Russia at war 1941-1945

Here was a clear admission that factories—and much else—were being burned down by

Russian troops—simply because they were "German property".

On April 14, Ehrenburg's hate propaganda was stopped by a strong attack on him in

Pravda by G. F. Alexandrov, the principal ideologist of the Central Committee.

According to Ehrenburg's post-war Memoirs this attack was launched on direct instructions from Stalin. Alexandrov's article, "Comrade Ehrenburg is Oversimplifying"

took him up on two points: first of all, it was both un-Marxist and inexpedient to treat all Germans as sub-human;

"Hitlers come and go, but the German people go on forever", Stalin himself had said in a recent speech; and Russia would have to live with the German people. To suggest that every German democrat or Communist was necessarily a Nazi in disguise was absolutely wrong. The article clearly suggested that there were now certain Germans with whom it would be necessary for the Russian authorities to co-operate. Secondly, Alexandrov

objected to Ehrenburg's Red Star article two days before, called "That's Enough! " in which he had raged against the ease with which the Allies were advancing in the west and the desperate resistance the Germans were continuing to offer the Russians in the east.

Ehrenburg had said that this was so because, having murdered millions of civilians, in the east, the Germans were therefore scared of the Russians, but not of the Western Allies, who were being deplorably "soft". They had, he claimed, even ordered Russian and Ukrainian slaves to go on working on German estates during the spring sowing.

While agreeing with some of this, Alexandrov still said that Ehrenburg was

"oversimplifying" the issue:

At the present stage the Nazis are following their old mischievous policy of sowing distrust among the Allies... They are trying, by means of this political military trick, to achieve what they could not achieve by purely military means. If the Germans, as Ehrenburg says, were only scared of the Russians, they would not, to this day, go onsinking Allied ships, murdering British prisoners, or sending flying bombs over

London. "We did not capture Königsberg by telephone," Ehrenburg said. That is quite true; but the explanation he offers for the simple way in which the Allies

occupy towns in Western Germany is not the correct one.

This sop to the Allies was no doubt still intended to be in the good Yalta tradition, but it was perhaps not meant to be overwhelmingly convincing. For, although there was to be genuine rejoicing, especially among soldiers and officers on both sides, when, on April 27, the Russian and American forces met at Torgau on the Elbe, and cut the German

forces in two, and although there were friendly demonstrations outside the American

Embassy on VE-Day in Moscow on May 9, there continued to be considerable distrust of the Western Allies. True, the Allies did not fall for Himmler's (or any other) "separate peace" offer, but no sooner had the Germans capitulated than the Russian press was already full of angry screams about "Churchill's Flensburg Government"—a government which, they later asserted, was not liquidated until the Russians themselves had taken a very strong line about this "outrageous business."

[The "Government" under Admiral Doenitz—Hitler's "heir"— which continued to function at Flensburg, near the Danish border, as an "administrative organ" for some days after the capitulation. The encouragement allegedly given to it by the British was

attributed by the Russians to the most sinister motives on Churchill's part.]

But that is a different story. The most significant part of Alexan-drov's attack on

Ehrenburg concerned the new official line on "the German people". Very suddenly the hate propaganda against "the Germans " was stopped. Ehrenburg was no longer allowed to write— at least not on Germany. His hate propaganda had served its purpose in the past, but now it had become inexpedient.

The "no-more-Ehrenburg" blow fell two days before the final Russian offensive against Berlin, which started on April 16, from the bridgeheads on the Oder. A week later, a special communiqué stated:

The troops of the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Zhukov launched their