: "17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35 Letts [Latvians], 15 Germans, one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles, three Finns, one Czech, one Karaim, and 457 Jews."

 

Less well-known is the relatively high proportion of Jews in the unleashing and organization of the Bolshevik terror (Cheka, GPU, NKVD). As stressed by Nicolas Werth in the Black Book of Communism, Trotsky, the People's Commissar for Military Affairs [and de facto head of the Red Army], speaking before the Delegates of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets as early as December 1, 1917, (new calendar: December 13) announced: "In less than one month, the terror will acquire extremely violent forms, just as it did during the great French Revolution."' Nicolas Werth also quotes Grigori Zinoviev, "one of the most important Bolshevik party leaders," who on September 19, 1918, writing in the newspaper Sevenaja Kommuna, demanded that, of the one hundred million residents of Soviet Russia, ten million "must be annihilated" through "our own socialist terror."

 

196--Although Stalin gradually restricted the influence of the Jews, and subjected many of them to severe persecution as "Trotskyites," or, later, as "cosmopolitans," they were still to be found in leading positions everywhere during the Second World War. An important propaganda role in regard to the United States, for example, was played by the "Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee," which was expressly founded for this purpose, but liquidated in 1948 by Stalin. One of Stalin's closest collaborators, to the end of his life, was Lazar Moisseevich Kaganovich, chiefly responsible, in addition to other persons, for "an unprecedented act of genocide"—the carefully planned murder of seven to nine million Ukrainian farmers during the 1932-33 famine. Kaganovich was "responsible for the death of an entire generation of intellectuals," and personally signed execution orders for 36,000 people. According to Medvedev, a historian of Jewish origins, Kaganovich had "his hand in the murder of millions," and had more crimes on his conscience "than the men hanged at Nuremberg in 1946." The order to shoot the 15,000 Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere—a crime that, in itself, would have sufficed for the imposition of a death sentence according to Nuremberg standards—was signed by Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich, in addition to Stalin.

 

Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda—a "scoundrel and common criminal," according to Colonel General Volkogonov—was for years the head of the Bolshevik mass terror apparatus and was responsible for the murder of millions as the head of the GULag Archipelago and People's Commissar of the Interior.

 

The terror in the Red Army was organized by the head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Army Commissar First Rank Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis. NKVD Colonel General Abakumov, who surrounded himself with a whole group of Jewish collaborators, was a close confidant of Beria. Beria, who was in turn called a "Jew from birth" by NKVD General Sudoplatov, was one of the chief persons responsible for the monstrous crimes under the authority of the NKVD-MVD. NKVD General Raikhmann, head of the regional administration of the NKVD in Kharkov, which was praised by Ezhov for its particular brutality during the 1930s, played a decisive role in the shooting of the Polish prisoners of war at Katyn in 1940. General of the Army Chernyakhovsky, Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd White Russian Front, was responsible for atrocities against the civilian population and against prisoners of war in East Prussia. The list could be extended indefinitely.

 

Even if, in Margolina's opinion, the active cooperation of many Jews in the Soviet terror organizations truly requires a chapter of its own, responsibility for crimes committed by the Bolsheviks can never be attributed to the Jewish people as a whole. It was not peoples as a whole—Germans, Russians, Georgians, Latvians, or even Jews and others—who were responsible for the atrocities, but rather, individual persons in all cases. As for Germans in particular, no one can say that the persecution and murder of peaceful populations form any part of the traditions of the German people.

 

205--In execution of an Order of Stalin to prevent the capture of Soviet political prisoners by the Germans, approximately 4,000 Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners and other civilians of all ages and both sexes, as well as a number of German prisoners of war, were systematically shot by the NKVD in the prisons of Lemberg, such as Brigidki Prison, Zamarstynow Prison, and the NKVD prison in the days preceding June 30, 1941. In some cases, the prisoners were horribly mutilated and showed signs of severe torture. This atrocity was exploited by Einsatzgruppe C of the Security Police and SD as providing a suitable opportunity for the shooting of up to 7,000 residents of Jewish origin, who had taken no part in the crimes at Lemberg or the surrounding regions, in a so-called "reprisal for the inhumane atrocities" before July 17. The fact, nevertheless, remains that it was the Soviets who left behind the 4,000 corpses of murdered civilians, some of them mutilated, a fact immediately seized upon by the Germans.

 

German press reports on Soviet atrocities in Lemberg were confirmed by Polish reports reaching Great Britain through unofficial pathways and not doubted by official circles in London. The British Foreign Office, immediately convinced of Soviet guilt as in the later Katyn case, sent the Moscow Foreign Commissariat a note requesting clarification, to which Molotov hastily issued a categorical Soviet official denial on July 12, 1941. Soviet propaganda immediately busied itself with concealing the Soviet crimes at Lemberg by blaming the prison massacres on the Germans. Lemberg thus set the precedent for the Soviet propaganda tactic of covering up Soviet crimes by attributing them to the Germans.

 

218--The monument was erected on NKVD terrain at Bykovnia (KOU NKVD), which is also in the vicinity of other extensive mass graves from the Stalin era—such as the mass graves at Darnica and Bielhorodka, in the region of Kiev. The deceptive inscription was, nevertheless, removed under the mounting pressure of publicity in March 1989. On March 17, 1989, the Soviet news agency TASS reported that, according to the findings of a "State Commission"—the fourth of its kind—mass graves containing the remains of 200,000-300,000 so-called "enemies of the people" murdered during the Stalin era had been discovered at Bykovnia, as well as in the Darnica Forest. At the same time, the journal of the Soviet Writer's Association, Literaturnaja Gazeta, in April 1989, considered it proper to stress that the massacres had been committed, not by "the Germans," but the Stalinists—"our own people." Frightful details of these mass murders committed by the NKVD, which began in 1937 and continued until immediately prior to the occupation of the city by German troops in September 1941, were provided by Carynnyk in an article entitled "The Killing Fields of Kiev," in the October 1990 edition of the magazine Commentary, published in New York by the American Jewish Committee.

 

In Germany, of course, such findings were only grudgingly acknowledged, if at all. In Germany, the Soviet propaganda figure of 100,000 victims in the Ravine of Babi Yar, which was not even accepted at Nuremberg, has penetrated deeply into the public mind, as was proven by related newspaper articles from the commemorative year, 1991. On September 14, 1991, a certain Wolfram Vogel, in a memorial article published the regional newspaper Sudkurier, succeeded in outdoing the claims of Stalinist war propaganda by alleging that "the mass grave of Babi Yar on the edge of Kiev" must have been capable of "concealing the bodies of 200,000 people murdered during the occupation. The female President of the German Bundestag, Submuth, turned a memorial speech on the Ravine of the Old Woman on October 5, 1991, into an occasion for an unjustified attack upon the entire German people, which had nothing to do with the executions of 33,771 Jews, or perhaps only half that number—which would have been bad enough—by Special Action Squad 4a of the Security Police and the SD. Executions that were committed without the knowledge or approval of the German people, and for which the German people cannot therefore be held responsible.

 

222--From the very outbreak of the conflict, neither Hitler nor Stalin considered the German-Soviet conflict an "ordinary European war" waged between two armies in the ordinary way, but rather, as a war of annihilation between two totalitarian systems that could only end with the destruction of one or the other. Although Stalin's radio speech of July 3, 1941, depicted the war as the Soviet Union's struggle, in alliance with the German people, to defeat "fascism," Soviet propagandists lost no time in raising the specter of a distinctly new and mortal enemy: not merely "fascism"—National Socialism—but the German nation as such. The German nation was in effect described as criminal almost from the first day of the war, along with the German Wehrmacht, all German military personnel, and, ultimately, the entire German people. Ehrenburg, in particular, was responsible for whipping up Soviet soldiers and workers to blind, raging fanaticism against everything German, through constant incitement to anti-German racial and national hatred.

 

An exact examination must now be made of the image of the German nation and people, as depicted by Soviet propagandists like Ehrenburg, Tolstoy, Simonov, and Zaslavsky, to mention only a few, as well as by historians and military men like Tarle, Bruevich, Velichka, and countless others. Ehrenburg, the principal spokesman for Soviet propaganda, never described the Germans as having advanced beyond "barbarism." "They clothe themselves in the skins of wild beasts and offer bloody sacrifices to their god Wotan." Even during the brilliance of the early Middle Ages, when the German Realm was governed by the Ottonian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, the Germans—according to Ehrenburg—still "roamed the forests, covered in the skins of wild beasts." Apart from the well-known historical fact that Russia and Poland derived enormous benefits from the heritage of their powerful expansions to the East, it was precisely the German colonization of the East during the Middle Ages—the "glorious traditions of the Teutonic Knights" as even Ehrenburg admitted—which was now vilified by Soviet propagandists in the context of the German-Soviet war through a series of misconceptions. "We are familiar with these traditions," wrote Ehrenburg on February 20, 1942: "The Germans were robbers, and robbers they have remained. They used to be bandits with spears and swords. Now they are bandits with machine pistols." Ehrenburg saw no difference between the various German tribes, past and present. To him, the Germans were always the "same." "There is something frightful about the Germans themselves," he wrote on January 14, 1942. "The Teutonic hordes plundered Rome," and in the ancient Hanseatic city of Novgorod, the German peddlers attempted "to swindle the Russians." "Cunning and intrigue are the German style"—allegedly a Russian proverb, according to Ehrenburg.

 

Ehrenburg's particular hatred was directed at the historical development of Brandenburg-Prussia, regardless of Prussia's ancient, and very close, dynastic and political links with Czarist Russia, to which Soviet propagandists drew all too frequent attention when it suited their purposes. In this distorted view, Brandenburg was a "cancerous growth," a "robbers' cave," from which the bandits sallied forth to terrorize "the Slavic and Lithuanian tribes in Pomerania and Prussia," whose lord and protector, in 1945, was now the Soviet Union headed by Stalin—in truth, of course, the largest slave state in the history of the world. In Ehrenburg's view, the sole purpose of the royal city of residence, Berlin, consisted of "the slaughter of human beings." Berlin, this "evil growth," had become "a deadly danger" "to all of Europe, and all civilized humanity" (naturally including the Soviet Union). "It is lucky for the world," Ehrenburg added that "Stalin is cauterizing this growth with fire and sword." "Stalin is saving the world by trampling to pieces the cradle in which the cruel Prussian monster was born 250 years ago." Proof of Prussia's alleged monstrousness included its "piratical attacks" upon Denmark in 1864, the Prussian-Austrian federal execution in the matter of Schleswig-Holstein, Austria in 1866, i.e., the Prussian-Austrian battle for the dominant position in Germany, and France in 1870-1871, although Prussia-Germany was, at that time, well assured of Russian benevolent neutrality, and despite the fact that both Marx and Engels referred to the Franco-Prussian war as a justifiable war of Prussian-German national defense against the imperialistic ambitions of Napoleon III's France.

 

225--Alluding to Soviet atrocities in the suburb of Metgethen, as described below, he added menacingly: "Konigsberg has looked the Red Army in the face and sees its fate written in the features of the Red Army... The city is moaning and stumbling about." Thus were the soldiers of the Red Army prepared for the forthcoming capture of the city of Konigsberg. The aftermath of the city's capture was in accordance with the propaganda build-up. Murder, rape, robbery, persecution, and utter anarchy raged throughout the ruined city. Entire rows of houses were deliberately burned down, sometimes with the residents still inside .The Soviet occupation authority, as stated, permitted 90,000 of the surviving 120,000 residents to simply starve to death in the months following the city's capture.

