Stalin's War of Extermination by Joachim Hoffmann

[Wolf Stoner]

The most atrocious invasion of Europe in its gruesome details

[Wolf Stoner]

This year Putin’s Russia intends to celebrate 80th anniversary of Soviet victory in the Second World War on grander scale. The preparations have already started a few months before the event.

The Soviet Union has built its identity around the October Revolution of 1917 with subsequent Civil War and the Soviet participation in the Second World War, which was named the Great Patriotic War.

After collapse of USSR back in 1991 the mythological status of the October Revolution collapsed as well. Instead of a deified event of universal significance it was relegated to a status of usual seizure of power amidst social chaos. Nothing glorious whatsoever. Comrade Lenin has lost his semi-god appearance and became a butt of all jokes. 1990es were a period of disillusionment and sober reassessment of history. The glitzy banners were torn down and the ugly face of the Soviet monster was bared for all to see.

But after a few years the ruling elite started to fear the ongoing disillusionment in society. The collapse of the false values’ system now threatened the system itself. If the whole state structure was based on lies and crimes, then, what kind of legitimacy could it claim?

In order to save the shaky authority the post-Soviet Russian state started to reverse the narrative. There was no way to rehabilitate the whole Soviet mythology with Lenin and October Revolution. Instead, the truncated version was chosen where the Soviet victory in the Second World War had to be presented as the most important event in history; the glorious salvation of the world by Soviet people; something for what the whole humanity must be in debt forever before Russia.

In Putin’s Russia the new state/national identity was created. It was the Soviet victory myth on steroids. The new fairy-tale version of the Soviet-German conflict was to be used as the main propaganda tool, both inside and outside of Russia.

Its purpose was not only to legitimize the system but to buttress its revanchist territorial claims to its neighbors. Each time when something was not to Kremlin’s liking, it started crying about “Neo-Nazis” and disrespect to heroes who saved the world from evil Germans.

The invasion of Ukraine had become the apotheosis of this process. The accompanying propagandistic war was based entirely on the newly refurbished Russian myth about WW2. The unprovoked aggression was framed in such a way as to present it as a necessary and just action in order to complete the unfinished job of annihilating evil Nazis. It is the way the majority of brainwashed Russian populace see it.

The Second World War in Russia isn’t history but the ever present event in which everyone must participate in some way or another; at least to pay regular obeisance to this myth and its idols. In recent years this collective insanity has descended to the level of Aztek religious frenzy where the bloody gods require ample human sacrifices. In some perverted way the whole war against Ukraine has become some kind of bloody ritual where incalculable human masses are brought to the altar of this new religion.

In order to understand this awful phenomenon and to decipher the inner workings of Kremlin’s rulers and their motives, we need to know the original event on which this bloody cult is based.

Joachim Hoffmann’s book “Stalin’s war of extermination 1941-45” provides excellent overview of this event. In stark contrast to many official mainstream historical studies this book is not biased in Soviet favor. It shows the Red Army as it was.

It must be noted that this book isn’t a revisionist one. It doesn’t attempt to disprove the accusations levelled at Germany by the Nuremberg trial. The author presents a historical study of the subject without imposing any ideological interpretation.

Joachim Hoffmann have no intention to exculpate Germany in anything. His task is to approach the Red Army and Soviet Union with the same measuring stick as was used against Germany.

The especial value of this book now is that it shows the modus operandi of the Soviet war machine; the mindset of Kremlin rulers and the way they intend to use their military. When Putin’s army invaded Ukraine in 2022 it acted according to the same template; with total disregard of any laws or human decency. The whole world was taken aback. It seemed impossible. But, if people had better studied the past and paid more attention to such historical studies as this, then, there would be no surprise. More than this: there would be much less probability that such events would take place again and again.

The false holy status of the Red Army that was accorded it by the allied war propaganda, has allowed USSR and afterward Russia to hide behind this convenient cover, crying “Neo-Nazis” each time when someone exposes its criminal deeds. Now is the time to deprive those criminals of their special status and to show them for what they are. But it would be difficult to do in regard to today’s criminals without addressing first the depredations of their predecessors.


Joachim Hoffmann
Stalin’s War of Extermination

Dr. Joachim Hoffmann is clearly the most qualified specialist in Soviet military history in Germany. For over thirty years he has pored over Russian language documents about the Second World War. Stalin’ War of Extermination can be seen as the most important result of Dr. Hoffmann’s long-lasting research. Because he followed certain official guidelines, the Freiburg Court Vice-President Johann Birk confirmed that this book does not violate any German law. This procedure was necessary in order to protect the author from criminal prosecution in Germany, where historians dissenting with official German myths are frequently subject to prosecution and sometimes even imprisonment.

Since the 1920s, Stalin planned to invade Western Europe in order to initiate the “World Revolution.” The outbreak of the War between Germany and the Western Allies in 1939 gave Stalin the opportunity to prepare an attack against Europe which was unparalleled in history both in terms of Stalin’s far-reaching goals as well as in terms of the amount of troops and armaments amassed at the Soviet border.

Of course, Stalin’s aggressive intentions did not escape Germany’s notice who in turn planned a preventive strike against the Red Army. However, the Germans obviously underestimated both the strength of the Red Army and the determination of its leaders. What unfolded in June 1941 was undoubtedly the most cruel war in history.

Dr. Hoffmann’s book shows in detail how Stalin and his Bolshevik henchman used unimaginable violence and atrocities to break any resistance in the Red Army and to force their unwilling soldiers to fight against the Germans who were anticipated as liberators from Stalinist oppression by most Russians, Stalin ordered not only to kill all German POW, but also to kill Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands alive, because they failed to fight to their death. Dr. Hoffmann also explains how Soviet propagandists incited their soldiers to unlimited hatred against everything German, and he gives the reader a short but extremely unpleasant glimpse into what happened when these Soviet soldiers, dehumanized by Soviet propaganda and brutality, finally reached German soil in 1945: A gigantic wave of looting, arson, rape, torture, and mass murder befell East Germany. After reading this book, the world should thank the German Army that they prevented Stalin from succeeding with his plans of World Revolution, despite all the wrongdoings the Germans committed themselves…

Stalin’s soldiers, in their own words, came, not as liberators, but as merciless avengers. All allegations to the contrary by today’s utilitarian propagandists belong to the realm of fairy tales and are a flat distortion of historical fact. If proof is required in this regard, simply consider the panic with which the entire population of the eastern provinces of the German Reich reacted to approach of the Red Army. It is not difficult to gather from the present study that the reality of the situation was to exceed even the worst fears.

As can be proven, with certainty, that the German-Soviet war—considered by Hitler to be inevitable following the fateful Molotov mission in November 1940—just barely preempted a war of conquest that was planned and prepared under high-pressure by Stalin, even more historical facts can be demonstrated today. This is confirmed by ever more historical evidence today. Thus, it was not just Hitler, as a certain school of contemporary historiography would continue to have us believe, but Stalin, who, from the very outset, in his political and military leadership of the Red Army, employed methods of outrageous brutality that vastly surpassed anything that had ever previously occurred…

The present volume, based largely on previously unknown documents and archive sources of German and Soviet origin, therefore—uninfluenced by so-called “taboos and intellectual prohibitions”—deals quite consciously with the methods of waging war on the Soviet side of the East-ern Front…

The point of departure of the present description is, as stated above, the fact—which is now indisputable—that Hitler, through the initiation of hostilities, just barely preempted a war of aggression prepared by Stalin. This indisputable scholarly fact is the rock upon which the hopes of our ideologues, in the truest sense of the word, are wrecked. Their arguments are null and void, but their doctrinaire blindness, nevertheless, remains…


Chapter 1. May 5, 1941: Stalin Proclaims the War of Aggression

The imperialistic power politics inherent in the Soviet political system from the very beginning—but not given due attention by the public—also found striking external expression in the governmental coat of arms of the USSR, which was still current in 1991. The symbolism of this state coat of arms consists of a hammer and sickle menacingly and crudely encircling the whole world, surrounded by the following inflammatory words in several languages: “Proletarians of all Countries, Unite!” What is so poignantly made evident here is the goal, openly proclaimed by both Lenin and Stalin, of world domination by Soviet Communist power, or, as they called it, the “victory of Socialism all over the world.” It was none other than Lenin who, on December 6, 1920, stated in a speech that what was involved was to exploit the conflicts and contradictions between the capitalist states…

Stalin was early devoted to this principle of Bolshevism, which was proven by his well-known speech before the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (b) in July 1925. At that time, Stalin declared: “Should the war begin, we will not stand by inactively; we will enter the war, but we will enter as the last belligerent. We shall throw a weight on the scales that should be decisive.” This “Stalin Doctrine,” as Alexandr Nekrich has shown with admirable clarity, and regardless of statements to the contrary, was never abandoned.’ It retained its force, and the effort to “incite fascist Germany and the West against each other,” as stated by author Viacheslav I. Dashichev, became a genuine idée fixe with Stalin. In 1939, when the Red Army found itself increasing in strength due to a rapidly growing gigantic armaments program, Stalin believed that the time had come to intervene as a belligerent in the crisis of “world capitalism.” Both the British Ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps, and the American Ambassador, Laurence F. Steinhardt, warned that Stalin wanted to bring about a war, not only in Europe, but in East Asia as well, as early as 1939. Recently revealed documents of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) offer sufficiently clear information in this regard. “The conclusion of our agreement with Germany,” according to the Narkomindel on July 1, 1940, to the Soviet Ambassador in Japan, “was dictated by the desire for a war in Europe.” In regard to the Far East, a telegram from Moscow to the Soviet Ambassadors in Japan and China on July 14, 1940, accordingly states: “We would agree to any treaty that brought about a collision between Japan and the United States.” Undisguised in these diplomatic instructions is the mention of a “Japanese-American war, which we would gladly like to see.” M, Nikitin transcribes Moscow’s attitude with the following words: “The Soviet Union, for its part, was interested in distracting British and American attention from European problems, and in Japanese neutrality during the period of the destruction of Germany and the ‘liberation’ of Europe from capitalism.”

On August 19, 1939, there was a surprise secret meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee, which included the participation of the members of the Russian section of the Communist International. During the meeting Stalin announced, in a programmatic speech, that the time had now come to apply the torch of war to the European powder keg. Stalin declared flatly that “if we accept the German proposal for the conclusion of a Non-Aggression pact with them,” it was to be assumed that “they would naturally attack Poland, and the intervention of France and England in this war would be inevitable.” The resulting “serious unrest and disorder” would, as he remarked, lead to a destabilization of Western Europe, without “us,” ie., without the Soviet Union, being initially drawn into the conflict. For his closest comrades, he drew the conclusion, already proclaimed in 1925, that, in this way, “we can hope for an advantageous entry into the war.” In Stalin’s vision, a “broad field of activity” now opened up for the development of the “world revolution.” In other words, for the achievement—which had never been abandoned—of the Sovietization of Europe and Bolshevik domination. He concluded with the call:

“Comrades! In the interests of the USSR—the homeland of the workers—get busy, and work so that war may break out between the Reich and the capitalistic Anglo-French bloc!”

As the first stage for the achievement of imperialist domination, Stalin designated the Bolshevization of Germany and Western Europe. The Non-Aggression pact, with the momentous additional secret protocol, was concluded between the representatives of the Reich’s government and the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics four days after this secret speech, on August 23, 1939…

Russian historians today have long seen an immediate connection between August 23, 1939, and June 22, 1941. The August 23, 1939, Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler enabled Stalin to achieve his initial goal. Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union, recalled that Stalin was “convinced that the Pact would enable him to wrap Hitler around his little finger.” “We have tricked Hitler for the moment,” was Stalin’s opinion, according to Nikita Khrushchev. The August 23, 1939, Non-Aggression Pact encouraged Hitler to attack Poland and, as a result—just as Stalin expected—a European war broke out. The Soviet Union participated as an aggressor, beginning on September 17, 1939, without, of course, incurring a declaration of war from the Western powers. The leader responsible for Soviet foreign policy, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Molotov, spoke before the Supreme Soviet on October 31, 1939. He said: “A single blow against Poland, first by the Germans, and then by the Red Army, and nothing remained of this misbegotten child of the Versailles Treaty, which owed its existence to the repression of non-Polish nationalities.” It was the express wish of Stalin that nothing should remain of the national existence of Poland.

Through the waging of aggressive war against Poland and Finland; through the extortionate annexation of the sovereign republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and through the threat of war against Romania, the Soviet Union, as a result of its treaties with Hitler, expanded its territory by 426,000 sq. km. This territory was approximately equivalent to the surface area of the German Reich in 1919. In so doing, Stalin tore away the protective buffer states on his Western border while significantly improving his base for deployment toward the West. In Stalin’s view, it was now time for the next step, and indeed the conditions for it were favorable. Germany’s political and strategic situation, regardless of initial German military achievements, was considered in Moscow to be critical. Decisive victory in the war with England was increasingly receding into the distance. Standing behind Great Britain, with growing certainty, was the United States of America, German forces were scattered all over Europe, locked in a single front against Great Britain stretching from Norway to the Pyrenees, On the other hand, Germany’s inability to fight a protracted war in terms of economics was very well-known in Moscow. The German Reich was becoming exceedingly vulnerable in regard to the possibility of being cut off from vital petroleum imports from Romania. Detailed studies of the German economic and armaments situation in these circumstances gave rise to a belief in Moscow that Germany was lapsing into a condition of hopeless military inferiority. That the Soviet leadership was “afraid of Germany and its armed forces” has been proven by M. Nikitin to be a fiction of Stalinist historiography.

During these circumstances in late 1940, while the strategic military situation for Germany and its Axis partner, Italy, was becoming increasingly more difficult, Stalin—through Molotov in Berlin on November 12-13, 1940—transmitted the delivery of a demand. The demand boiled down to an expansion of the Soviet “sphere of influence” that was to include Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Greece, i.e., all of southeastern Europe, and, in the north, Finland—with which a peace treaty had only been solemnly concluded in March of that year. A so-called “Swedish question” was also raised. The Soviet Union, in other words, was now demanding a dominant position in all of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. Furthermore, it demanded the creation of bases on the outlets of the Black Sea as well as discretionary passage through the outlets of the Baltic (Great Belt, Small Belt, Sund, Kattegat, and Skagerrack). The Reich, engaged in a struggle for its existence, would be hemmed in simultaneously from the north and south.

These demands, delivered in the midst of an increasingly difficult military situation, were so provocative that they left the Germans, as a practical matter, only one alternative: to submit to subjugation or to fight. These demands amounted to a deliberately calculated provocation in which the psychological motive is of principal interest, because it reveals the extent to which Stalin must have believed himself to be utterly safe in terms of his military superiority at that time. If Stalin had really been afraid of Hitler, as he repeatedly allowed the German Embassy in Moscow to believe, he would hardly have provoked the Germans in a manner that, in the view of Emst Topitsch, amounted to a “summons”—a thinly disguised demand for subjugation. That Molotov, in the days of his mission to Berlin, was in constant, intensive telegraphic contact with Stalin, proves beyond a doubt that he was acting on Stalin’s direct instructions…

Stalin’s feeling of superiority, as expressed in the revelation of his aggressive intentions, was, of course, entirely justified by the truly gigantic increase in Soviet armaments production, which, at that time was just getting into high gear. Half a year later, on the date of the outbreak of the war, on June 22, 1941, the Red Army possessed no less than 24,000 tanks, including 1,861 type T-34 tanks (a medium tank, perhaps the most effective armored weapon of the entire war) and KV (Klim Voroshilov) tanks (a series of heavy tanks), which had no equal anywhere in the world; 358 units of these were manufactured in 1940, while 1,503 units were manufactured in the first six months of 1941. Since 1938, the Air Forces of the Red Army had received a total of 23,245 military aircraft, including 3,719 aircraft of the latest design. The Red Army also had 148,000 artillery pieces and mortars of all types and systems. The inventory of the Red Navy, in addition to a multiplicity of ships of other types, had 291 or, according to Soviet sources, at least 213 submarines—an expressly aggressive weapon. This meant that the Soviet Armed Forces had a larger fleet of submarines than any other country in the world, outnumbering those of the world’s leading maritime nation, Great Britain, more than four-fold in terms of the number of submarines.

Soviet armored forces, in the judgment of a competent expert, Marshal of Armored Troops Poluboyarov, were superior to those of any foreign power, both in numbers and in “technical equipment, organizational formations, and combat operation.” This was true, not only of the unsurpassed T-34 medium tank and the KV-series heavy tank, but also of the so-called older models: the T-26 (light tank for infantry support), BT-7 (lightly armored “fast” tank, originally used for cavalry support), T-28 (medium tank) and T-35 (heavy tank). Of those Soviet tanks enumerated, the T-28 medium tank and the T-35 heavy tank were clearly superior to the German PzKpfw III (Panzerkampfwagen III, a medium tank) and PzKpfw IV (also a medium tank but with slightly more armor and much better armament than the PzKpfw III) in almost all combat qualities and technical specifications. Even the BT-7 Soviet “fast” tank (bystrochodnyj tank), mass-produced on the order of 9,000 units, exceeded the German PzKpfw III standard tank in armament, armor, horsepower, speed, and range. In regard to the armament with which many models of the PzKpfw III medium tank were equipped, it was even inferior to the Soviet T-26 light tank. 3,719 Soviet airplanes of the most modern design had been delivered since 1940: the MiG-3, LaGG-3, and Yak-1 fighter planes; and the Pe-2 dive-bomber. The ll-2 fighter-bomber—of which 2,650 were manufactured in the first half of 1941 alone—was in no way inferior to comparable German models; on the contrary, they were superior to German models for their speed alone. Even older Soviet models exhibited considerable performance qualities, and could, like the well-known Polikarpov I-16 Rata (Rat) fighter plane, be very dangerous to German combat aircraft because of its maneuverability alone. Finally, some of the artillery weapons of the Red Army, including the 132 mm (5.2 inch) BM-13 rocket launcher (which had 16 launching rails and was later nicknamed “Stalin organ” for the sound it made), the 76 mm (3 inch) field gun, the 122 mm (4.8 inch) howitzer, and the 152 mm (6 inch) howitzer (heavy artillery), was partly of a quality that aroused the astonishment of top German officers. All these findings have been confirmed with increased accuracy by new Russian research work.

The personnel and material superiority of the troops of the Red Army on June 22, 1941, is clear from a mere comparison of strength. Thus, their armed strength, as early as May 15, 1941, as the General Staff reported to Stalin, consisted of 303 divisions; of these 303 divisions, 258 divisions and 165 flight regiments were deployed in offensive positions against Germany, Finland, and Romania at that time. Contrary to earlier claims, all these large units were, as a result of quietly manning them with reservists, no longer very far below their authorized strength, according to mobilization figures. The total of 303 divisions, as reported by the General Staff of the Red Army to Stalin on May 15, 1941, had, moreover, further increased by the beginning of the war, due to the intensive reactivation of units. For example, until the beginning of August 1941, 330-350 divisions were deployed facing the German and German-allied armies, which would have resulted in a total strength of the Red Army of at least 375 divisions at that time. According to Soviet sources, 3,550 German tanks and assault guns (cannons mounted on tank chassis and used to support armored forces in the field) faced 14,000-15,000 Soviet tanks—an estimate that, out of a total inventory of 24,000 tanks, is, however, too low. Especially when one considers that, of 92 mechanized divisions (according to the figures of May 15), 88 were stationed on the western border alone. There were also numerous independent armored battalions, such as in the cavalry and infantry divisions, which would mean a total inventory of approximately 22,000 Soviet tanks. 1,700 of the German tanks, moreover, consisted of the quite insufficient PzKpfw I and PzKpfw II types (both tank types had light armor and armament), as well as the light Czech-built P 38 tank. As a result, only 1,850 of these 3,550 German tanks and assault guns were capable of fighting it out with their Soviet adversaries.

2,500 combat-ready German aircraft—2,121 according to other sources—faced a total of allegedly “only” 10,000 to 15,000 Soviet aircraft of the existing 23,245 machines, which, even though of “older” designs, made their appearance in critical situations, giving the German Air Force no end of trouble, as Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels himself complained in his diaries. 7,146 German artillery pieces faced 37,000 Soviet artillery pieces—out of a total of 148,000 cannons and mortars that the Soviet armaments industry had already produced for the Red Army, according to Soviet data. In view of the fact that, apart from headquarters reserves, of 303 available divisions, 248 divisions, and of 218 available flight regiments, 165 regiments, were concentrated “in the West” as early as May 15, 1941, the proportion of weaponry stationed in the West must have been even greater. Even assuming the admitted order of magnitude, the Red Army, on June 22, 1941, possessed a five- to six-fold superiority in tanks, a five- to six-fold superiority in aircraft, and a five- to ten-fold, and perhaps even greater, superiority in artillery pieces. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that the mass production of modern weapons was really just gearing up. A huge increase in production figures was not only scheduled, but was actually achieved during the last six months of 1941, despite huge losses in industrial capacity as a result of the German conquest of Soviet territory.

On the tangible basis of a huge and increasingly rapid development of military arms production, the Red Army had unilaterally generated a bold doctrine based exclusively upon a theory of military aggression. It was characteristic of this military doctrine that the concept of a “war of aggression” as well as that of “unjust war,” became-obsolete as soon as the Soviet Union entered hostilities as a belligerent. Lenin stated that what counted was not who attacked first or who fired the first shot, but rather, the causes of a war, its aims, and the classes that waged it. To Lenin and Stalin, any attack by the Soviet Union, against any country at all, was automatically a purely defensive war from the very outset. In addition, it was also a just and moral war under any circumstances. The distinction between preventive attack and counterattack was, furthermore, abandoned. Soviet military theory, moreover, assumed that modern wars were no longer declared, since every attacker naturally strove to ensure the advantage of the element of surprise. “Surprise has a paralyzing effect” stated the 1939 Field Duty Regulations, “therefore, all military action must be carried out with the greatest concealment and the greatest rapidity.” The Soviet attacks on Poland and Finland in 1939 were sudden attacks, without legal declaration of war. All tactical operations should be carried into enemy territory by means of immediate surprise attack, thus gaining control of the situation from the very initiation of hostilities…

Since early 1940, Stalin believed that conflict with Germany was inevitable. Aware of the increasing strength of the Red Army and the deteriorating situation of the Reich, he used the graduation ceremony of the Military Academies on May 5, 1941, as his platform. Stalin announced to the Red Army leadership and a large military audience that, in view of the superiority of the Soviet Army, which had recently been attained, that the time had now come, in his words, “to abandon defensive tactics and adopt a military policy of attack operations.” The significance of this speech by Stalin in relation to his aggressive intentions is obvious from the simple fact that his words, in contrast to the usual practice, were concealed from the public, while the text of his speech was hidden in central party archives…

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to the Stalin’s seminal speech of 5th May 1941 where he, in essence, has openly proclaimed his intention to wage an aggressive war against Europe. The full text of the speech is kept secret in the Russian archive. Only the abridged version of it was made public in 1990es. But the multiple secondary sources had allowed to identify the main points of the speech.
The Russian government continues to conceal many documents pertaining to such sensitive topics in order to preserve its canonic version of history. But even being denied access to those archival materials, it is enough to know the forces ratio statistics in order to understand who intended to wage a war of aggression.
to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter2.
June 22, 1941: Hitler Preempts Stalin's Attack

On May 5, 1941, Stalin officially demanded the intellectual and propagandistic conversion of the Red Army to the concept of attack, praising the great superiority of the Red Army. He did not, however, touch upon the actual question of operational preparations for an offensive war against Germany, which was, of course, hardly possible before the audience in the Kremlin. The military preparations had, nevertheless, long been underway. Thus, the Red Army, even in 1940—ie., long before the German invasion—had already begun offensive deployment in the exposed salients near Bialystok and Lemberg, as the future Chief of the General Staff and Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov was compelled to admit. A conference of the highest commanders of the Red Army under the Chairmanship of the People’s Commissar of Defense, Marshal of the Soviet Union Timoshenko, made the decision in December 1940 to conduct any future war as a war of attack. In January 1941, two large-scale staff war-game planning maneuvers of the top leadership cadres of the Red Army (also under the direction of the People’s Commissar of Defense and to some extent in the presence of Stalin and a few members of the Politburo) produced the first study for the execution of an offensive war against Germany. A strategic map maneuver that was played through included an offensive with the objective of conquering East Prussia and Konigsberg by superior Soviet forces from the Baltic region. This offensive was to combine with overwhelmingly superior forces from the region around Brest in an offensive over the Carpathians in a southwestern thrust with the objective of conquering southern Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. These strategic map maneuvers, which took place on January 2-6, 1941, and January 8-11, 1941, are, typically, either not mentioned at all or only marginally in Soviet war historiography and historical memoirs. This is an indication that the desired results that stood in the foreground of the performance of these exercises were not defensive measures but, rather, offensive operations.

