Russia at war 1941-1945

If, in 1941 and even in 1942, the German soldier seemed to so many Russians a soulless, but formidably efficient robot, the Russian attitude to the Germans changed very

perceptibly during 1943 and 1944—but in two different directions. There were still some formidable German soldiers, particularly the Waffen-SS, ready to fight to the last round, and even known to commit suicide rather than surrender. But the ordinary German war

prisoner was no longer the arrogant individual he used to be in 1941 and 1942. Now more and more German prisoners tended to whine, and tried to look pathetic, and spoke of

"Hitler kaputt"; the 1941 and 1942 desire to beat up and even kill German prisoners had now largely disappeared; after a short time the Russian soldiers' anger cooled down, and they would even give newly-captured Germans food, saying: "go on, stuff yourselves, you bastards."

But there was another side to the "German problem". Nearly every liberated town and village in Russia, Belorussia or in the Ukraine had something terrible to tell.

In Belorussia, hundreds of villages in alleged "Partisan country" had been burned down, and their inhabitants either murdered or deported. Everywhere large cities had been

systematically destroyed; in the Ukraine, where there was relatively little scope for partisan warfare, the Germans had deported a very high proportion of the young people; everywhere, in the towns, the Gestapo had been active, and people had been shot or

hanged. The Einsatzkommandos and other troops had been busy exterminating partisans or alleged "accomplices" of partisans—often whole villages, including women and children. In hundreds of towns there had been the systematic massacre of Jews. In Kiev, for example, tens of thousands of Jews had been exterminated in a gully outside the city called Babyi Yar. Every Ukrainian and Belorussian city had its own horror story. As the Red Army advanced to the west, it heard these daily stories of terror, and humiliations and deportation; it saw the destroyed cities; it saw the mass-graves of Russian war

prisoners, murdered or starved to death; it saw Babyi Yar with its countless corpses, among them the corpses of small children; and, in the Russian soldiers' mind, the real truth on Nazi Germany, with its Hitler and Himmler and its Untermensch philosophy and its unspeakable sadism became hideously tangible. All that Alexei Tolstoy and

Sholokhov and Ehrenburg had written about the Germans was mild compared with what

the Russian soldier was to hear with his own ears and see with his own eyes and smell with his own nose. For wherever the Germans had passed, there was a stench of decaying corpses. But Babyi Yar was small amateur stuff compared with Majdanek, the

extermination camp near Lublin where one and a half million people had been put to

death in a couple of years, and which the Russians captured almost intact in August 1944.

[See pp. 889 ff]

It was with the whiff of Majdanek in their nostrils that thousands of Russian soldiers were to fight their way into East Prussia... There was the "ordinary Fritz" of 1944, and there were the thousands of Himmler's professional murderers; but was there a clear

dividing line between the two? For had not "ordinary Fritzes", too, taken part in the extermination of "partisan villages"? And did not the "ordinary Fritz", in any case, approve of what his SS and Gestapo colleagues were doing? Or didn't he approve? Here was both a psychological and political problem which was to give the Soviet government and the Red Army command a good deal of trouble, especially in 1944 and 1945.

The Teheran communiqué had created in Russia a feeling of euphoria: but for a number of reasons this did not entirely suit Stalin and the Party. Stalin had apparently been irritated by Churchill's half-hearted attitude to "Overlord", and also by his repeated grumbling about "the Polish Problem", on which Stalin held strong views. So in January 1944 Pravda launched, as already said, its "Cairo Rumour" about separate peace talks

"between two leading British personalities and Ribbentrop in a coastal town of the Iberian Peninsula"—a story which was later implicitly repudiated by Stalin himself in the Red Army Order of February 23. This story was followed by a particularly savage attack by Zaslavsky in Pravda on Wendell Willkie (of all people) who had raised some questions—in a very mild form—about what the Russians were going to do about Poland, the Baltic States, the Balkans and Finland.

Willkie, said Zaslavsky, was using the phraseology of the "enemy camp"; and then he went off the deep end:

It is high time it was understood that the question of the Baltic States is an internal Soviet matter which is none of Mr Willkie's business. Anyone interested in such