 

That the Soviet Union had very different objectives at this point was revealed by a brief but informative announcement of June 21, 1945, relating to the appointment of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. By Order No. I of that authority, Colonel General Serov of the NKGB—in Colonel General Professor Volkogonov's opinion, "one of the wickedest members of Beria's entourage"—was now appointed Deputy of the General Director of the Soviet Military Administration (SMA) Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Occupation Troops in Germany. Serov, was also simultaneously the plenary Deputy of the NKGB of the USSR within the group of Soviet Occupation Troops in Germany. Serov had, since the outbreak of the war, acted as Stalin's chief tool in the practical implementation of mass deportations and other acts of violence, all falling under the legal definition of genocide and crimes against humanity. It was Serov who deported 1-2 million Poles, Ukrainians, White Russians, and Jews from the annexed Polish territory in 1939-1940 to the barren regions of the Soviet Union, followed by tens of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians from the annexed Baltic republics in 1940-1941. Usually the family units were torn apart, and the head of the family was often liquidated, as in the case of the Baltic States. Tens of thousands of residents of the annexed Romanian national territories of Bucovina and Bessarabia suffered the same fate. Serov then implemented the deportation of 1,209,400 Russian ethnic Germans under inhumane conditions to Central Asia and Siberia, as ordered by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on August 28, 1940. In 1943-1944, it was again Colonel General Serov of the NKGB who carried out the mass deportation and destruction of the Kalmuck, Chechen, Ingush, Kabardinian, and Karachay peoples, and, finally, the Crimean Tatars, upon the decision and order of Stalin, the Politburo of the Central Committee, and the State Defense Committee. Based on Order No. 00315 of People's Commissar Beria of April 18, 1945, Serov now made immediate mass arrests among the civilian population in the occupied parts of Germany, through the operational group of the NKVD/ NKGB, which he commanded. The arrested persons, including women and young people (according to recent Russian data, a maximum of 260,000 people), were transferred to ten captured or newly built concentration camps, where tens of thousands of them perished from inhumane living conditions. Serov's appointment to the politically decisive position of head of the Soviet occupation zone and the immediately implemented, brutal elimination of all persons in any way considered hostile, in any event left no doubt as to the type of future policy the Soviet Union intended to apply in Germany.

 

If the German-Soviet conflict, as a collision between two opposing socialist systems, could end only with the complete annihilation of one of the two systems, then the methods of waging war employed were entirely in accordance, in their pitilessness, with the totalitarian nature of both ideologies. "The Soviet-German war was an exceptionally cruel war on both sides," Yakushevsky remarked in the periodical Novoe Vremja in 1993: "Both totalitarian systems waged war using similar methods." Interpretations of history intended to give the impression in Germany that the German-Soviet conflict could have been conducted in a more humane manner had Hitler and the leadership of the Wehrmacht not unscrupulously abrogated the usual rules and customs of war, even in the planning of "Operation Barbarossa," ignore the central reality of the situation, since these interpreters fail to consider corresponding realities on the Soviet side. This does not, of course, imply that unnecessary German severity could not have been avoided. Hitler's cardinal error was certainly his failure to respect Russian honor and patriotism, as well as Russian bravery, thus squandering a unique opportunity to gain the sympathy of the Russian people—an act of blindness that made loss of the war inevitable.

 

The principle established by Hitler in his address to the military leaders on March 30, 1941, passed on by the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, General Halder, and repeated by the Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal Keitel, in his letter to Admiral Canaris of September 15, 1941, was: "We must deviate from the principle of soldierly comradeship. A Communist is no comrade to start with, and no comrade later on. This is a war of annihilation." This was an exact mirror image of Stalin's views from the very outset. To quote Stalin's key radio speech of July 3, 1941, yet again, Stalin made it immediately clear that "the war against fascist Germany... must not be viewed as an ordinary war"; "it is not a war between two armies." "This is no ordinary war," Ehrenburg, his interpreter, immediately echoed, "and it is no ordinary army that is fighting against us"—a statement that was, of course, just as true of the Red Army itself.

 

250--The horrible details of the massacre of over 4,000 Ukrainian and Polish prisoners in the city of Lemberg (such as Brigidki Prison, Zamarstynow Prison, and the NKVD prison) have already been the object of detailed military court and forensic medical studies and post-war international investigations and require no further comment here. The forensic medical officer, Medical Captain Dr. Schneider, a professor of medicine, stated in an official letter to Medical Major General Dr. Zimmer on July 21, 1941: "It has become clear to me that the atrocities against Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and, unfortunately, against captured members of the Wehrmacht as well, committed by the GPU in Russia shortly before the evacuation of the cities, far exceeds everything previously... known in terms of atrociousness and cruelty... My assistant, who spent two days in Lemberg, told me that these events could neither be described nor even intimated. The murder victims were without any doubt sadistically tortured before death, in torture chambers installed for the purpose."

 

276--The reaction of the German Wehrmacht to the uninterrupted series of murders of German soldiers must now be examined. It has already been mentioned that the High Command of the Wehrmacht prohibited all reprisals as early as July 1941 on the grounds that "reprisals would fail because of the mentality of the Russians, thus unnecessarily contributing to the bitterness of the war." The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, was also of the opinion that reprisals would be ineffective in regard to the Soviet Union in contrast to the Western powers, and would, furthermore, have a negative influence upon the abstractly favorable prospects for German front-line propaganda where the Red Army was concerned. An order to this effect was issued to all divisions of the German Army of the East, without regard to "serious violations of international law by the Russians." At the same time, on July l, 1941, a decision of the "Fuhrer and Supreme Commander" was issued to treat the wives of all "officers and commissars," and all Soviet women, "carrying weapons in accordance with orders as prisoners of war when found in uniform." Whereas, if captured in civilian clothing, they were to lose all protection under international law and be treated as partisans.

 

On July 5, 1941, the Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Army, Field Marshal von Reichenau, ordered Red Army Major Turta of the 781S Infantry Regiment of the 124 Infantry Division summarily shot because, as stated in the execution order, the division had since June 22, 1941, "deliberately mistreated, tortured, mutilated, and murdered German soldiers of all ranks following capture, whether wounded or not, in a manner so cruel and bestial as to be hitherto inconceivable." These bestialities were done "under the very eyes of, and with the toleration of, officers fully and entirely responsible for the crimes of their subordinates. Although von Reichenau continued to grant Soviet soldiers ordinary treatment according to the customs relating to the treatment of prisoners of war, he believed himself obligated to administer a "hard and justified atonement" to the officers of the Red Army's 124 Infantry Division on behalf of his "murdered comrades."

 

This was, after all, simply an isolated case of reprisal, the victim of which may perhaps have been the person responsible.

 

Generally, the German command authorities do not appear to have deviated from the provisions of international law in regard to prisoners, even on the eastern front. For example, on July 10, 1941, the battalion doctor of the II Battalion of the 53rd (Motorized) Infantry Regiment reported to the divisional doctor of the 14th Motorized Infantry Division that one officer, eight non-commissioned officers, and sixty-five soldiers of his regiment, some of them wounded, had been captured by the Soviets, and that, as proven by an investigation, all had been murdered "deliberately and according to order" by shooting them in the back of the neck, stabbing them with bayonets, or beating them with rifle butts, at the bridgehead at Dzisna on July 8, 1941. A number of the wounded men showed signs of the "cruelest forms of mutilations." When the shocked head physician asked his professional superiors for instructions on the proper future treatment of wounded Russians, on the grounds, as he wrote, that "it was difficult for me to continue to act as I would have previously considered it my duty to do, after learning of this criminal attitude on the part of the enemy in relation to our wounded," he received an order that was characteristic. The Chief of the General Staff of the 3rd Panzer Group, Major General von Hunersdorff, reported, through the battalion doctor on July 13, 1941, that "on the grounds of fundamental considerations, there could be no question of a change in attitude on the part of German soldiers toward enemy wounded." He simply ordered that there should be no reduction in the quality of care for the fellow German wounded as a result.

 

When it was proposed to the High Command of the 17 Army that high-ranking officers of the Soviet 6th and 12th Army be shot in reprisal for the murder and mutilation of nineteen German wounded soldiers and two medics in a Red Cross vehicle in August 1941, the army commander, Lieutenant General von Stulpnagel, rejected this idea as well, with quite analogous justification. When German soldiers became enormously embittered after the massacre of Grishino-Krasnoarmejskoe, the Commanding General of the XXXX German Panzer Corps, Lieutenant General Henrici, issued an order of the day on his own initiative on March 3, 1943, warning the troops against permitting themselves to become carried away to the point of engaging in acts of revenge as a result of these occurrences. The order read in part: "We, nevertheless, wish to adhere closely to the soldierly principle that an enemy who has been captured in uniform, who is no longer capable of fighting and is unarmed, belongs in a prisoner of war camp."

 

At Nuremberg on March 22, 1946, the President of the International Military Tribunal, Judge Lawrence, rejected an application by defense lawyer Dr. Stahmer for admission into evidence of the White Book of the German Reich Government on "Bolshevik Crimes against the Laws of Humanity and the Laws and Customs of War," first series, 1941, as evidentiary material for the defense. Lawrence concurred with the application of Soviet Chief Prosecutor General Rudenko, who permitted himself to portray the legal investigation documents collated in the White Book as "inventions" and "forged documents" characteristic of "fascist propaganda," purely and simply intended to "hide the crimes which were perpetrated by the fascists." Since the victims of the crimes investigated and analyzed in the White Book consisted solely of German and German-allied soldiers, the International Military Tribunal considered such material "irrelevant" in full accordance with the London Agreement. It is precisely this fact that justifies the presentation of a few of the innumerable documented cases of mistreatment of German prisoners of war who are otherwise consciously and methodically relegated to forgetfulness by the journalistic profession in relation to the German-Soviet war.

 

282--The number of prisoners of war murdered in the German eastern provinces alone will never be known. Concerning the number of civilian victims, the investigations of the German Federal Ministry for Victims of Expulsion and the German Federal Archives, based on resident population statistics, provide at least an approximate idea, although their estimates are very conservative and only include the victims of immediate acts of violence. According to these estimates, 120,000 men, women and children were murdered, most of them by Soviet soldiers, while 100,000-200,000 more perished in various prisons and camps. More than 250,000 others died during the deportations—which began on February 3, 1945—and in Soviet work camps as "reparations deportees." Many more died from the inhumane living conditions under the Soviet military administration of the following occupation period—90,000 in Konigsberg alone. There was also an extremely high proportion of persons who put an end to their own lives out of desperation. This does not include the tremendous losses in human life caused by immediate acts of violence in the prisons, concentration camps, and extermination camps of Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, such as the 43,000 civilians—at a minimum—who died of hunger or epidemics in the concentration camps of the Soviet occupation troops.

 

As for conditions in Bohemia and Moravia in particular, one need only quote the proclamation broadcast over British radio on November 3, 1944, by the commander of the Czech armed forces in exile, General Ingr: "When our day comes, the entire nation will follow the old war cry of the Hussites: Strike them, kill them, leave no one alive! Everyone should start looking for the best possible weapon with which to hit the Germans as hard as possible, right now. If there are no firearms available, some other weapon should be prepared and hidden—one that cuts, stabs, or hits."

 

In the spirit of this and other, similar proclamations, to cite just one example, the Commander of the 3rd Infantry Brigade of the lst Czechoslovakian Army Corps in the Soviet Union, General Klapalek, who left London to join with the Soviets, was jointly responsible for the mass murder of 763 German civilians at Postelberg (Postoloprty) in June 1945. Czech military personnel were also involved in the massacre at Aussig (Usti nad Labem) on July 31, 1945, where up to 2,000 German civilians were murdered following a provocative explosion incited by the Benesh government, under circumstances of horror that exceed the normal powers of imagination. A total of up to 270,000 defenseless Germans were murdered in Czechoslovakia (CSR) beginning in May 1945, some in an animalistic manner. In general, an estimated total number of 2.2 million "unsolved cases" were reported in the so-called "Expulsion areas," most of which, upon broader interpretation of the term, must be viewed as "crime victims," i.e., the victims of anti-German genocide.

 

The present exposition is primarily concerned with the zone of responsibility of the Red Army, which had already committed serious crimes against the civilian population in Yugoslavia in 1944. It will be seen that Stalin, the Politburo, the Members of the State Defense Committee, the political and military leadership of the Red Army, the subordinate army and unit leaders, and their subordinate officers of all ranks, bear immediate responsibility for everything that occurred. The commanders and other officers are especially responsible, since they not only failed to restrain their troops from committing acts that were criminal under international law, but, on the contrary, incited them to commit such crimes, tolerated and encouraged such acts of violence, and, to a great extent, even participating in them. Particular responsibility falls upon the Commander-in-Chief of the Y White Russian Front, General of the Army Chernyakhovsky, and of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, and their Military Councils, the full texts or extracts of whose criminal orders have been found. Similar orders issued by the Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd White Russian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Rokossovsky, and the Commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Konev, have apparently not been found, but the conditions in their zones of responsibility were in no way different.

