Russia at war 1941-1945

Sitting there in the dark hut, with only a small oil lamp burning under the ikon (with Stalin's picture torn out of some magazine beside it), the old woman now wept softly. She said she had four other sons, all at the front, and said that one of them "wasn't writing any more". And in the dark corner of the hut the younger woman wept, and kissed and slapped, and then again kissed the hanged man's unruly laughing child.

I remember another journey later in the summer—this time to the Rzhev sector of the

front, where there had been some very heavy fighting for weeks. Again we passed

through Istra with its forest of chimney-stacks (that was all that was left of the town) and the ruins of the New Jerusalem monastery which the Germans had blown up; then we

drove through Volokolamsk, where there was much less destruction, but where the

Germans had hanged numerous "partisans". And then we stopped at Lotoshino. A number of people came up to our cars. There was a little man there, wearing a tattered cap and jacket, and with a bunch of spring onions under his arm. He had been here right through the German occupation. The first day the Germans came, he said, they hanged

eight people in the main street, among them a hospital nurse and a teacher. The teacher's body was left hanging there for eight days. They had called for the people to attend the execution, but few went. The teacher was a Party member. The Germans had stayed in

the town for three months, till January 2; a fortnight before, they had begun to burn down the town. The last houses weren't burned down till the eve of their departure. They

appointed starostas (village mayors) from among the local inhabitants; later, when the Russians caught these starostas, they shot them.

As we stood there talking, a crowd of village kids gathered. They were mostly a bunch of ragamuffins in tattered clothes, and though many of them looked underfed, they were full of fun as they talked about the Germans. One or two even saw a humorous side to the

teacher being strung up...

One boy, with a jolly laugh, told how he once set fire to a German store. "Then I ran away and hid on top of the stove, and was very scared; but one of the Germans came

along and dragged me down, and kicked me in the arse, but nothing more happened. I

suppose they forgave me. 'Kleiner Partisan'' they would call me, and give me another kick in the arse, and when winter came, they kept on screaming for fires and saying,

'Kalt, kalt, kalt!' Or they'd keep on shouting 'Scheisse' which means... I said I knew.

"Actually," said the boy, "what saved us was the distillery. It kept them in good humour.

They'd fill themselves up with vodka from the distillery storehouse, and then they'd sing German songs—don't know what the hell they sang; it sounded kind of mournful on

winter nights— like dogs howling... And, of course, they fed their faces; they devoured everything—chicken and geese and pigs and ducks. They would chase the ducks and

geese and beat them to death with sticks. And then they burned down the town. I avoided them the last days; they were in such a foul temper. And now," he went on, "people live here in dugouts (for all the houses have been burned down), or on the kolkhoz not far away. Tomorrow—on September 1—the school will open, but it's not our school, but

another one, five kilometres away; our old school (he pointed at a patched-up building) was burned down, but has now been patched up as a hospital."

Three points emerge very clearly and indisputably from these (and many similar)

accounts: firstly, that the public executions of communists and other "suspects"—usually branded "partisans"— were a common practice in towns and villages occupied by the Germans. Since these executions frequently took place "on the first day" of the occupation, they were apparently the work not of any special detachments under

Himmler, but of members of the Army itself. It seems also true that the "communists"

must have been picked as a result of denunciations either by willing collaborators, or by people frightened into doing so.

[That executions were carried out by the Army is persistently denied by German generals, but, according to the Russian eyewitnesses I saw in 1942, it was "ordinary soldiers" who did the hanging. However, this is a much argued point, and it seems that the practice varied from place to place.]

Secondly, that, already in 1941, the Germans were practising a scorched-earth policy, with incendiary teams burning down whole towns and villages before retreating—if they had the time to do so. Thirdly, that the Germans appointed Russian burgomasters in the towns and starostas in the villages—people picked from what they considered "reliable"