Russia at war 1941-1945

murdered and gassed at Maidanek are marching on Berlin. The dead are knocking

on the doors of the Joachimsthaler Strasse, of the Kaiserallee, of Unter den Linden and all the other cursed streets of that cursed city...

We shall put up gallows in Berlin... An icy wind is sweeping along the streets of Berlin. But it is not the icy wind, it is terror that is driving the Germans and their females to the west... 800 years ago the Poles and Lithuanians used to say: "We shall torment them in heaven as they tormented us on earth"... Now our patrols standoutside the castles of the Teutonic Knights at Alienstein, Osterode, Marienburg...

We shall forget nothing. As we advance through Pomerania, we have before our

eyes the devastated, blood-drenched countryside of Belorussia...

Some say the Germans from the Rhine are different from the Germans on the Oder.

I don't know that we should worry about such fine points. A German is a German

everywhere. The Germans have been punished, but not enough. They are still in

Berlin. The Führer is still standing, and not hanging. The Fritzes are still running, but not lying dead. Who can stop us now? General Model? The Oder? The Volks-sturm? No, it's too late. Germany, you can now whirl round in circles, and burn,

and howl in your deathly agony; the hour of revenge has struck!...

And, after visiting East Prussia, Ehrenburg wrote: "The Niezschean supermen are whining. They are a cross between a jackal and a sheep. They have no dignity... A

Scottish army chaplain, a liberated prisoner-of-war, said to me: 'I know how the Germans treated their Russian prisoners in 1941 and 1942. I can only bow to your generosity

now.'"

It did not take very long for both the Party and the Command of the Red Army to realise that all this was going too far. The troops were getting out of hand, and, moreover, it was clear that, before long, the Russians would be faced with a variety of political and administrative problems in Germany which could simply not to be handled on the "anti-Marxist" basis that "all Germans are evil." The alarm, not so much over "atrocities" as over the totally unnecessary destruction caused by the Red Army in the occupied parts of Germany, was first reflected in the Red Star editorial of February 9, 1945:

"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is an old saying. But it must not be taken literally. If the Germans marauded, and publicly raped our women, it does not

mean that we must do the same. This has never been and never shall be. Our

soldiers will not allow anything like that to happen—not because of pity for the

enemy, but out of a sense of their own personal dignity... They understand that

every breach of military discipline only weakens the victorious Red Army... Our

revenge is not blind. Our anger is not irrational. In an access of blind rage one is apt to destroy a factory in conquered enemy territory —a factory that would be of value to us. Such an attitude can only play into the enemy's hands.