Stalin: A Biography

The Warsaw Uprising was neither soon nor easily suppressed. While the Red Army took the opportunity for rest, recovery and resupply, the Home Army of the Poles got about its business. The insurgents were flexible, well organised and utterly determined. The Germans had no idea how to contain them until the order was given to raze the districts of insurgence to the ground. Stalin might have had justified doubts that aid for the Polish rebels by means of an amphibious assault across the Vistula would decisively weaken the Wehrmacht. But if it had been a large group of Russian or Ukrainian partisans rising against the Third Reich, he would surely have dropped guns and food for their use and bombed the Germans. His prevention of assistance to Warsaw involved a calculated decision about Poland’s future. Already Stalin had set up a Provisional Government. This was the cabinet, appointed by the Kremlin and beholden to it, which he intended to put into power after Germany’s defeat. Other Polish leaders, however popular they might be across the country, were to be kept away from the centre of events. Stalin aspired to rule Poland through his communist stooges. The more insurgents were wiped out by the Germans, the nearer he would come to his objective. Churchill’s imprecations about Stalin’s military and political measures were justified ones.

Nevertheless Churchill was to impress on Stalin at their Moscow meeting in October 1944 that he held no suspicion that the Red Army had been deliberately held back.⁵ The cohesion of the Grand Alliance took precedence. The Wehrmacht, despite being on the defensive in East and West, had not lost its resilience. The Allies knew they had a fight on their hands as Germans, despite grumbling about Hitler’s military and economic failures, stood by their Führer. Churchill and Stalin understood the importance of getting to Berlin first. The conquest of territory would put the conqueror in a position to prescribe the terms of peace. Roosevelt and Eisenhower felt differently; their strategy was premised on the desire to minimise casualties on their side rather than join a race to reach Berlin first. Stalin was determined to win the race even if the Americans declined to compete. He was worried that the USA and the United Kingdom might do a deal with the Germans for an end to the fighting. This could lead to a joint crusade against the Soviet Union; and even if this did not happen, the Germans might surrender to the Western Allies and deprive the Soviet Union of post-war gains. Stalin selected his finest field commanders — Rokossovski, Konev and Zhukov — to reinforce the campaign to seize the German capital.

The Red Army on his orders started the Vistula–Oder Operation on 12 January 1945. Although his Red Army outnumbered the Wehrmacht by three to one, the German will to resist had not faded. Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front burst forward on the southern wing of a military force which stretched across the length of the Polish lands. Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front advanced in the north. As German defences crumbled, Zhukov could report that he held the banks of the River Oder. The pockets of Germans who had not retreated were caught in a trap. Königsberg and its population were cut off. On its way through Poland the Red Army came across terrible sights as it entered the concentration camps. Evidence of mass murder had been obliterated at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, but at Auschwitz (Oswiecim) the fleeing Germans had not had time to disguise the incarceration, forced labour, starvation and murder. Soviet soldiers would have acted furiously even without such an experience. German atrocities in the USSR had been systematic from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and Soviet wartime propaganda had dulled any lingering sensitivities towards the Germans as a people. As it moved into central Europe, the Red Army went on the rampage; its troops pillaged and raped with almost no restraint by its commanders.

Red troops acted with almost no discrimination about nationality. Not only Germans but also other peoples were brutally treated and Stalin refused to punish the offenders. The Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas complained to him in vain. ‘Well, then,’ Stalin replied:⁶