On May 15, 1941, ten days after the utterance of Stalin’s military threats, the Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, General of the Army Zhukov, transmitted to “the President of the Council of the People’s Commissars of the USSR, Comrade Stalin,” in the presence of the People’s Commissar for Defense, Marshal Timoshenko, the plan, signed by all of them, for an offensive war against Germany under the harmless title (Considerations on the Strategic Mobilization Plan of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union in the Event of War with Germany and German Allies...). Due to strict secrecy, this document was only available in a single clean handwritten copy…

This plan for an offensive war on Germany is the quintessence of other projects worked out by the Soviet General Staff in the spring of 1941 for an offensive against Germany. This has been published and commented on in detail by the Candidate for the Historical Sciences, Colonel Valeri Danilov, with the cooperation of university lecturer Dr. Heinz Magenheimer of the National Defense Academy in Vienna, in the renowned Osterreichischischen Militarischen Zeitschrift. These projects included the following:
1. The strategic deployment plan of March 2, 1941, of the Armed Forces of the USSR in the event of a war with Germany;
2. The projected operational plan in the event of war with Germany, referred to in the document of May 15, 1941;
3. The Specific Deployment Plans of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union toward the West and East of March 11, 1941, that, according to Colonel General Volkogonov, was also prepared with the participation of Major General Vasilevsky and presented to Stalin by Marshal Timoshenko and General of the Army Zhukov.

…The merit of Colonel Danilov’s work is that he published the entire Soviet plan of attack, with thorough comments, thereby disseminating conclusive details of Soviet military preparations. The General Staff Plan of May 15, 1941, incorporated the principles contained in Stalin’s speech before the graduates of the Military Academies and, as a practical matter, converted the remarks of May 5, 1941, combined with the resources of the General Staff, into a primer for operational action. The composition of this plan of attack and its presentation on May 15, 1941, to the originator of the demand, that it was now necessary to make the transition to a “military policy of offensive operations,” was equivalent to a highly official step of the General Staff, which, in view of the conditions of the Stalin regime, could only be undertaken upon the instructions of Stalin himself. Danilov is fully justified when he stresses that “operational documents of such importance” could only be drawn up “exclusively upon the basis of military-strategic concepts issued by Stalin.” Any individual initiative in matters of such importance was out of the question, because it could be interpreted as a concerted protest against the “party line,” ie., against Stalin, with all the dire consequences arising therefrom. This, of course, applied first of all to the People’s Commissar of Defense Timoshenko and the Chief of the General Staff Zhukov. In particular, it was clear to Zhukov, who was still mindful of the Great Purge, what it would have meant to oppose the Stalinist line and to work out one’s own plans.

Stalin, however, took great care not to sign documents of fatefully grave content. Colonel General Volkogonov has, however, left no doubt as to Stalin’s knowledge of the General Staff Plan of May 15, 1941, and on July 29, 1990, in the Military History Research Office in Freiburg stated that Stalin “signed with his monograph” (i.e., initialed) the plan. Alexandr Nekrich says: “Stalin favored execution of the plan, but wanted to keep his own hands clean.” Stalin always acted this way in decisive matters. An extraordinary document has also been found in the “Presidential Archives” (in the former archive of the Politburo of the Central Committee) in Moscow. This is the text of an interview prepared on August 20, 1965 by Marshal Vasilevsky, with a concurring comment by Zhukov, stating that “Stalin fully approves the principal theses of the ‘considerations.’ Timoshenko and Zhukov must have received Stalin’s approval, since they immediately commenced execution of the plan; in which, according to Valeri Danilov as well, they drew up “extensive preparations” for an offensive war against Germany.

Finally, even Colonel General Gor’kov, in his foreword to an interview of Marshal Vasilevsky, cannot help admitting that the plan of attack of the General Staff of the Red Army very quickly (i.e., within nine days, on May 24, 1941) became the object of a conference of the top leadership levels in Stalin’s presence. That this conference in the Kremlin was, in fact, an event of the greatest importance, is also proven by the participation of the First Deputy to the President of the Council of People’s Commissars (i.e., Deputy Premier to Stalin) and Foreign Minister Molotov, as well as Timoshenko, Zhukov, Vatutin, and Commander of the Air Forces of the Red Army Zhigarev. In addition, the commanders of the five military border regions, Generals Popov, Kuznetsov, Pavlov, Kirponos, and Cherevichenko, the members of their military councils, and other leading officers from their fields were also present.

Due to detailed research, colonel Kiselev arrives at the conclusion that Stalin, even if he did not expressly approve the plan of attack of May 15, 1941 (in accordance with his style), he, nevertheless, accepted it “One of the most important references to the accuracy of this assumption”, in his view, “is that the measures for which the High Command was searching in the document of May 15, were actually carried out.” “The measures listed in the ‘Considerations on the Strategic Deployment Plan of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union’ of May 15, 1941,” as Kiselev summarizes, “began to take shape, which would not have been possible without the approval of the political leadership, meaning Stalin.” Michail Mel’tiukhov has accepted this research finding, and defended it against misleading ideological criticism. He writes:

“It is therefore impossible, insofar as one can pursue it, not to agree with V. Kiselev and V. Danilov that the plan of May 15 was approved by the Soviet leadership, since, as stated above, the measures proposed in the plan were carried out in May-June. Consequently, the opinions of V. Danilov, V. Kiselev and B. Petrov in this regard, that the Red Army created an offensive army, appear entirely justified.”

The argument adduced by General Colonel Gor’kov and other Stalin apologists that the plan of attack of the General Staff of the Red Army of May 15, 1941, should be considered “defensive” because it contained no supplementary political plans for the occupation of the territories to be incorporated, is groundless. Thus, for example, the expert American historian Professor Richard C. Raack replies: “There had to have been some other planning somewhere, at some level, for some sort of political result from a successful invasion according to the plan Gor’kov reported.” To Raack, the “non-existence of a supplementary Soviet plan is inconceivable.” As Viktor Suvorov stresses, the failure to find such a plan is no proof to the contrary; since in Moscow, as the Katyn case teaches (the site of an NKVD massacre of Polish officers), the only documents ever found were those that they wanted to be found. Finally, from 1939 onward, the huge territorial regions of Poland, Finland, the Baltic Republics, and East Romania were also annexed more or less off the cuff.

Suvorov makes it clear that the preparations of the Red Army for the “Campaigns of Liberation” in 1939 and 1941 were conducted according to the same scheme. As in 1939, military councils selected higher party officials for Special Applications Groups (Osnaz), whose existence was later hushed up. These groups came to be formed in regard to the planned “War of Liberation” in 1941 for the purpose of executing the goal of Sovietization. We can infer from an official work of the Institute for the Military History of the 18th Army (which, incidentally, passed all the censors) that, in addition to other party officials, the later General Secretary Brezhnev was assigned to such an Osnaz group prior to the beginning of the war. On page 11 of the work, it says “Until mid-September 1941, Leonid Ilyich belonged to the Special Applications Group of the Military Council for the Southern Front.” Suvorov considers this as an involuntary admission that the Bolshevization of the territory to be conquered in 1941 was indeed planned, and that corresponding political plans must also have existed, in addition to the plan of attack of the General Staff of the Red Army of May 15, 1941.

What were the details of the Soviet General Staff’s plan? The above mentioned short “Credo of Attack” ran as follows:

“When one considers that Germany keeps its army mobile through the installation of rear support services, then it can preempt us [predupredit’, with double underlining by General Vatutin] during deployment, and carry out a surprise attack. In order to prevent this, and to crush the German army [the latter is crossed out], I consider it necessary not to leave the initiative to the German command at any time, under any circumstances, and to preempt the enemy during deployment [upredit’, with double underlining by General Vatutin], and to attack the German army during the deployment stage, when it is not yet able to build a front and organize the cooperation of its branches of service.”

As a perceptive observer, Pourray, has remarked, if the Soviet General Staff feared that the Germans might “preempt” the Red army, this must have been because the Russians were already doing something that the Germans needed to preempt.

The first strategic objective, according to the Soviet General Staff plan, was the destruction of the chief forces of the German Wehrmacht south of the Brest-Deblin line and the attainment of the Ostroleka-Narew- Lodz-Kreuzburg-Oppeln-Olmiitz line within 30 days. A second strategic aim was the continuation of the offensive out of the region around Kattowitz to the north and northwest, to crush the forces of the left wing and take possession of all of Poland and East Prussia as well. The main blow should be led with forces from the Southwest Front out of the Lemberg salient, to cut off the German Army from its southern allies. It was simultaneously planned to encircle and annihilate the German group in the Lublin-Radom region with the right wing of the Southwest Front, in cooperation with the left wing of the Western Front, in an offensive from the Bialystok salient in the direction of Warsaw-Deblin. Against Finland and East Prussia—apparently a result of the war-game staff maneuvers of January—and against Romania and Hungary, an active defense was to be organized in the south from the regions around Czernowitz and Kishinev. Romania was then to be attacked to capture Jasi and destroy the left wing of the Romanian army.

The General Staff plan of May 15, 1941, meant, in terms of one central point, a deviation from previous doctrine: an enemy offensive was no longer to be answered with a devastating blow. Rather, the Red Army was to preempt enemy attack, which was, at this point, still purely hypothetical, since the armored shock forces of the German Armies East were deployed on the eastern border for the first time only on June 3, 1941. Since the great devastating blow was intended to introduce the “military policy of attack operations” ordered by Stalin on May 5, 1941, and, as Kalinin revealed on May 20, 1941, this really involved a political aim, i.e., of “expanding the zone of Communism,” which meant expanding the power of the Soviet Union, it was, therefore, a purely offensive war, a war of conquest, not a preventive war that was being prepared, similar to the manner in which Hitler—although for different reasons—planned an offensive war of his own.
This is true, regardless of whether or not German deployment served as the motivation, and essentially proves that the Soviet preparations for attack by the concentration and deployment of Red Army troops was covered in the guise of local defense. The success of the planned large-scale surprise attack against the troops of the Wehrmacht presupposed a few measures expressly advocated by the General Staff of the Red Army on May 15, 1941.
1. Secret mobilization was to be carried out under the cover of exercises for the soldiers of the Red Army.
2. Troops were to be concentrated in the vicinity of the western border areas under the pretense of the concentration of training camps; as a priority, all the reserve armies of the Soviet High Command were to be concentrated.
3. The Air Forces were to be secretly concentrated on airfields, while the development of the ground organization was to begin immediately.
4. The rear support services were to be organized under the screen of training procedures and exercises.

These demands generally corresponded to the new operational and tactical principles of the Red Army, of which the Germans soon became aware. Beginning in the spring of 1941, the Germans noticed that “extensive studies” of the “initial phase of a new war” were being recorded in Soviet military literature. All these studies, according to a summary of the High Command of the German 18th Army of April 15, 1941, climaxed in the recognition that all modern wars would begin “with a ‘sneaking up’ into war, without an official declaration of war, and with gradual mobilization that was concealed until the final opening of hostilities.” Motorized forces and cavalry would be concentrated “on troop training areas and during maneuvers,” and be used “within the shortest time as an army of penetration.” The objective of the “surprise opening of hostilities” was to carry the “military operations into enemy territory, and take the initiative from the beginning of the campaign.” The question arises: to what extent were these requisitions still in the planning stage, and to what extent had they actually been completed by June 22, 1941?

As for secret mobilization, Soviet troops in the western border regions, in accordance with the new mobilization plan MP-1941, received orders from the General Staff of the Red Army to prepare for a full mobilization by June 1941. The date indicated for all troops and installations of the western special military districts was June 15, 1941; for that of the Baltic special military districts, June 20, 1941. The mobilization of the troops was to be prepared “down to the last detail” in accordance with the date established in the deployment scheme. The General Staff apparently wished “to take a resolute step forward” in June, and also to actually carry out a general mobilization. In the meantime, Stalin rejected a similar proposal of Timoshenko and Zhukov on June 14, 1941, since mobilization would automatically mean the opening of hostilities, which should, in the opinion at that time, begin with a surprise blow at a point in time chosen by the Soviets. The measures already taken, as Colonel Filippov recently showed, had been so effective that mobilization was no longer even necessary. In May 1941, Stalin ordered the call-up of a further 800,000 reservists, so that approximately 300 divisions were now ready. These divisions were only approximately 2,500 men short of wartime strength per division. The German command authorities were, of course, quick to perceive the intent behind this move. They knew that the increasing call-up of specialists and the drafting of all the eligible men born in the same year meant the systematic strengthening of the Red Army without this being apparent to the outside for the sake of camouflage.” “Due to this procedure,” was the conclusion, “a public general mobilization is no longer necessary under certain circumstances.”

As with the secret mobilization, the secret concentration of troops under cover of training camps was largely completed. Soviet historians, precisely to prove alleged Soviet peaceful intentions, have adduced a system of “decentralized camp exercises,” In reality, however, the General Staff had, once again under the strictest secrecy, shifted four armies from the interior of the country to the border region as early as May 13, 1941, on Stalin’s instructions. These armies were followed by others in June. The armies in question were the 16th, 19th, 20th, 21th, 22nd, 24th, and 28th, ie, a total of seven armies, as well as the 21st and 23rd Mechanized Corps and the 41st Infantry Corps. These huge troop movements were conducted under the umbrella of denials inspired by Stalin. Thus, the news agency TASS, on May 15, 1941, attacked the rumors of large troop concentrations with the truly baffling claim that a whole division had been transferred from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk due to better lodging conditions. On June 13, 1941, TASS called rumors of war preparations against Germany as “mendacious and provocative,” and the call-up of reservists for the forthcoming maneuver was only intended for “training” and to “control the railway apparatus.” At this time, according to later German statements, so far “almost the entire available armed might of the Soviet Union was transported out of the interior of Russia to the German eastern front in one month of continuous movement.” Otherwise, large units would hardly have appeared before the German army eastern front in numbers that, according to the enemy situation report of Panzer Group 4 of August 10, 1941, amounted to 330 Soviet divisions, but, according to the intelligence report on the enemy of Panzer Group 3 of August 3 to 7, 1941, amounted to as many as 350 Soviet divisions. In the belief of the German General Staff of the Army, such a concentration of troops must have begun quite a long time before the beginning of the war, particularly when one considered the “vast expanse of the regions” and the “difficult transportation conditions” in the Soviet Union.

“That the Soviet Union was preparing to begin an offensive war against the German Reich” is, however, also evident from the type of troop deployment, the actual “battle order,” as vigorously stressed in a memorandum undersigned by the Chief of the Foreign Armies East Branch of the German General Staff of the Army, Colonel Gehlen, on September 9, 1943: “Proofs of Russian Offensive Preparations Against Germany (preparedness in terms of personnel and the deployment of personnel).” Thus, strong forces, especially “mobile” forces, i.e., mechanized, motorized, and cavalry units, were predominantly concentrated in the salient extending far into German controlled territory at Biatystok and Lemberg. The memorandum pointed out:

“These two chief points of emphasis make clear the intention, that through a thrust in the general direction of Lizmannstadt (Lodz), to encircle and destroy the German forces in the projecting part of the General Gouvernement [German occupied Poland] and to cut East Prussia off from the Reich upon suitable development of the situation in the north through a thrust in the direction of Elbing.”

But here, the full extent of the Soviet General Staff plan of May 15, 1941, had not even remotely been correctly recognized. It is also characteristic that this “operative configuration” was maintained regardless of the certainty of a German attack, although the troops thus deployed were in immediate danger of profound enclosure, encirclement, and destruction, as Marshal Zhukov also admitted after the war. According to Major General Grigorenko, such concentrations would only have been justified

“if the troops there were intended to be used in a surprise attack. Otherwise, they would have been halfway surrounded right from the start. The enemy only needed to deal two opposing blows at the base of our wedge, and the encirclement would have been complete.”

Documents captured by the German army, moreover, confirm the fact observed by Colonel Filippov, that even before the beginning of the German attack, between June 18 and June 21, 1941, the majority of the Soviet divisions were placed on combat readiness. Furthermore, from June 14, 1941, the order was issued to relocate the newly created Front Staffs (formed out of the staffs of the peacetime military districts) to field combat positions, which was understandable only in the event of forthcoming hostilities.

The secret concentration of the Soviet Air Forces, the development of the ground organization, and the organization of the rear support services were already almost entirely finished on June 22, 1941. The General Staff of the Red Army had concentrated “the most combat-ready aviation attack formations” in all previous air war history, in “the immediate vicinity of its national borders,” and, to this end, had installed a dense network of operative airports in the area since early 1941. This was done, consistently and by preference, in the salients extending from Biatystok and Lemberg, from which the great surprise blow on the Western and Southwest Front was to be dealt according to the Soviet General Staff plan of May 15, 1941. A map prepared during the war by the German Luftwaffe Operation Staff clearly shows the concentration of Soviet airports in the intended main direction of thrust. At least 142 Soviet airfields were built west of the Wilna-Kovel’ line, and at least 260 west of the Luck-Czernowitz (Chernovicy) line. The concentration of airports in the Baltic region, as well as Romania, was also conspicuous. Between 1937 and 1940, the Soviet Air Forces also worked out exact documentation and descriptions of their objectives in a large number of German cities, at least as far as the Kiel-Celle-Erfurt line. To the Luftwaffe Operation Staff, this was “clear proof” of the methodical war preparations of the Red Army even in these early years.

Clear offensive intentions were also revealed by the transfer forward of all material resources of the armed forces that were stationed immediately adjacent to the western national borders. Gigantic depots of ammunition, weapons, equipment, fuel, provisions, and other stores and materiel, in fact all mobilization supplies, were, as Colonel Danilov has also stated, installed practically in the effective range of enemy fire—even railway tracks were ready for use. For example, in Brest-Litovsk alone, the Germans captured ten million liters of fuel. This was “an unmistakable indication of plans of aggression,” because these quantities of gasoline, immediately on the border, were, furthermore, stored in front of the deployed units of the 14th Mechanized Corps. The then Chief of the Administration for Signal Services of the People’s Commissariat for Defense, Major General Gapich, writes from a knowledge of his field of expertise: “All steps were thus directed to the creation of bridgeheads, to prepare to deal a blow against the enemy, and to carry the war into enemy territory.” In G. P. Pastukhovsky’s opinion, everything was prepared “to ensure profound offensive operations.”

The maps supplied to Red Army troops are another infallible indication of large-scale offensive plans. At various places near the border, as well as far behind the lines, the Germans captured maps extending far to the west and into Germany territory, as well as equally copious documentation providing other information on Germany. Such map discoveries were made at Kobryn, Dubno, Grodno, and many other places. In October 1941, the German XXIV Panzer Corps captured a map of Lithuania and East Prussia, as well as “an apparent operational study entitled ‘Attack on East Prussia.’” As the XXXXVIII Panzer Corps reported on July 1, 1941, the citadel of Dubno contained

“warlike-packed supplies of map materials drawn up for divisional tasks. These maps covered territory west of the border regions as far as the region of Cracow [in German occupied Poland]... large quantities of exercises for general staff officers and lecture documentation on Germany were also found.”

At an unidentified military drill location, as the activity report of the XXVIII Army Corps stated on July 16, 1941, “mobilization maps of the Red Army were found showing nothing but southern Lithuania, the former Polish areas, and parts of East Prussia. These maps clearly reveal the intent of the Red Army to attack the German Reich.”

On July 23, 1941, Soviet Captain Bondar, Chief of Staff of the 739th Infantry Regiment of the 213th Infantry Division, stated that “the Red Army had adjusted itself not for defense but rather for an attack against the General Gouvernement.” “Maps extending as far as Cracow” were made available to his regiment, as to other parts of the Red Army. These maps were “rendered useless by the German surprise advance.” Such Red Army map supplies in fact prove even more treacherous as the Soviet troops had a lack of military maps of their own territory when military operations—contrary to expectations—suddenly shifted east of their national borders and into Soviet territory. Reliable witnesses, such as Colonel Liubimov, artillery commander of the 49th Armored Division and long-time teacher of tactics at the Artillery Academy in Moscow; Colonel Ovanov, Chief of Staff of the 46th Infantry Division; Major Kononov, Commander of the 436th Infantry Regiment of the 155th Infantry Division; as well as Stalin’s son, as strong in character and as clever as his father, First Lieutenant Dzhugashvili, of the 14th Howitzer Artillery Regiment of the 14th Armored Division, testified that the lack of maps in the units was, in fact, so serious that combat operations were seriously hindered by it. Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Mainz, Dr. Gotthold Rhode, was at the time an interpreter and Sonderfuhrer (K)(special leader K) in the staff of the 8th Infantry Division. As he made note of it in his diary, on June 23, 1941, in the headquarters building of the Soviet 3rd Army in Grodno, he found, “in a room, stacks of maps of East Prussia, beautifully printed, on a scale of 1:50,000, much better than our own maps, covering all of East Prussia.” Why, he wondered at that time, did the Red Army “need hundreds of maps of a neighboring country?” “One thing remains incomprehensible,” Rhode remarked recently:

“If Stalin did not wish to start his own offensive war no later than late summer 1941, then why did he jam-pack the Bialystok pocket full of divisions that were too numerous for defense? Or did Stalin wish to appear to have been attacked, to be the victim of surprise, and then be able to strike back quickly, and only miscalculated the comparison of strengths?”

Soviet aggressive intentions are also indicated by the fact that war-game map maneuvers, staff exercises, and the like were fundamentally offensive and aggressive in nature. Even at the division level, described by the First Ordinance Officer of the 87th Infantry Division, First Lieutenant Filipenko, “attack was practiced almost exclusively, with the support of artillery and combat vehicles”; “defense only rarely, up to company strength at most.” On May 24, 1941, German radio reconnaissance in the border area near Grodek “with certainty” listened in on a Soviet exercise with the participation of tank units called “attack on Land N,” meaning Germany. Lieutenant Colonel Kovalev, initially the Commander of the 223rd Infantry Division, and, until May 1941 a student at the Military Academy of Moscow, and Captain Pugachey, First Ordinance Officer on the Staff of the 11th Mechanized Corps, described the war games at the Army level, which exclusively involving the right wing (West Front) of the Soviet offensive front, but that already provide an introduction to the extent of the profound operations that were to be brought about according to the General Staff Plan of May 15, 1941. According to Kovalev, the following map maneuvers for subsequent “counteroffensives” were drawn up at the Moscow Military Academy:

“From Leningrad in the direction of Helsinki; out of the Grodno - Brest-Litovsk line in the direction of East Prussia; in the south, from the Ukraine, in the direction of Warsaw-Lodz, with flank protection through the Pripet swamps and the Carpathians.”

Even more revealing was Pugachev’s description of a map maneuver of the Commanders of the Western Special Military District with the Army Commander-in-Chiefs and Corps Commanders as early as March 18 through 21, 1941:

“The 3rd Army was ordered to break through to Suwalki by way of Augustow. The 4th and 10th Armies were ordered to break through to Warsaw and Litzmannstadt [Lodz]. This assignment was to be completed in fourteen days. The troops stationed in Lithuania were to hold the borders toward East Prussia and to march into East Prussia as soon as the southern army had completed the above mentioned assignments.”

This is an obvious reflection of a fundamental concept of the General Staff Plan of May 15, 1942.
The shifting forward of the principal forces of the Red Army to the West and to the national borders took place under strict secrecy, but it could not, of course, remain entirely concealed. Only the actual extent of the preparations east of the German-Soviet borders remained unknown to the Germans…

Since the Germans did not know about the existence of approximately one hundred armored and motorized divisions before June 22, 1941—rather, they assumed only seven armored divisions and thirty-eight motorized, mechanized brigades—they were very surprised after the onset of the war by the huge mass of armored divisions that suddenly confronted them. It “soon appeared obvious that the Russians had many more divisions available than had been assumed by the OKH before the beginning of the eastern campaign,” noted the 1st Panzer Army on December 19, 1941. “Throughout the entire section, the enemy was obviously stronger than had been assumed at the beginning of the operation,” stated Panzer Group 3 as early as June 23, 1941. This astonishment not only related to the numbers of tanks and aircraft, which exceeded all expectations, but also to the quality of Soviet weapons and equipment. To some extent, the Soviet leadership even received a word of praise, and was described, for example, in the appraisal of the enemy situation of Panzer Group 3 of July 8, 1941, as “extremely skillful, energetically active, and deliberate.”

The admission of a crass underestimation of the Red Army is also found in Dr. Goebbels’s diaries. Looking back, he noted on August 19, 1941:

“We obviously quite underestimated the Soviet shock power and, above all, the equipment of the Soviet army. We had nowhere near any idea of what the Bolsheviks had available. This led to erroneous decision-making...”

The Reich Minister for Enlightening the People and Propaganda expanded upon how difficult it had been for Hitler to make the decision to attack the Soviet Union to start with, adding:

“But if the worries of the Fuhrer due to our inaccurate estimate of Bolshevik potential were so great as it is... and caused him such nervous strain, it would have been far worse if we had had a clear picture of the real extent of the danger!”

Hitler, Goebbels added, was now very indignant

“that he had allowed himself to be so deceived by the reports from the Soviet Union over the potential of the Bolsheviks. Above all, his underestimation of the enemy armored and air forces caused us extraordinary problems in our military operations. He has suffered a great deal over this. It was a very serious crisis...”