 

Fundamentally, the above mentioned men were, like Chernyakhovsky and Zhukov, as well as the Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Malinovsky, responsible in each case for the deportation of peaceful residents for slave labor in the Soviet Union, a crime under international law similar to that for which Alfred Rosenberg and Fritz Sauckel were sentenced to death, and Albert Speer to twenty years imprisonment, by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The deportation of all able-bodied ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia to compulsory labor in the Soviet Union had been ordered by Directive No. 7161 of the State Defense Committee (Goko), signed by Stalin as early as December 16, 1944. According to the implementation order issued (on the basis of the above directive) by Marshal of the Soviet Union Malinovsky, all able-bodied ethnic German men aged 17-45, and all able-bodied ethnic German women aged 18-30, on the territory of Hungary and Romania (Transsylvania), were ordered arrested for this sole purpose. On February 3, 1945, the State Defense Committee, by Directive No. 7467, also ordered the mass deportation of German men and women from the territory of the Reich itself. In addition, all able-bodied Reich Germans aged 17-50 were now to be arrested, organized in labor battalions, and deported to the Soviet Union for slave labor. The document, signed by Stalin in collaboration with Colonel General of the NKVD Serov and the Deputy of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Beria, instructed the Commander-in-Chief of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, and his Military Council, "to take consistent measures" in this regard.

 

Professor Semiryaga who held a position of responsibility in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) for five years, wrote: "For two and a half months, transport trains traveled eastward, loaded with tens of thousands of German women and old people (since the entire population of young males was at the front)."

 

In reality, minors, and even children aged 12-13, were also deported under terrible conditions resulting in innumerable fatalities, often during transport. Professor Semiryaga does not conceal his awareness of the fact that "Soviet military authorities in all the countries liberated by the Russian Army" had undertaken the "illegal deportation" of peaceful German civilians. Through their collaboration with Stalin's order, which was "in fact, criminal," the leadership of the Red Army had become guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including those in the sense of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

 

As far as military discipline was concerned, the Red Army was in fact experiencing an increasingly rapid degeneration into savagery even in 1944. During the reincorporation of former Soviet territories, such as the Ukraine, but also in Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, excesses and acts of violence against the local population reached such proportions that the Soviet Command authorities were compelled to take severe measures. Colonel General Petrov, Army Commander of the 4th Ukrainian Front, in Order No. 074 of June 8, 1944, denounced the "disgraceful excesses" by members of the Army of his Front in the Soviet Territory of the Crimea, excesses "that even included the armed robbery and murder of local residents."' He referred to the guilty soldiers, including high-ranking officers, as "bandits," "rogues," and "armed criminals" who, exploiting "the helplessness of the population," had tarnished the honor of the Red Army. Directive No. 0017 from the Chief of the Political Administration of the 1st Ukrainian Front, Shatilov, of April 6, 1944, which is quite similar, mentions "plundering," "murders," "terrorist attacks," "marauders having grown bold," and "criminals" from "many units and agencies," and other crimes committed against the populations of the western regions of the Ukraine, i.e., eastern Poland, very often with the tolerance of political officials .The tenseness of the situation in Poland is revealed by the diary of an officer in the 2nd Guards Artillery Division of the 5^th Artillery Corps of the 1^st Baltic Front, Yuri Uspensky, who was later killed. "Amongst ourselves, we speak of the Poles with great hostility," this highly meditative officer writes in regard to the conditions in Vilna: "The soldiers even say that the Poles must all be hanged, adding the following cultural platitude: "The Polish people, historically, are totally unfit to live."

 

Of course, a single occurrence, such as the "Violation of International Law" reported on November 1, 1944, by the Chief of Staff of the German 16 Army, cannot be generalized in regard to the non-German region; but it, nevertheless, illustrates the crimes of which some Soviet soldiers had already become quite capable. On September 20, 1944, behind the Soviet lines, in a small forest belonging to the farm-hand Araji in the municipality of Grfnhof, not far from Mitau (Latvia), at about 10 o'clock in the morning, three Latvian soldiers in the German army became aware of "inhuman screaming, moaning, and death-rattles." They observed the following from a hiding place: "The screams came from a woman, apparently twenty to thirty years old, completely naked, fastened to a wooden support, apparently in a kind of crucifixion, her back upward, her face turned downward toward the undersupport, which was leaning up against a tree at an angle of 45 degrees. The body of the woman was inclined diagonally to the right, on top of this wooden support, the arms stretched outward sideways and apparently fastened, the palms of the hands turned upward, the legs together, reaching to the ground. I consider it possible that the body was held in place by the nails driven through the plank-like under-support, and may perhaps even have been held up by them. Two to four Soviet soldiers, recognizable from a distance only as uniformed soldiers of unknown rank, went walking around from time to time, without stopping, but, nevertheless, apparently gloating at the woman's suffering, the real cause of which could not be discerned. They walked around mostly in groups of two, at a distance of 20 meters from the woman, walking around her, as far as I could tell, but otherwise making no other movement, which led me to assume that tortures of this kind are not at all unusual amongst them. We all three heard the cries for about two hours. The cries continued for the most part without interruption and grew mute toward the end of this time, apparently due to exhaustion on the part of the woman. The cries were so inhuman, that one of us, whose family had been unable to flee from the Soviets, lost control over his nerves for a while, although we were all three old veterans of the former Latvian army. We conclude that the woman's sufferings must have been quite inhuman."

 

It proved impossible to provide any assistance. In the non-German countries, the Soviet command authorities, though often in vain, continued to intervene occasionally against excesses and plundering by members of the Red Army. Upon entering the territory of the German Reich, however, all inhibition was lost. Thus the Corps Commander of the 43 Infantry Corps, Major General Andreev, threatened his soldiers in Poland with court martial in January of 1945 in the event of excesses, then simultaneously continued: "But as soon as we get to Germany, I will not waste one word over such things." The basic attitude of the Red Army soldiers after crossing the Reich border was characterized by the hate propaganda of I. Ehrenburg, A.N. Tolstoy, E.V Tarle, M.A. Sholokhov, K.M. Simonov, A.A. Fadeev and many others who deserve to be mentioned here. On August 24, 1944, Ehrenburg, who was the spokesman for the inciters, wrote: "On the German borders let us once again repeat the holy oath to forget nothing ... we say this with the calm of a long ripening and invincible hatred, we say this at the border of the enemy: 'Woe to thee, Germany!'"

[For Genocides]

306--The political administrations and command agencies of the Red Army appealed to the hate feelings and thirst for revenge of Soviet soldiers in order to achieve the highest degree of combat readiness and performance. This procedure, as discreditable as it was risky, was resorted to for the purpose of generating heroism; yet the inevitable results of unleashing base human instincts soon made themselves apparent. An "unrestrained instinctual behavior, unworthy of human beings," set in among Soviet soldiers with the rapidity of the wind, leading to a degree of demoralization and descent into savagery of such proportions that "control over the troops was lost in many units and formations." Order no. 006 of the Council of War of the 2nd White Russian Front, issued on 22 January 1945, discussed in more detail below, lamented that the discovery of large quantities of alcohol had led to "excessive indulgence" among Soviet troops, in addition to "robbery, plundering, arson"—the murders were hushed up—and "mass booze-ups" in all sections of the front, even with the participation "of the officers," to the chagrin of the superior command authorities. The case of the 290 Infantry Division, assigned to the front line, in which the soldiers and officers drank so much that "they no longer even looked like warriors of the Red Army," was cited as one example. It was stated that wine barrels had been placed upon the chassis of tanks of the 5th Tank Army and that munitions vehicles had been so heavily laden with "all possible kinds of household goods, looted food and civilian clothing, etc." that "they became a burden to the troops," "reducing troop mobility" to the detriment of "the breakthrough capacity of the tank units."

 

Individual examples in Soviet orders must be immediately generalized, here as everywhere else. Soviet soldiers began to wear "civilian hats instead of the regulation headgear," or, as noted by Yuri Uspensky in his diary, to wear "Napoleon caps" and to carry "walking sticks, umbrellas, rubber raincoats," immediately acquiring the outward appearance of robbers and marauders. Failure to obey orders also became quite prevalent. As observed by the Council of War of the 2nd White Russian Front, "these failings on the part of the rear units show no signs of abating; on the contrary, they are even increasing." The needless destruction of "the dwellings required to quarter troops and staff, and to store military materiel"—i.e., the burning of existing German buildings—was very detrimental and referred to as a "shameful phenomenon" against which Soviet commanding officers not only failed to intervene, but, quite the contrary, even encouraged through their refusal to act. In this connection, the only mention made was of shortcomings having a detrimental effect upon the combat readiness of the Red Army. There was no mention of excesses and crimes committed against the German population, offences which, in comparison, were far more serious. Nevertheless, the need to restore some kind of military discipline, in addition, last but not least, to a concern on the part of Soviet leadership for the possible negative propaganda effect upon their Western Allies of the actions of Soviet troops—skillfully exploited by the Germans while Soviet troops continued their rapid advance into Central Europe—caused the leadership of the Red Army to take severe measures after only ten days.

 

The Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd White Russian Front, Marshall of the Soviet Union Rokossovsky, was the first to intervene. Order no. 006, issued as early as 22 January 1945, signed by Rokossovsky himself as well as by Member of the Council of War, General Subbotin, and the Chief of Staff, General Bogomolov, and referred to above, was, remarkably enough, to be made known to all ranks, even down to platoon leaders. In the severest language, Marshall Rokossovsky ordered the Commanders-in-Chief of the Army, all corps and divisional commanders, and all commanders of all independent units of his front, "to extirpate these occurrences, which bring shame upon the Red Army," "with red-hot steel," in all units, squads, and divisions; to bring those responsible for plundering and drunkenness to account; and to "punish such behavior with the severest penalties, including shooting." The political administration of the Front, the military state prosecutor's office, military tribunals, and SMERSH—an NKVD organization—were assigned to take all necessary measures to implement this order.

 

Marshall Rokossovsky now demanded that the entire officer staff establish "exemplary order and iron discipline" in all units. The widespread reality of the murders of prisoners of war received further confirmation in this regard as well, though only peripherally: Rokossovsky saw fit to remind his officers and soldiers that enemy soldiers were to be killed in combat, but taken prisoner when they surrendered. There was particular concern for the situation in the rear zones. The Chief of the Political Administration of the Rear Front Zone was called upon to establish the immediate order necessary in the units of his zone as well. But the principal matter of concern was simply the preservation of material values. The Chief of the Rear Zone and the Superintendent of the Front received a special order to "take all measures to ensure the seizure and confiscation of all loot," and to prohibit "the misappropriation and black-market sale" of the same. The Commander-in-Chief of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshall of the Soviet Union Zhukov—who had incited his troops to the commission of acts of revenge and "inhuman acts of violence" in unmistakable language on 12 January 1945—now performed a perfect 180-degree turn, just as had done once before, in the winter of 1941-42, by suddenly announcing that his subordinates would be held personally responsible for "actions in violation of international law."

 

Contrary to many reports in the relevant literature, Marshall Rokossovsky, the most nearly moderate among the four Commanders-in-Chief at the front as far as we know, never wasted one official word relating to the violations of international law committed by his troops against the German population, even though such violations were quite well known to him. The problem was nevertheless openly discussed in at least a few implementation orders. On 23 January 1945, and with reference to the demands of the Councils of War of the Front and the 48^th Army, the Military Prosecutor of the same army, Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Malyarov, issued an order to all military prosecutors of the subordinate units, such as, for example, those of the 190 Infantry Division (the 0134th, 0135th, and 0137th). This order was chiefly concerned with the preservation of material values .The principle that "all material values in East Prussia, from the moment upon which they come into the possession of the troops of the Red Army, are to be transferred to the ownership of the Soviet Union, subject to seizure and transport into the USSR"—a principle in violation of international law—was now bluntly proclaimed. No distinction was made between private property and public or governmental German property. If the Soviet military authorities now complained of the "enormous material damage" caused "by wantonness and hooliganism" in the cities and villages, this was due solely to a preoccupation with a possible reduction in the harvest of loot which it was hoped could be collected from the Germans.

