Russia at war 1941-1945

The best Italian divisions were sent there: Celere, Sforzesca, Giulia, and others; but they found their graves in the Don and Voronezh steppes. In Russia they lost

100,000 men in killed and prisoners. Then came Tunis...

And now... the British and Americans have, in a short time, overrun the greater

part of Sicily. The jackal had boundless greed, but his teeth were rotten... And now he has been forced to abandon his post of Dictator... These twenty-one years of

Mussolini's dictatorship are the gloomiest period in the whole of Italy's history...

Mussolini sold Italy to Hitler.

And the article already foreshadowed a lenient Russian attitude to the Italian people.

The Germans, these sworn and time-honoured enemies of the Italian people, became

masters of Italy through the services of their flunkey, Mussolini. Mussolini, the traitor to Italy's interests, will as such go down to his grave... The liquidation of the German offensive in the sast in the summer of 1943 was a mighty blow at Hitler.

The collapse of his ally, Mussolini, is another mighty blow.

Not that that was quite enough. The theme of much of the comment about that time was that, splendid though the political achievements of the Allies were in Italy, there was a growing danger of the Germans now trying to drag out the war; therefore it was

necessary to strike at Germany herself; i.e. land in France.

It is doubtful, however, whether the Russians had any serious illusions left on the

possibility of such a landing in 1943.

Two developments of the summer of 1943, after the victory of Kursk, concerned Russian policy vis-à-vis Germany. First, with the liberation of large areas of the Soviet Union, some terrible German atrocities had come to light; and these called for a definite policy of ruthless punishment; on the other hand, pending an agreed Anglo-American-Soviet

policy on Germany, it was felt that certain political precautions were called for, now that Hitler's last hope of defeating the Russians had been smashed at Kursk.

So only a few days after this victory, there were these two seemingly contradictory

manifestations of the Soviet attitude to Germany. One was the Krasnodar trial, where a handful of Russian traitors were sentenced to death for collaborating with the Gestapo in exterminating 7,000 Jewish and other Soviet citizens, chiefly by means of the

dushegubka, the word for "soulkiller", which was applied to the gas wagon which the Gestapo had used to exterminate its victims—men, women and children. It was the first public trial in Russia in which Gestapo horrors were revealed to the world with a mass of details which at that time were still completely new. In the light of later discoveries—

such as Maidanek and Auschwitz—the Krasnodar revelations were small stuff; but they

were almost the first concrete example of their kind, and made a deep impression on

soldiers and civilians alike. The trial was fully reported for days at the beginning of the Russian Orel offensive. As "hate propaganda" it was first-rate, but all these details of how screaming children were pushed into the gas wagon were so horrifying that not only did the press abroad tend to play down the Krasnodar trial, but even in Russia some sceptics wondered whether the whole thing hadn't been somewhat touched up for propaganda

purposes—little knowing that Krasnodar, with "only" 7,000 victims, was merely a minor episode in the Gestapo's and the SD's activities throughout Europe.

And then another startling development took place. On the very day after the Krasnodar verdict the Russian press came out with a spectacular display of the fact that a Free German Committee, composed of anti-Nazi war prisoners and a few German émigrés in