Hitler made statements that fully confirm this testimony. In the Fuhrer main headquarters on April 12, 1942, Hitler frankly admitted that he had been deceived in regard to the strength of the Red Army, when he declared that the Soviets had

“surrounded everything relating to their army with enormous concealment. The whole war with Finland in 1940—just like the Russian invasion of Poland, which was carried out with ancient tanks and weapons, and badly uniformed soldiers—was just one whole gigantic deceptive maneuver, since the Russians already possessed equipment that could only be compared with German and Japanese equipment.”

The initial successes of the Wehrmacht no longer permitted a true estimate of the situation. Another strength report by the Foreign Armies East Branch of the German General Staff of the Army on August 9, 1941, considered the combat strength of the Red Army as now exhausted; and that no more significant Soviet deployments were to be expected. “Their total strength is now insufficient either for a large-scale offensive or for the formation of a drastic defensive front.” It also stated, “they will have reached the limit in the foreseeable future in terms of men as well.”

Since the General Staff Plan of the Red Army of May 15, 1941, assumed 258 Soviet divisions, but since 330-350 divisions had already appeared before the front of the German army by August 8, one would not be wrong in assuming that nearly 300 Soviet divisions must have been concentrated immediately on the national border or not far away, as early as the first day of the war. By June 17, 1941, the High Command of the German Army only recognized the existence of 182 Soviet divisions (including 7 armored divisions) and 38 motorized, mechanized brigades. In a proclamation on June 22, Hitler even spoke of only “160 Soviet divisions on our border,” indicating that even that number of divisions was a threat in his eyes. Although the Germans had only inaccurate notions of the actual extent and striking power of the Soviet attack army, the Soviet deployment, even in the form in which it was merely assumed, had already been the object of careful considerations. Soviet measures generally were evaluated as only defensive, not least of all on political grounds (because of the Non-Aggression Pact of 1939). Nevertheless, the fear of forthcoming Red Army offensives repeatedly arose ever since the spring of 1941 due to the known course of Soviet forces.

As early as March 1941, reports increased of strong troop concentrations in the Baltic States. Statements had been received from Latvian officers, such as Colonel Opitis and Colonel Carlson, that large maneuvers were taking place in the vicinity of the German border, and that the war with Germany would then begin. An initial “attack against the Memel region” could no longer be “completely excluded,” but was, on the contrary, “considered possible.” The Chief of the German General Staff of the 18" Army gave a preventive order to “hold the bridgehead at Tilsit,” and conferred on the XXVI Anny Corps a similar warning. “It is possible that the Russians will open the struggle, at least to a limited extent, by way of an offensive,” the German High Command of the 16th Army said on May 1. The Commander of the 3 Panzer Group made a similar statement on May 30, 1941, “Because of Russian rapid units in the immediate vicinity of the border region, it appears that it is not impossible that the Russians intend to penetrate German territory.” From April on, it was quite clear that the Red Army also “had enough forces to begin a surprise-attack operation to the Romanian border.” In May and June, increasing reports linked the concentration of “strong Soviet mobile forces” in the immediate vicinity of the border near Czernowitz and in southern Bessarabia, as well as the preparation to cross the river Pruth, with Soviet offensive intentions in a southerly direction against Romania.

…The Chief of the Operations Staff of the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, High Command of the Armed Forces), Lieutenant General Jodl and the Chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Keitel, sent several letters to the Foreign Office and to the Reich Government between April and June 1941, in which, with increasing concern, and, finally, in almost imploring tones and with “the strongest emphasis,” they drew their attention to the fact that Soviet Russia “was conducting the most gigantic military deployment in its history, directed against Germany” and that “a huge Soviet troop force” to the west could be set in motion “at any moment.”

Were these warnings part of an attempt to protect the now completed and planned “Operation Barbarossa” by means of propaganda, in which the German attack was described as a response to an increasing threat from the Soviet Union, or were they motivated by true concern? The usual interpretation by Stalinist-influenced “anti-fascism,” particularly in Germany, is that such warnings can only have constituted a preventive propaganda maneuver to justify German attack, stereotypically characterized by these groups as “the treacherous fascist attack on a unsuspecting, peace-loving Soviet Union.” If one, however, considers the facts of Soviet preparations for a war of conquest, which are obvious today, these warnings appear in another light, particularly in view of the still incomplete state of knowledge of the OKW. Thus, for example, the Chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, in his letter to Ambassador Ritter on June 20, 1941, could only discern one armored division and five armored brigades in tank forces in the salients projecting far to the west around Bialystok. This alone was sufficient cause for concern, however, in reality, no fewer than three mechanized corps, each one numbering a minimum of 1,030 tanks, were concentrated in the semicircle around Bialystok, and another mechanized corps was in service of the salient between Brest and Kobryn. Although the German reconnaissance findings might still have been defective, the situation reports of the OKW, nevertheless, added up to an overall picture of an already menacing nature.

According to the state of knowledge of the OKW, “the Soviet Army leadership had systematically employed all the methods of reconnaissance available to them” in the service of offensive planning. This included the “deliberate use of the Soviet Air Force over the sovereign territory of the Reich,” the “almost daily incoming reports of additional border violations by Soviet aircraft,” and “deliberate provocations.”…

The constant shifting of Soviet units closer to the border, in fact, all along the front line from the Baltic to southern Bessarabia, was perceived by the OKW as a “serious threat”; yet the scope of these movements was still far underestimated. A matter of entirely justified concern, as we know today, was the rapid progress in the development of the ground organization and the filling up of “air fields near the border containing strong units of the Air Force,” as confirmed by the OKW. These measures were accurately interpreted as “preparations for extensive bombing attacks on the German Reich by strong combat aircraft units.” This assessment was all the more so reliable as there were numerous known statements of leading Soviet officers that “openly spoke of a forthcoming Russian offensive.”

On May 11, 1941, Field Marshal Keitel sent the Reich Foreign Minister a letter in which, for the first time, he spoke of the “constantly increasing concern” of the OKW about the “development of the deployment of Russian forces along the German eastern border.” This letter from the Chief of the OKW, who, after all, had cabinet rank, to his Minister colleague could, of course, be interpreted as a mere alibi in regard to the forthcoming Operation “Barbarossa”; yet its contents are fully confirmed by what we know today. Keitel’s mention of the OK W’s conviction “that the extent of Russian deployment, which is practically equivalent to Russian mobilization along the German eastern border, can only be interpreted as a preparation for Russian offensive measures on the largest scale,” is a reflection of one of the basic principles of the General Staff of the Red Army of May 15, 1941. Just as accurate as it was disturbing was the conclusion that the “deployment, which is approaching conclusion,” would enable “the Soviet State leadership to select the attack date at its own discretion,” as it was indeed planned.

Fundamental confirmation may also be found in the contents of the memorandum sent by the Chief of the OKW on June 11, 1941, by way of the Reich Foreign Minister directly to the address of the Reich Government. Keitel’s repeated warning that Soviet “military measures” had led “to a great deployment of the Red Army from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea,” which was “clearly aimed at preparing for an attack on the German Reich,” corresponded to the actual situation. From the vantage point of our knowledge today, Keitel was quite correct when he remarked that the “Russian deployment” was shifting increasingly closer to the border, that “the individual units of the Army and Air Force” were moving forward, and that the “air fields near the border are being equipped with strong units of the Air Force... All these facts, linked with a determination to destroy Germany, as cultivated within the Russian army,” suggested to Keitel “that the Soviet Union was preparing itself to attack the German Reich at any moment that appears suitable to the Soviet Union.”

Unlike the OKH, the OKW had therefore drawn entirely accurate conclusions within the scope of its limited possibilities. Hardly a passage in the letters of Keitel and Jodi contains a factual exaggeration; on the contrary, the danger was minimized from lack of knowledge. In reality, the offensive preparations of the General Staff of the Red Army were no longer very far from completion, as we know today. With similar certainty as for the operational part, this can also be said for the ideological part of the offensive preparations, which were drawn up by the Main Administration for Political Propaganda of the Red Army (GUPPKA) under Army Commissar First Rank Zaporozhets. Stalin issued quite definitive directives, not only to the General Staff, but also to the “political” Main Administration in keeping with his remarks of May 5, 1941. General Colonel Volkogonov summarized this instruction in the following telling statement: “The Vozd’ [Leader] made it unmistakably clear that war is inevitable in the future. We must be prepared for the complete smashing of German fascism.” Stalin demanded the preparation of the directive “On the Tasks of Political Propaganda in the Red Army in the Near Future.” Upon his instructions, this was to incorporate every demand previously made on May 5, 1941:

“The new conditions in our country, the present international situation, which is full of unexpected possibilities, demand a revolutionary power of decision and constant readiness to launch a devastating attack on the enemy... All forms of agitation and propaganda are to be directed to one single goal—to the political, moral, and fighting preparation of all personnel to wage a just offensive and an all-destroying war... all personnel are to be educated in the spirit of active hatred of the enemy, to an eagerness to take up the struggle with him, to a readiness to defend our nation on the territory of the enemy, and to deal him a lethal blow...”

…At a meeting of the Main Military Council of May 14, 1941, Army Commissar First Rank Zaporozhets was entrusted with the preparation of a suitable draft of the directive given on behalf of Stalin. Zaporozhets informed Zhdanov, Shcherbakov, and Alexandrov on May 26, 1941, of the preparation of further supplementary documentation entitled “Changing Tasks of the Party Political Work in the Red Army,” “On the Marxist-Leninist Instructions of the Leadership Resources of the Red Army,” and “The Current International Situation and the Foreign Policy of the USSR.” All these documents and, of course in particular, the text of the propaganda instructions upon which they were based, “On the Tasks of the Political Propaganda in the Red Army in the Near Future,” were drenched with the spirit of the offensive plan of the General Staff that was being worked out at the same time. For example, the directive “On the Political Education of the Men and Non-Commissioned Officers of the Red Army in the Summer Period of 1941,” which was, likewise, issued to the troops. It had been prepared by the Main Administration for Political Propaganda and recalled the words of Lenin: “as soon as we are strong enough to smash capitalism completely, we will grab it by the throat. In it, it was also remarked that “the Red Army will only conduct a defensive war; but the truth is sometimes forgotten that every war waged by the Soviet Union will be a just war.”

Such words, expressed at such a time, reveal the true reality of the situation: it was not a question of “preempting” the threat of foreign aggression, but rather achieving “extensive plans based on Communist ambitions.” The allegedly necessary preventive blow served merely as an occasion and pretext for the elimination of Germany, “Fascism,” and, thereby, the principal obstacle to the expansion of Soviet power. Of course, in view of such lofty political objectives as those of the world revolution, as Valeri Danilov puts it, “the initiation of hostilities by the Soviet Union against any country at all, in Stalin’s view, was deemed justified, even a moral affair.” The plan of attack of the General Staff and the Directives of the Main Administration for Political Propaganda of the Red Army complemented each other and both served the same purpose. These documents were in accord with Stalin’s remarks before the graduates of the Military Academies on May 5, 1941, as well as with the political speeches of Zhdanov, Kalinin, and other leading Bolshevik officials, and were therefore issued upon Stalin’s instructions. This is confirmed by two accompanying letters from Army Commissar First Rank Zaporozhets relating to the Propaganda directives of May 26-27, 1941. In these letters he repeatedly and deliberately confirmed that the documents were assembled “based upon the instructions of Comrade Stalin, which he had issued on the occasion of the graduation of the students of the Academies” on May 5, 1941. Following a detailed analysis of the propaganda directives prepared at the highest political levels, Vladimir Nevezhin arrives at the same conclusion, i.e., that they were issued “in the spirit of Stalin’s appearance before the graduates of the Military Academies” in the Kremlin on May 5, 1941. “The guiding propaganda documentation of May and June 1941, constantly stresses the view,” he writes, “that the USSR, in the situation that was developing, was compelled and duty bound to take the initiative in dealing the first blow, beginning the war of attack with the objective of expanding the borders of Socialism.”

As early as May 1941, a large-scale propaganda campaign was initiated with the objective of adapting all human resources of the Red Army to Stalin’s demands, both politically and ideologically, in accordance with the concept of an offensive war. Thus, the Department for Political Propaganda of the 5th Army, in consultation with the Chief of the 7th Department of the GUPPKA, who was sent from Moscow, worked out a “Plan for Politically Securing Military Operations during the Offensive” that reveals that Stalin’s directives were being immediately implemented. This document was captured by German troops in the headquarters building of the 5th Army of the Kiev Special Military District in Luck, in addition to other important documents. The document contains detailed instructions by the Chief of Political Propaganda of the 5" Army, apparently Uronov, for the political and propagandistic preparation and implementation of a surprise attack on the German Wehrmacht. This “Plan for Politically Securing Military Operations during the Offensive” was worked out on the directive of the GUPPKA (“On the Tasks of Political Propaganda...”) on Stalin’s orders, and apparently upon additional instructions from the emissary from Moscow. The plan states: “The German Army has lost the taste for a further improvement in military technology. A significant part of the German Army has become tired of the war.”

Accordingly, a report from the Leader for Political Propaganda of the 5th Army from Rovno dated May 4, 1941, on the “Morale of the Population in the General Gouvernement” noted the “first indications of a collapse in morale in the German Wehrmacht.” German soldiers were said to be unsatisfied, and this dissatisfaction was said to find expression in “open and covert opinions against the war and against Hitler’s policies,” “in hostile statements,” in “the distribution of Communist propaganda literature,” in “drunkenness,” “quarrelsomeness,” “suicides,” “lack of enjoyment in doing service,” and “desertion.” In plain language, the “Plan for Politically Securing Military Operations during the Offensive,” says:

“It is necessary to deal the enemy a very hard, lightning-like blow, in order to quickly shatter the morale and strength of resistance of the soldiers... a lightning-like blow by the Red Army will undoubtedly have the consequence of a growing and deepening of the phenomena of decomposition already becoming perceptible in the enemy army...”

The “concentration of the army, the capture of lines of departure, and preparation to traverse the Bug [River]” were viewed as the “first” stage, and this formulation alone shows the preparation of an offensive war.

…The “Plan for the Political Protection...” gave the political workers of the 5th Army exact instructions about their duties during the forthcoming offensive operations. The extensive propaganda preparations even included the publication of newspapers (“number of copies for the first few days, in German: 50,000”) as well as leaflets for both German soldiers and the Polish population. Suitable leaflets for “enemy troops,” “the content of which is to conceal our intentions while exposing the imperialistic plans of the enemy, and inciting German soldiers to disobedience,” were already being prepared in large numbers even before the outbreak of the war. Thus it was not surprising that “leaflets of the Soviet Union for German soldiers” were discovered at Shakiak, Lithuania, in the sector of the German 16th Army, as early as the first day of the war—June 22, 1941. These leaflets, according to the High Command of the 16th Army, “are decisive proof of Soviet military preparations.”

Not a few political workers and officers of the Red Army have testified to the effects of the anti-German war propaganda that was now going into high gear. A paper entitled “Politkom und Politorg” states:

“Thus, the aim of Soviet propaganda, shortly before the beginning of the eastern campaign, was unequivocal. Quite unexpectedly, new slogans appeared: Germany is in a bad way. Lack of all necessities... Stalin believes that a second world war is brewing, which will be fought on German territory this time.”

The Commissar of the 16th Infantry Division, Goriainov, a deserter, made the following written statement on July 21, 1941, that was transmitted to the Foreign Office:

“On June 15, 1941, in Gagala camp (Zsoland), on a furlough day, Sunday, the Divisional Commissar Mshavandse, in a speech to the Red Army men and the commanders, declared that we would not wait for a German attack, but would rather seek a favorable moment and then attack Germany ourselves.”

The Brigade Commander of the 7th Infantry Brigade, Nikonov (Timofeev), also a deserter, active in the Political Department of the Staff of the 13th Army until August 8, 1941, reported on August 23, 1941, that the propaganda campaign against Germany was

“officially stopped after conclusion of the Non-Aggression Pact. Covertly, however, it continued without letup, and was carried on with particular vehemence among the leadership cadres of the Red Army. There was open incitement everywhere after May 1941.”

That a change for the worse set in, starting in May 1941, did not remain unknown to German radio reconnaissance. “The radio messages quite suddenly reveal a hostile mood against German soldiers that had not been hitherto perceivable,” stated a radio-interception report of the 44th Infantry Division of May 19, 1941.

The hostile mood incited in the Red Army was expressively reflected in a political talk by a decisive authoritative official on June 15, 1941, before an apparently prominent audience. It was held one week before the beginning of the war, only two days after the famous declaration by the TASS agency which was obviously intended to have a “tranquilizing” effect. The full text of this revealing propaganda speech fell into the hands of the German troops on July 19, 1941, in the Buiuoani barracks before Chisinau. The following are a few key sentences:

“In recent times, Germany has been able to expand by bloating itself up through the conquest of other countries, but this does not mean that it has become capable of survival... the war is dragging on, and is acquiring a form that will be fatally exhausting to Germany... Germany can wage blitzkriegs, but not a long war. England can dare to wage a long war, a war to exhaustion, all the more so because it is supported by the USA...Germany is obviously striding toward its defeat.”

Due to Germany’s unfavorable political-strategic situation, this high official, in regard to the Soviet Union, on July 15, 1941, drew a conclusion that was in harmony with Stalin’s directives of the previous month. He said:

“The peoples of the USSR are against imperialistic war. We are for revolutionary war. The peoples of the USSR are ready for this war of revolution. They like to fight and are good fighters... We are for the just war. In the interests of accelerating the world revolution, we support the peoples who are fighting for their liberation. The Red Army draws the following conclusions:
1. Utmost vigilance.
2. Constant military preparedness...
4, Readiness to carry out, with honor, the forthcoming orders of our Bolshevik party and the Soviet government, under Comrade Stalin.
5.The Red Army will struggle to achieve the complete annihilation of the enemy...”

In accordance with Stalin’s instructions, the Main Administration for Political Propaganda in fact succeeded in creating a mood within the Red Army before June 22, 1941, in which war between the Soviet Union and Germany was believed to be inevitable and that the Red Army would have to deal the first blow. There are many concurrent testimonies in this regard, a few of which should be noted. Thus, Abschnittsstab (Section Staff) Gotzmann (German 17th Army) reported on May 22, 1941:

“Russian Commissars, who are active in party work (Politruks), are educating the population to the effect that war with Germany is inevitable, that the Army will have to fight against the Reich, and that the poor must fight against the rich.”

Similarly, even before the outbreak of the war, Panzer Group 4 reported the statement of a deserter:

“Since Molotov’s visit to Berlin [Nov. 1940], the prevalent opinion is that war between Germany and Russia is inevitable. The officers say, we will attack when Stalin gives the order.”

…Shortly before his extradition to the Soviets in 1946, the Major General of the Vlasov Army (VS KONR; Military Forces of the Committee to Free the Peoples of Russia; ROA Army to Free Russia), Meandrov, former Chief of the Operations Branch of the 6th Red Army, made the following statement: “The policy of the government for the preparation of a big war was completely clear to us... What was described to us as defensive measures proved in reality to be long-prepared and carefully concealed plans of aggression.” “The policies of the Soviet Union were directed against Germany even after 1939,” said a well-informed official of the Central Apparatus of the NKVD, Zhigunov, as early as September 18, 1941.

“The Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 was concluded to drive Germany into war, and to profit from the resulting weakening of Germany... If Germany had not preempted Moscow, the Soviet Union would have attacked Germany, sooner or later.”

Such statements are still indefinite as to the possible date of a Soviet attack. On November 20, 1941, Lieutenant General Ershakov, Commander- in-Chief of the 20th Army, referred to an alleged statement by Zhukov in the spring of 1941, according to which war must be avoided in 1941. While such opinions are supposed to have been expressed in the spring of 1941, Stalin, however, deviated from this, since there is significant proof that he brought the attack date forward. Everything indicates that the date must have lain between July and September, because the Red Army could not have wintered in western territory in such massive numbers. As German command authorities also recognized, a movement to the rear would have been required in early summer, unless these forces were simply preparing to attack. The fact that Stalin wished to delay war for a bit longer, “even if by only a few weeks” (Volkogonov); “even if only for a month, a week or a few days” (Danilov)” for tactical reasons, ie., to complete his preparations, indicates offensive intentions during the summer. What would have been gained by such a short respite, if the intent had not been to attack the German Reich by surprise?

Furthermore, what did the Politburo of the Central Committee mean, according to point 183 of Protocol No. 33 in its meeting of June 4, 1941, when it made the decision to fix July 1 as the date of “the establishment of an Infantry Division consisting of personnel of Polish nationality and Polish language in units of the Red Army.”? In Boris Sokolov’s opinion, the arguments in favor of a “Soviet attack upon Germany on July 6, 1941” thus acquire “the status of a scientific certainty.”

Nor is it any accident that Soviet Commanders and Staff Officers who, after all, were not just exposed to a massive propaganda campaign, but were also, at least to some extent, entrusted with the present situation of the war preparations, expected an initiation of hostilities between July and September 1941. Captain Krasko, Adjutant of the 661st Infantry Regiment of the 200th Infantry Division, declared, for example, on July 26, 1941: “In May 1941, among the officers, the opinion was already expressed that the war would begin right after July 1.” Major Koskov, Commander of the 24th Infantry Regiment of the 44th Infantry Division, testified:

“In the view of the Regimental Commander, the justification— namely the evacuation of the western Ukraine, ‘because the Soviets were allegedly attacked without preparation’ was in no way true, because Soviet military preparations had been underway for a long time, and, in accordance with the extent and intensity of these military preparations, the Russians would have attacked Germany of their own accord in two to three weeks at the latest.”

Colonel Gaevsky, Regimental Commander of the 29th Armored Division, declared to the Germans on August 6, 1941:

“Among the commanders, there has been a lot of talk about a war between Germany and Russia. There was the opinion that the war would break out on approximately July 15, 1941, upon which date Russia would assume the role of the attacker."

Lieutenant Kharchenko of the 131st Infantry Division stated on August 21, 1941:

“that large-scale preparations for war with Germany were underway since the spring of 1941. The general opinion was that war would have broken out at the end of August or the beginning of September at the latest, i.e., after the harvest, if Germany had not preempted us. The intent to conduct the war on foreign soil was obvious. All these leadership plans were upset by the outbreak of the war inside Russia.”

…The key to an understanding of Stalin’s offensive preparations in the spring of 1941 lies in the great “overestimation of the strengths of the USSR and the Red Army,” in an “overestimation of the fighting skills of our troops,” in a “huge... overestimation of our capacities.” These overestimations were made by Soviet military officers of all ranks, including Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasilevsky. Military historians unanimously and repeatedly make similar statements. This feeling of Soviet superiority was, materially speaking, very justified in view of the multiple superiority of the Red Army in tanks, aircraft, and artillery pieces. Furthermore, the industrial capacity of the USSR had increased to an extent where it was able to equip the Soviet armed forces “with a truly inconceivable amount of armaments” within very short periods of time. This superiority related, moreover, not just to equipment and materiel, but to personnel and even leadership cadres. For example, it suffices to mention that, for example, the German Reichsheer had only 4,000 officers in 1935, while the Red Army at that time had over 50,000 “commanders,” thus the Germans suffered from a significantly poorer initial situation. Where were the Germans to obtain sufficient numbers of officers during the armaments phase? Soviet superiority extended to the sector of leadership cadres as well, since, as Colonel Filippov has proven, even the gigantic bloodletting of the Great Purge had been to some extent already compensated for by the summer of 1941 through graduates of the numerous military training installations, including the academy of the General Staff and the Frunze Military Academy. Stalin also counted upon an incipient demoralization of the troops of the Wehrmacht. In addition, the prevalent opinion in Moscow was that the German proletariat would help the Red Army in the event of war with the Soviet Union. This was a delusion, but such delusions gave increased vehemence to the aggressive mood before June 22, 1941, rather than, of course, reducing it.

The consciousness of Soviet strength combined, at the same time, with a knowledge of the difficult political-strategic situation in Germany, which could not, as was well-known, fight a war on two fronts, led to the decision that has been called the “kernel of Bolshevism” ever since the time of Lenin. Namely, that it was important to exploit a unique historical opportunity and bring about a so-called “revolutionary war of liberation,” thus vastly expanding the power of the Soviet State, as crudely illustrated by the symbolism of the Soviet governmental coat of arms. Stalin and Kalinin, as well as other high officials such as Zhdanov, openly propagated Soviet imperialism in several of their speeches in the spring of 1941. In November 1940, the feeling of a growing superiority had given Stalin the occasion to make demands in Berlin which, at any rate, made one thing quite plain: he saw no danger in Germany at that time. The Red Army had taken up offensive deployment on the Western border with overwhelming forces which were not organized for defensive purposes even as it became evident that, for its part, Germany was also preparing an attack.