 

Simultaneously, however, the order of the military prosecutor of the 48th Army denounced the crimes against the civilian population and prisoners of war for the first time. Malyarov pointed out that there had indeed been "cases" of the use of firearms by military persons "against the German population, particularly, against women and old women." It was also stated that "numerous cases of shootings of prisoners of war" under unjustifiable circumstances of pure "maliciousness" had been established. The military prosecutors were ordered by Lieutenant Colonel Malyarov to inform the members of the army, in cooperation with the political apparatus, that the destruction of captured property and the "burning of buildings and entire villages" constituted subversive action. Additionally, it was stated that "reprisals against the population are not customary in the Red Army, the use of weapons against women and old people is contrary to law, and those guilty of such actions will be severely punished." It was furthermore added that it was in the interests of the Soviets to take German prisoners. The military prosecutors' offices were ordered to organize an immediate "show trial" against "arsonists and other louts," to notify the troops of the sentences imposed, to exercise strict control and, furthermore, in any case, to arrest the culprits immediately.

 

The fact—unequivocally admitted in the order of the military state prosecutor of the 48th Army, as well as in the order of the Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd White Russian Front—that an increasing demoralization and descent into savagery was now prevalent among the ranks of the Red Army, was, however, immediately hushed up by the subordinate troop leadership and political apparatus. This fact is illustrated by the manner in which shameful incidents of wanton destruction and drunkenness were interpreted for the benefit of subordinates. One example is order no. 026, issued on 25 January 1945 by the Chief of Staff of the 174 Infantry Division, Colonel Romanenko, to the troop commanders, in this case, the 508 Infantry Regiment. In this order, the arsonists are no longer described as marauding Soviet soldiers, but rather, as enemy agents and provocateurs—i.e., Germans, who, "dressed in the uniforms of the Red Army," were alleged to be seeking to prevent the advance of Soviet troops by "burning settlements and individual buildings."

 

The official explanation for the widespread alcoholism among the members of the Red Army, accompanied by "mass booze-ups"—as Rokossovsky called them—with the participation of Soviet officers and with devastating consequences, was very similar. The Political Administration, which was best acquainted with the attitude of the Council of War of the 3rd White Russian Front, in an instruction leaflet addressed to the "Comrade combatants, sergeants and officers" even attempted to place responsibility for unrestrained Soviet drunkenness upon the Germans—the "reprehensible, treacherous enemy"—who was said to be deliberately poisoning the supplies of alcohol and food "in an attempt to cause casualties among our soldiers and officers and to harm the Red Army. For example, if members of a Red Army unit commanded by First Lieutenant Klimets, or some other Soviet commander, drank huge quantities of methyl alcohol, or if a group of Soviet soldiers under the command of the officer Nikiforov quaffed "a barrel containing a fluid which smelled like alcohol," and died horribly, the deceased were, of course, simply the victims of the "treacherous enemy": an enemy which, in his efforts to harm the Soviet Army, never shrank from the "basest, most reprehensible, and horrible means of fighting." The question now arises: how were excesses against the civilian population to be prevented if the impulsive lack of restraint of the Red Army soldiers was mendaciously attributed, as described above, to German treachery, countered with the mere proclamation that the "fascist beasts" and "German monsters", were to be punished for these "treacherous methods" with "renewed, devastating blows"?

 

The orders issued by the Soviet command authorities, were, therefore, far from unanimous. Many prisoners of war informed the Germans that they had received knowledge of the new rules of conduct in February 1945. For example, Major of the Guards of the Superintendent Service Kostikov of the 277 Guards Infantry Regiment of the 91st Guards Infantry Division (39th Army, 3rd White Russian Front), on 17 February 1945, reported that "strict orders have been issued that the German civilian population is to be left alone, nothing is to be stolen, and German women are not to be molested." According to the testimony of one Red Army soldier, Shevchuk, the "shooting of civilians and German prisoners of war," which had been customary in the Red Army until that time, was now "strictly prohibited" in the 44th Motorized Infantry Brigade as of 6-7 February 1945. Similar, quite comparable, prohibitions were also issued with regards to other units. When Soviet soldiers wantonly set fire to the city of Gleiwitz, the burning of localities was "strictly forbidden" in that section of the front as well. The commander of the 1042nd Infantry Regiment of the 295th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Chaiko, informed his units that violations of the existing prohibition against plundering would be "severely punished." Generally, the Soviet command authorities were not stingy about threats of punishment; the military tribunals appear to have intervened occasionally. But these were exceptions. Members of the Red Army unanimously maintained that the authorities only intervened in rare cases; in practice, everything continued as before.

 

German civilians and prisoners of war continued to be murdered as before, often upon the inducement of superior officers, usually the "battalion and regimental commanders involved," although a few prisoners of war testified that there were units in "which such crimes were not tolerated." German women and girls continued to be raped as before by "officers and younger soldiers of the Red Army," despite of existing prohibitions, and were very often murdered afterwards. Arson and pillaging with the participation of officers continued just as before. That the numerous orders to the contrary remained a dead letter is illustrated by the fact that anti-German hate propaganda was not amended or modified in the slightest respect. A captured second lieutenant from the 266th Infantry Regiment of the 88th Guards Infantry Division testified that posters with inflammatory slogans were to be seen on the streets everywhere, even in February 1945, such as: "Strike the Fascist Beasts Dead! Take Revenge on the Fascists! Remember the Women and Children Murdered by the Fascists and Take Revenge for Them!" The watchword of agitation upon the 27th anniversary of the Red Army on 23 February 1945 was as follows: "Let's wreak vengeance on the German-fascist monsters for plundering and destroying our cities and villages, for raping our women and children, for murdering and deporting Soviet citizens to German slavery! Vengeance and death to the fascist fiends!"

 

Since the powerful political apparatus employed an entirely distinct language from the command authorities of the Red Army, which had only intervened half-heartedly so far, it is no wonder that violations of international law against German civilians and prisoners of war continued to be committed on a horrendous scale throughout February and March 1945.

 

The manner in which the orders of the Soviet leadership were put into practice is illustrated by the multitude of reports received by the Germans on atrocities by Red Army soldiers against prisoners of war and the civilian population even in February 1945. The available official material is naturally incomplete; some of it, furthermore, can only be mentioned briefly here, for purposes of example. Similar reports continued to be received from all parts of the regions of the provinces of Silesia, the Brandenburg district, Pomerania, and East Prussia, all of which were only partially occupied by the enemy. These reports unanimously described the same criminal acts, murder, rape, robbery, plundering, and arson, and provide, on the whole, a truthful picture of these frightful events. The selected cases are typical of innumerable similar atrocities committed in all parts of the four eastern provinces even in February 1945.

 

Silesia

Near the borders of the Reich, west of Welun, Soviet soldiers from the 1st Ukrainian Front doused the wagons in a fleeing line of refugees with gasoline and burnt them, together with the passengers. Innumerable corpses of German men, women, and children, some of them mutilated, with their throats cut, their tongues cut out, their stomachs slit open, littered the roads. Also west of Welun, 25 members (Front workers) of the Organization Todt were shot by tank crews of the 3rd Tank Army of the Guards. In Heinersdorf, as well, the men were all shot, and the women raped, by Soviet soldiers. At Kunzendorf, 25-30 members of the Volksturm were shot in the back of the neck. At Glausche, near Namslau, 18 persons, "including members of the Volksturm and female nurses" were murdered by members of the 59th Army. At Beatenhof, near Ohlau, after the recapture of the village by German troops, all the men were found shot in the back of the neck, 14 murdered by members of the Soviet 5th Army of the Guards. In Grunberg, eight families were murdered by members of the 9th Tank Army of the Guards. The Tannenfeld manor near Grottkau was the scene of a cruel orgy of crime: Soviet soldiers from the 229th Infantry Division raped two girls and then murdered them after various acts of mistreatment. The eyes of one man were gouged out and his tongue cut out. A 43 year-old Polish woman received the same treatment and was then tortured to death.

 

At Alt-Grottkau, members of the same division murdered 14 prisoners of war, cutting off their heads, gouging out their eyes, and crushing them with tanks. Soviet soldiers from the same division were responsible for crimes committed in Schwarzengrund, near Grottkau: they raped the women, including the members of a nunnery, shot the farmer Kahlert, slit his wife's abdomen open, hacked off her hands, shot the farmer Christoph and his son, as well as a young girl. On Eisdorf manor near Marzdorf, Soviet soldiers from the 5th Army of the Guards gouged out the eyes of an elderly man and woman, apparently a married couple, and cut off their noses and fingers. Eleven bodies of wounded members of the Luftwaffe who had been horribly murdered were found in the near vicinity. Twenty-one prisoners of war murdered by Soviet members of the 4th Tank Army were also found at Giitersstadt near Glogau. In the village of Haslicht, near Striegau, all the women were raped by Soviet soldiers from the 9th Mechanized Corps, "each one participating in turn." Maria Hainke discovered her husband, showing almost imperceptible signs of life, and dying in a Soviet guardroom. A medical examination revealed that his eyes had been put out, his tongue cut out, an arm fractured in several places, and the top of his skull crushed.

 

At Ossig, near Streigau, members of the 7th Tank Guards Corps raped the women, murdered six or seven young girls, shot 12 farmers, and also committed similar serious crimes at Hertwisswaldau near Jauer. At Liegnitz, the bodies of numerous civilians shot by Soviet soldiers of the 6th Army of the Guards were found. In the small city of Kostenblut, near Neumarkt, occupied by units of the 7th Tank Guards Corps, all the women and girls were raped, including an advanced pregnant mother of eight children. Her brother was shot for attempting to protect her. All foreign prisoners of war were shot, as well as six men and three women. Nor did the nurses in a Catholic hospital escape mass rape. At Pilgramsdorf, near Goldberg, numerous murders, rapes, and cases of arson were committed by members of the 23rd Mechanized Infantry Brigade. At Beralsdorf, a suburb of Lauban, 39 of the still remaining women were violated "under the cruelest conditions" by Soviet soldiers of the 7th Tank Guards Corps. During the rapes, one woman received a gunshot wound to the lower jaw, was locked in a cellar, and, days later, was "gang raped at gunpoint in the most brutal manner" by three Soviet soldiers even though she was running a high fever.

 

Province Mark Brandenburg (primarily Neumark and the Sternberger region)

A report from the Russian agents Danilov and Chirshin assigned to the area by the 103rd Front Reconnaissance Unit between 24 February and 1 March 1945 provides a general idea of the treatment meted out to the population. According to the report, all the Germans aged 12 or upwards were ruthlessly put to work building fortifications, while all members of the population not assigned to such work were deported to the east; the old were simply left to starve. At Sorau, Danilov and Chirshin saw "piles of bodies of murdered women and men (butchered), shot (in the back of the neck or in the heart)..., lying on the roads, farms, and in the houses." According to the statements of one Soviet officer, personally shocked at the extent of the terror, "all the women and girls, regardless of age, were ruthlessly raped." Soviet soldiers from the 33rd Army also indulged in a "cruel and bloody campaign of terror" at Skampe near Zullichau. "Strangled bodies of women, children, and old people" were found in almost all the houses. The bodies of a man and woman were found a short distance from Skampe, on the road to Rentschen: the woman's abdomen was slit open, her embryo torn out, and the aperture in the abdomen stuffed with straw and garbage. Three members of the Volksturm were found hanged nearby.

 

At Kay, near Zullichau, members of the same army murdered wounded members of a transport, including all the women and children, by shooting them in the back of the neck. The city of Neu-Bentschen was plundered and wantonly burned by members of the Red Army. On the Schwiebus-Frankfurt road, Soviet soldiers from the 69th Army shot so many civilians, including women and children, that the bodies lay "underneath and on top of each other." At Alt-Drewitz, on the road to Calenzig, members of the 1st Tank Army of the Guards shot a medical major, a major and several medics, while simultaneously opening fire on American prisoners of war being retransferred from Stalag Alt-Drewitz; 20-30 of the prisoners were wounded and an unknown number killed.  On the road to GroB-Blumberg/Oder, the bodies of approximately 40 German soldiers were found in groups of five to ten bodies each, murdered by gunshot wounds to the back of the head or neck, and then robbed. In Reppen, all the men in a passing line of refugees were shot by Soviet soldiers from the 19th Army and the women raped. At Gassen, near Sommerfeld, civilians were indiscriminately shot at by tanks from the 6th Mechanized Guards Corps. At Massin, near Landsberg, members of the 5th Assault Army shot an unknown number of residents, raped the women and young girls, and carried away looted objects. In an unknown location near Landsberg, members of the 331th Infantry Division shot eight male civilians, after robbing them.

