Russia at war 1941-1945

Communists were still openly against the Ostgrenze, the Oder-Neisse Frontier, and hoped that the Russians would "reconsider" it. It was not till 1948 that the German Communists recognised it as "the Frontier of Peace and Friendship." Nor was it till 1948 that, under the impact of the Stalin-Tito quarrels, the German Communists openly abandoned their Sonderweg positions and decided to model their régime, in the main, on the Soviet Union.

There were thousands of Russian soldiers in Berlin during those days. On the ruins of the Reichstag, where deadly lighting had gone on for days, on the pillars of the shattered, battered Brandenburger Tor, on the pedestals of the Siegessäule (Victory Column), of the Bismarck monument, of the smashed equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I, thousands of Russian names had been scratched, or written or painted: "Sidorov from Tambov", or

"Ivanov, all the way from Stalingrad", or "Mikhailov who fought the Fritzes in the Battle of Kursk", or "Petrov, Leningrad to Berlin", and so on. There were Russian soldiers'

graves in the Tiergarten, around the Reichstag; and along the main streets, especially in the busier and less devastated streets of East Berlin, notices had been put up everywhere:

"HITLERS COME AND GO, BUT THE GERMAN PEOPLE AND THE GERMAN

STATE GO ON.—STALIN." The reference to the "German State" made many Germans believe that there would soon be a central German government. There were German

policemen with white brassards at street corners, and a few tramcars and a couple of underground lines were running. Water was being pumped out of other underground lines which had been flooded on Hitler's orders and in which a large number of people had

been drowned as a result.

There was much army traffic in the main streets and there were also the wheelbarrows—

hundreds of them—of Germans moving their belongings from one place to another.

There were also lorries packed with D.P.'s. The Germans looked subdued; only once in a while one caught the glimpse of a dirty look. Most of them were busy: they were clearing away rubble and mending pavements.

There was more mateyness between the Russians and the Germans than one would have

expected. At street corners soldiers were seen chatting with German men and girls; they were not supposed to sleep with German girls, though they could at their own risk and peril—and they did. Small German boys and elderly women were the most boisterous of

all. The boys would scrounge food and cigarettes off the Russians, and the elderly women displayed a sort of motherly familiarity. They waved at Russian lorries for lifts, and the lorries would often stop.

Colonel-General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, was a fine specimen of a Soviet

general.

[He was to be killed in a car smash only a week later; that, at any rate, was the official version. Many Russians in Berlin suspected that he had, in reality, been assassinated by Nazi terrorists.]

He was, quite obviously, not at all pleased at the prospect that Berlin would soon have to be shared with the British, Americans and French. He felt that as the Russians had lost thousands in the fierce final battle of the war they deserved Berlin all to themselves. He also felt that he had made as good a job as possible of Berlin in the incredible

circumstances of May 1945, and that things were beginning to take shape. The arrival of the others would only cause a lot of rivalry and friction, and undermine the Russians'

authority with the Germans...

Anyway, Berzarin was not the kind of man who had much use for the Allies, least of all the British. The son of a Leningrad steel worker, and a Party member of long standing, he had joined the Red Army in 1918 at the age of 14, and, in 1919, he had fought the British at Archangel. "Yes," he said, "I had to fight there against our present allies. At first we got it in the neck from them, but later I realised what good athletes they were—they could certainly run!" In 1939 he had fought at Halkin Gol; in 1941, he commanded a Russian army at Riga, "and there I got my first knock from the Germans, and it was a pretty hard knock, I can tell you." Then he fought on various other fronts—and, finally,

"our army was the first to reach the Oder, and it was we to whom the Germans in Berlin finally capitulated last month."

"But it was heavy going," he went on. "Our artillery and infantry won this battle. The allied bombing caused great damage here, but it was of no direct military value. The allied dropped 65,000 tons of bombs on Berlin, but it was we who, in a fortnight, fired 40,000 tons of shells at it. With tanks and guns we had to smash up whole houses. The Germans were fanatical. Young boys and girls threw hand-grenades at us and attacked