It is today proven beyond a doubt that Stalin was very closely informed about the German offensive. As early as 1966, Soviet Defense Minister and Marshal of the Soviet Union Grechko made it quite clear that perhaps some front-line troops may have been surprised by the German offensive, but not the Soviet government and Red Army leadership"! Remarkably, Khrushchev, in addition to other military officers, left no doubt in this regard when he declared: “No one who has the most minimal political understanding can believe that we were surprised by an unexpected and treacherous attack.” One cannot speak of a “German sneak attack,” as Colonel Filippov recently put it. Stalin’s feelings of superiority was, furthermore, so great that he thought himself capable of defeating “any surprise attack by Germany and its allies at all... and to destroy the attacker.” The President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Kalinin, expressed this conviction in a lecture before the V. I. Lenin Military Political Academy on June 5, 1941, openly assuring his listeners:

“The Germans intend to attack us... We are waiting for it! The sooner they do that, the better, since we will then wring their necks once and for all time."

With such an attitude, neither Stalin nor the Politburo itself, on June 22, 1941, doubted even for a moment that they would be successful in dealing Hitler the defeat that he deserved. General Sudoplatov, Chief of the Reconnaissance Service, even spoke of the “Big Lie of a panic in the Kremlin.” Stalin was not surprised on June 22, 1941, but, on the contrary, as Colonel General Volkogonov stresses, the shock set in only several days later, i.e., when the illusions evaporated and catastrophe was looming on the front line, a catastrophe in which it finally became clear that the Germans were, nevertheless, superior in combat...

Stalin, the General Staff, and the GUPPKA, in any case, expected an easy victory by the Red Army. They expected that the huge offensive they were planning would end with the complete destruction of the enemy with only a few Soviet casualties. As for Hitler and the Germans, they had only a very incomplete notion of what the Soviets were preparing. When one considers the extent of these preparations, however, it becomes clear that Hitler under high pressure only barely preempted an attack planned by Stalin. June 22, 1941, was therefore pretty much the last date on which it would have been possible to initiate a “preventive war.”

Colonel Petrov, a candidate in the historical sciences, expressed this in plain but accurate language on the anniversary of the victory on May 8, 1991, in a leading article of the official party organ Pravda:

“As a result of the overestimation of our own possibilities and the underestimation of enemy possibilities, we drew up unrealistic plans of an offensive nature before the war. In keeping with these plans, we began the deployment of the Soviet armed forces on the western border. But the enemy preempted us.”

Finally, the Russian historian M. Nikitin should be mentioned who made a detailed analysis of the objectives of the Soviet leadership during the decisive months of May and June 1941. He summarized his research findings in the following words:

“We once again repeat that the fundamental objective of the USSR consisted of expanding the ‘Front of Socialism’ to the greatest possible territorial extent, ideally to include all of Europe. In Moscow’s opinion, circumstances favored the realization of this scheme. The occupation of large parts of the continent by Germany, the protracted futile war, the increasing dissatisfaction of the population of the occupied countries, the dispersion of the forces of the Wehrmacht on various fronts, the prospects of a conflict between Japan and the United States—all these factors were thought to give the Soviet leadership a unique chance to smash Germany by surprise attack, and to ‘liberate Europe’ from ‘rotting capitalism.’”

A study of the guiding documents of the Central Committee of the VKP (b), in Nikitin’s view, “together with the data on the immediate military offensive preparations of the Red Army... unequivocally proves the intention of the Soviet leadership to attack Germany in the summer of 1941.”

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 3
Soviet Soldiers Were driven into Combat by Terror

Soviet historical writing on the German-Soviet war is dominated by a propaganda claim that has been maintained with iron consistency to the present day regardless of all other considerations. This claim, that of so- called “Soviet patriotism,” was first publicly made by Stalin on the twenty- seventh anniversary of the October Revolution on November 6, 1944 Briefly, the claim is that the peoples of the Soviet Union, filled with “fervent and self-sacrificing Soviet patriotism”, “ardent love of their Socialist homeland”, “limitless dedication to the cause of the Communist Party”, and “limitless faith in the ideals of Communism,” “rallied around the Communist Party and the Soviet government,” and merged together in a “burning hatred for the conqueror.” The “moral-political unity of Soviet society,” and the “unshakeable mutual friendship of the peoples of the USSR”— according to the stereotypical formula that was to be unceasingly repeated from that time onward—was alleged to have been “gloriously” confirmed and vindicated during the “Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union.”

In regard to the Red Army, Stalinist propagandists never tired of asserting that every soldier in the Red Army was a “boundlessly devoted fighter for his Socialist homeland,” motivated by “feelings of the highest dedication... to the task entrusted to him of defending the Socialist home- land.” He was inspired by “the highest morals, magnificent resistance, courage, and heroism,” in fulfillment of “the holy duty to defend the Socialist homeland,” “for Party and government, for Comrade Stalin,” and, therefore, prepared to fight to the last bullet and the last drop of blood “for our Socialist homeland, for our honor and freedom, for the mighty Stalin.” As late as October 1991, regardless of all evidence to the contrary, at a time when Comrade Stalin had long since been unmasked as a criminal against humanity, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Deputy Chief of the Institute for Military History of the Defense Department in Moscow, Major General Dr. Khor’kov, at an International Conference on “Operation Barbarossa” organized by the Military Historical Research Office of the Bundeswehr in Freiburg, nevertheless, felt entitled to speak of the “will to resistance of the Soviet people and Soviet army” on June 22, 1941, of the “mass heroism of the Soviet soldiers,” of the “mass heroism, courage and steadfastness” alleged to have been exhibited by the Red Army from the very outbreak of hostilities, at all times, everywhere, and without exception. If such statements are accepted without objection, and even applauded, by audiences with some claim to factual knowledge and professional acumen, what can be expected of the general public, whose historical knowledge is largely based upon the superficial reports dished out by an almost ignorant, but politically clearly committed journalism?

Anyone with any knowledge of Russian military history is aware of the high quality of Russian military spirit, the oft-proven bravery and steadfastness of Russian combatants during attack and, most especially, in the defense of their native country. The Germans in 1941 frequently underestimated the great degree of love of homeland and country always felt by the Russian people and Russian soldiers. German documents prepared after the outbreak of the war mention innumerable examples of the fact that many Soviet soldiers, for whatever reasons, continued their dedicated and self-sacrificing resistance in many localities until they were killed. Such examples are, however, deceptively and unreliably generalized by Soviet propagandists while consciously and deliberately ignoring everything not in accordance with the propaganda image of Soviet heroism. The question, nevertheless, arises: why would Russian soldiers—not to mention other soldiers conscripted from the oppressed peoples of the USSR—fight “‘to the last bullet and the last drop of blood” for the same terroristic regime that had inflicted the most atrocious sufferings and privations upon its own citizens and peoples?

Stalin himself was initially blinded by illusory misconceptions as to the strength and cohesiveness of the Red Army. Days after the invasion, he was paralyzed by shock but had no illusions in this regard. He accurately attributed the collapse of the front, not only to a failure of leadership, but above all, to a disinclination to fight on the part of the troops of the Red Army. To Stalin, there was only one way to inspire Soviet soldiers with “Soviet patriotism” and to generate the frame of mind that is still referred to, even today, as “mass heroism.” This was the same method that had hitherto always proven effective and upon which Stalin’s entire system was based: the infliction of the greatest possible compulsion and terror, combined with an endless propaganda campaign intended to ensure political sway. On July 3, 1941, Stalin dared for the first time after the German attack to make a radio address to the peoples of the Soviet Union. In manifold repetitions, he skillfully revealed the conclusion at which he had just arrived: “There must be no place in our ranks for grumblers and cowards, panic mongers and deserters.” In this speech, his first of the war, Stalin said:

“We must wage a relentless struggle against all forms of subversion behind the front, against deserters, panic mongers, and rumor mongers; we must annihilate all spies, subversives, and enemy paratroopers. All those that harm the national defense through panic mongering and cowardice must be handed over to courts martial without regard to persons... The Red Army, Red Navy, and all Soviet citizens, must defend every inch of our Soviet territory. We must fight to the last drop of blood for our cities and villages.”

The leadership apparatus of the Red Army immediately transposed these desiderata of a general nature into orders intended to give Soviet soldiers only one choice: to fight or die.

The Main Administration for Political Propaganda of the Red Army (GUPPKA), under Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis, pulled out all the stops to hammer into every “individual soldier” “the speech of the Leader of the Peoples, the President of the State Defense Committee, Comrade Stalin, as well as an awareness of the tasks that lie ahead of us.” The corresponding watchwords were issued in a series of directives and orders, such as Order No. 20 of July 14, Order No. 081 of July 15, 1941, and other fundamental orders. All these orders complied with the slogan of defending “every foot of the Soviet homeland,” as expressed in the familiar formula, “to the last drop of blood” and “‘the last breath.” Unauthorized “withdrawal from positions,” “leaving the battlefield,” and “permitting oneself to be captured,” were declared “crimes against your people, against the Soviet homeland and government.” “Subversives, panic mongers, cowards, deserters, and the spreaders of provocative rumors” among the “soldiers, commanders (officers), and political fellow-workers” were henceforth to be opposed with a “ruthless struggle,” the “most brutal and severest countermeasures,” and “merciless” persecution.

Just what this was to mean in practice was soon revealed on June 26, 1941, when a soldier in the 131 Mechanized Division of the Red Army was bayoneted to death before the assembled troops for his failure to carry out an insignificant order. “May all traitors to the homeland receive similar treatment,” stated the writ, prepared in the form of an order. The command authorities, emulating the Main Administration for Political Propaganda, naturally hastened to announce similar cases. They specified names for the purpose of general deterrence and selected those from the plethora of executions that now became everyday occurrences. Order No. 1 to the troops of the Southwest Front on July 6, 1941, announced the executions of Red Army soldiers Ignatovsky, Vergun, Koliba, and Adamov. The Commander- in-Chief, Colonel General Kirponos, Member of the Military Council Mikhailov, and Deputy Chief of Staff General Trutko, in a joint proclamation, stated menacingly:

“At times such as these, deserters who betray their comrades, who forget their service oath, deserve only one sentence: the death sentence, accompanied by contempt and expulsion from our ranks.”

The West Front was also purged upon (the former People’s Commissar for Defense) Marshal of the Soviet Union Timoshenko’s assumption of the position of the arrested Commander-in-Chief, General of the Army Pavlov at the end of June. On July 6, 1941, order No. 01, jointly signed by Timoshenko and Member of the Military Council, Army Commissar Mekhlis, was announced to the troops of the Western Front, and was intended to serve as a warning to the entire leadership corps, including all officers down to the rank of platoon leaders. It was announced that Captain Sbirannik, Military Doctor 2 Rank Ovchinnikov, Military Doctor 2 Rank Beliavsky, Major Dykmann, Battalion Commissar Krol, and an adjutant to a depart- mental chief of the Front Staff, Berkovich, had been handed over to a court martial “for conspicuous cowardice” and “treason.”

Prikaz (Order) 02, issued to the troops of the West Front on the following day, July 7, 1941, and, likewise, signed by Timoshenko and Mekhlis, continued the intimidation of the military leadership. On this occasion, it was announced that the Inspector of Engineers of the Red Army, Major Umanets, had been handed over to a court martial “for failure to obey a combat order, and for treason.” Umanets’ crime consisted of a failure to blow up the bridges over the Berezina near Borisov in time to prevent them falling into German hands. This order was brought to the attention of all officers of the West Front down to the rank of platoon leaders, as well as to all officers on the endangered Southwest Front and the troops of the NKVD. On July 8, 1941, Timoshenko, whose Military Council now included the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of White Russia, Ponomarenko, in addition to Mekhlis, issued Order № 03, which was intended as a cautionary warning for the troops of the West Front. This deterrent order announced the sentences handed down by courts martial against the Commander of the 188th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Colonel Galinsky, and Battalion Commander Cerkovnikov. The “crime” of these two officers simply was that the Germans had succeeded in capturing part of the military equipment of the anti-aircraft regiment near Minsk during a surprise attack on July 26, 1941.

This ruthless intervention by the former People’s Commissar for Defense (Timoshenko) was intended to set an example and was soon emulated by command agencies on all levels, such as, for example, the 20th Army, under Lieutenant General Kurochkin, who announced to all units, by Order № 04 of July 16, 1941, that he had ordered the Commander of the 34th Armored Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Liapin, the Battalion Commander of the 33 Armored Regiment, First Lieutenant Piatin, and the Deputy Commander of the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 17" Armored Division, Captain Churakov, handed over to a court martial “for cowardice and for engendering a mood of panic.” This was equivalent to a death sentence. Marshals of the Soviet Union Voroshilov and Budenny were, of course, no less zealous than their colleague Timoshenko. The same was true of General of the Army Zhukov, who was feared in the Red Army for his brutality. In his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the West Front, Zhukov gave an order on October 13, 1941, that all “cowards and panic mongers” were to be shot on the spot. Soviet military tribunals were there simply to ensure that the sentences were carried out. Order № 0179 of November 19, 1941, of the Commander-in-Chief of the 43 Army, Major General Golubev, threatened that all “cowards” would be “killed like dogs.”

As early as July 10, 1941, Stalin demanded that the “treacherous” commanders of the Northwest Front who had withdrawn before the enemy would be held to account. Holding the entire Front Staff of the Army Corps and Divisions responsible for this “ignominy,” he issued orders that all “cowards and traitors” were to be dealt with on the spot. Voroshilov, assigned by Stalin as new Commander-in-Chief of the Northwest Front, as well as Member of the Military Council, Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s closest confidants in the Politburo, transformed this order into action. Order No. 3 of July 14, 1941, demanded that all “commanders (officers) and soldiers” who withdrew from the front line were to be hauled before a court martial and sentenced to death, or simply “annihilated on the spot.” Continuing in this line of reasoning but further enriched with insults was Order № 5 of July 16, 1941, issued by the Commander-in-Chief of the Southwest Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Budenny. On July 13, 1941, the President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Kalinin, placed the lawful sanction for the execution of death sentences passed by courts martial upon a broader basis. Executions of officers, political workers, and soldiers in the Red Army, in large numbers—both with and without a legal verdict—had long been an everyday occurrence, but Stalin once again intervened to spread the terror even further.

Stalin decided to make an example of the demoted and arrested Commander-in-Chief of the West Front, General of the Army Pavlov and his staff, thus sending a shock through the entire Red Army and distracting attention from Stalin’s own responsibility for the collapse of the West Front. He ordered death sentences against General of the Army Pavlov as well as against the Chief of Staff of the West Front, Major General Klimovskikh, the Chief of Signal Communications of the Front Staff, Major General Grigoriev, and the Commander-in-Chief of the 4th Army, Major General Korobkov. The judgement, signed by the President of the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the blood-stained army jurist UI’rikh, was correspondingly drawn up upon Stalin’s instructions, presented to Stalin, and approved without any formal court proceedings. Such was the usual practice of Soviet justice as dispensed by Soviet courts martial.

On July 16, 1941, on his own responsibility as President of the State Defense Committee, Stalin issued Order No. 00381 announcing the forthcoming sentencing of the above mentioned generals to the Red Army, as well as the sentencing of the Commander of the 41st Infantry Corps, Major General Kosobutsky, the Commander of the 60th Mountain Infantry Division, Major General Shalikhov, the Regimental Commissar, Kurochkin, the Commander of the 30th Infantry Division, Major General Galaktionov, and the Regimental Commissar, Eliseev. The defendants were accused of “cowardice, failure to supervise, incompetence, lack of organization, abandonment of weapons to the enemy, and unauthorized withdrawal from a position.” That these accusations were not entirely without justification is clear from Order No. 001919 of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, apparently signed on September 12, 1941, by Stalin and the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal of the Soviet Union Shaposhnikov, that contains a revealing passage:

“There are numerous elements on all fronts who desert to the enemy, throwing away their weapons upon the first contact with the enemy and taking others with them... at the same time, the number of decent commanders and commissars is not very great.”

Stalin would hardly have made such an admission if it were not true.
The institution of the military commissars and politruks, reintroduced on the same date, July 16, 1941, for the supervision of the troop leaders of all ranks, is additional proof of just how unreliable the political attitude and morale of the Red Army were in fact believed to be. That the NKVD troops made no exceptions is revealed by the example of the 23rd Motorized Infantry Division of the Operational NKVD troops. On July 12, 1941, the Political Deputy (Zampolit) of the Divisional Commander and Chief of the Department for Political Propaganda of the 23rd Motorized Infantry Division of the NKVD, Regimental Commissar Vodiakha, by Order No. 02/0084, drew the attention of all subordinate formations and units to examples of “failure to understand the nature of the Patriotic War of the Peoples of the Soviet Union against the German fascists.” Regardless of the military program for the “activity of the Soviet peoples and its glorious Red Army,” set forth on radio on July 3, 1941, by the “Leader of the Peoples,” Comrade Stalin, there were, in Vodiakha’s words, “persons among the ranks of our fighters, and even in the leadership, who voice doubt as to our victory, expressing defeatist opinions, praising the alleged power of the German fascist army, repeating fairy tales about the excellent provisions in the German Army, and even expressing doubt as to the veracity of our press.” Such talk constituted a “hostile, extremely harmful influence, aiding and encouraging the enemy.” The disseminators of such “mendacious rumors” were now to be called to account and handed over to courts martial according to an Ukaz (order) published on July 6, 1941, by the President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Kalinin.

The much famed “ardent Soviet patriotism” and “mass heroism” of the Red Army, not to mention, quite simply, its concept of honor, must indeed be open to question if the Commander-in-Chiefs and Military Councils of all Fronts and Armies, the commanders of all military districts, the commanders of all corps, divisions, regiments, and battalions, in addition to the entire officer personnel of the Soviet Army, including company, squadron and battery chiefs, really needed to be “warned” by their Supreme Commander in the coarsest language that “all signs of cowardice and lack of organization” would be “punished with an iron hand,” and that the “strictest methods” would be used “without regard to consideration of persons.” In the German Wehrmacht, such a degree of mistrust, accompanied by such shameful measures, was totally unknown, even during the concluding phase of the war. Stalin announced to all Soviet officers down to the regimental commanders:

“I hereby inform you that in the future all those who violate their service oath, all those who forget their duty to the homeland and harm the good reputation of the soldiers of the Red Army, as well as all cowards and panic mongers, all those who abandon positions without authorization or who abandon weapons to the enemy without fighting, will be punished without regard to persons: mercilessly, with the greatest severity, according to martial law.”

At the same time, a large group of Soviet generals was arrested. On July 28, 1941, the leadership personnel of the Red Army was apprised of the executions of Generals Pavlov, Klimovskikh, Grigoriev, and Korobkov by Order № 250 of the People’s Commissar of Defense. The impression was thereby given that the previous farce of the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR had constituted a regular legal proceeding. On October 28, 1941, Colonel General Shtern and Lieutenant General of the Air Force Smushkevich were shot; Lieutenant General of the Air Force Pumpur and Major General of the Air Force Shakht and other generals were shot in February 1942.

Similarly, the measures taken so far were only a prelude to Headquarters Order № 270 of the Supreme High Command of August 16, 1941, signed by Stalin in his capacity as President of the State Defense Committee, as well as by Molotov, in his capacity as Stalin’s Deputy, and by Marshals of the Soviet Union Budenny, Voroshilov, Timoshenko, Shaposhnikov, and General of the Army Zhukov. This order was read aloud to all soldiers in the Red Army. If any further proof is required that the much-famed “Soviet patriotism” and “mass heroism” of Soviet soldiers was nothing more than a propaganda myth, then such proof is to be found in this fundamental Order of Stalin, which has no equivalent in military history. Like the order of July 16, 1941, Order 270 of August 16, 1941, once again repeated that there were “inconstant, faint-hearted, cowardly elements in the ranks of the Red Army, not only among soldiers of the Red Army, but among the leadership.” The fact that “cowardly elements” were the principal object of such a basic order reveals that these “elements” cannot have been a marginal phenomenon. What did such “cowardice” consist of? The answer is that it consisted of a prevalent inclination among Soviet troops not to fight to “the last bullet and the last drop of blood,” but rather, to flee forward to the Germans and be captured, or retreat to the rear. The Order of Stalin № 270 threatened draconian measures to prevent flight in either direction.

Three generals were once again used to set a deterrent example: the Commander-in-Chief of the 28th Army, Lieutenant General Kachalov (who had, in reality, been killed on August 4, 1941, by a direct hit with an artillery shell near Starinka, and whose soldierly death was exploited for purposes of intimidation); the Commander-in-Chief of the 12th Army, Major General Ponedelin (who had been captured while severely wounded); and the Commander of the 13th Infantry Corps, Major General Kirillov. These three generals were accused of having permitted themselves to be captured by the German fascists “in a cowardly manner,” thus committing the crimes of desertion and violating their service oath. This accusation was in fact directed, not at these generals alone, but at all members of the army military councils, all commanders, political officials, members of special operations groups, regimental and battalion commanders, and practically every soldier in the Red Army who failed to allow himself to be killed for “Comrade Stalin” on the foremost front line. “All cowards and deserters must be annihilated,” Stalin repeated. He now ordered that all “commanders and political leaders,... who flee from the enemy, or allow themselves to be captured,... are to be considered evil deserters, as violators of their service oath, and traitors to their country,” and “must be annihilated on the spot.” On August 25, 1950, following five years of investigation after their release from German captivity, the Generals Ponedelin and Kirillov ought to be sentenced to death by the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR and subsequently shot. All “superiors and Red Army officers” who allowed themselves to be captured instead of fighting to the death would be annihilated by all “means, both terrestrial and aerial.” Overcrowded German prisoner of war camps such as Orel and Novgorod-Severkij were thus attacked and bombed by the Soviet Air Force. That the Soviet government recognized no Soviet prisoners of war, but rather, only traitors to the Soviet homeland, had become general knowledge during the Finnish Winter War at the very latest. Every Soviet citizen was familiar with the reprehensible extension of liability to all members of a family for the crimes of one member. All members of the Red Army were once again expressly warned that the families of all officers and political workers who surrendered would be arrested, while the families of all Red Army soldiers who surrendered would lose “all State support or assistance.” The practical application was far worse in most cases.

It was typical of Stalin, and characteristic of conditions in the Red Army, that the dissemination of fear and terror, rather than appeals to much famed “Soviet patriotism,” was now considered the most suitable manner in which to induce members of the Red Army to fight for their “Socialist homeland.” This was made even clearer during the crisis of 1942, when Soviet soldiers of all ranks were once again directly addressed in menacing language by Stalin, regardless of the system of terror that had been perfected in the meantime. Following the occurrence of a potential breakthrough by German assault troops into the interior of the country in July 1942, German documents spoke of “panicky” and “uncontrolled retreat” on the part of Soviet troops. On July 28, 1942, Stalin, in his capacity of People’s Commissar for Defense, issued Order № 227, amounting, in practice, to a cruder version of Order № 270 of August 16, 1941. Order 227 unequivocally recalled that “panic mongers and cowards” were to be liquidated on the spot or handed over to military tribunals for sentencing. In the “Red Army of Workers and Farmers”—which was, nevertheless, simultaneously supposed to be inspired by “ardent Soviet patriotism” and “mass heroism”—the lower ranking officers, such as platoon leaders and company chiefs, in addition to all battalion and regimental commanders, and especially all generals, divisional and corps commanders, army commanders-in-chief and their military councils, military commissars and political leaders, not to mention the broad mass of soldiers, were suspected of being capable of “treason to the homeland” and threatened with the severest punishment. Stalin, furthermore, ordered the formation of 8,000-man punishment battalions, “according to the situation and strength,” filled with all fickle “middle and high-ranking leaders” and “political leaders of equal rank.” Punishment battalions were also formed out of all defeatist non-commissioned officers and personnel to afford them an opportunity “to redeem themselves with their blood for their crimes against the homeland.” To the members of these punishment battalions—which were ruthlessly assigned to particularly difficult sections of the front line—this meant, in practice, that they could only be amnestied in the event of a severe wound; in the event of a slight wound, they would be immediately sent back into combat as soon as it healed. Well-armed “blocking units” stationed to the rear of all combat troops were ordered to open fire upon all retreating units or soldiers, and “to shoot panic mongers and gossips on the spot.”

The degree to which one might justifiably assume a lack of “Soviet patriotism” and “mass heroism” among all ranks of the Red Army, even in 1942, was revealed, in particular, during the fighting in the foothills of the Caucasus after a German breakthrough in the Soviet front near Rostov. A summary German report on interrogations of prisoners of war, deserters, officers, and political workers described the degree of political and morale collapse on August 1, 1942, as follows: “The higher commanders fled first, followed by the officers and, finally the leaderless troops.” There were also reports of mass desertions of Soviet officers and soldiers… Stalin’s claims, as the author of Order № 227, about the inner disintegration of the troops was confirmed by the experience of the North Caucasus Front. Budenny was constrained to admit that, following the “disorderly withdrawal” from the Don, the “commanders and political workers of platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, and armies,” i.e., the entire military and political leadership personnel, precisely because they were filled with panic, was not in a position to put a stop to defeatism among the rank and file, thus failing to carry out “Comrade Stalin’s” order. This document, couched in roundabout phraseology, culminated in the well-known threat

“that all commanders and political workers seized by fear, all those who fear the Germans, will be beaten, [and] that... all cowards and panic mongers who run from the front, and all those who help them, will be shot.”

That these were no empty threat was revealed by the indiscriminate executions then reported everywhere, even for unimportant trifles.