 

When units of the Soviet 11th Tank Corps or the 4th Infantry Corps unexpectedly invaded the city of Lebus west of the Oder, they immediately began to rob the residents, shooting a number of civilians. Soviet soldiers raped the women and girls, two of whom were beaten to death with rifle butts. The sudden breakthrough of Soviet troops as far as the Oder and, in some localities, even across the Oder, had fearful consequences for innumerable residents and German soldiers. At GroB-Neuendorf/Oder, ten German prisoners of war were locked in a barn and machine gunned, apparently by Soviet soldiers from the lst Tank Army of the Guards. In Reitwein and Trettin, all German soldiers, police officials, and other "fascists," as well as entire families in whose houses members of the Wehrmacht had found lodgings, were shot by Soviet soldiers, apparently from the 8th Army of the Guards. In Wiesenau, near Frankfurt, two women aged 65 and 55 were found dying after being raped for several hours. At Zehden, a uniformed Soviet woman officer, of unknown rank, from the 5th Tank Guards Corps, shot a sales representative and his wife. At Genschmar, Soviet soldiers murdered a manor owner, the manor manager, and three workers.

 

An assault group from the Vlassov Army under Colonel of the ROA Sakharov retook the villages of New-Lewin and Kerstenbruch, in the Oderbruch, on 9 February 1945 with German support. The population in both villages, according to a German report of 15 March 1945, had been "mistreated in the cruelest manner" and were still suffering from the "frightful effects of Soviet terror." At Neu-Lewin, the mayor was found shot, as well as a member of the Wehrmacht on furlough. In a barn lay the bodies of three women who had been raped and beaten to death, two of them with their feet tied. A German woman lay shot in front of the door to her own house. An elderly married couple were strangled to death. The 9th Tank Guards Corps was found to have been responsible, both here and in the village of Neu-Barnim, not far away. At Neu-Barnim, 19 residents were found dead. The body of the inn keeper, a woman, was found mutilated, her feet tied together with wire. Here, as in the other localities, the women and girls were raped; at Kerstenbruch, the rape victims included a 71 year-old woman with one leg amputated. Pillaging and wanton destruction also formed part of the pattern of violent crime committed by Soviet troops in these villages of the Oderbruch, as well as everywhere else in the German regions of the East.

 

Pomerania

Only relatively few reports are available for Pomerania during the month of February 1945, since the real breakthrough battles only began towards the end of the month. A report by the Georgian Lieutenant Berakashvili, who was commandeered from the Georgian Liaison Staff to the German officer cadet school at Posen, where he participated in the German defense of the Posen fortress with other officers from volunteer units and then managed to get through to Stettin, provides a few impressions relating to the region south east of Stettin. Persons wearing the uniforms of any German civil service—not only Party members and members of the Hitler Youth, but also railway employees, etc.—were shot everywhere. Soldiers and civilians killed by shots to the back of the neck often lined the roads; the bodies were "always half naked, and in all cases without boots." At Schwarzenburg, Lieutenant Berakashvili witnessed the brutal rape of a farmer's wife in the presence of her crying children, and saw signs of pillaging and destruction everywhere. The city of Bahn was "cruelly destroyed, and many civilian bodies" lay piled up in the streets, killed "in reprisal," as Soviet soldiers explained.

 

The conditions in the villages around Pyritz completely confirm these observations. At Billerbeck, the manor owners, as well as the old and sick, were shot. All women and girls, down to the age of ten, were raped, the dwellings plundered, and all surviving residents deported. On Brederlow manor, Soviet soldiers raped the women and girls, one of whom, as well as the wife of a German soldier on furlough who succeeded in escaping, were then shot. At Koselitz, the principal official, a farmer, and a lieutenant on furlough were murdered. At Eichelshagen, the Local Group Leader and a six-member family were murdered. The perpetrators in all cases were members of the 61st Army. A series of similar events took place in the villages around Greifenhagen south of Stettin. At Jadersdorf, ten evacuated women and a 15 year-old boy were shot, the surviving victims killed with bayonets and pistol shots, and entire families with small children "slaughtered" by members of the 2nd Guards Tank Army. At Rohrsdorf, Soviet soldiers shot numerous residents, including a wounded soldier on furlough. Women and girls were raped and frequently murdered afterwards. At GroB-Silber, near Kallies, Soviet soldiers from the 7th Cavalry Guards Corps raped a young woman with a broomstick, cut off her left breast, and crushed her skull. In PreuBisch Friedland, Soviet soldiers from the 52nd Guards Infantry Division shot eight men and two women and raped 34 women and girls. A cruel crime was reported by the Commander of a German tank engineer battalion of the 7th Tank Division.

 

In late February 1945, Soviet officers from the 1^st or 160th Infantry Division used several children aged 10 to 12 north of Konitz to clear a minefield. German soldiers heard the "horrible screaming" of the children, severely injured by exploding mines, "bleeding to death helplessly after being blown to bits."

 

East Prussia

In East Prussia, the scene of heavy fighting, atrocities in February 1945 continued uninterruptedly despite any official Soviet prohibition. German soldiers and civilians were murdered on the road near Landsbergstabbed with bayonets, beaten to death with blunt objects, or shot at pointblank range, and some of them severely mutilated—by members of the Soviet 1st Tank Army of the Guards. At Landsberg, Soviet soldiers from the 331rd Infantry Division drove the surprised population, including women and children, into the cellars, set fire to the houses, and shot at all those fleeing in panic. Many people were burned alive. In a village on the Landsberg-Heilsberg road, 37 women and girls were locked in a cellar for six days and nights by members of the same Infantry Division; many of them were chained together and raped several times a day with the participation of the Soviet officers. Two of the Soviet officers cut two women's tongues out "with a curved knife" in front of everyone because of their horrible screaming. Two other women had their hands placed on top of each other and were pinned to the floor with a bayonet. A very few of the unfortunate victims were finally liberated by German tank soldiers; 20 women died of their injuries. At Hanshagen near PreuBisch Eylau, Soviet soldiers from the 331st Infantry Division shot two mothers for resisting the rape of their daughters, as well as a father whose daughter was dragged out of the kitchen at the same time, and raped by a Soviet officer. A married couple, teachers with three children, as well as an unidentified young female refugee, an innkeeper, and a farmer, whose daughter was raped, were also murdered. At Petershagen near Eylau, members of the same division murdered two men and a boy aged 16 named Richard von Hoffmann during the continuing rape of the women and girls.

 

Soviet troops made a surprise breakthrough into the western part of the Samland in early February 1945, with the result that a large number of localities fell into their possession. The Germans succeeded in defeating and to some extent forcing a withdrawal of the invading forces after a few days, and in restoring the broken land and sea link with Konigsberg by means of a bold, large-scale counterattack on 19-20 February 1945. The High Command of the German Army Section Samland and the German Army Group North conducted investigations on the fate of the population in the recaptured regions with the help of the police, the results of which are of course only available for a few localities. Members of the 271st Special Motorized Battalion (motorcyclist) of the 39th Army murdered four civilians in Georgenwalde and threw the bodies into a burning house. Women and girls, including some no older than children, were cruelly raped by officers and Soviet soldiers. At Kragau, two young women were raped and strangled by members of the 91st Infantry Division; at Medenau, at least eleven persons were murdered by members of the 358th Infantry Division: the bodies of two murdered women, a small child, and an infant were found in front of a house. Two elderly men and a 14 year-old boy were beaten to death, as well as two women and two small girls after being raped. The completely nude body of a woman, approximately 30 years of age, was found with stab wounds in the breast, her skull split open, and the body riddled with bullets. At GroB-Ladtkeim, members of the 91st Guards Infantry Division shot two German prisoners of war and four civilians, including the mayor and his wife. There was no trace of their 18 year-old daughter. However, the body of a young girl was found with her breasts cut off, her eyes gouged out, and showing obvious signs of rape.

 

The Soviet 91st Guards Infantry Division penetrated the Krattlau-Germau region by way of Thierenberg and was then encircled and, to some extent, defeated on 7 February 1945 after heavy fighting. Serious violations of international law were established in the localities occupied by the same division. For example, at Thierenberg, 21 German soldiers were dragged out of a home for disabled war veterans near Sorgenau, taken to Thierenberg, and murdered. Elisabeth Homfeld was raped and killed with her father-in-law by pistol shots to the head, along with Minna Kottke, who had attempted to protect herself from rape, and the son of the tenant of the parsonage, Ernst Trunz. Three women and a man were shut inside a shed and killed by the explosion of a hand grenade thrown inside, several other persons being seriously injured. Soviet officers and soldiers later admitted in German captivity to having gang-raped women and even minor girls without interruption and in a "bestial manner." In Krattlau, members of the 275th Guards Infantry Regiment of the 91st Guards Infantry Division murdered six men and two German soldiers by bayonet wounds or shooting in the head. All the women and girls, including thirteen-year olds, were raped without interruption, many women being "sexually violated 5 to 8 times a day by 6 to 8 soldiers at a time." Three to four of the youngest women were reserved for the officers, who handed them over to their subordinates when they were finished with their rape. At Annental, the German liberators found the bodies of two women who had been raped and then strangled, one of them on a dungheap.

 

It was possible to begin detailed investigations in Germau, which had been occupied by the Staff of the Soviet 91st Guards Infantry Division and the Staff with sections of the 275th Infantry Guards Regiment. The bodies of 21 murdered men, women, and children were found at Germau. Eleven persons were unable to withstand the horrible tortures and committed suicide. Fifteen German wounded soldiers were murdered by crushing their skulls, one of them with a harmonica crammed violently in his mouth. According to investigations carried out by medical captain Dr. Tolzien, one female corpse exhibited the following injuries: bullet wound to the head; crushing of lower left tibia; gaping, open cuts on the interior of the left lower leg, gaping, open cuts on the upper part of the left thigh, all inflicted by means of knives. Another woman, as well as a young girl found nude, died from crushing fractures to the back of the head. A married couple named Retkowski, as well as another married couple named Sprengel, with their three children, a young woman with two children and an unidentified Pole, were all found murdered. The bodies of an unknown female refugee, as well as a German woman named Rosa Thiel (maiden name Witte), and a 21year-old Polish girl, were all found in a common grave, the girls cruelly murdered after being raped; the bodies of two master handicraftsmen of the village were also found, one of whom, the miller Maguhn, had been shot for attempting to protect his young daughter from rape. Two small girls were found on the Germau-Palmnicken road, at kilometer stone 5, having been shot in the head at close range; one of them had her eyes gouged out. The female population of Germau, approximately 400 women and girls, were confined in the church on the order of the commander of the 91st Guards Infantry Division, Colonel Koshanov, allegedly to protect them from excesses, according to Major Kostikov, a prisoner of war. But Soviet officers and soldiers stormed the church and committed "mass rapes" in the choir loft. The women in the surrounding houses were raped uninterruptedly during the following days, mostly by officers. Young girls were raped up to twenty-two times a night. Thirteen-year-old Eva Link was raped eight times before the eyes of her despairing mother in the bell-loft of the church by an officer and several Soviet soldiers. The mother apparently suffered the same fate.

 

The events in the city suburb of Metgethen, west of Konigsberg, which was occupied by units of the Soviet 39 Army (192nd, 292nd, and 338th Infantry Regiments) during the night of 30-31 January 1945, and liberated on 19 February after bloody fighting by sections of the German 1st Infantry Division, the 561th Volksgrenadier Division and the 5th Tank Division, have been described in detail many times in the literature, including, recently, in a publication of the Russian periodical Novoe Vremija under the headline "Crimes of the Red Army Soldiers." The American expert on international law, Alfred M. de Zayas made a particular study of the atrocities committed at Metgethen; his work deserves mention here. German soldiers found horrible evidence of atrocities at Metgethen and the near vicinity. According to the former 3rd General Staff Officer (Ic) in the Staff of the Commander of the fortress of Konigsberg, Major in the reserves Professor Dr. G. Ipsen, the survivors were "in a condition bordering on madness."

