Russia at war 1941-1945

end of the war, a number of SS officers took part in this Ukrainian guerrilla war against the Soviets. Bandera was released by the Germans in September 1944 and Melnik a

month later. (See Dahin, op. cit., p. 624.)]

Among all this rubble, in a vacant space between two houses, lay a dead German soldier

—a young lad, of not more than eighteen, with the face of a sleeping child. But his belly had been crushed— probably by some vehicle in the mad stampede which had

accompanied the Germans' panicky flight from Uman.

A standing joke was one of a German general driving out of Uman on a rickety old farm tractor with a camel-like movement, one of the few vehicles able to cope with the deep mud.

There were very few people in the streets of Uman that day; they still seemed frightened to come out after all the firing during the previous days, and there were no militia in the streets, but, instead, weird figures on foot or on horseback—men with high fur caps, with red ribbons attached. Many were wearing German army overcoats. These were partisans

from the neighbourhood. I talked to some of them. One, a young fellow in a blood-

stained German overcoat, told a long story of how he had been arrested and tortured by the SD; how he had then escaped to the partisans, how the Germans had then murdered

his wife, who had stayed at Uman. He said this with an uncanny calm. "There were lots of traitors in this town," he said; "and the worst was the chief hangman of the SD, a bastard called Voropayev; but now the NKVD have got him under lock and key. We'll

see that he gets hanged all right."

Another of the partisans was a fat man, clean-shaven with a greasy cap on the back of his head: he might well have come straight out of a pub in Leeds or Manchester. He had

worked at the railway depot at Uman as the chief liaison man with the partisans—"We are helping the Soviet authorities," he said, "to catch all the spies and traitors".

*

Major Kampov and I stayed at an improvised Russian officers' hostel, and saw a

wonderful variety of people at Uman during that week. The house had been inhabited by German officers until a few days before, and a good search had been made for mines and booby-traps; one had been found inside the tinny old piano; if anyone had struck one of the keys, it would have popped off.

The next day there were not only many soldiers, but also rather more civilians than before in the streets of Uman, with its small, nondescript, mostly ex-Jewish houses in the centre, and its more pleasant Ukrainian thatched cottages with gardens on the outskirts. I mixed with a large crowd of civilians who had come to the main square for the military funeral of a Russian tank-crew. Almost the sole subject of conversation was deportation to

Germany. Practically all the young people in the town had been deported. The technique of deportation varied from time to time; in some places, the Germans had started by

offering tempting labour contracts; once a few dozen people had fallen for the offer, the rest were mobilised compulsorily. But there were ways of dodging deportation—if one

was lucky and wealthy enough to be able to bribe a German doctor or a German official.

There was much corruption among the Germans. Self-mutilation was also fairly

commonly practised to avoid deportation.

I also heard stories of Russian Cossacks serving under the Germans. They were a bad lot.

A few days before the Germans evacuated Uman, some of these Cossacks—so the story

went—were let loose, and looted part of the town, and raped several girls; they were said to have been wearing Red Army uniforms and the Germans said they were a Russian

advance unit. One theory was that the Germans wanted the population to be terrorised at the thought of the Russians' coming, and to flee to the west.

The Gestapo and SD had been very active in Uman. The Jews had all been murdered; but the Gestapo had also been active among non-Jewish civilians; later, I went to see the field outside the prison, and here were the fresh bodies of some seventy or eighty civilians whom the Germans had shot before leaving Uman. Among them were a lot of ordinary

peasants and peasant women, suspected of, and imprisoned for, "partisan" activity; among the dead bodies I also saw a little girl of six, still with a cheap little ring on her finger. She must have been shot so that she wouldn't tell. I also saw the Gestapo H.Q.

with hideous instruments—such as a hard-wood truncheon with which prisoners' hands

were smashed during interrogation.

We spent one evening at the Town Soviet. What a strange assembly of people were round the supper table! Mayor—i.e. Chairman of the City Soviet—Zakharov, a small palefaced man, with dark hair brushed back, had been one of the chief partisan leaders of the

Ukraine. He had been wounded three times; here also was the former Bishop of

Taganrog; and a doctor, a typical old-time intellectual, with a little beard and glasses, looking rather like Chekhov; and an elderly woman teacher, and a stout clean-shaven