Post-Soviet historical literature, which had no choice, so to speak, but to sacrifice Stalin—calling many of his criminal measures by their proper name—continues to racks its brain in support of certain Stalinist historical propaganda allegations. Among those that may not be questioned are: the myth of the “cowardly, treacherous, fascist surprise attack upon the unsuspecting, peaceful Soviet Union”; the formula of the “great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union,” which did not exist in that usage; not to mention the unquestioning “Soviet patriotism” and “mass heroism” of the soldiers of the Red Army. Stalin’s terrorization orders, such as, for example, Order № 270 and 227, are invariably described as a continuation of the unjustified repression of the 1930s, once again directed against the innocent, These orders are alleged to have resulted in unjustified damage to the Soviet war effort, just as if there had never been any large-scale “treason to the homeland” at all.

An analysis of the relevant documents, however, leads to a different conclusion. Stalin was concerned, not only with finding scapegoats for the disasters at the front—for which he himself was, after all, responsible—but also with compelling Soviet soldiers to fight under the threat of ruthless terror. Only through the dissemination of fear and terror did Stalin believe it possible to stabilize the front at a time when all the reports described a collapse in morale among the troops of the Red Army, although examples to the contrary should, of course, also be cited over and over again. A personal directive by Stalin on September 12, 1941 stated that the “infantry divisions of all fronts” contained “numerous panic mongers and regular hostile elements who throw away their rifles upon the first contact with the enemy, screaming ‘we are surrounded!’” “The result of this... is that the division takes flight, and that our equipment is abandoned on the spot.” Stalin, furthermore, admitted that “the number of consistent and steadfast commanders and commissars is not very great.” This was an accurate description of the situation as revealed by the documents of high command authorities from the summer and the fall of 1941.

Reports from the Chief of the Political Administration of the 20th Army to the Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis, speak of “mass desertions” in the 229th and 233rd Infantry Divisions between July 13 and July 23, 1941, as well as in the 13th Armored Division. Of the 12,000 men in the 229th Infantry Division, approximately 8,000 were said to have “disappeared without a trace.” The public prosecutors for the Red Army were said to have handed over dozens of officers to military tribunals, including colonels and battalion commanders, for fleeing in panic at the head of their men. Other officers were

“handed over to courts martial for removing their rank insignia, throwing away their Party books (commissars!), fleeing in civilian clothing, openly reading German leaflets (a Jewish commissar!), praising the German troops, etc.”

Nor were conditions in the 6th Army of the South Front much different in October 1941. On October 4, 1941, Commander-in-Chief, Major General Malinovsky, Member of the Military Council, Brigade Commissar Larin, and Chief of Staff, Brigade Commander Batiunia applied Order № 0014 to the subordinate units in menacing tones. The numbers of “missing,” and those “absent for other reasons”—especially in the 255th, 270th, and 275th Infantry Divisions—amounted to over 11,000 men, as compared to 167 men, which the units had admitted were taken prisoner between September 1 and October 1, 1941. These categories (missing and absent for other reasons) made up 67% of the total losses, a “scandalous phenomenon” according to Malinovsky, for which the commanders (officers) and military commissars were to be held unfailingly responsible.

Exact data are available as to the personnel of the armies on the Southwest Front. On September 1, 1941, the Staff of the Southwest Front (Chief of Staff, Major General Tupikov, Military Commissar Solov’ev, and Colonel Konovanov) was confronted with the painful task of supplying the Chief of the Main Administration for the Initial Establishment and Replacement of Troops of the Red Army, Army Commander First Rank Shchadenko, with an exact breakdown of all losses having occurred since the beginning of the war from the regions of the 5th, 37th, 26th, 38th, and 40th Armies. According to this report, no fewer than 94,648 soldiers, including 3,685 officers, were “missing” or “absent for other reasons,” of whom only 720 soldiers, including 31 officers, had allegedly been taken prisoner. The Commander-in-Chief of the Southwest Front, Colonel General Kirponos, Member of the Military Council, Burmistenko, and Chief of Staff, Major General Tupikov, furthermore, conceded in Order № 41 that these “ignominious cases of desertion and the absence of sections of troops” were further aggravated by the fact that, according to a report from the Chief of the NKVD troops, a total of 48,756 officers and soldiers had been arrested in the rear, when the 6th and 12th Armies were taken into consideration as well.

The Commander-in-Chief of the 26th Army, Major General Kostenko, Member of the Military Council, Brigade Commissar Kolesnikov, and Chief of Staff, Colonel Barenikov, informed the Military Council of the Southwest Front of the overwhelming losses in “deserters,” “traitors to the homeland,” and “runaways.” In connection with these losses, serving further notice of another momentous fact in a letter under Reference № 00134, dated September 16, 1941, that they could not be stopped regardless of reprisals and propaganda measures. The Political Administration of the Northwest Front quoted a directive by Stalin, under № 0116 of July 20, 1941, declaring that members of the Red Army in the “Western regions of the Ukraine, White Russia... Moldavia, Bucovina, and the Baltic States’— the so-called “right-bankers”—had displayed a “mass mood” “in which they do not wish to fight,” but rather, “to run home.” Stalin’s suspicions in this regard extended, not only to the broad masses of the Red Army, but to the “commanders (officers) and political leaders” as well—and justly so.

The “ignominious phenomena of desertions and treason to the homeland” repeatedly admitted in Soviet documents must be evaluated against the underlying fact that members of the Red Army could not be prevented from deserting en mass to the Germans, regardless of any threat of punishment. One and a half million Soviet soldiers of all ranks were in German captivity by the middle of August 1941, over 3 million by the middle of October 1941, and 3.8 million by the end of 1941. A total of 5.25 million Soviet soldiers and officers were captured during the course of the war. During the initial phase of hostilities, the German command authorities reported “that large sections of the enemy no longer exhibit any strong will to fight,” however, soon afterward they observed, that “the enemy units are now offering stiffer or more embittered resistance.” Nevertheless, the latent tendency of Soviet soldiers to allow themselves to be captured or to run away never entirely vanished at any time during the war. This was true not only in 1941, and during the great crisis of 1942, but during the following years as well, even during the concluding phase of the war.

There is only one answer to the question of how the Soviet leadership attained the objective of inducing the not very enthusiastic and fundamentally indifferent soldiers of the Red Army to offer “resistance at any price” on behalf of the Soviet regime: this effect was produced by the tried and true Stalinist method of the “greatest terror and the most deliberate deception,” as the Germans were quick to recognize. Terrorism alone proved effective; the somewhat anti-Stalinist Colonel General Volkogonov in his biography of Stalin has recognized the effectiveness of these methods of necessity, In addition to other draconian measures, mass executions of officers, political workers, and Red Army men, with or without a legal verdict, by means of courts martial and by “blocking units” or executions by those officers, political workers, and Communists loyal to the party line, were the primary tools of terror. According to the data of Russian experts at a German-Russian archive conference in Dresden on July 6, 1997, Soviet courts martial held a million trials against their own soldiers between 1941 and 1945, carrying out no fewer than 157,000 death sentences. Hand in hand with these executions were the prohibition against surrender, the indictment of all captured personnel as deserters and traitors, and the reprisals against relatives that were common in the Soviet Union. Endless atrocity propaganda against the Germans and German allies was also intended, from the very outset, to deprive all Red Army soldiers of their taste for capture by the “fascists.”

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 4.
“A Fighter in the Red Army Does Not Surrender”

The Soviet Union is the only state in the world ever to have declared the captivity of its soldiers to be a serious crime. The military oath, the article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code and other regulations, such as the Interior Service Regulation and the “Infantry Combat Provisions of the Red Army” left no doubt that allowing oneself to be taken prisoner would inevitably be punished by death as “desertion to the enemy,” “flight to a foreign country,” “treason,” and “desertion.” “Captivity is treason to the homeland. There is no more reprehensible and more treacherous act,” the regulation stated: “But the highest penalty—shooting—awaits the traitor to the homeland.” Stalin, Molotov, and other leading officials, such as Madame Kolontay, repeatedly and publicly declared that the Soviet Union only recognized the existence of deserters, traitors to the homeland, and enemies of the people. The concept of “prisoner of war” was unknown. Since it was impossible for the “Nation of Workers and Farmers” to permit revolutionary soldiers in the Red Army of Workers and Farmers to seek refuge in enemy captivity, the Soviet government, from 1917 onward, no longer considered itself a signatory of the Hague Convention and, in 1929, refused to ratify the Geneva Convention for the protection of prisoners of war. This attitude toward prisoners of war should be borne in mind if one wishes to understand a tactical maneuver engaged in by Moscow starting in July 1941, which has caused fundamental confusion right down to the present day.

In reply to an initiative from the International Committee of the Red Cross of July 27, 1941, Molotov declared himself prepared to accept proposals relating to prisoners of war, as well as to exchange lists of names. The Council of the People’s Commissars, as early as July 1, 1941, hastened to confirm a “Decree on Prisoners of War”, the provisions of which were entirely in accordance with the basic principles of the international conventions. The Chief Quartermaster of the Red Army, Lieutenant General Khrulev, by Circular Letter No. 017 (4488) of July 1941, furthermore, established corresponding standards of supply for captured soldiers of the German Wehrmacht. The Medical Administration of the Red Army (Chief, Divisional Doctor Smirmov, and Deputy Chief of the Rear Supply Services, Major General Utkin), on July 29, finally disseminated a corresponding proposal relating to adequate hospital care for wounded or sick soldiers of hostile armies. With this bureaucratic backing, the Reich’s Government was then notified on July 19, 1941, in a verbal note from the protecting power, Sweden, with reference to the “Decree on Prisoners of War” that the government of the USSR was prepared to acknowledge the provisions of the Hague Convention of October 18, 1907 on prisoners of war on the condition of “reciprocity by the Germans.”

Did this indicate a basic change in the Soviet attitude toward prisoners of war? The subsequent train of events shows that the Soviet government was never serious in this regard, and never for an instant considered creating protection and privileges for captured prisoners of the Red Army under the Hague Convention or vice versa, or the acceptance of any obligations relating to German prisoners of war. This demonstrative demand for reciprocal recognition by the Germans was, in fact, merely a propaganda maneuver directed to the Western powers. It was, as accurately stated by Count Tolstoy, “patently a blind.” This is revealed by various Orders of Stalin from the same period, particularly, Order № 270 of the State Defense Committee, which threatened surrendering Soviet soldiers with annihilation as deserters “by all means, both terrestrial and aerial.”

Only in regard to foreign countries did it appear expedient to provide the Soviet Union with a veneer of civilization in accordance with international law. Shortly afterward, on August 26, 1941, the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, raised the question with the Soviet government of possible Soviet actions relating “to the basis of treatment of prisoners of war.” After still another deceptive declaration by Deputy Foreign Commissar Vyshinsky of August 8, 1941, the Soviet government in fact never again returned to the question of any such agreement. The application of the principal clauses of the Hague Convention, such as the exchange of name lists of prisoners of war, International Red Cross access to the camps, and permitting the circulation of letters and packages, was firmly rejected by the Soviet Government from the very outset. All efforts undertaken by the International Committee of the Red Cross, relating to an agreement with reference to Soviet approval, or even to discussions in Moscow, were flatly ignored, like comparable efforts during the Soviet wars against Poland in 1939 and Finland in 1939/1940.

As early as July 9, 1941, the International Committee of the Red Cross informed the Soviet government of the readiness of Germany, Finland, Hungary, and Romania, and, on July 22, of Italy and Slovakia as well, to exchange lists of prisoners of war on the basis of reciprocity. On August 20, 1941, an initial German list of Soviet prisoners of war was transmitted. Finnish, Italian, and Romanian lists of prisoners of war were, likewise, transmitted to the International Red Cross and forwarded to the Soviet embassy in Ankara, intended by Molotov to serve as a relay. Reception was never confirmed, to say nothing of Soviet acknowledgement of the necessary principle of reciprocity. In view of the unyielding silence of the Soviet government, the International Committee of the Red Cross, through various channels, such as the Soviet embassies in London and Stockholm, made efforts to obtain approval for the sending of a delegation, or even a single delegate, to Moscow in the hopes of clearing up any presumed misunderstandings through oral negotiations. Applications in this sense were renewed over and over again, but were never answered. The possibility, created by the International Committee of the Red Cross, of mailing assistance to Soviet prisoners of war in Germany also came to naught because the Soviet government never replied to the corresponding requests from Geneva. All parallel efforts undertaken by protecting powers, neutral states, and even allies of the USSR, in relation to an agreement on the question of prisoners of war were similarly met with silence. In the spring of 1943, the International Red Cross felt itself compelled to send a formal reminder to the Soviet government of Molotov’s promise, given on June 27, 1941, at the same time remarking resignedly that it had offered its services without practical result right from the start of the hostilities. There was never any change in this situation, then or later. The true attitude of the Soviet government toward the good services of the Red Cross during the war was revealed in 1945, when the Red Cross delegation in Berlin was robbed of its working possibilities and deported into the Soviet Union without any justification whatever.

Having stated the above, the question arises as to the measures taken by the Soviet government to prevent “flight forward” by members of the Red Army, i.e., surrender to the enemy. As always, there were two methods, mutually supplementing each other: propaganda and terror. In other words, where propaganda did not suffice, terror followed; anyone who did not believe official Soviet propaganda soon experienced official Soviet terror.

A handbook for political agitation under the revealing title “A Fighter in the Red Army Does Not Surrender” (N. Brykin, N. Tolkachev) was published by the Political Administration of the Leningrad Military District in 1940. Even at this early date, it summarized the facts to be borne in mind by members of the Red Army in this matter. All the stops of so-called “Soviet patriotism” were pulled out, based on the Soviet service oath and the axiom that military captivity was “treason to the homeland,” the greatest crime and greatest shame that could ever be committed by a Soviet soldier. “Death or Victory” was accordingly said to have been the commandment of every fighter of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, all of whom were alleged to have preferred “death to shameful captivity.” For members of the Red Army, the motto “Bolsheviks Do Not Surrender” was said to have been the watchword during the civil war, the battles with the Japanese (in an undeclared war) at Khasan Lake and Khalkhin Gol River, the “Liberation” of the western Ukraine and Western White Russia (in other words, during the unprovoked wars of aggression against Poland) and, in particular, the struggle against the Finnish White Guards (i.e., the unprovoked war of aggression against Finland), which was said to have been schemed and organized by “Anglo-French imperialists.” “In fulfillment of their holy duty,” “the patriots of the Socialist homeland,” the “true sons of the Soviet people,” were said to have considered it as perfectly natural to commit suicide rather than surrender alive to the class enemy, saving the last bullet for themselves, or if necessary, allowing themselves to be burned alive—all the while singing a Bolshevik party song.

The second method consisted of detailed descriptions of the horrible pangs of torture or of the “horrible deaths by torture” inevitably suffered by Red Army soldiers in capitalist captivity. Drastic examples were set forth, in particular, from the struggles against the “White Finnish bands,” the “Finnish cut-throats,” the “White Finnish scum of humanity.” The Finns were said to have directed all their efforts to “practicing unprecedented torments upon prisoners of war and the wounded, burning the wounded alive, as on the Island of Lassisaari, burning out their eyes, cutting open their stomachs, and mutilating them with knives.” Political agitators Brykin and Tolkachev referred to a speech by the Premier of the Soviet government, Molotov, before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on March 29, 1940, describing many examples of the “unprecedented barbarity and bestiality” of the “White Finns.” Molotov claimed:

“In their region north of Lake Ladoga, when the Finns surrounded our medical huts, containing 120 severely wounded Soviet soldiers some of them were found burned, some of them with their heads crushed, and the rest stabbed or shot. Apart from the mortal wounds on other parts of the body, a great many of the dead showed traces of gunshot wounds to the head or killing by bludgeoning; a great many of those shot to death also showed traces of facial stab wounds inflicted by Finnish women. A few corpses were found with the heads hacked off; the heads could not be found. Special torments and incredible acts of brutality occurred in the treatment of prisoners who fell into the hands of female White Finnish nurses. The Finnish White Guards, the protecting corps, already long known to Finnish workers as butchers, revealed their animal nature with particular clarity during the wars against the USSR. Among the Finns, ridicule, derision, torture, and barbaric methods of extermination of prisoners were beloved methods of treatment reserved for Soviet combatants. The enemy spared no one: neither the wounded, nor medical personnel, nor women.”

If helplessly wounded prisoners had already been massacred by Finnish nursing personnel, the members of Lotta Svard, could unwounded prisoners of war expect a better fate, now or in the future?

The Political Administration had another and, this time, truly convincing argument ready for anyone who failed in their eagerness to believe the official presentation of proof. “A disgraceful fate awaits anyone who surrenders out of fear, thereby betraying the homeland,” the authorities stated menacingly: “Hate, contempt, curses from family, friends, and the people as a whole, followed by a shameful death.” The text of the agitation manual describes the example of two Red Army men who, upon returning from Finnish captivity, were said to deserve and to have received “just retribution” for their “treason” and “violation of their service oath” “before the Soviet people.” A court martial was alleged to have sentenced the two soldiers to death by shooting for “treason to the homeland,” as “monsters,” and “Joathsome souls,” on the grounds that a “traitor to the Socialist homeland has no right to live on Soviet soil.” The circumstances, in reality, were somewhat different, Repatriated Soviet prisoners of war were never individually indicted following the conclusion of peace with Finland on March 12, 1940. Rather, they were indiscriminately and summarily arrested by the NKVD, solely on the grounds of their military captivity, and were never heard from again, having been shot to the last man.

As shown by Stalin’s terrorization orders, the criminalization of military captivity could, of course, only be considered a matter of course during the German-Soviet war as well. The Chief of the Administration for Political Propaganda of the Red Army, Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis, in Instruction № 20 of July 14, 1941, set forth a corresponding regulation with reference to the text of the agitation manual of 1940.'7 It begins with an appeal to Soviet patriotism: “You have given your oath to be true to your people, the Soviet homeland and government, until your last breath. Keep your oath during the struggle against the fascists.” This is followed by a deterrent argument:

“A fighter in the Red Army does not surrender, The fascist barbarians torture, torment, and kill their prisoners in the most bestial manner. Better death than fascist captivity!"

This was followed by a momentous threat: “Surrender to captivity is treason to the homeland.” A political text, “Fascist Atrocities against Prisoners of War According to Data from the Foreign Press, Leningrad, 1941,” disseminated for the assistance of propagandists and agitators in the autumn of 1941, shows the manner in which members of the Red Army might be deprived of the desire to be willingly taken prisoner by the Germans. Thus, it was hypocritically stated that the Germans “do not respect the international conventions on prisoners of war”’—conventions that were ratified by Germany, but not by the Soviet Union. Prisoners of war were allegedly therefore “deprived of all legal protection. Everyone in fascist Germany may kill them.” One witness to the alleged “bestial treatment of prisoners, refugees, and the population in the occupied territories” was the Military Commissar of the Red Army, Mushev, of the 22nd Army, who was mentioned further on. The Main Administration for Political Propaganda of the Red Army constantly reminded Red Army soldiers of the horrors of German captivity:

“All prisoners bitterly regret having fallen alive into the hands of the fascists; death is nothing in comparison to what they endure in captivity... Fascist captivity means a death by slow torture... Fascist captivity—prison, inhuman suffering, worse than death.”

Propaganda intended to make Red Army soldiers believe that they would inevitably be killed in German captivity' began with the outbreak of the war and may be observed as early as June 23, 1941. The central task of the political apparatus was to stimulate and intensify the fears of captivity and was continued onward with iron consistency throughout the war. The emphasis was not upon mere shooting, but rather, continued the propaganda line of the Finnish Winter War. German soldiers were accused of “bestial tortures,” “horrible mutilations,” “torturing prisoners to death,” “cutting off their fingers, ears, and noses, putting out their eyes, and ripping out their spinal columns before shooting their prisoners.”!” Scattered throughout the documents are references to alleged atrocities that no political tract or lecture, no “meeting,” no address of political workers, no frontline newspapers could fail to feature in 1943. For purposes of enhanced credibility, gross falsification was resorted to. Thus, as early as July 1941, photographs of Poles and Ukrainians shot by the NKVD by the thousands in the prisons of Lemberg were produced as alleged “proof” of atrocities committed against prisoners of war by German soldiers. There were other methods. German prisoners of war were shot and left lying on back roads to provoke reprisals against Soviet prisoners of war, that, in turn, it was hoped, would detract from the “inclination of soldiers in the Red Army to desert.” Some German command posts showed signs of falling for such a trap. The High Command of the Wehrmacht, however, put an early stop to this, and prohibited reprisals on the grounds that “it would only unnecessarily increase the bitterness of the struggle.”

Members of the Red Army were constantly reminded of the alleged fate of Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity with such penetrating force that such propaganda could not remain entirely without effect. Thus, the German command authorities repeatedly reported that, as a result of systematic repetition by their “officers and commissars,” the belief became widespread among soldiers in the Red Army that the Germans “killed all prisoners,” that “we shot all Russian prisoners of war, even torturing them beforehand.” It was discovered that, for one part, the “simple souls” among Soviet soldiers expected to be shot. The above mentioned Doctor of the Microbiological Chair at the Medical Institute in Dnepropetrovsk, Kotliarevsky, then in the 151st Medical Battalion of the 147th Infantry Division, testified on September 24, 1941, that “all the wounded to whom he was assigned as a doctor were firmly convinced that they would be killed by the Germans.” This fear was also shared by groups of officers and, to some extent, higher-ranking officers and individual generals. Thus, for example, the Commander of the 102" Infantry Division, Major General Besonov, on August 28, 1941, and a Colonel in the Staff of the 5th Army, Nachkebya, on September 21, 1941, in addition to other officers, all stated that they were under the impression that they would lose their lives in German captivity. “Many officers and commanders believed that they would be shot in German captivity,” Major Ermolaev, commander of the 464th Howitzer Artillery Regiment of the 151st Infantry Division, admitted on September 20, 1941.

It is widely known today that, under the terms of Hitler’s notorious “Commissar Order”, political officers of the Red Army were shot as alleged non-combatants by the German Security Police and SD and, at least to some extent, by German troops—although in relatively small numbers, and in the face of increasing reluctance. It, nevertheless, appears necessary to remark in this connection that similar actions were also committed by the Soviets: members of the Wehrmacht known to be members of the NSDAP, particularly officers, were immediately shot. Colonel Gaevsky of the Soviet 29th Armored Division, on August 6, 1941, even testified to the existence of an order from the Superior Army (4th or 10th), commanding that “lower-ranking officers should be shot because these officers must be assumed to be dedicated followers of Hitler.”

German captivity was naturally characterized by differing methods of treatment, as may be shown by a brief survey. For example, the German army, by decree of the Quartermaster General, Major General Wagner, on July 25, 1941, even released Soviet prisoners of war of Ukrainian nationality and, soon afterward, of White Russian nationality as well, in their homelands in the occupied territories. According to Russian data, 292,702 prisoners were released in the zone of the High Command of the German Army before the action was stopped on November 13, 1941, while 26,068 prisoners were released in the zone of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. At a time when the Panzer Group 3, for example, released the 200,000th prisoner of war, Driuk, home with praise, and other units were acting similarly…

That the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity in the winter of 1941/2 was indeed terrible is generally well-known. Hundreds of thousands of them perished from hunger and epidemics during those winter months in what has been justifiably been called a “tragedy of huge proportions.” There were, however, many different reasons for this mass mortality. A lack of familiarity with the peoples of the East, human indifference, or even ill will engendered by political resentments, particularly on subordinate levels, may have all played a part. In a greater sense, however, it was not so much ill will as the logistical inability to provide food and housing for millions of often totally exhausted prisoners of war under the harsh conditions of the eastern winter of 1941/2. The German field army, engaged in a life and death defensive struggle, was suffering from severe deficiencies following the near total collapse of the transportation system. Comparatively speaking, it may be said that the mortality rate among Soviet prisoners of war in Finnish captivity amounted to almost one third of the total of men captured.” It is simply contrary to historical truth to blame the competent Quartermaster General of the German Army General Staff for the conditions of the prisoners of war or to attempt to relate any losses to Hitler’s so-called “policy of extermination” in the East. It was the Quartermaster General of the General Staff of the German Army that, by the decrees of August 6, October 21, and December 2, 1941, to the Wehrmacht Military District Commanders, established food rations in quantities sufficient to maintain the life and health of all prisoners of war in the occupied territories, including the regions of the Ukraine and the Eastern territories (Ostland), as well as Norway and Romania. The question arises as to whether, and to what extent, these decrees were followed, or could be followed, or, if applicable, why they were not followed.

Orders and instructions from the High Command could not in any case simply be ignored. It can also be shown that the responsible commanding officers of the rear army service zones as well as many POW camp commandants, made an effort to improve the conditions of the prisoners of war and to create some kind of assistance within the limits of their restricted possibilities. If only very limited success was achieved, the reasons resided in the increasingly difficult supply situation caused by the huge numbers of prisoners and the total collapse of the transportation system in the winter of 1941/42, which also severely jeopardized the supplies of the German Army of the East. In the spring of 1942, however, when the ice broke, a number of steps were taken to improve the situation of the Soviet prisoners of war— measures intentionally based on the conditions of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which was never ratified by the Soviet Union. From the spring of 1942 onward, conditions were, without delay, consolidated and began to improve, both in the domain of the High Command of the Army and the German High Command of the Wehrmacht, so that the survival of Soviet prisoners of war in the camps was no longer in question.