 

The bodies of several hundred German soldiers, some of them mutilated beyond recognition, lay in the access roads, while men, women, and children, beaten to death, lay in almost all the houses and gardens, the women exhibiting obvious signs of rape, often with the breasts cut off. In one location, according to the former ordinance officer on the Staff of the 561st Volksgrenadier Division, K. A. Knorr, the bodies of two girls approximately 20 years old, were found torn apart by vehicles. At the railway station stood at least one refugee train from Konigsberg. Each carriage contained the bodies of "brutally murdered refugees of all ages and both sexes." German prisoners of war and civilians had been driven together on the tennis court in Metgethen and then killed by explosives. Parts of human bodies were found even 200 meters from the gigantic crater. As late as February 27, 1945, a Captain on the Staff of the Fortress Commander, Sommer, accidentally discovered the bodies of 12 completely nude women and children in "a jumbled heap," lying on top of each other in a gravel pit behind a house on the intersection of the road and railway lines near Metgethen. All had been cut to pieces by bayonet and knife wounds.

 

In addition to individual corpses scattered all over the entire residential suburb and numbering several hundred, large earth mounts were discovered, containing, as was later established, 3,000 corpses, according to Captain Sommer and Prof Dr. Ipsen. The investigations of the commission of investigation created by the Commander of the Fortress, Infantry General Lasch, proved very difficult: the Soviets had poured gasoline over the bodies and attempted to burn them. It nevertheless proved possible to establish that most of the victims had not been shot. Instead, they were cruelly murdered, often with the use of blunt objects and cutting weapons. A great proportion of the dead, moreover, were not even German. They were Ukrainian refugees, approximately 25,000 of whom had been stranded at Metgethen, or members of the so-called Ukrainian "labor service," recruited for compulsory labor service (and poorly treated by the Germans); like many of their compatriots in another location, these then fell victim to Soviet acts of revenge.

 

According to Captain Sommer, west of Metgethen, on the road to Powayen, the bodies of murdered civilians lay everywhere, killed by bullet wounds in the back of the neck, or "completely naked, raped, brutally stabbed to death with bayonets, or bludgeoned." On the intersection before Powayen lay the bodies of four nude women, dragged to death behind a Soviet tank. A truly symbolic crime committed by Soviet soldiers in the church at GroB-Heydekrug is testified to by Captain Sommer, as well as by Major Ipsen, a professor of law: a young girl had been crucified between two German soldiers, who were hanged next to her on either side. All this took place before the very gates of the provincial capital of Konigsberg. The indescribable orgy of cruelty and crime committed by inflamed Soviet soldiers after the fall of the city of Konigsberg on 7-9 April 1945 is impossible to describe, and is mentioned in the diaries of the doctors Deichelmann and Count von Lehndorff only by way of suggestion.

 

The violations of international law committed on German soil placed large parts of the Red Army outside the tradition of ordinary military virtues. Criminal acts against the defenseless such as the above, which are described only by way of example and committed with the incitement and participation of the military leadership, were unknown in the armies of other European countries, even during the Second World War; they would never have been tolerated by the command authorities of any other country. The German Wehrmacht was no exception to this rule. Robbery and plundering, not to mention murder and rape, were punishable by severe penalties under the compulsory provisions of the German military criminal code. To maintain military discipline, German military tribunals, as a rule, even in the Soviet territories, punished criminal acts by members of the Wehrmacht against civilians with severe penalties, including the death penalty, often inflicted without hesitation .The question of responsibility for the war crimes committed in the German eastern provinces must now be raised. According to the ancient military principle that the superior is responsible in each case for the actions of his subordinates, the majority of the commanders and troop leaders assigned to these zones, as well as many members of the middle and lower-ranking leadership, would be "war criminals" under the terms of the Nuremberg statutes. Due to its expert knowledge, the Foreign Armies East Branch of the General Staff of the German Army was decisively involved in the "identification of enemy war criminals." According to the "lists of war criminals" drawn up, and like, for example, the High Command of the German Army Group Center, the Foreign Armies East Branch was inclined from the outset to find Soviet commanders and unit leaders responsible for the crimes of their subordinates. The concept should, however, be more narrowly defined in the present connection. When we refer to a number of Soviet officers by name in the following paragraphs as bearing responsibility based upon documentation which is furthermore only available as a result of pure chance, this occurs solely where the existence of aggravating circumstances or joint responsibility in violations of international law has been proven on the basis of documentary evidence, or insofar as compelling grounds exist for suspicion to this effect.

 

The following officers have already been referred to as bearing responsibility for violations of international law committed in the German eastern provinces: the Commander-in-Chief of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshall of the Soviet Union Zhukov and leading officers of his front staff, such as Member of the Council of War, Lieutenant General Telegin; Colonel General of Artillery Kazakov; Colonel General of Aviation Rudenko; Chief of the Front Staff, Colonel General Malinin, and, even more clearly, the Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd White Russian Front, Army General Chernyakhovsky; Member of the Council of War, Lieutenant General Khokhlov; and, finally, the Chief of the Political Administration of the Front Staff, Major General Razbitsev. Among the many persons implicated, the following officers bear particular responsibility: the Commander-in-Chief of the 31st Army, Colonel General Glagolev; the Members of the Council of War of the 31st Army, Major General Karpenkov, Major General Lakhtarin, and the Chief of the Political Administration of the Army, Major General Riapasov; the Commander of the 43 Infantry Corps, Major General Andreev; the Commander of the 72 Infantry Division, Major General Yastrebov; the Commander of the 87th Infantry Guards Division, Major General Tymchik; the Commander of the 88 Infantry Division, Colonel Kovtunov; the Commander of the 153rd Infantry Division, Colonel Eliseev; the Commander of the 2nd Artillery Guards Division, Colonel Kobtsev; the Chief of the 7th Department of the Political Administration of the 50th Army, Lieutenant Colonel Sabashtansky, whose subordinates included two German collaborators, Major Bechler and Lieutenant Graf von Einsiedel, so-called "Front Delegate" members of the NKFD; the Commander of the 611th Infantry Regiment of the 88th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Sotkovsky; the Commander of the 14th Infantry Regiment of the 72nd Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Korolev; the Commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment of the 72nd Infantry Division, First Lieutenant Vasil'ev; and, finally, Adjutant of the 2nd Section of the 919th Artillery Regiment, First Lieutenant Pugachev.

 

The following Soviet officers, identified on the basis of documents available solely as the result of chance, are responsible for the commission, advocacy, or deliberate toleration of war crimes on German soil: Lieutenant General Okorokov, Chief of the Political Administration of the 2nd White Russian Front, personally participated in "extensive plundering" and other serious crimes committed in his sector of the front. At Petershagen near Pr. Eylau on 2 February 1945, Major General Berestov, the Commander of the 331rd Infantry Division, accompanied by one of his officers, raped the daughter of a farmer's wife, after personally being served food and drink by her; he also raped a Polish girl. He is also fully responsible for the many war crimes committed by his division at Pr. Eylau and Landsberg, "only a very small proportion of which could be investigated." Major General Papchenko, the Commander of the 124th Infantry Division, and Major General Zaretsky, the Commander of the 358th Infantry Division, bear responsibility for the crimes committed at Medenau between 15-21 February 1945, as well as for the crimes committed at Kragau and GroB-Ladtkeim on 4 February 1945 by the Commander of the 91st Guards Infantry Division, Colonel of the Guards Koshanov. The latter is moreover responsible for "the murders and rapes committed by his soldiers at Thierenberg." Lieutenant Colonel Muratov, the Commander of the 1324th Infantry Regiment of the 413th Infantry Division, bears responsibility for inciting Soviet soldiers, through his political representative (Zampolit), to commit acts of vengeance against the Germans: "You may now revenge yourselves. Combat troops may do whatever they want with German prisoners... "

 

Lieutenant Colonel Bondarets, Zampolit of the 510 Infantry Regiment of the 154 Infantry Division of the 2nd Army of the Guards of the 3rd White Russian Front, informed Soviet soldiers in East Prussia that "of course, they could rape German women," but that they ought not to shoot them.. Lieutenant Colonel Tolstukhin, the Commander of the 85 Guards Infantry Regiment of the 32nd Infantry Guards Division, a well-known "German hater," caused "most of the German prisoners of war" in East Prussia "to be shot". Lieutenant Colonel Rosentsvaig, Zampolit of the 72nd Guards Infantry Regiment, informed the soldiers of the Red Army through their unit leaders that they "had full freedom to plunder". Lieutenant Colonel Sashenko, the Commander of the 275 Infantry Regiment of the 91st Guards Infantry Division, is fully responsible for the "war crimes committed by his soldiers between 2 and 8 February 1945 in Germau and Krattlau." Major Beliaev, Chief of the "Anti-Fascist School" of the 2nd White Russian Front, shot a helpless old woman at Neidenberg, and three wounded soldiers at another location, in addition to other crimes. Major Sadykov, the Commander of the 870th Infantry Regiment, personally committed rapes in Upper Silesia and "had many prisoners of war shot" purely on the grounds of personal hatred . Major Kobuliansky, the Commander of the 271st Special Motorized Battalion of the 39th Army, and several of his officers, including company leader Alt-Metveden and platoon leader Zinoviev personally participated in aggravated rapes in the Ostsee bathing resort of Georgenwalde between 3 and 5 February, and are responsible for a number of murders in the immediate vicinity. A few of the immense numbers of Soviet top-ranking officers who committed crimes or morals offences in the German eastern provinces include the following: Captain Sobolev; Adjutant of the 2nd Battalion of the 691st Infantry Regiment of the 383rd Infantry Division, First Lieutenant Sherebsov; Chief of Staff of a section of the 788th Artillery Regiment of the 262nd Infantry Division, First Lieutenant Sliusarev; Chief of Staff of the lst Battalion of the 72nd Guards Infantry Regiment of the 24th Guards Infantry Division, Lieutenant Shilkov of the same battalion; and Lieutenant Kalinin, Political Representative of the 2nd Battalion, who expressly incited Soviet soldiers to the commission of crimes, stating that "they should spare no one and nothing." These are just a few of the names which could be listed here. But they make it sufficiently clear that officers of all ranks, from Marshall of the Soviet Union down to the ranks of lieutenant, general, staff officer, as well as top-ranking officers in the Red Army, were equally guilty of the commission of war crimes against the civilian population and against defenseless prisoners.

 

Was the Red Army, taken as a whole, guilty of participation in violations of international law? The constant and enduring campaign of inflammatory propaganda conducted by the Political Main Administration and its subordinate political organizations, coupled with the fact that the sudden countermanding orders, issued by the troop leadership, were in total contradiction to the initial proclamations, that they were not emphasized and were furthermore only enforced in exceptional cases, hardly encouraged humanitarian intervention. Not a few Soviet officers and soldiers took offense at the horrible crimes and excesses of their own comrades. The Soviet agents active on the German side, Danilov and Chirshin, for example, spontaneously reported the case of an unidentified officer who voiced disgust at the extent of the terror. In view of the atmosphere of incitement and hatred prevalent in the Red Army, however, criticism of the barbaric treatment of the civilian population and prisoners of war, which "made a mockery of all human decency," was rendered difficult and dangerous by the immediate possibility of intervention by the political supervisory bodies.

 

Soviet prisoners of war "unanimously" confirmed that it was "strictly prohibited to express one's moral outrage to the leadership, since there was the danger of being called a Hitlerite and being treated accordingly." For example, when Captain Beliakov, referred to once again below, reported to his superiors relating to the brutal rape of a 17 year-old girl in the presence of her mother by eight Red Army soldiers, he was reprimanded by his Zampolit, Lieutenant Colonel Bondarets, with the rhetorical question of whether he "wished to defend the civilians?" If not, he should get out, and go back to his battalion. Other critics were treated more harshly. Captain Efremov, Battalion Commander in a regiment of the 4th Guards Tank Corps, who had raped a woman in Lindenhagen near Cosel on 2 February 1945, shot out of hand a Red Army soldier who condemned this act. At another location, as testified to by a captured Second Lieutenant of the 287th Infantry Division, several Soviet officers were shot by inflamed Red Army soldiers for "trying to intervene on behalf of the civilian population and to prevent the excesses."

 

There are reports of tank crews who warned the residents of the cruelty of the following units, and there were always Soviet officers and soldiers who helped women and children or distributed bread to them. Shining examples of humanity were set by Captain Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Major Lev Kopelev, who paid for their intervention on behalf of the mistreated civilian populations of East Prussia with years of deportation to the concentration camps of the GULag, having been accused and convicted of "bourgeois humanitarian propaganda, sympathizing with the enemy population, and slandering the Soviet military leadership." This series of cruel occurrences was described in prosaic form for posterity by the later Nobel Prize winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his publication "East Prussian Nights."

