Russia at war 1941-1945

When practically the whole of the Crimea, with the exception of Sebastopol, had been overrun by the Germans, 80,000 soldiers and a considerable amount of military

equipment were successfully transported by sea from Odessa to Sebastopol and the

Caucasus—and this despite a large-scale attempt at sabotage by enemy agents who, at the height of the evacuation, set fire to numerous port installations.

[ IVOVSS, vol. n, p. 118.]

Odessa fell after two and a half months of extremely fierce fighting, and losses were heavy on both sides. The Russians were very surprised by the toughness of the Rumanian troops, since Rumania's military record, particularly in World War I, had not been exactly glorious. According to the Russians—always prone to exaggerate enemy losses—the

Rumanians had lost 110,000 men at Odessa; but this is by no means a fantastic figure, since, according to the Rumanians, their army lost, between the outbreak of the war and October 10, 1941, as many as 70,000 dead and 100,000 wounded.

[Telpukhovsky, op. cit., German edition, p. 58.]

Odessa and all the country between the Dniester and the Western Bug, were to be

incorporated in Rumania under the name of Transniestria. There was, as we shall see, going to be a marked difference between the Rumanian and the German occupation

régime.

Whether 175,000 prisoners were taken east of Kiev, or 400,000 or 600,000—all this

Russian and German quibbling over figures is one thing; another is what all this

represented in human terms.

A heavy silence hung over the whole question all through the war and, indeed, for many years after. Certainly, Molotov issued, from time to time, long Notes on the ill-treatment of Russian war-prisoners, or on atrocities committed by the Germans in the occupied

areas of the Soviet Union. But these were clumsy documents, in which horrors were piled upon horrors to such an extent that those who read them, not only in the West, but even in Russia in 1941-3, only half-believed them—if that. Except for some atrocities the

Germans had committed in the relatively small areas around Moscow that were liberated by the Russians in the winter of 1941-2, there was still very little first-hand information on the German occupation, or even on the German treatment of war-prisoners. Only after Stalingrad, when the Russians began to liberate enormous areas, did the truth begin to emerge. And even then, not the whole truth. The full enormity of it did not begin to be measured until the liberation of Poland with its super-death-camps and the occupation of Germany when stock could at last be taken of what had happened to the Russians

deported to Germany as slave labour, or captured as war prisoners, particularly in 1941-2.

For long after the war, very little was said about those who were taken prisoner in those early war days; a stigma was still attached to those unfortunate people.

The human tragedy of the Russian prisoners was not to be openly discussed in Russia

until long after the war. By far the most graphic account of what it was like to have been trapped in the Kiev Encirclement was not to be written until twenty years after, and published in the form of a short story in Novyi Mir of January 1963. But though presented as fiction, it is the tale of one of its survivors, and has the ring of absolute authenticity.

In the thirty pages of Through the Night, Leonid Volynsky succeeds in telling the story of German captivity with the same concentrated intensity that Solzhenitsyn had given to his account of the Stalin labour camps.

The story begins on September 17, 1941 in a Ukrainian village, just as the German ring is about to close round the Russians.

Many years afterwards, I read a book by von Tippelskirch, a German general, who

wrote that the encirclement of our troops east of Kiev had tied down large German forces, and so ruined Hitler's game, since it delayed his offensive against Moscow.

No doubt that's just how things happened... But we knew nothing about that. To

hundreds of thousands of men trying during those nights to break out of the

German ring... groping their way through forests and marshes, and under a

hailstorm of German bombs and shells ... all this was nothing but a vast and

inexplicable tragedy.