Atrocity propaganda as a major factor in the Soviet military effort was naturally unaffected by all this and continued unabated in the Red Army. Even in the spring of 1943, at a time when the “Russian Welfare Staff” of the ROA (Russian Liberation Army), with a strength of one officer, four non-commissioned officers, and twenty squads, had long since officiated in all military prisoner of war installations and divisions of the German Army of the East for the sole purpose of protecting the interests of their fellow prisoners of war—an institution that made a lasting impression on the members of the Red Army—the Soviets tirelessly repeated that the Germans were “hanging or shooting all prisoners of war, as well as subjecting them to cruel tortures.” In the region of Smolensk, allegedly “35,000 prisoners of war were shot,” (a reference to recent events at Katyn, where Polish officers were in fact shot by the Soviet NKVD). According to German records, even Red Army soldiers inclined to oppose the Soviet regime began “to grow somewhat suspicious, because they do not know whether or not we will shoot them.”

On the whole, the Germans were quick to perceive that the systematic dissemination of tales of real or alleged German atrocities against prisoners of war had the automatic effect of stiffening the resistance of the Red Army while diminishing the tendency of Soviet soldiers to surrender. Major Solov’ev, Chief of Staff of the 445th Infantry Regiment of the 140th Infantry Division, expressed this as follows: “The only explanation for the resistance by the Red Army is that Wehrmacht atrocity allegations were made both orally and in writing with an intensity that has no equal.” As early as June 24, 1941, prisoners stated that the reason for their stubborn resistance was that the following was “drummed” into them:

“1. If Soviet troops evacuated a position and withdrew, political commissars immediately shot them.
2. If they deserted, the Germans would immediately shoot them.
3. If they were not shot by the Germans, they would be immediately
shot as soon as the Red Army retook the position, in which case, their property would be confiscated and their relatives also shot.”

These statements reveal the hopeless situation in which Soviet soldiers found themselves entrapped.

The stiffening resistance of the Red Army may also be a pragmatic explanation for the increasing disinclination of the German command authorities to enforce the Commissar Order, which was finally rescinded on May 6, 1942. To combat Soviet fears of captivity, the Germans simultaneously undertook a massive leaflet action. In view of the fact that Soviet prisoners of war had had good experiences in addition to bad ones, such as those of the Commander of the 8th Infantry Corps, Major General Snegov, who stated in evidence on August 11, 1941: “The first few days in German captivity made a wonderful impression on us. We felt like different men. I and my comrades felt that we were able to talk to each other for the first time.”32 After the winter catastrophe of 1941/42, increasing numbers of positive arguments could be cited in favor of surrender, but the precondition for the success of such counter-propaganda was, and remained, complete truth- fulness. The High Command of the 3rd Panzer Army informed the High Command of the Army on August 21, 1942, that promising decent treatment and failing to keep those promises would destroy the credibility of all German front-line propaganda in the long run.

By means of terror, the Red Army leadership attempted to suffocate all doubt as to its atrocity allegations. This was true first of all of German propaganda leaflets that, like Soviet propaganda leaflets, were initially characterized by uncouthness and crudity, becoming rather ineffective during the winter of 1941/42. Only when the leaflets were adapted to the mentality of Soviet soldiers with the help of locals who knew the country, particularly, when they ceased to exclude or threaten officers and political workers, but were rather personally addressed to them, building “golden bridges” to them and were made recognizable as passes did these leaflets produce their full effect. The Soviet military agencies reacted nervously and took all possible steps to prevent German leaflets from coming into the possession of the highly receptive Soviet soldier. “Tighten up on the collection and destruction of fascist leaflets... by Party and Komosoi organizations as well as by the divisional political apparatus, and take care to prevent these leaflets from falling into the hands of Soviet soldiers,” was the watchword of the NKVD in September 1941. Merely picking up “counterrevolutionary fascist leaflets” was subject to severe punishment. All Soviet soldiers found in possession of a fascist leaflet were to be “immediately arrested” and held responsible based on a directive of the newly assigned NKVD “Special Department” ( Kontrrazvedka or Counterespionage, previously the 3rd Chief Directorate), such as the Southwest Front of the 26th Army (August 2, 1941), or the 9th Army (September 5, 1941, № 25165). Concerning what happened to the guilty, the reports agree in their particulars: picking up and reading German leaflets was punished by death. Red Army soldiers were shot for this, everywhere, without judgement by court martial, and, if possible, in front of the assembled troops. “Possession of a German leaflet by a Soviet soldier is punished by court martial, in most cases by shooting,” the Commander of the 27th Infantry Corps, Major General Artemenko, bluntly admitted in September 1941.

Another source of information turned out to be no less injurious to the credibility of anti-German atrocity propaganda. In a directive of Stalin’s (Northwest Front № 0116, July 20, 1941), the source was identified as the so-called "traitors,” and "spies” the most dangerous of these being the "commanders (officers), political leaders, and Red Army members” returning individually or in groups from the "encirclement in the western territories of the Ukraine, White Russia, and the Baltic,” i.e., all Soviet soldiers, regardless of rank, who escaped from German captivity or made it back to their own troops from behind enemy lines. All such returning soldiers automatically fell under suspicion and were indicted in accordance with Stalin’s orders. What the Soviet leadership feared most of all, apart from direct agent activity, was the dissemination of “provocative rumors...denying that the commanders of the German army carried out reprisals against prisoners of war, or claiming that prisoners were well-fed, and were afterward released to work on the kolkhozes.” The Chief of the 3rd Section of the 12th Army, Colonel Rozin, remarked angrily on July 15, 1941: “provocative rumors as to the invincibility of the German army and the good, kind treatment of captured Red Army soldiers by the Germans.” Although Soviet prisoners of war were sometimes harassed or suffered acts of violence by the Germans and were exposed to increasing distress after the autumn of 1941, the Soviet command posts were suspicious that “counter-revolutionary rumors” of allegedly good treatment of “captured Soviet soldiers and the civilian population” could damage the credibility of Soviet propaganda tales of the “bloody crimes and bestial acts of violence committed by the Hitlerite cannibals,” so for example the Kursk Regional Military Commissariat on September 23, 1941.

From documentary material by the Special Department of the NKVD of the 19th Army captured near Vjaz’ma in May 1942, the Germans derived some gratifying conclusions stating:

“In contrast to the infamous partisans, the peaceful populations of many localities are joyfully greeting the Germans as liberators. The fact, unique in the history of warfare, of a population greeting an ethnically foreign enemy as the liberator from the intolerable yoke of its own government is a devastating condemnation in itself. The all-pervading spirit of mistrust filling the available NKVD records from first to last page, nevertheless, confirms the documentary condemnation. Every civilian, every soldier—even Soviet soldiers who fled from German captivity at the risk of their lives—is suspected of high treason, such suspicions often acquiring truly grotesque forms.”

To enforce the directive by Stalin, severe measures were taken by the NKVD, the political apparatus, and the apparatus of military justice to pre- vent all enemy influence on the troops from the very outset, and to isolate returning soldiers or render them harmless. The Chief Military Prosecutor of the Red Army, Divisional Military Jurist Kondrat’ev, by Order № 00120 of September 24, 1941, attempted to make a distinction between “traitors” who had been directly recruited, and “seducers” among “fascist prisoners of war,” who merely made claims of “good treatment” in captivity, although in his opinion both categories were obviously “a great danger.” Such subtleties, however, had long since been disregarded by the controlling apparatus of the NKVD. Thus, for example, the Special Department of the 26th Army on August 5, 1941, announced that the Germans were engaged in the “mass recruiting of agents among the civilian population, surrendering Red Army soldiers, and deserters,” sending them “into the Soviet territory for purposes of espionage and subversion” and the dissemination of “provocative rumors.” This was a blanket accusation that presupposed the obviousness of the dissemination of “provocative rumors” while simultaneously expressing obvious mistrust of every Soviet soldier. Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis basically expected “spies and White Guards,” especially among returning officers.

The “strictest countermeasures” were now threatened. “The arrest ofall persons coming from areas occupied by German troops, detailed interrogations with the objective of obtaining a confession, and handing the guilty party over to court martial”—which was the equivalent to shooting him. High-ranking officers in the Soviet 6th and 12th Armies, including Lieutenant General Muzychenko, Lieutenant General Sokolov, Major General Tonkonogov, Major General Ogurtsev (6th Army), Major General Ponedelin, Major General Snegov, Major General Abranidze, and Major General Proshkin (12th Army), testified on August 16, 1941, that “soldiers having escaped from German captivity were immediately shot,” According to the testimony of the Commander of the 196th Infantry Division, Major General Kulikov, returning officers only received a minimum of ten years imprisonment in a labor camp for “residence on the territory of the enemy.” In addition, all Soviet soldiers who escaped the collapse of the fronts and the encirclement battles and broke through to their own troops were subjected to severe persecution. According to Major General Grigorenko, encircled troops (okruzhenci) were greeted with orders of execution:

“Soldiers and officers, members of supply units, infantrymen, fliers… tank crews… artillerymen... were all shot; the next day, those who had shot them could themselves be encircled by the enemy and might well suffer the same fate as those shot by them yesterday.”

Only the absence of a continuous front and the collapse of uniform leadership are believed to have saved literally "hundreds of thousands” of soldiers from a senseless policy of extermination.

The Soviets also used another—psychological—means to prevent flight forward by Red Army soldiers: the principle, well-known to every resident of the Soviet Socialist Republics, of revenge and reprisals against family members (Criminal Code, part 2, article 58-1 "V”). German interrogation records unanimously reveal the anxiety with which captured Soviet soldiers contemplated this type of “revenge by their Soviet rulers,” i,e. that their family members “would be banned to Siberia or shot.” What is more, the “group of relatives subject to the severest reprisals,” according to the testimony of a captured First Lieutenant, was “interpreted very broadly.” First Lieutenant Filipenko, First Ordinance Officer of the Staff of the 87th Infantry Division, on June 27, 1941, testified to the existence of a Soviet law “according to which the relatives of captured or deserting soldiers would be held responsible, i.e., would be shot.” A summary report on prisoner of war interrogations in the German XXIII Army Corps of July 30, 1941, states: “The officers live in constant fear that their relatives will be shot by the GPU [Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye; State Political Administration; the Soviet Secret Police] if they are captured.” This was also the impression of aircraft crewmembers Lieutenant Anoshkin, Second Lieutenant Nikiforov and Sergeant Smirnov:

“If it is discovered that a flier has been captured by the Germans, his family will answer for it, either through banishment or through the shooting of individual members of the family. This fear of reprisals is what prevents most desertions.”

Similarly, Major General Abranidze, Commander of the 72nd Mountain Infantry Division, on August 14, 1941, testified to his great concern for “the fate of his relatives,” “when it becomes known that he has been capfared.” Major Generals Snegov (Commander of the 8th Infantry Corps) and Ogurtsev (Commander of the 49th Infantry Corps), Colonels Loginov (Commander of the 139th Infantry Division), Dubrovsky (Deputy Commander of the 44th Infantry Division) and Meandrov (Deputy Chief of Staff of the 6th Army), on the same date, confirmed the existence of an order, issued in the spring of 1941, according to which the relatives of all deserters “are punished with the full severity of the law, including death by shooting.”

An apprehensive mood was already widespread throughout the Red Army concerning the fate of the relatives of soldiers, when Stalin, by Order № 270 of August 16, 1941, once again expressly decreed the application of the principle of the liability of all members of a family for the crimes of an individual member. According to Order № 270, signed by Stalin in his capacity as President of the State Defense Committee, as well as by Molo- tov, Budenny, Voroshilov, Timoshenko, Shaposhnikov, and Zhukov, cap- fared commanders (officers), and political leaders were equated with deserters, as stated above. Their families were therefore to be arrested as the “families of persons guilty of violating their service oath as well as of deserters guilty of betraying the homeland.” While the families of arrested Soviet soldiers “were to be deprived of all State assistance and support,” and were therefore subject to death from starvation. That such families would be deported to the barren regions of the Gulag and their property confiscated was considered a matter of course. According to the testimony of the prisoner of war Chief Doctor Varabin and others, the political workers responsible for explaining the Order of Stalin to the units also right away hinted at “a more severe punishment.”

Wherever possible, the Special Departments of the NKVD and the Political Departments in the units felt themselves responsible for transmitting the home address of captured soldiers to the appropriate local NKVD agencies for the purpose of enforcing the threatened reprisals. This even occurred, for example, in cases when Soviet soldiers were surprised by Ger- man reconnaissance troops and captured, as on September 27, 1941, in the 238th Infantry Regiment of the 186th Infantry Division. The Chief Military Prosecutor of the Red Army, Divisional Military Jurist Kondrat’ev, instructed the Military Prosecutors of the Fronts on September 24, 1941, to sentence the captured Soviet soldiers in absentia and take “all steps for the application of reprisals against family members.” The Military Public Prosecutor’s Office of the 286th Infantry Division on December 15, 1941, was even reprimanded by the Deputy Department Chief of the Main Military Public Prosecutor's Office, Military Jurist First Rank Varskoi (№ 08683), for failure to supply the addresses of relatives for purposes of enforcement of legal reprisals against the family of a Soviet soldier named Panstyan who had been shot for attempted “treason to the homeland”.

The extreme fragility of phrases like “Soviet patriotism” and “mass heroism” in the Red Army is revealed by the representative Order № 0098 of the Leningrad Front of October 5, 1941, signed by General of the Army Zhukov, Member of the Military Council and Secretary of the Central Committee Zhdanov, Members of the Military Council Admiral Isakov and Kuznetsov, and Major General Semashko. The occasion was an “unprecedented occurrence” involving the 289th Independent Machine Gun Battalion, assigned to a section of front near Sluck-Kolpino, where German soldiers appeared and struck up a conversation with members of the Red Army to induce them to desert. Such “criminal fraternization” on the battlefield was now the occasion for Zhukov, in his usual brutal manner, to suspect and threaten all the troops on the Leningrad Front. For failing to prevent such negotiations, the immediate superiors and political leaders of the soldiers in question were handed over to a court martial and shot for “aiding and abetting criminals against the homeland,” and for “aiding and abetting the fascist monsters.” In addition, co-workers of the Political Departments and Special Departments of the NKVD on the level of the battalions in question—the Fortification Zone of the 168th Infantry Division and the 55th Army—were to conduct draconian punishment. Zhukov did not, of course, hesitate to prosecute the family members for the purpose of preventing all future attempted acts of “treason and villainy.” He ordered:

“The Special Departments of the NKVD of the Leningrad Front must immediately take steps to ensure that all family members of traitors to the homeland are arrested and handed over to a court martial.”

If Soviet soldiers very often had no choice than to fight to the death, the real reason for it must be sought in this, and other, similar, criminal orders by the Soviet leadership—not in the alleged ideals of so-called “Soviet patriotism.”

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 5
Stalin’s Terror Apparatus
The Creation of “Mass Heroism”
and "Soviet Patriotism”

It should be clear by now that the Red Army rested upon two pillars: the military leadership apparatus, and the independent political apparatus. The latter had its own official channels and was subordinate to the Chief of the Main Administration for Political Propaganda (GUPPKA; after July 1941, the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army) under the notorious Commissar First Rank Mekhlis. Another institution, working in secrecy, was all the more dangerous: the NKVD terror apparatus, which had nothing to do with the Red Army in terms of organization, but took its orders from the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs under Beria. The ruling system of the Soviet Union was based on the simple principle that anyone who failed to believe Soviet propaganda soon experienced Soviet terror. In the Red Army, terror was institutionally extremely well provided for.

Stalin’s mistrust of the “command personnel” ie., the Red Army leadership personnel and troops generally, was not entirely unjustified; this mistrust in turn had serious organizational consequences upon the Army on July 16, 1941, and upon the Red Navy on July 20, 1941. On that date, the “Institute of Military Commissars” was established in all corps, divisions, regiments, staffs of military educational foundations and facilities, technical troops of armored battalions and artillery battalions as well as the infantry battalions starting in December. The “Institute of Political Leaders”, with corresponding functions, was established in all companies, batteries, cavalry squadrons, and air squadrons. Both institutes had recourse to the Political Departments in performing their tasks. In regard to the Armies and Fronts, high party officials took over the same tasks as the Members of the Military Councils. In accordance with the “Legal Provisions on Military Commissars in the Red Army,” confirmed by a decree of the President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Kalinin, on July 16, 1941, the military commanders and unit leaders, on the same date, lost the political functions for which they had hitherto been responsible. These political functions were now completely taken over by their former representatives in matters involving political propaganda in their new capacity as military commissars or political leaders.

These officials, most of whom had “no military training whatever,” were not only entrusted with political responsibilities in the Red Army, but with “responsibility for military work,” or responsibility “in a military connection” as well. Although they formally enjoyed only “equal entitlement” in regard to the commanders, in practice, they were superior to them. In reality, they were their supervisors, with the right and duty to ensure strict control of “fulfillment of all orders of higher command personnel,” and to “inform the High Command and government of any commanders and political workers unworthy of the name of commander or political worker, and whose leadership is injurious to the honor of the Red Army.” A commander, even in the position of a divisional commander, was no longer able to make any decisions, even in operational and tactical matters; rather, he was relegated to the role of an executive consultant, a mere military specialist. The decisions of the commanders were never valid without the signature of the military commissar, who represented the “party and government in the Red Army.” However, the orders of the commissar or politruk were valid even without the signature of the commander or unit leader, and had to be obeyed in any case. As the Divisional Commissar of the 280th Infantry Division, Martinov, stated on June 5, 1942, a military order could only be obeyed if it had been stamped by the commissar using the service stamp administered by him alone.

The significance of the political apparatus in the Red Army is revealed, not only by the superior position of the military commissar, but also by the large number of personnel of the political administrations and departments available to the commissars. For example, the personnel of the political department of an infantry division was unanimously described by the Commander of the 436th Infantry Regiment, Major Kononov, the Chief of the Operations Branch of the 137th Infantry Division, Captain Nagelmann, and the official of the central apparatus of the NKVD, Zhigunov, as consisting of twenty-five persons: the divisional commissar, the chief of the political department, and twenty-three other persons. In terms of numbers therefore, the political department exceeded the personnel of the military division staff. If, in addition, one considers the political bodies of the regiments, battalions, and companies, Party and Komsomol secretaries and political instructors, including the numerous spies and informers, and ordinary Party and Komsomol members, the result is a total personnel of 559 officials holding these positions as their principal office in just one infantry division.

The field of responsibility of the political apparatus was described in greater detail in a "Program for the Commissars and Political Leaders in Leningrad,” published by Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis and annexed to Order № 270 of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command on August 19, 1941. “Next to the commander,” therefore, the military commissar was clearly the “military leader of the unit.” His duty was to supervise and inform upon all personnel, including the commanders, unit leaders and officers, while simultaneously “cooperating with the agencies of the military public prosecutors, courts martial, and Special Departments.” The military commissars and political leaders were supposed to ensure "unconditional obedience” to all battle orders, and were therefore responsible for ensuring that all soldiers fought “bravely,” with “unflinching readiness”, “to the last drop of blood, against the enemies of our homeland.” The commissars were therefore principally responsible for forcing Soviet soldiers into battle regardless of heavy casualties. The commissars were simultaneously responsible for waging a “ruthless struggle against cowards, panic mongers, and deserters by restoring revolutionary order and military discipline with an iron hand.” This meant, in other words, that every soldier, regardless of rank, was “to be shot on the spot” if he attempted to desert (or surrender), or if he became visibly “tired of attacking.” This also implied the “pitiless” destruction of all “cowards and panic mongers, those of faint heart, and deserters,” i.e., all “who leave positions without authorization and without orders.” Cowardly commanders in battle were to be dealt with according to Order of Stalin № 270. “In the ranks of the Red Army,” says Mekhlis’s appeal to the military commissars, “there is no place, there must be no place, for the small-minded, for cowards, panic mongers, deserters, and those without courage.”

The overwhelming importance of the commissars and political leaders in the Red Army as supervisors and enforcers made them an object of fear and loathing for the broad mass of Soviet soldiers. This was especially the case for the officers, whose leadership position was eroded and who were often threatened personally; nor did they conceal their opinions from the Germans. The commander of the 49th Infantry Corps, Major General Ogurtsev scourged the Soviet regime “as the greatest swindle on the people in the history of the world.” He also testified, on August 11, 1941, “with great bitterness, as to his cooperation with his political commissar,” whose decisions were “decisive in all matters”; the commissar had “no knowledge of military matters” but enjoyed “unlimited plenary powers.” The resulting influence upon combat actions was therefore “considerably” “to the detriment of the corps.” The military commissar had constantly threatened to report him to higher authorities.

The Commander of the 139th Infantry Division, Colonel Logionov, on August 14, 1941, indicated that the chasm between officer and commissar would “only be bridged by fear and terror.” The Divisional Commander of the 43rd Infantry Division, Major General Kirpichnikov, on September 30, 1941, described the commanders as tied to the commissars “hand and foot,” totally stifled in their “creativeness and operational thinking.” The “resigned” answer of Air Force Captain (military engineer) Ogrisko on September 19, 1941, was:

“You can imagine the relationship for yourself. When you consider that there is a political commissar or controller for every military leader... In the army, for every two soldiers, there is a third who acts on behalf of the apparatus as a member of the Komsomol, of the Party, or NKVD. In the officer corps, the ratio is 1:1.”

This was confirmed by the Commander-in-Chief of the 19th Army and of the entire group encircled near Vjaz’ma (the 19th, 20th Armies and the nearly depleted 16th Army, 32nd and 24th Armies, as well as the Boldin operational group), Lieutenant General Lukin. Based on his own experience, he declared: A commander in the Red Army was “no longer permitted to take a single step.” “He is surrounded by commissars, informants, and his Military Council... even the generals have their secret-police agents, the regimental commanders have their informers, and so on.” If this was generally true for the political apparatus, which operated relatively “openly,” what can be said of the true terror apparatus in the Red Army, the NKVD, whose operations were a secret? This apparatus will be subjected to a closer examination below.

So much has been written about the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs)—which has been responsible for millions of murders and for the system of concentration camps (GULag), as well as the for continual repression and terrorization of all Soviet citizens, using sub-organizations and special troops to
perform its functions—that, generally, commentary at this point would be superfluous. Just one small, but characteristic, report from the early stages of the war, relating to the working methods of this criminal organization, is in order at this point. The Chief of the Counter Intelligence Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Admiral Canaris, presented a report in July 1941 concerning an inspection of the Soviet Embassy building in Paris, i.e., an extra-territorial diplomatic installation. According to the report, it was discovered that a GPU headquarters had been installed in a side wing of the Paris Embassy, with facilities for “torture, executions, and for the destruction of corpses,” something quite unique in the diplomatic history of civilized states. The report assumes that “the bodies of several white Russian generals who mysteriously disappeared in Paris a few years ago were destroyed here.”

On July 16, 1941, Stalin announced the forthcoming sentencing of the arrested Generals of the Staff of the West Front and a few others generals who had been taken prisoner. He also decided to re-institute the apparatus of the NKVD, more exactly known as the Special Department of the NKVD within the Red army, in addition to the “Institute for Military Commissars and Political Leaders.” A regulation of the State Security Committee of July 17, 1941, subordinated the Special Departments under the immediate control of the NKVD, although in March 1941, they had just been incorporated into the People’s Commissariat of Defense as the 3rd Department. This was anything but a purely administrative proceeding, and was discussed in more detail by People’s Commissar Beria in a decree on July 18, 1941, who justified it on the basis of the “glorious Chekist traditions,” i.e., the perpetuation of their great practical experience in the use of mass terror.

It is characteristic that the existence of the terrorist secret organization, which was granted unlimited powers in the Red Army, has remained almost unknown right down to the present day. West German journalism, for example, only speaks of so-called “political commissars” (meaning military commissars and political leaders). Yet it was precisely this subsidiary of the NKVD that had a task of the greatest importance to perform within the armed forces. It was responsible for waging “merciless struggle against espionage and treason in the units, the liquidation of deserters in sections immediately adjacent to the front,” as well as for carrying on a “pitiless struggle against the subversion of cowardly traitors and deserters.” Accordingly, the Special Departments received the authorization on all levels, right up to the division level, to arrest, at any time, deserters among soldiers and non-commissioned officers and, in urgent cases, officers and, if need be, to shoot them on the spot. Arresting members of the “middle, higher-ranking, and supreme leadership personnel” was abstractly dependent upon prior approval by the Special Department of the NKVD for the section of front in question. This was hardly more than formal obstacle at any rate, since, as Major Kononov testified, such approval was “fundamentally declared to be forthcoming,” and was in most cases obtained following the executions of the officers. In practice, therefore, the “divisional commander received a brief notice afterward, stating that one of his officers had been shot.”