 

Soviet officers occasionally succeeded in intervening against the uniformed criminals, in some cases because they had superiors who felt the same, since a great deal always depended upon the "attitude of the particular commander." Attitudes were not unanimous, even in the "Duchachina" 91st Guards Infantry Division. Horrible atrocities were committed at Germau and the surrounding vicinity by the 275th Guards Infantry Regiment, including the divisional staff, although no murders or rapes at all were reported in localities like Willkau, occupied by other units of the same division. When one newly assigned commanding officer was informed of the many crimes committed in Germau, he issued orders, including to sentries surrounding the church, that mistreatment of women would no longer be permitted: "otherwise it will be necessary for you to fire on your own men." Conditions in the 72nd Infantry Division, commanded by war criminal Major General Yastrebov, were quite different. For example, the 3rd Battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment committed serious atrocities, while Soviet soldiers in the 3rd Battalion of the 187th Infantry Regiment were warned against the commission of any criminal acts against civilians. But all things considered, these appear to have been exceptional cases. The Chief of the Foreign Armies East Branch of the General Staff of the German Army, Major General Gehlen, whose agencies gathered all relevant reports, reported the "correct behavior" of Soviet officers and soldiers in individual cases, but felt simultaneously compelled to add that "a large proportion of the officers tacitly tolerated excesses, and very often even committed them personally". Captain Beliakov, the Commander of the lst Battalion of the 510th Infantry Regiment of the 154th Infantry Division of the 2nd Army of the Guards of the 3rd White Russian Front, mentioned above, deserted to German troops on 10 February 1945 at Dulzen near Pr. Eylau because, as he explained: "I could no longer stand by and watch the way Soviet soldiers treated the German civilian populations in the areas we conquered." Captain Beliakov, who had already shot a sergeant of his battalion and another Soviet soldier caught in the act of brutally raping a totally deranged minor girl in a remote barn, believed that he could only escape forthcoming arrest by the military counter intelligence SMERSH (under Colonel General of State Security Abakumov) by deserting to the Germans.

 

330--The German-Soviet war was inevitable. The only open question was which of the two competing powers would strike first to preempt its adversary. The rapidly increasing superiority and strength of Soviet armaments, especially in tanks, aircraft, and artillery, over the troops of the Wehrmacht, dispersed over all parts of Europe, led the Germans to view June 1941 as the last possible opportunity for German initiation of preventive war. Further delay would have eroded the only factor favoring the Germans, which was their level of training. The most recent discoveries in Soviet archives illustrate the extent to which Soviet military preparation and deployment had in fact already been completed. To all appearances, Stalin moved the attack date forward from 1942 to the months of July-September 1941. This would offer a plausible explanation of Stalin's desire to postpone the initiation of hostilities "even if only for... a month, a week, or a few days," to complete his own military preparations—without the slightest fear of German attack. Soviet research has also arrived at the conclusion that the "military struggle against Germany might have begun in July 1941."

 

The actual strength of the Soviet army remained unknown to the Germans, although they obviously recognized that preparations for an attack were taking place on their eastern border. The German command authorities were nevertheless surprised by the enemy potential encountered in the East after 22 June 1941. Statements alleged to have been made by Hitler, and confirmed by Goebbels in his diaries, indicate that the decision to attack would have been much more difficult to make had Hitler been aware of the full strength of the Red Army. The results for Germany, and the rest of Europe, if Hitler had not given the order to attack on 22 June 1941—if Stalin, on the contrary, had been permitted to initiate his planned war of extermination in Europe—are best left to the imagination. This does not, of course, constitute a justification of the politically and morally detrimental methods employed by Hitler in Russia (and Poland). Hitler planned a war of conquest, too. The National Socialist war on the Soviet Union was conducted in the spirit of a statement once made by Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield: "The racial question is the key to world history." It should be borne in mind, in this regard, that, by the very nature of things, no conflict between the National Socialist German Reich and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, could possibly resemble an "ordinary" war; the war was inevitably fated to acquire extraordinary features from the very outset. Militarily speaking, the great initial successes of the troops of the Wehrmacht and their rapid penetration of Soviet territory resulted in an underestimation of Soviet strength and powers of resistance which ultimately proved fatal.

 

Stalin's intent was to destroy the forces of the Wehrmacht concentrated on his western border in several heavy blows constituting one huge attack operation; he was not even swayed from this concept by Hitler's preventive attack. Stalin and the Soviet leadership, in full awareness of the enormous superiority of the Soviet Union, and quite well-informed as to the many weaknesses of the Wehrmacht, fighting on two fronts, retained an absolute confidence in the certainty of victory, even after 22 June 1941. These illusions only evaporated after the unexpectedly successful German attack. After a brief phase of lethargy, however, the Bolshevik regime (Stalin, the Politburo, and the newly-founded State Defense Committee) proclaimed a "patriotic war," the radicalism of which made the so-called "total war" proclaimed in Germany only after the defeat at "Stalingrad" appear a mere figure of speech.

 

Stalin's initial concern, and that of the STAVKA was, essentially, to restore the stability of the wavering front. This was achieved through the ruthless application of the tried-and-true Stalinist methods: first, utterly shameless propaganda, and, secondly, the most brutal terror. The system was as simple as it was effective: anyone who did not believe the propaganda, experienced the terror. Of course, the Soviet leadership was perfectly well aware that any attempt to inspire Soviet soldiers with "ardent and self-sacrificing Soviet patriotism," with "limitless dedication to the cause of the Communist Party," with enthusiasm and "endless love for the Party and government, for Great Comrade Stalin," and whatever other words might come to mind, would be doomed to failure. The solution was believed to lie in a far deeper, more wide-ranging, appeal to the baser instincts. It was considered necessary to generate feelings of hatred and thirst for vengeance against the foreign invader, against the "fascists"—the German occupier and German allies. In this respect, Soviet propaganda, with decisive assistance from Ilja Ehrenburg, was to descend to a level of primitive baseness and degeneracy which could hardly be surpassed.

 

The primary necessity was to generate an atmosphere of fear and terror in the Red Army and Navy by creating conditions which would leave Soviet soldiers and sailors no choice but to fight and die—"to the last bullet," "to the last drop of blood"—for the "Soviet homeland" (whatever that might mean), "for the Party and government," "for our beloved Stalin." Contrary to the allegations of certain German historians, the possibility of escape through surrender to the Germans, or German-allied armies, never for a moment existed where members of the Red Army were concerned. In this regard, Stalin, Molotov, and other leading Soviet officials, including Soviet woman Ambassador Kolontay, never left the slightest doubt in anyone's mind. The Soviet Union was the only country in the world to denounce the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, and had refused to ratify the 1929 Geneva Prisoner of War Convention. In the Soviet Union, the concept of "prisoner of war" was simply unknown. The provisions of Soviet military law only recognized the terms deserter and traitor, flight to class-enemy occupied territory and anti-Soviet collaboration with the enemy. The Soviet Air Force is known to have carried out deliberate bombing attacks against columns of Soviet prisoners of war. The principle of brutal retaliation against the families and relatives of Soviet prisoners of war, including shootings, was also standard practice.

 

The measures taken to prohibit flight into captivity were also accompanied by other measures intended to prevent flight to the rear. A system of spying and surveillance by the political apparatus, by the NKVD organizations of the Special Departments and their spies operating in secrecy, by terrorist activities of blocking units, by military tribunals as well as by the measures announced in Stalin Orders nos. 270 and 227 was intended to leave Soviet soldiers no alternative. All this is inconceivable in the armed forces of any other state. But this—plus the mass shootings of soldiers and even members of the command authorities, including many generals up to the rank of Commander-in-Chief of the Front—generated the state of mind which continues to be praised as the "mass heroism" and "Soviet patriotism" of the "Great Patriotic War." Generally speaking, bravery and contempt for death are common characteristics of Russian soldiers in any case. But true heroism is not generated by terror. The casualties resulting from driving Soviet soldiers forward into enemy machine gun fire, like cattle, were horrendous, amounting, during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, to at least five times the casualty rate inflicted upon the Finns. "Human life must not be spared": such was the Stalinist motto upon which the Soviet military strategy was based, even where Soviet soldiers and civilians were concerned.

 

In describing the Stalinist war of extermination, it proved inevitable, no matter how delicate the entire topic may be, to make a brief comparison between the mass killings perpetrated by the Stalinist regime on the grounds, oversimplifying somewhat, of class struggle, and those of the Hitler regime, committed on the grounds of racial struggle. These politically ideologically motivated crimes, which have no equal in the history of the world, were committed, in part, as a result of the propaganda war conducted parallel to the military conflict between the Soviet Union and Germany. It must, of course, be borne in mind, if a proper sense of proportion is to be maintained, that, in the unanimous opinion of all persons having studied the matter, the Soviet authorities killed at least 40 million people even before the murder squads of the Reichsfuhrer SS ever even could go into action. Kolyma, with its three million deaths, was only one of the central concentration camps in the system of the GULag, preceding Auschwitz in time. In accordance with Stalin's orders, the shootings of real or imagined political adversaries began in all parts of the country—in Eastern Poland, in the Baltic States, in White Russia, the Ukraine, in Greater Russia, and finally in the Caucasus—immediately following the beginning of the German-Soviet War. The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, which began to shoot the totally innocent Jewish population in so-called retaliation for the Soviet massacres already committed in Lemberg and leaving a trail of blood throughout the country, simply followed in the footsteps of the NKVD. Hugo von Hofmannsthal has stressed that the Austrians and Germans of the occupation regiments of the Commander-in-Chief for the East during the First World War acted in a spirit of justice for all, including the Jewish populations—which were very pro-German. The events now taking place in the occupied eastern territories would have been quite inconceivable under the ancien regime of the Kaiser, and were the expression of a new age of barbarism. In any case, these actions had no precedent in German tradition, and they were carried out without the knowledge or even approval of the German population.

 

A series of murder locations have acquired particular significance in the war of German-Soviet propaganda. Lemberg, Kiev, Khar'kov, Minsk, are symbolic of the crimes of the two belligerents, although in differing respects. Beria was responsible for Katyn and Vinica, while Himmler was responsible for Majdanek and Auschwitz, their superiors being Stalin and Hitler respectively. The concentration camps of the system of the GULag nevertheless lay outside the eastern theatre of war, and were therefore not taken into consideration in this context. The Soviet Union, initially on the defensive both military and politically, appears to have been increasingly successful in regaining ground, politically, when the anti-Jewish excesses of the Einsatzgruppen came to light during the German withdrawal. An "Extraordinary State Commission" was created to serve as the suitable instrument for the concealment of Bolshevik crimes and for the propaganda exploitation of fascist crimes. Katyn and Vinica were mendaciously represented to the normally well informed Allied Governments as "fascist" crimes. The endless mass graves of Bykovnia, Darnica, and Bielhorodka, with their hundreds of thousands of victims, in the vicinity of Kiev, disappeared behind the propaganda smokescreen of Babij jar—the Ravine of the Old Woman—which nevertheless continues to cast up certain unsolved riddles. The massacre of the NKVD and its Chekist predecessors at Khar'kov, Minsk, and Lemberg were also concealed by the Soviet propaganda roaring about the "fascist crimes" also committed there.

 

Soviet propaganda gained the upper hand after the further advance of Soviet troops into the concentration camps of the General Government of Poland, particularly, Auschwitz and Majdanek, in late 1944/early 1945. The locations of horror in the extermination camps of Poland, immediately exploited with self-satisfaction by the "Extraordinary State Commission," appeared to confirm all previous Soviet allegations and made a devastating impression, particularly in the Allied countries. That the numbers of victims were exaggerated in this context was irrelevant within the dispute and is still considered irrelevant. Today, it is considered almost a criminal offence "to speak of Jewish losses as having been horrendously exaggerated."  Historians are particularly disturbed by this situation, since it means that they are caught between a system of political justice and spying and informants on the one hand, and their professional duty to the truth on the other hand, i.e., their duty to determine the number of victims with the greatest possible accuracy: Hans Delbruck, for good reason, stressed the demand for strict critical analysis of figures; even Friedrich Engels once called the statesman Adolphe Thiers a "big swindler" because of the alleged incorrectness of all of his numerical statements.

