Russia at war 1941-1945

April and May 1944 saw the final expulsion of the Germans from the southern parts of the Ukraine. The troops of Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front swept all the way into northern Rumania, and it was not till they had reached a line some twelve miles east of Jassy that the front became temporarily stabilised. On April 2 Molotov, announcing the invasion of Rumania, hastened to declare that the Soviet Union did not aim at altering the "social order" (i.e. capitalism) in that country. The troops of Malinovsky's 3rd Ukrainian Front had meantime advanced along the Black Sea coast, liberating Kherson, Nikolaev and

Odessa, and, on April 11, the beginning of the Russian invasion of the Crimea, Hitler's last stronghold on the Black Sea, was announced. Within a month, the Crimea was

cleared.

The great peculiarity of Odessa, "the Russian Marseilles" was that, except for the last few weeks when the Germans took over, it had not been under German rule. As a reward for Rumania's participation in the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler had given her a large and rich territory in the southern Ukraine stretching all the way from Bessarabia to the Bug; this included the great Black Sea port of Odessa, and the whole area was

incorporated into "greater Rumania" as a new province under the name of Trans-niestria (i.e. the land beyond the Dniester).

Malinovsky liberated Odessa on April 10, and the Germans, fearing encirclement, had

left in a frantic hurry, some by sea, under almost constant Russian bombing and shellfire, others by the last remaining road between Odessa and the Dniester estuary, where a ferry took them across to the parts of Bessarabia and Rumania which the Russians had not yet occupied. By the time Odessa fell, this road was littered with hundreds of

wrecked and abandoned German vehicles. Though in a desperate hurry to get out of

Odessa, the Germans had had time to turn the harbour, most of the factories and many other large buildings, into smouldering heaps of wreckage.

I drove to Odessa on a beautiful spring day in mid-April from a point just north of

Nikolaev, on the east side of the Bug. The Bug had been the frontier between German-

occupied and Rumanian-annexed Ukraine, and civilians were not allowed to travel

between the two except by very special permission. But since February 1944 the

Germans no longer took any notice of the fiction of "Trans-niestria" being part of Rumania.

They had tried to drive away the cattle; but as they could not get the cows across the Bug, they shot them, and the green banks of the river were littered with dozens of brown

carcasses of dead cows which were beginning to stink.

It was typical steppe country between the Bug and Odessa, and sometimes there was no village in sight for miles as one drove between the immense green carpets of winter

wheat which had been duly sown in the autumn, and which the Russians were now going

to harvest.

Here and there, there were fallow patches, but not many. But one of the strangest sights on this road were some completely deserted villages; they did not look like Russian or Ukrainian villages. Their houses were painted in bright colours, and they had spired churches —Lutheran churches, or maybe Catholic churches, for by the roadside there

were also one or two Catholic shrines. These were German villages—villages of German colonists who had lived here for 150 years, and had latterly acted as quislings

everywhere, filling administrative and police jobs placed at their disposal by the Germans on the eastern side of the Bug. Those who had stayed in this "Greater Rumania", had acted as an arrogant German minority, and had no doubt already been preparing

unpleasant surprises for the Rumanian "majority". But the rapid advance of the Red Army had obliged them to abandon their homes. Later, in Odessa, I was to see a paper called Der Deutsche in Transniestrien, in which the province was in fact treated as part of the German heritage, and the Rumanians were not mentioned once! Nevertheless, until

only a few weeks before, Hitler still felt obliged to keep up the myth of Greater Rumania, and the pretence that Transniestria was a Rumanian province and Odessa a Rumanian

city.

We approached Odessa at dusk, and as we drove towards the Black Sea, the country

became hillier, and here and there were signs of fighting. All along the road we had passed many dead horses, and here, on these wind-swept hills above the Black Sea there were many more, and some bomb craters, and, here and there, some dead men. At one

point we passed an enormous war memorial the Rumanians had erected to commemorate

their Odessa victory of 1941. It was here, through these hills, that the Russian ring of defences round Odessa then ran.

And then we came to Odessa, and in the streets there was a sharp smell of burning.

Odessa was completely dark. All the power stations had been blown up by the Germans

who had full control of the city in the last fortnight and, worse still, there was no water—