Special Departments of the NKVD existed on the levels of the Fronts, Armies, Corps, and Divisions; on the regimental staff, there was a “plenipotentiary” of the Chief of the Special Department of the Division with his assistants. To supervise the detainees and carry out the executions, the Special Department of the Division had its own execution squad in platoon strength. The personnel of the Special Departments also had the right to carry out “controls and inspections of all documentation” and to participate in all service conferences. The effectiveness of these Special Departments was based primarily on a system of informants, penetrating all aspects of the Army. Order № 40 of the Chiefs of the Special Department of the NKVD of the 51st Independent Army, Brigade Commissar Pimenov, on October 25, 1941, provides an idea of the extent to which the “Soviet patriots” of the Red Army were subjected to spying and informing.10 Pimenov complained menacingly that no “mass secret service,” no “large-scale information network,” no “thick network of intelligence agents,” no “capable cell-agencies” of “operative” informers, spies, and agents had been created in the 276th Infantry Division in compliance with Order of Stalin 270 and additional NKVD orders. While at least eight “agents” should have been assigned in every company, in addition to a “resident,” he said, only one single informant had been found in a certain company of this front-line division, so that “class enemies,” “counter-revolutionary” and “criminal elements” were able to carry on their subversive activity without hindrance.

Documentary material from the Special Department of the NKVD of the 19th Army under Colonel (of State Security) Korolev provides us with some information on the average daily work of the NKVD, which also supervised the military commissars and political leaders. It consisted, briefly, of the detection, arrest, and liquidation of "traitors.” “Many hundreds of denunciations” by company informants against soldiers had to be constantly evaluated. Between 25 and July 27, 1941, the Special Department of one division and its guard command alone arrested “up to 1,000 persons fleeing from the front.” A few individual entries, selected at random, ran as follows:

“7 men were shot before the assembled personnel ... furthermore, 5 men were shot without a verdict: 3 deserters and 2 traitors to the homeland who attempted to desert to the enemy; 16 self-mutilators, 2 deserters, and 2 men were shot, according to the judgement of the military tribunal, for leaving the battlefield without authorization... On August 29, of this year, Yurgin Fedor, Member of the All-Russian Communist Party, was shot before the assembled personnel of the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 400th Infantry Regiment for failing to carry out an attack order of the regimental commander, Major Novikov.”

The methods commonly employed are revealed by an accidentally discovered “special communication” from the Special Department of the NKVD of the 264th Infantry Division to the Chief of the Special Department of the NKVD of the 26th Army, Major (of State Security) Valis, on the first combat action of the 1060th Infantry Regiment. When the young soldiers of the 4th Company of the 2nd Battalion failed, heavy machine guns opened fire on them and killed at least 60 of them: “The commander and the political leader shot all who attempted to surrender.” A letter from Soviet writer Stavsky written to “Dear Comrade Stalin,” states that 480-600 soldiers were shot for “desertion, panic mongering, and other crimes” in the 24th Army in region around El’nja within a few days of August 1941 alone, according to data of the Soviet High Command and the Political Department.

In the face of such orders of magnitude, the records are simply filled with data on individual and mass executions in the units of the Red Army. “The number of daily executions for desertion and self-mutilation is amazingly high,” says a German evaluation report. No wonder then that, as stated elsewhere, the mere existence of the Special Department had “a paralyzing effect on officers and soldiers,” or, as the captured Generals Snegov and Ogurtsev and other high officers admitted to the Germans: “Fear of the ghostly power of the NKVD was impossible to overcome.” “All officers have a great fear of the NKVD.”14 On August 9, 1941, this was also readily admitted by the Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Army, Lieutenant General Muzychenko, who must be considered to have been loyal to the system: “The NKVD is a dreadful organization that can exterminate every one of us at any time.” One who stood close to the proceedings, the Divisional Commissar of the 176th Infantry Division, Filev, described the functions of the Special Department in the following pithy phrase: “All counter-revolutionary activity is immediately and unmercifully repressed by draconian means.”

The far-reaching curtailment of the authority of Soviet officers in favor of the reintroduced military commissars and political leaders, in addition to the installation of the secret NKVD apparatus independent of the army, did not yet appear sufficient to Stalin to check the armed forces that he so mistrusted. Based on Order № 001919 of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, signed on September 12, 1941, by Stalin and Marshal Shaposhnikov, so-called “blocking units” made up of “reliable fighters,” or, as it states in another place, “reliable, resistant, dedicated commanders, political leaders, sub-commanders, and soldiers” were to be formed in battalion strength in each division within five days. These well-armed blocking units, equipped with their own tanks and armored cars, received the authority to prevent any unauthorized withdrawal of front-line troops by armed force, and to shoot down all panicky soldiers attempting to withdraw from combat.

Implementation Order № 04/00378 of the Command-in-Chief of the 19th Army Lieutenant General Lukin, and Member of the Military Council, Divisional Commissar Sheklanov, of September 15, 1941, shows that the blocking units were not formed on a case by case basis, but consisted rather of permanent, “independent” units. In addition to these permanent blocking units of the divisions, “one company to one regiment,” which were deployed at the height of the artillery positions, ad hoc blocking units can be proven to have been drawn from the regiments as early as July 1941. According to the testimony of the Regimental Commander, Major Kononov, these units formed of Party and Komsomol members in alternating composition (for the purpose of concealment), received the order, issued in every case prior to any combat action, to shoot all “cowards,” i.e., all those “who do not blindly storm forward for whatever reason.” Concealed blocking commandos consisting “of military commissars and chiefs of the Special Departments” were also posted to the rear of the Soviet armies, especially on the streets and crossroads, to arrest all suspicious-looking soldiers and transfer them to NKVD “Special Camps,” where they would be “examined,” i.e., most of them were shot.

During the crisis of 1942, the blocking units were granted a renewal. Stalin returned to this tried-and-tested institution in his well-known Order № 227 of July 28, 1942, and further emphasized his demands by means of an order of July 31, 1942, issued by himself and General Vasilevsky, who at that time was Chief of the General Staff.19 Under the leadership of the members of the Special Departments, well-equipped blocking units, with a strength of 200 men each, were accordingly to be posted immediately behind every division, subordinated to the Military Councils of the Soviet armies. These units, as well, were to shoot all “panic mongers and cowards on the spot” in the event of unauthorized withdrawal. If, in addition to the political administrations and departments, Special Departments and blocking units, one also considers the justice meted out by the military public prosecutors and military tribunals, as well as the punishment battalions and punishment companies introduced by Order № 227; if, furthermore, one considers the barbaric methods used by these bodies, then one understands something of the real driving forces behind the so-called “mass heroism” and “Soviet patriotism” of the soldiers of the Red Army during the “Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union.” The methods employed, however, require more detailed examination.

Generally, it is true to say that the inhumane treatment of the Soviet soldiers differed from the treatment meted out to the Soviet civilian population in the combat zone only in its perfection. Stalin had given the watch- word on July 3, 1941, when he demanded that “not one kilo of wheat, not one liter of gasoline” should be left to the enemy, and that “all valuable property... that cannot be transported” should be destroyed, “without exception.” This was further intensified in regard to the civilian population by Soviet radio on July 7, 1941.20 All rolling stock, all stocks of raw materials, all stocks of fuel, every kilo of wheat, every head of livestock, were to be destroyed. Implementation of the newly proclaimed principle of destruction meant deliberate, unquestioning destruction of the basic necessities of life for the civilian population. It also meant that the population would be exposed to the foreseeable consequences of the partisan war, which was begun at this same time, and which was illegal under international law— i.e., the danger of severe reprisals by the Germans and German-allied troops.
As early as June 29, 1941, the Council of the People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the VKP (b) gave instructions that all forces of the “Soviet” population were to be mobilized in the struggle against the Germans, and that an extensive people’s war was to be organized in the enemy hinterland. The face of this “people’s war” is representatively revealed, in addition to many similar worded proclamations,22 by a directive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of White Russia of July 1, 1941, communicating the following data relating to the incipient “partisan movement:”

“Every link to the enemy hinterland must be destroyed, bridges and streets must be blown up or damaged, fuel and food warehouses, vehicles and aircraft must be burned, railway catastrophes must be arranged, ail enemies must be exterminated: they must receive no rest either day or night; they must be exterminated everywhere, wherever they are surprised, they must be killed by any means that comes to hand: axes, scythes, crowbars, hay forks, knives. you must not shrink from using any means in the extermination of the enemy: strangle them, hack them to death, burn and poison the fascist scum.”

According to the testimony of the captured partisan Kozlov on October 1, 1941, the member of the Central Committee of the Party, Kazalapov from Kholm, also demanded that German soldiers and wounded be “further tortured by mutilation prior to shooting.”

It was not only the partisan units and partisan groups, some of them recruited by force from among the male population under the threat of being shot, that now began an illegal guerrilla war in crass violation of the letter and spirit of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare. The entire civilian population was irresponsibly drawn in, as revealed by a proclamation directed at all residents of “enemy-occupied territory” by the Commander- in-Chief of the West Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Timoshenko, and with him, Member of the Military Council, Bulganin, on August 6, 1941. The “workers, farmers, and all Soviet citizens” were ordered to “attack and destroy German rear connections, transports, and columns, burn and destroy bridges, tear down telegraph and telephone lines, set fire to houses and forests.” “Beat the enemy, torture him to death with hunger, burn him with fire, destroy him with bullets and hand grenades... to carry out the destruction of bridges in the rear of the enemy, use mostly local means, use expedients involving explosives... burn warehouses, destroy the fascists like mad dogs.” All very easily said by persons who knew that they were in safety; the people would suffer the consequences. No army in the whole world would have tolerated such actions without the severest reprisals.

Many leaflets were directed at Russian women, alleging that German soldiers “kill small children before the eyes of their mothers, cut open the stomachs of pregnant women, cut off the breasts of breast-feeding women, they rape women, mothers, and sisters, and force them into brothels.” Soviet women, as “beloved citizens,” were called upon to commit illegal acts of the greatest danger. For those women, who however, like the majority in the occupied territories, wanted nothing more than the restoration of halfway tolerable life relationships, the Soviets offered a half-concealed threat: “We will see you later, we will see you again soon!” Everyone knew what that meant. Agents were assigned to draw up “precise lists” of all persons in any way associated with the Germans, even if their only crime had been their inability to avoid German troops from being quartered on them. First Lieutenant Kovalev of the 223rd Infantry Division testified that the population was also called upon to refuse to work. Fields, forests, and buildings were to be set on fire. The rural population was to bum all wheat, destroy agricultural implements, while the workers in the cities were to destroy the machinery and manufacturing installations. “Long live our great Stalin!” shouted Timoshenko and Bulganin to the population, who were called upon to deprive themselves of the last resources needed to survive.

In order to lend force to the “scorched earth policy,” proclaimed by Stalin on July 3, 1941, and introduced by the Party and governmental bodies by directive of the Central Committee and the Council of the People’s Commissars as early as June 29, 1941, so-called “destruction battalions” were formed of Party and Komsomol members and elements loyal to the system. Their task was to carry out destruction on the greatest possible scale in the centers and cities of areas threatened by the enemy. By order of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, operational sapper groups were formed under the leadership of the Main Administration for Military Engineering Affairs, in cooperation with the front-line staffs, for example, in Kharkov, Kiev, and in other cities, for the general purpose of blowing up or undermining all important objectives and houses in the region. Colonel General Volkogonov also published Order № 0428 of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command of November 17, 1941. In this “horrible order,” characteristic for its “cruelty,” Stalin ordered every regiment to form special arson commandos that, together with partisans and subversives, were to “destroy and burn down completely“ all human settlements and houses in the German hinterland, to a depth of 40-60 kilometers, and 20-30 kilometers right and left of the roads, without exception, in the event of forced withdrawal. Concentrated forces of the air force and artillery were to participate in this work of destruction. No consideration was given to the populations who lived there, and who were thus robbed of their last lodgings and chased out into the icy wastes. “Villages and houses were always burned, wherever there were no Germans,” writes Volkogonov. “Where there were occupants, it was not so easy to set fires...weathered farm houses blazed brightly, while fear-stricken mothers pressed weeping children to themselves. A pall lay over the villages of the home- land, tried by suffering.” That the Order of Stalin communicated to the front and army staffs was obviously carried out before the issue date is shown by documents captured by the Germans, in relation to the “systematic arson action.” For example, the Chief of Staff of the 1322nd Infantry Regiment, Major Zharkov, distributed a combat order to the 1st Battalion as early as November 17, 1941, ordering the villages near Barykovo, Lutovinovo, and Krjukovka burned down during the coming night. All persons (soldiers and civilians), attempting to leave the houses, were to be exterminated by hand grenades and firearms.

Stalin’s callousness in regard to the sufferings of the civilian population were also revealed in an order distributed on September 21, 1941, to the Commander of Leningrad, General of the Army Zhukov, Members of the Military Council Zhdanov and Kuznetsov, and NKVD Deputy Merkulov. The motive for it is not authenticated; nor is it entirely credible. In any case, the above-named persons reported that the German troops were sending “old men and women, and mothers with children ahead” to Leningrad, with a request that the Bolsheviks surrender Leningrad and conclude peace. Stalin, in his usual manner, reacted with “extreme cruelty,” issuing the threat that all persons “in our ranks” with inhibitions “against opening fire upon this type of delegation,” “must be destroyed, since such persons are more dangerous than the German fascists.” His “advice” in reality, an order communicated by the Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, Marshal of the Soviet Union Shaposhnikov, read:

“There must be no sentimentality; rather, hit the enemy and his lackeys, both willing and unwilling, in the teeth... hit both the Germans and their delegates with all your strength, wherever they may be. Mow the enemy down, whether willing or unwilling. No mercy to the German cutthroats and their delegates, whoever they may be.”

This order by Stalin to open fire upon old men and women, and mothers with children was immediately communicated in detail to the commanders and commissars of the divisions and regiments in Leningrad.

The inhumane attitude of both Stalin and his regime toward their own population was revealed perfectly when the German troops began to withdraw in 1943, with Soviet troops gradually regaining the previously occupied territories. The Red Army troops were everywhere followed by border troops and NKVD troops to secure the hinterland; these were responsible for taking “Chekist measures” to purge “all territories liberated from the occupant,” particularly cities and inhabited areas, “from enemy elements and their lackeys,” from “enemy agents and other hostile elements,” to “normalize” and “restore” the situation and create a “revolutionary order” behind the front line. What this meant in practice is revealed with sufficient clarity by the actions of the Soviet security corps: the shooting of all inhabitants and residents, without regard to age or sex, having maintained at least bearable relations with the German occupation authorities or German soldiers. Hundreds of thousands now fell victim to NKVD purges, an order of magnitude that compares, and may even exceed, the victims of the Einsatzgruppen of the German Security Police and SD.

A terrible fate awaited the Caucasian peoples of Kalmucks, Karachays, Chechens, Ingushs, Balkars, parts of the Karbardinian people, as well as the Tatars of the Crimea for their collaboration with the German occupation authorities. Following the initial, far-reaching waves of bloody purges, these people, on the order of Stalin, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKP (b), and the State Defense Committee (GKO) of 1943/1944, were tom from their ancestral residences and deported to concentration camps in the barren regions of Siberia, and to north of the Polar circle, or to central Asia. They were dispersed, stripped of all national identity, and treated, immediately and practically, like convicts. Tens of thou- sands fell victim to this “mass crime”—so-called by Khrushchev in 1956, although he was personally involved. This crime was carried out using methods that were as treacherous as they were cruel, with the usual accompanying phenomena of executions and the systematic dispersion of families. These actions clearly constituted the crime of genocide according to the 1948 Genocide Convention, ratified by the USSR (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

Anyone prepared to act as mercilessly against his own civilian population would naturally show no mercy to one’s own soldiers. This is revealed by many characteristics. A common crime in the Red Army, for example, was the self-infliction of wounds by soldiers just prior to serious attacks in order to avoid combat. As a rule, the self-mutilators, who were found in all sections of the army, were shot. This may be seen from the records in all cases, either with or without judgement by a court martial, which was irrelevant under Soviet conditions. The number of sentences handed down for self-mutilation, already considerable as early as June 1941, increased rapidly in 1942, almost doubling on the Kalinin Front, the Southwest Front, and the North Front between January and May 1942, and increased by the factor of nine on the Northwest Front over the same time period. It was not the fact that there were “sometimes hundreds of self-mutilators” in the “etappe” i.e., the field hospitals and military hospitals to the rear, but rather the fact that few such cases were being reported on the furthermost front line, in the first-aid stations (PPM) and medical battalions (MSB), that motivated the intervention by the Military Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Red Army under Corps Jurist Nossov, on July 18, 1942. Nossov’s Order № 0110 instructed the military public prosecutors of the Fronts and Armies not just to take action afterward, as had been done previously, but rather to hand over a few self-mutilators, sentence them to death and shoot them immediately, during the attack preparations or just after the attack began, “in front of all assembled personnel,” to achieve the maximum degree of deterrence.39 In this instance as well, the “mass heroism” and “Soviet patriotism” of the Red Army was the result of intimidation. In contrast to conditions in the German Wehrmacht, where soldiers were only suspected of so-called self-mutilation in exceptional cases, the broad mass of soldiers in the Red Army was suspected of self-mutilation from the very outset. According to Order of the People's Commissar of Defense № 111 of April 12, 1942, signed by Lieutenant General Khrulev, even wounded or sick soldiers lying in medical installations were to be indicted and prosecuted as self-mutilators.

The slaveholder mentality and the system of contempt for human life peculiar to the Soviet Union is clearly demonstrated by the methods of attack commonly practiced by the Red Army, i.e., the tactic of the “human steam roller,” guided, according to Major General Grigorenko, by the “inhumane slogan” of “Spare No Human Life.” Colonel General Volkogonov has combed thousands of operational documents of the Supreme Commander Stalin; not a single one of them contains any hint that saving lives, achieving the established objective at minimum cost, or avoiding unprepared frontal attacks was of any importance at all. Quite the contrary: Stalin demanded successful assaults “at any price in casualties”; for example, in one order, he compelled “even Colonel General Yeremenko and Lieutenant General Gordov to spare no manpower, and to shrink from no casualties.” “Casualties, casualties en masse,” were indifferent to Stalin, and simply didn’t matter if only the desired success could be achieved. According to Volkogonov, Stalin led his armed forces to victory “at the price of horrendous losses.” Why is it, asks Volkogonov, “that our losses were up to three times as high as those of the enemy?” This was an underestimate, since, according to Finnish experiences during the Winter War, Soviet losses exceeded Finnish casualties—at a “conservative estimate”— by the factor of five: “Soviet infantry was driven en masse against Finnish positions without any regard for losses.” Authors from the Soviet era, then drawing to a close, confirmed this assertion by stating, very much to the displeasure of the Stalinist Voenno-istoriceski zhurnal (4/1991), “that our army suffered losses in the past war that were five times higher, and even more, than those suffered by the army of the Hitlerites.”

The Soviet methods of attack employed by the Red Army during the Winter War with Finland differed from those of all other armies, and were repeated in a cruder fashion during the German-Soviet conflict, according to a slogan attributed to the Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis: “They Can’t Kill Them All!” A German empirical report from 1941 stated: “If the first attack fails, stubbornly following the order often means that the Russian infantry bleeds to death in our defensive fire.” Majors Anikin and Gorachev of the 10th Infantry Corps described this method of attack on March 10, 1943, in the Kuban’ bridgehead as follows:

“Once the order is given and compliance with the order proves impossible, Soviet soldiers are invariably driven into combat at the same place, driven over and over again, regardless of heavy losses.”

How could it be otherwise in an army in which the leadership corps was personally threatened? During the last ten days of July 1941, Stalin was extremely anxious about the German capture of Smolensk, since he foresaw the danger of a strategic breakthrough to Moscow. On behalf of the Supreme High Command, the Chief of Staff of the High Command of the West, General Malandin, and Member of the Military Council, Bulganin, Stalin ordered the Commander-in-Chief of the 16th Army, Lieutenant General Lukin, whose troops were encircled, on July 20, 1941, to recapture the city of Smolensk at any price:

“You have failed to carry out the order from Headquarters...Answer! The order is to be carried out at any price to the last man. if you fail to carry out the order, you will be arrested and handed over to a court martial.”

A similar order was received by the Commander-in-Chief of the 20th Army, Colonel General Kurochkin, also encircled at Smolensk. The severely wounded Lieutenant General Lukin told the Germans how the attack now took place: demoralized soldiers were “driven onward” and sacrificed by the tens of thousands during vain assault attempts, “over and over again.” “The troops only attack under the severest compulsion by the political agencies,” was the experience of Regimental Commander Major Kononov, mentioned above.

To get an idea of these attacks, a few relevant testimonies should be selected from the incalculable number of similar reports. “Of the assigned forces, in strengths of approximately 700 men, only 70-80 came back from the first thrust,” stated the Chief of Staff of the 46th Infantry Division, a colonel, on July 24, 1941. “During the second thrust, with a newly arrived battalion.., the losses were just as great,” The German IX Army Corps reported on August 2, 1941, that enemy attacks were “carried out with extraordinary tenacity, despite the heaviest losses...through our own observation and through prisoner testimonies, it was established that Russian infantry was driven into combat by machine gun fire from the rear, and by pistol shots from commissars, five days,” First Lieutenant of the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Guards Infantry Brigade, Sergeiev, confided to his diary on April 17, 1943, before falling in combat: “The companies only have six to eight men left.” And on May 1, 1943: “We are attacking with as much success as ever, it is just that we have lost many men.”

What this kind of perverted combat tactics implied for Soviet soldiers may be seen from the testimony of a few captured survivors of the 105th Infantry Brigade on July 11, 1942 53 “On July 7 the brigade was utilized during the attack against Bashkino for the first time,” according to the inter- rogation record. “During the first attack, the 1st Battalion was almost totally annihilated... The attack terrain must have already been covered with dead from the previous attacks by the 12th Guards Division. When the battalion assembled again after the first attack, the Brigade Commander (a colonel) and Brigade Commissar appeared. They had all the Komsomol and Party members step out, and, from them, they formed the 1sl Company, which was to move forward in the second wave during the next attack and shoot all those who withdrew or lay down. On the commissar’s order, three Red Army men were shot... During the next attack on July 9, we again had very heavy losses, so that the rest of the brigade were concentrated in a single battalion toward noon, and was again assigned to a new attack on Bashkino. On the evening of July 9, during battalion assembly, only sixty men returned from this attack. The attack terrain was a terrible sight because of the great numbers of corpses there. As the result of a direct hit, parts of human bodies lay everywhere, especially in the depressions, so that no Soviet soldier could avoid this horrible sight.”

A few other practices from Soviet assault procedures are worthy of mention, such as the distribution, whenever possible, of alcoholic spirits before attacking. As a result, Soviet soldiers stormed forward in thick agglomerations and suffered high losses. In contrast to the German army, the Soviet infantry often were not even equipped with steel helmets, and were therefore exposed to the risk of severe head wounds. While fighting the Japanese at Khasan Lake or the Finns during the Winter War, tank crews were temporarily locked inside their combat vehicles. Soviet soldiers were also locked inside their bunkers, as observed in 1941 by the Germans. The Soviet Air Force was prohibited from bailing out over German-occupied territory. According to an order from the 322nd Infantry Division to the Commander of the 1087th Infantry Regiment, Major Romanenko, on January 16, 1942, houses were to continue to be defended even if they were on fire. That Soviet soldiers died in the flames was irrelevant. As Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov revealingly remarked to the speechless American General Eisenhower in this regard, in particular: “If we came to a mine field, our infantry attacked just the same, as if it weren’t there.” The resulting casualties were accepted as a matter of course.

The whole system of Soviet contempt for human life also found expression in the manner in which the personnel was treated, which was compulsorily conscripted from the recaptured territories starting in 1943. It must be recalled in this regard that the population of the Caucasus, the Cos- sack regions at Terek, Kuban, and the Don, as well as in the southern Ukraine, had generally maintained good relationships with the Germans— from the Soviet point of view this was an attitude of treason and hostility. The compulsory conscription of all men of military age immediately after the recapture of this region therefore formed part of a mass punishment campaign, undertaken collectively against the population, as well as an act of revenge. As revealed by Order №052 from the 3rd Guards Army of February 23, 1943, as well as by the statements of General Staff Major Zhilov of the staff of the 58th Army, the mobilization of the male population after the first uncontrolled recruitments was left to the front-line units of the corps and divisional commanders, who were thus given an easy opportunity to make up for the heavy losses suffered by their units. In practice, local commanders were assigned to summon the local male population under threat of severe punishment. They then systematically began to comb the cities and localities with the help of the Special Departments of the NKVD and other NKVD agencies for “military age” male personnel. All persons caught were ruthlessly drafted "the same night” All males up to the age of fifty, and in some cases, sixty, were considered able-bodied and liable for military service. Basically, all youths born as late as 1927, and in some cases, 1928, i.e., sixteen-year old, and, in some cases, fifteen-year old, were drafted, in various divisions by falsification of their birthdates. In accordance with the Stalinist principle that no one was unfit for military service, only the "obviously sick and cripples” were rejected; the handicapped were, nevertheless, drafted as “fit for service” in many cases. Depending upon their classification, the young people were immediately assigned to the front units or to punishment units, so that, according to one source, “the punishment companies consist mostly of young people, and the youngest age groups.”