 

With regards to the losses in life caused by the Anglo-American air raids on the open city of Dresden in February 1945, mentioned purely for purposes of example, the minimum figure of 35,000, dictated by the Soviet occupation authorities on political grounds in early 1945, continues to be quoted to this day, even though the municipal administration of the regional capital of Dresden, in a letter dated 31 July 1992, described a figure of 250,000-300,000 deaths, mostly women and children, as "realistic," based on "proven data." With regards to the losses in human life occurring in Auschwitz extermination camp, however, the maximum figure of four million deaths continues to be considered valid, although the figure can be proven to originate from the Soviet NKVD. The number of victims at Auschwitz was, however, seriously reduced in 1990, and now amounts to 631,000 to 711,000 according to the latest reports; this is, of course, just as frightful, but appears to be approaching a realistic order of magnitude. That the figure of 74,000 supported by the documents, only relates to a part of the actual total, cannot be doubted. Generally, however, the mere fact that it can be proven to have been none other than the perpetrator of crimes against humanity, Ilja Ehrenburg, who first mentioned the figure of Six Million Jewish victims of National Socialism on 22 December 1944, and then introduced that figure into Soviet propaganda, must nevertheless give rise to caution. How, one must ask, did he arrive at this figure? Auschwitz concentration camp with its four to five million deaths—or so we were told—was only captured by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945! This question remains unanswered.

 

Stalin's war of extermination, by contrast, began with the mass murders at Lemberg in June 1941, although he only used the term personally on the 24th anniversary of the "Great Socialist Revolution" for the first time on November 6, 1941. The murders of German prisoners of war, which began spontaneously on 22 June 1941 along the entire front, were not, as often alleged, in reprisal for the Commissar guidelines, which were unknown to the Soviets at the outset, and were furthermore rescinded in May 1942 as a result of protests within the German army. The murders of helpless German prisoners of war, and prisoners from the German-allied armies, were frequently ordered, or at least tolerated, by Soviet officers, often of higher rank, although many command agencies repeatedly, and in vain, attempted to prohibit the arbitrary shooting of prisoners, if only on the grounds of the need to capture Germans for reconnaissance purposes. But what could one expect of the mass of Soviet soldiers if they were incited to "kill all German invaders," "just destroy them," "fulfilling this humanitarian mission," in continuation of "the work of Pasteur," "the work of all those scientists" having "discovered the means of destroying all deadly microbes"—to "put the Germans underground," or, quite simply, "wipe them off the face of the earth"—all in the space of just a few days, by the front propaganda led by someone like Ilja Ehrenburg? In view of the genocidal attitude generated in the Red Army—an attitude which was not directed against "fascists" at all, but rather, against all Germans—it was very difficult (and very often quite dangerous) for the moderate segments of the Soviet command agencies to attempt to stop the unrestrained activities.

 

Following the breakthrough of Soviet troops into the territory of the German Reich in October 1944, the victims of inflamed soldateska, often incited by their officers, were no longer limited to defenseless German prisoners of war, but rather included German civilians, men, women, and children. At least 120,000 German civilians were killed outright, and at least 100-200,000 others perished in Soviet prisons and camps. More than 250,000 civilians died during or after deportation to the Soviet Union for slave labor, while innumerable others simply starved to death: 90,000 in Konigsberg alone. A total of 2.2 million "unexplained" fatalities are estimated to have occurred in the subsequent "deportation regions," fatalities which must, for the most part, upon a closer examination, be viewed as "victims of terrorism," i.e., anti-German genocide. The internationally known expert, Professor Dr. de Zayas, furthermore, considers that the actual number of victims may have been lower—"while it may also have been higher"—than the official figure of 2,379,000 "'deaths testified to by eyewitnesses', plus unexplained fatalities." The Soviet Commanders-in-Chief at the Front, who had themselves personally called for acts of revenge, soon found themselves compelled to intervene against the descent into savagery and sadism on the part of considerable numbers of their troops. All such efforts nevertheless remained without effect in view of the anti-German hate propaganda, which, under the Ehrenburg's leadership, continued unabated until shortly before the end of the war, culminating in the demand to "put an end to Germany," as well as in a demand, which Ehrenburg considered "modest and honorable," to "reduce the German population," in which case the only decision that remained to be made was whether it was preferable to "kill the Germans with axes or clubs."

 

Stalin personally was fully aware of all these monstrous measures and procedures; it was he who personally ordered them; it was he who bore immediate responsibility for them. This is clear from an order of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander, signed by Stalin and the Chief of the General Staff, Army General Antonov, on 20 April 1945, which speaks of the "cruel measures" of the Soviet armed forces—not on humanitarian grounds, or out of any concern for international law, but purely and simply on the basis of political considerations. As explained by Professor Semiryaga, this order from the STAVKA, signed by Stalin, constitutes an admission that Stalin personally considered the acts of the Red Army to be cruel, "both against prisoners of war and the civilian population."

 

The German-Soviet conflict, conducted by both powers as a war of extermination, each in its own way, would have represented an absolute low in German-Russian relations had there not, despite everything, been an aspect of hope. During the initial phase of the war, the friendship with which a large proportion of the Soviet population greeted the German troops is quite obvious—if not in the large industrial centers, then at least in the cities and villages of the steppes and plains generally. This was true of the Baltic States and Eastern Poland, of White Russia and the Ukraine, of Greater Russia as far as Smolensk and beyond, of the Crimea in 1942, and even of the Caucasus. "The further east we go," reported the Supreme Command of the Army on 12 July 1941, "the friendlier the attitude of the civilian population towards the German Wehrmacht seem to be, particularly in the countryside." In many localities, the Germans were actually welcomed as liberators. But even where this was not directly true, even where the population merely greeted the Germans with amicable reserve or expectant curiosity, the situation was still in absolute contradiction to official Soviet doctrine. Unjustified requisitions and, in certain cases, plundering and other excesses by German soldiers, against which the German command authorities naturally intervened, led to disillusionment in certain areas without, however, seriously disturbing the reciprocal relationship. A sudden change in the attitude of the population set in with further developments. This change in attitude resulted from the absence of any constructive German occupation program, combined with many repressive measures and irresponsible actions in reprisal for the actions of partisans in guerrilla warfare. This partisans warfare was, of course, illegal under international law and was initiated by the Soviets in a spirit of cold calculation. The persecution of the Jews may also have made a greater impression on many segments of the Russian population than the Germans were aware. It should, however, be noted that the areas controlled by the German Army and Wehrmacht, despite many injustices, often contrasted very favorably with other zones under German civilian administration. Army Group A, for example, assigned to the Caucasus, was granted full political authority: the result was that relations with the minority nationalities living in the region, the Cossacks as well as Russians, were extremely positive. In the Caucasus, the foundations of preliminary forms of independent states for these nationalities, including a Cossack state, were even laid with German assistance.

 

When it is furthermore recalled that, regardless of all the Soviet deterrent terror and horror propaganda, a total of no less than 3.8 million Soviet soldiers, from enlisted men up to the rank of generals, surrendered to the Germans in 1941 alone—a total of 5.3 during the entire war—it becomes clear how favorable the prospects for a political and military cooperation between the "Russians" and the "Germans" actually were. The unconditional precondition for such cooperation, would, however, have been the recognition of Russia as a German-allied state. The essential preconditions for Russian cooperation with the Germans against the Stalinist regime were stated, from the very beginning of the war and throughout the years that followed, by Soviet officers of all ranks in German captivity, including a considerable number of Army Commanders-in-Chief, corps and divisional commanders. These conditions were: the formation of a "Russian national government and Russian army of liberation under entirely Russian leadership," the "actual recognition of a Russian national government," and their "own national liberation army." Soviet officers and commanders stating these requirements included the Commanders-in-Chief of the 22 (20) Army, Lieutenant General Ershakov; of the 5th Army, Major General Potapov; of the 12 Army, Major General Ponedelin; of the 19th Army, Lieutenant General Lukin; of the 3rd Army of the Guards, Major General Krupennikov, and other military leaders, of whom the following deserve particular mention: Generals Abranidze, Alaverdov, Besonov, Egorov, Kirillov, Kirpichnikov, Kulikov, Ogurtsev, Sibin, Snegov, Tkachenko.

 

It was Hitler who destroyed the attractive possibilities of a German-Russian alliance, substituting "racial-ideological" principles for realistic negotiation, as a result of which his policy of conquest, oppression, and exploitation was doomed to failure. And yet, although they never received the slightest concession, a small group of Soviet generals as well as hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and officers, trusting in an ultimate, inevitable change in German attitude, decided to take up the struggle on the side of Germany. These generals included the Representative Commander-in-Chief of the Volkhov front, Lieutenant General Vlassov; Army Commissar and temporary leader of the 32nd Army Zhilenkov; and Major Generals Artsezo (Assberg), Blagoveshchensky, Bogdanov, Malyshkin, Shapovalov, Sevastianov, Trukhin, and Zakutny.

 

The resulting military cooperation, arising from the most insignificant beginnings in 1941 and contrary to Hitler's original intentions, was also, politically speaking, perhaps the most positive phenomenon of the German-Soviet war. Although political considerations may have been less decisive than military considerations on the German side, at least initially, the deployment of these volunteer units, consisting of members of all nationalities of the Soviet Union, was the only way in which Hitler's efforts in the East, doomed to failure, could successfully be countered. Hitler declared on 8 June 1943 that he will never build a Russian army, since that would mean abandoning "complete control over the war aims from the very outset." The creation of volunteer units, however, conducted with the support of nearly all Commanders-in-Chief and commanding officers of the Army of the East and Central Army Agencies with the de facto cooperation of the responsible Group Leader II in the Organizational Division of the General Staff of the Army, Major on the General Staff Count von Stauffenberg, could no longer be countermanded, and now acquired, on the contrary, new momentum. National armies of liberation were now created, recruited from the peoples of Turkestan and the Caucasus, of the eastern legions of non-Russian minority nationalities of Turkestan, the North Caucasus, Azerbajdzian, Georgia, Armenia, and Volga Tatars. Units of Crimean Tatars, of Kalmuck and Cossack cavalry corps, now arose to liberate the Cossacks of the Don, Kuban, Terek, and Siberia, parallel with a Ukrainian liberation army in divisional strength.

 

All soldiers of Russian nationality within the structure of the German army after 1943 could consider themselves members of a Russian Liberation Army, although it existed in name only. But with the creation of the Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Peoples (KONR) in Prague on November 1944, a Russian Liberation Army (ROA) actually came into being, with its own Supreme Command and all arms of the service, including a small air force, referred to as the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Peoples (VS KONR). General Vlassov, as Chairman of the Committee—equivalent to a government-in-exile—also became the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of a Russian national army which was entirely independent, both de jure and de facto, and simply allied with the German Reich. Thus was Hitler's stated principle turned upside-down. If, as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn writes, hundreds of thousands, but in reality, as we know, one million Soviet soldiers of all ranks took up the struggle against their own government on the side of the enemy, in a war described as a "great patriotic struggle," the reason for it lay, not in any variety of treason, no matter how that word may be defined, but rather, in an elementary political phenomenon which never before existed on such a scale at any time in history. This unique historical phenomenon would, in itself, suffice to refute the mindless catchword of the unlimited validity of a so-called "Soviet patriotism" and "mass heroism."

 

The war between the German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was conducted with methods reflecting their ideology on both sides. After the battle of Kiev in 1941, Stalin personally ordered Beria in the Kremlin to spare no means in the generation of "hate, hate, and more hate." On 6 November 1941, he expressly proclaimed a war of extermination against the German Reich. Ultimately, however, it was the soldiers on both sides who bridged this gap of hatred for the first time. "In the years of the common struggle," General Vlassov announced to his troops upon assuming Supreme Command on the Munsingen drill ground on 10 February 1945," "a friendship arose between the Russian and German peoples. The errors committed on both sides, as well as their means of rectification, prove the existence of common interests. The main thing is the trust, the mutual trust, in the task of both sides. I wish to thank all German and Russian officers having participated in the deployment of this unit." These were expressions hardly ever before heard in this war of extermination. Vlassov closed his speech, which was joyfully received, with the following appeal: "Long live the friendship between the Russian and German peoples! Long live the soldiers and officers of the Russian Army!" Hitler and Stalin were never even mentioned with as much as a single word. The Russian liberation movement, which also pursued the objective of a renewed Germany, naturally failed, as a result of the unfavorable turn of events in 1945, but it was not in vain; nor were the failed attempts at liberation in the history of other peoples, bequeathing a particularly brilliant power of example to the annals of history.