Usually poorly trained, or not trained at all, sometimes still wearing civilian clothing, poorly armed and insufficiently provisioned, these men were immediately thrown into the struggle at the foremost front fines and driven into German machine gun fire. The German command posts repeatedly described the manner in which the Soviets—for example, on the Taman’ peninsula and elsewhere—drove their units forward against fully fortified and defended German positions, without reconnaissance or preparation, wave after wave, with “extraordinarily high losses.” An unnamed Soviet political officer with the rank of captain also very accurately remarked in his diary on March 4, 1943: “In the region... the young people... are mobilized and immediately sent into combat as cannon fodder. In the unanimous opinion of Soviet deserters and prisoners of war:

“The extremely high losses naturally suffered by these untrained replacement troops who had no interest in fighting for the Soviet Union, and were trapped between the front line and the blocking commandos, were deliberately accepted, since the Soviet Union had no desire to keep these fascist-contaminated elements that therefore constituted a danger to the morale of the Red Army”

The German troops took account of this inhumane and illegal method, at least, insofar as armed civilians were treated as prisoners of war rather than guerrillas if they were captured in fighting formation next to regular soldiers of the Red Army.

In reply to Churchill’s well-known “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, Stalin, in a foreign interview published in the party newspaper Pravda on March 14, 1946, stated that the Soviet Union, “in the struggle against the Germans, and, additionally, as a result of the German occupation and the conscription of the Soviet population for forced labor, irretrievably lost approximately seven million people,” i.e., both military and civilian personnel. The seven million figure was later further inflated for propaganda purposes—several times during the following time period. Thus, Member of
the Politburo and Stalin Party doctrinaire Suslov, in 1965, increased the figure to 20 million, a figure that was obligatory throughout the Brezhnev era, while the total number of military and civilian deaths in the USSR was increased to 27 million by Soviet State President Gorbachev on May 9, 1990. Of these, 8,668,000 were members of the armed forces, including members of the Interior Troops, the Border Troops, and Security Agencies. One year later, on the evening before the anniversary celebrations, on June 21, 1991, a Soviet historian, Professor Dr. Kozlov, ventured to assert: “The USSR suffered 54 million war dead.” A comparison of obviously speculative casualty figures will hardly produce reliable results. Furthermore, as the Austrian military historian, University Lecturer Dr. Magenheimer, accurately stated:

The suspicion arises that many of the civilian losses must be attributed to the reprisals, liquidations, and deportations of the Stalinist system, not least of all to the compulsory repatriations during and after the end of the war in 1945, all of which took place at the express will of Stalin.”

It was Stalin who—at the end of the war, by order to the Commander- in-Chiefs of the 1st and 2nd White Russian Fronts, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Ukrainian Fronts, as well as to “Comrade Beria, Comrade Merkulov, Comrade Abakumov, Comrade Golikov, Comrade Khrulev, Comrade Golubev”—personally demanded the creation of gigantic NKVD camps with a capacity of one million persons for “former prisoners of war and repatriated Soviet citizens.” Regarding the number of military dead in particular, it should be recalled that the Soviet Union was at war with, or had attacked, not only the German Reich between 1939 and 1945, but the following states as well: Poland, Finland, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Iran, Bulgaria, and Japan. Although Colonel General Volkogonov estimates Soviet losses at two or three times higher than those of the enemy, these same losses,“at a conservative estimate,” were in fact five times higher than those of the enemy during the Winter War with Finland alone. If the ratio rose even higher between 1941 and 1945, then the reasons for it must be ascribed primarily to the Soviets.

The Soviet Union did not recognize the Hague Convention, and never ratified the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention, in order to prevent Soviet soldiers from saving their lives by permitting themselves to be captured. Prisoners of war were fundamentally considered “traitors” and “deserters,” and were to be annihilated by all means, both aerial and terrestrial; they were therefore deliberately subjected to bombing attacks by the Soviet Air Force against German prisoner of war camps. In terms of cause and effect, therefore, the Soviet Union was itself responsible for the casualties among prisoners of war; this is, furthermore, the opinion of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Of course, this only exculpates the Germans insofar as German treatment of prisoners of war did not result from indifference
or ill will, but was rather dictated by the force of circumstances. The individual and mass executions, which were common in the Red Army through- out the war, also caused heavy losses among Soviet soldiers. The numbers are difficult to determine, but generally they must have been enormous. Finally, the barbarism of Soviet methods of attack cost huge numbers of human lives. These massacres, coldly calculated by the Soviet leadership, set the Red Army apart from all other armies in the world, including the German army. One need only recall, for example, the seriousness with which theories relating to the most economical methods of infantry attack in terms of human life were discussed in the German army, even before the First World War, and that blind frontal assaults against enemy positions prepared for defense were considered to be almost prohibited at that time.

Regardless of all countermeasures, over 3.8 million Soviet soldiers surrendered to the Germans by the end of 1941, and a total of 5,245,000 during the entire war. According to the official Soviet definition, all these men were “traitors,” and “deserters.” Two million of them perished primarily during the first winter of the war from hunger and epidemics. Large numbers were also shot by totally deluded German Security Police and the SD. A million Soviet soldiers, nevertheless, did volunteer for military service on the German side, permitting themselves to be armed for combat against the Soviet regime by the Germans. Under the circumstances, the question arises: how can one possibly speak seriously of a “Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union”? Furthermore, what is the justification for the stereotypical allegations of “mass heroism” and “Soviet patriotism” of the Red Army when the most reprehensible methods of compulsion were required to drive Soviet soldiers into combat? “I repeat that the military defeat was the result of the unwillingness of the Red Army to fight,” wrote former Lieutenant Oleg Krasovsky of the 16th “Kikvidze” Infantry Division in regard to the events of 1941. Krasovsky was later adjutant to Major General of the ROA, Blagoveshchensky, and until his death in 1993, he was Editor in Chief of the almanac Veche, published by the Russian National Association. According to Lieutenant General Professor Pavlenko, the basic questions of the German-Soviet war continue to be “unscrupulously falsified” by Soviet historiography. It appears that these falsifications include, first and foremost, the propaganda myth of “Soviet patriotism” that continues to be a feature of historical literature on the German-Soviet war to this very day.


to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 6

The “Great Patriotic War”
Soviet Propaganda and its Tools

The German invasion of June 22, 1941, resulted in a total transformation of the international situation of the Soviet Union, freeing it at a single blow from the odium of its past partnership with Germany. The Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939, which the author Dashichev called “amoral and criminal in the highest degree,” had made Stalin the “accomplice of fascist aggression.” “The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939”—which the well-known Socialist Andre Rossi considered lofty beyond all doubt—“was an agreement to attack Poland... The secret agreement proved...legally, that this crime was committed jointly by Germany and Russia... The German-Soviet agreement of August-September 1939 was based on the division of Eastern Europe.” From the very first day of the German-Polish war on September 1, the Soviet Union had, more- over, provided immediate military assistance to help crush the Republic of Poland, by readily acceding to a request from the Chief of the General Staff of the German Luftwaffe to provide German combat aircraft operating in Poland with their positions by means of a direction-finding signal from a radio transmitter at Minsk. On September 3, 1939, the Soviet government had indicated its “unconditional” agreement to the incorporation of the “spheres of interest” promised to the Soviets in Moscow, agreeing upon the technical details of such incorporation with the German Ambassador in Moscow, Count von der Schulenburg, on September 10. On September 17, the Soviet Union had begun an unprovoked war of aggression in violation of treaties, attacking Poland from the rear which, at that moment, was fighting for its existence.

The German-Soviet military talks of September 20, 1939, in Moscow had culminated in an agreement according to which the German Wehrmacht was to take all “necessary measures” to prevent “any provocation or acts of sabotage by Polish bands or the like” in the cities and localities to be handed over to the Red Army. The Red Army, for its part, had agreed to provide “all available forces necessary for the destruction of Polish units and bands” during the withdrawal of German troops. President of the Council of People’s Commissars Molotov, the leader responsible for the Soviet policy, had declared in a speech before the Supreme Soviet on October 31, 1939:
“A single blow against Poland, first by the Germans, then by the Red Army, and nothing remained of this monster of the Versailles Treaty, which owed its existence to the oppression of non-Polish nationalities.”

It had been the express wish of Stalin that nothing should remain of the national existence of Poland, and that all Polish national resistance should be stifled by amicable German-Soviet mutual agreement. In a telegram to Reich Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop on December 27, 1939, Stalin had spoken of a “friendship between the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union,” a friendship sealed “in blood.” The German-Soviet Border and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939, concluded at the expense of Poland and other sovereign states, had sealed the dangerous cooperation between the two great powers.

Following the “settlement”—naturally assumed to be “final”—of the “Polish question” from the Soviet point of view, the Soviet regime, in Stalin’s words, had wished to proceed with a solution of the “problem” of the Baltic States, by way of the agreement of August 23, 1939. That is, it began to put massive pressure upon the sovereign republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, regardless of any existing treaties, to throttle their independence through the relentless application of political terror and threats of military force.

According to the German-Soviet Treaty of August 23, 1939, Finland was also deemed to lie within the Soviet “sphere of interest,” doubtlessly destined for a fate similar to that of Poland and the Baltic States.4 However, the unprovoked Soviet attack upon Finland, in violation of international law, had taken an unexpected turn as a result of stubborn Finnish resistance. The Soviet government, to avoid the threat of involvement by the Western powers, had abandoned its objectives in regard to Finland and had been— temporarily—satisfied with the annexation of large chunks of territory in the Karelian peninsula. On the basis of the German-Soviet agreement of August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union had adopted a similarly hostile attitude to Romania in the spring of 1940. The High Command of the Soviet 12th Army, which was concentrated on the Soviet-Romania border, and the Mechanized Cavalry Group under Lieutenant General Cherevichenko had been ordered to initiate a surprise attack against Romania on July 26, 1940. Upon the urgent advice of Germany, the Bucharest government submitted to the Soviet ultimatum demanding the relinquishment of the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina to the Soviet Union, thus avoiding the outbreak of military conflict.

The immediate result of Stalin’s agreement with Hitler, therefore, had been that the Soviet Union had waged aggressive wars against Poland and Finland; that, in partnership with Germany, the Soviet Union had destroyed the sovereignty and independence of the Polish nation; that Romania had been forced to relinquish enormous territories under threat of war; and that the Soviet Union had destroyed the independence of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania under the direct or indirect use of force, and had incorporated these nations into the Soviet empire. Poland had been described by the Soviet government as a matter of exclusive concern to the Soviet Union and Germany, fundamentally rejecting the right of the Western powers and Great Britain to intervene in Polish affairs. According to Moscow, Britain and France had been alleged to enjoy “undivided rule over hundreds of millions colonial slaves,” thus forfeiting the moral right to speak of the “freedom of peoples.” The traditional justification for the declaration of war upon Germany by the Western powers, therefore, had been merely a pretext intended to conceal true motives and objectives. The latter, in turn, had consisted of nothing more than the mere desire to maintain the antiquated balance of power in Europe, created at Versailles and of advantage to the Western powers alone, the elimination of which had been the true intent of the German-Soviet treaty—according to Stalin. The only concern of the Western powers had been to eliminate Germany as the most dangerous competitor on international markets.

Britain and France had been branded by the Soviet Union as the instigators of an imperialistic war, and had been alleged to be responsible for its continuation and expansion. Molotov, in a speech before the Supreme Soviet on October 31, 1939, had called the alleged motive of the Western powers for continuing the war against Germany (the struggle against “fascism,” which was by all possible means also actively engaged in by the Soviet Union until 1939, then stopped, and then suddenly recommenced in 1941) a meaningless and criminal piece of stupidity and cruelty. According to Pravda on September 30, 1939, it was “a crime against the peoples, committed by provocateurs and politicians without honor.” Stalin, summarizing the official opinion, had told Pravda in an interview on November 29, 1939:

“1. It was not Germany that attacked France and Britain; rather, it was France and Britain that attacked Germany, therefore assuming the responsibility for the present war;
2. Following the outbreak of hostilities, Germany made peace proposals to France and Britain; the Soviet Union publicly supported the German peace proposals, because it believed, and still believes, that a rapid end to the war would radically alleviate the situation of all countries and peoples;
3. The ruling classes in France and Britain insultingly rejected Germany’s peace proposals and all Soviet efforts for a rapid end to the war. These are the facts.”

The partnership and complicity between Hitler and Stalin had been revealed, not only by the fact that the Soviet Union had acted as an active partner in the violent transformation of territorial conditions in Eastern Europe, but by the provision of Soviet political, economic, and military support to the German Reich in its struggle against the Western powers. Soviet maritime assistance to the German naval war effort against Britain; the sabotaging of the French war effort by the French Communist Party at the bidding of Moscow; uninhibited Soviet efforts to sanction the situation created in Europe by the German success at arms under the terms of international law; and, finally, huge Soviet strategic economic deliveries to the German Reich—all of this is sufficiently well-known so that it doesn’t require repetition. A few remarks are, nonetheless, called for at this point simply to typify the attitude of the Soviet regime.

From the Soviet point of view, the Western powers alone had desired a continuation of the war. The occupation of Denmark and Norway by German troops in the spring of 1940 had therefore been considered a justified countermeasure against the expansion of the war into northern Europe desired by Great Britain and France. On April 9, 1940, Molotov had formally advised the Reich Government of the Soviet understanding of what Molotov called the “defensive measures...forced upon Germany,” simultaneously wishing the Germans “complete success.” The official Communist Party publication and largest-circulation newspaper in the USSR, Pravda, as well as the government newspaper Izvestia, and the trade union newspaper Trud, had commented upon German actions in Scandinavia by stating responsibility for expanding the war to Scandinavia.” In his speech before the Supreme Soviet on July 31, 1940, Molotov had publicly declared that Germany would never have been able to expand its sphere of influence to Scandinavia and Western Europe without indirect assistance from the USSR. that Britain and France had “invaded” the neutral waters of the Scandinavian countries to undermine Germany’s military position. In view of the fact that the Western powers were said to be “violating the sovereignty of the Scandinavian countries,” and were expanding “the war to Scandinavia,” any discussion of the legality of the actions forced upon Germany was said to be “laughable.” Britain and France were said to “assume the full weight of responsibility for expanding the war to Scandinavia.” In his speech before the Supreme Soviet on July 31, 1940, Molotov had publicly declared that Germany would never have been able to expand its sphere of influence to Scandinavia and Western Europe without indirect assistance from the USSR.

As for the German attacks on the neutral countries of Holland and Belgium, the Soviet government had expressed only understanding and sympathy. Pravda and Izvestia, on Stalin’s personal instructions, referred thereupon to the plans of the Anglo-French bloc, which had long been to "drag Holland and Belgium into the imperialist war as well.” Germany, consequently, was said to have been faced with the need to deal a counterblow against the invasion of Reich territory planned by the Western powers. It not Germany, but rather, Britain and France that were said to have impelled “two additional smaller countries into the flames of imperialist war.” Similarly, the 1940 German offensive against France had not been criticized in Moscow as a “fascist invasion”; on the contrary, it had been celebrated in Moscow as a masterpiece of planning and strategic execution. Upon the fall of France, Molotov had extended “the warmest congratulations of the Soviet government upon this brilliant success of the German Wehrmacht” to the German Ambassador, Count von der Schulenburg. The Soviet Union was alleged to have understood itself to be acting for Ger- many in the capacity of an “valuable second.” Ambassador Count von der Schulenburg had informed Berlin that the Soviet press coverage and statements of the propaganda machinery during the operations in France were in accordance with the “highest expectations” of the German Reich. Molotov, in his speech of July 31, 1940, and his talks with Hitler in November 1940, had recalled several times that the German-Soviet agreement of 1939 had “not been without influence on the great German victories.”

The complicity between Hitler and Stalin on the eve of the Second World War and during the opening phases of the war, as set forth above, ended abruptly on June 22, 1941. Without lifting a finger, the Soviet Union, once again, unexpectedly found itself on the side of the nations compelled to defend themselves against Germany and that were at war with Germany. This was a highly favorable position, as Stalin remarked in a speech on July 3, 1941, “a serious long-term factor on the basis of which the military successes of the Red Army in the war with fascist Germany must now be achieved.” Germany, in Stalin’s words, “has been revealed in the eyes of the entire world as a bloody aggressor,” on the basis of which, once again according to Stalin, “the best men in Europe, America, and Asia... extend their sympathy to the Soviet Union, approving Soviet actions and recognizing that our cause is just..,.” From now on, there were just two, clearly distinct, warring sides: the aggressors, led by Germany, and the victims. The most prominent victim now, ironically, was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union now successfully exploited this favorable political situation with an unprecedented lack of shame, using propaganda as a weapon fully in the service of the war effort.

Soviet journalists and literary hacks, artists and historians, were now called upon to assist in the victory of the Soviet Union, each in his own way. They were to devote all their talents and abilities to design in a black-and- white manner an image of the German enemy and to establish it as true. This depiction would be justified, by even the most reprehensible methods, as long as it served the purpose of filling the Soviet Union and Soviet soldiers with hatred of everything German. The “unsuspecting, peaceful Soviet Union”—according to the historical legend, which endures to the present day and which appears impossible to eradicate—was now alleged to have been “treacherously attacked by the fascists in violation of treaties.” According to the legend, the Soviet Union was shocked by this unexpected breach of faith on the part of its former contractual friend, accomplice, and partner. Shock, however, normally causes paralysis—not deliberate clearheaded action. The Soviet war propaganda machine, nevertheless, anticipated the attack, which came on June 22, 1941, and set to work with an apparently preestablished program. As early as the first day of the war, the Soviet Union’s most famous writers were convened under the chairmanship of the leading officials of the Writer’s Association and Stalinist favorite Fadeev, to receive their instructions—astonishingly pre-prepared—for a radical 180-degree turn in the Soviet propaganda treatment of Germany. With “surprising haste,” as was noted, they were now instructed to place all their talents in the service of the “Holy War” that was now just beginning. This “Holy War” was promised by Lebedev-Kumach, a writer of songs for the Soviet masses, in his hymn of the same name, published a few days later on June 24, 1941. An unprecedented, but well-controlled, propaganda avalanche then broke loose that penetrated the entire Soviet empire and exerted a profound influence on non-Soviet countries as well. The Germans had little notion of what was being brewed up against them.

Of the numbers of Soviet writers who participated in the huge anti-German war propaganda effort, most of whom now departed for the front or were assigned to the staffs of the Red Army as newspaper correspondents, a few in particular should be mentioned by name. These included the already named Fadeev, official writer and outspoken Party literary hack who committed suicide in 1956, and who owed his notoriety in the Soviet Union to the partisan novel Razgrom (Destruction), published in 1927, followed by the novel Molodaja Gvardija (Young Guard), published in 1945, glorifying the struggle of the “Soviet people” against the fascist conquerors. Mention should also be made of the later Nobel Prize Winner Sholokhov, who, in his well-known novel Tichij Don (The Quiet Don), published in four volumes between 1928 and 1940, describes the struggle between two worlds, one good and the other evil, the Bolshevik world naturally being portrayed as the “good” one. Sholokhov’s chief contribution to the propaganda battle of the German-Soviet war effort consisted, in addition to innumerable articles published in the party newspaper Pravda and the army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda, of a tale published in 1942 under the revealing title Nauka Nenavisti (School of Hate). Another person who wrote just as advantageously for Krasnaya zvezda was Simonov, author of a number of books as well as articles, film scripts, sketches, and the like, who turned his hand to the theme of Soviet human beings in the war. His war poem “Zdi menja” (Wait for Me), popularized by the entire Soviet media, became a commonplace in the Soviet Union, enjoying considerable popularity among the masses. Also not to be forgotten, is Professor Tarle, a well-known historian chiefly of the Napoleonic period, author of the two-volume work The Crimean War, whose journalistic and propagandistic effectiveness during the war was a masterpiece of intellectual abuse and corruption of the historical sciences for political purposes as practiced by the Soviet regime.

Alexei Tolstoy, descended from Count Tolstoy on his father’s side and Turgenev on his mother’s side, a gifted, if somewhat woolly writer fully in the service of Stalinism, should also be mentioned in this connection. When the delirium of the “Great Purge” raged over the entire country in 1937, it was Tolstoy who made his appearance at so-called “anti-fascist congresses” in foreign countries as the representative of the Soviet Union for the purpose of influencing Western intellectuals. That he was also a leading member of the “Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the German Fascist Invaders and their Allies,” a creation of war propaganda, the objective of which will be discussed in more detail below, was certainly due to his compliance as much as his name. Tolstoy deservedly received the Stalin Prize for the novel Petr Pervyj (Peter I), which has remained unfinished. His publications include Rasskazakh Ivana Sudareva (Tales of Ivan Sudarev, 1942-1944), Ivan Groznyj ( Ivan the Terrible), and Trudnye Gody (Difficult Years). However, above all, his numerous emotional propaganda articles were to contribute in no lesser degree to the awakening of unholy passions among Soviet soldiers.

The most important of these men, however, was Ilya Grigoriyevich Ehrenburg (Erenburg), the principal war propagandist of the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg cannot simply be dismissed as a man of “great criminal energy,” an “instigator of homicide,” or even a “psychopath,” or as a man of pathological talent. Criminal or psychopathic tendencies in no way exclude literary and journalistic talent. These gifts, linked with a deficient love of truth and a lack of all moral scruples, in any event, permitted him to become the most important instrument of anti-German hate propaganda.

Who Was Ehrenburg?
Bom in Kiev in 1891 as the son of a Jewish beer brewer, Ehrenburg acknowledged his Jewish origins all his life and, as he himself wrote: “I am a Jew and proud of it.” Averse to regular training, he dedicated himself, even as a schoolboy, not so much to his homework assignments of his humanities oriented secondary school, but rather, to roaming around in the political underworld of his native Russia. As a so-called “sixteen-year-old Bolshevik revolutionary,” he emigrated to Paris to lead the unsteady existence of a homeless, rootless intellectual from that time onward. He was a man with a profound and lifelong aversion for all men with an honorable calling and an ordered bourgeois existence. As a cafe literary hack in Paris until 1917, he was a regular guest of the Closerie des Lilas, where he “sat and wrote, all day, every day.” Attracted by the Russian revolution, he traveled to Moscow in 1917, where he fell out with the new Soviet rulers, and once again attempted to settle down in Paris. Expelled by the French police, he took up lodgings in the disordered atmosphere of Berlin until 1924, where, having entered Soviet service in 1921, he apparently earned his living as an employee of the Soviet press and, in particular, as an informer and agent for the notorious GPU (State Political Administration), the Soviet secret police. Returning to Moscow and then again returning to Paris, he was assigned to Spain during the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent and agitator from 1936-1939. He stayed once again in Paris in 1939-1940, then, after the German invasion of France, he traveled to Berlin, where the nature of his assignment remains unclear, and finally took up residence in Moscow.

Ehrenburg first attracted international attention through various publications
in the 1920s, including the political novel Neobychajnye pochozhdenija Khulio Khurenito i ego uchermikov (The Unusual Adventure of Julio
Juarenito and his Pupils), dealing with the defeat of the bourgeoisie by rev- olution during the First World War. The book contains an axiom of Bolshe- vik wisdom, summed up in the sentence: “Murders must be committed for the well-being of mankind.” In his work Padenie Parizha (The Fall of Paris), published in 1941, Ehrenburg once again gave free rein to his lifelong “hatred for the well-tempered French bourgeoisie,” describing, under the impression of his experiences in Spain, the causes for the defeat of France in 1940, from the point of view of the Soviet class conflict.19 As the well-deserved reward for this welcome propaganda hack job, Ehrenburg was granted the highest literary distinction that the Soviet Union had to offer: the Stalin Prize First Class. Hardly inferior to the last-named production in its “effectiveness upon the masses in terms of contemporary history” was the political novel Burja (The Storm), published in 1946, also honored with the Stalin prize. Ehrenburg’s talents, his unscrupulousness, his knowledge of foreign countries, and not least his proven compliance, predestined him, as no other, to handle the principal propaganda challenges facing Stalin in 1941.

With the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, Soviet propaganda, in a sense, was caught in its own trap. It was not very difficult to awaken feelings of hostility against “fascists”—anti-fascist agitation had never really stopped since 1939, and was being carried on covertly. In addition, there was the outdated doctrine that “German workers and farmers” were the natural enemies of “fascism,” which had, moreover, only succeeded in seizing power in Germany “with the help of the magnates of the Ruhr and the social traitors.” According to this theory, Hitlerite Germany confronted “yet another Germany.” According to this theory, the “workers and farmers” in the Wehrmacht would refuse to fight against the “homeland of the Workers,” the Soviet Union, as soon as they “learned the truth.” This explains the crudity of Soviet propaganda on the front line during the opening phase of the war—propaganda that was absolutely not understood by German soldiers, filled as it was with phrases resembling those of the first Soviet leaflets: “German soldiers! Who profits from the war against the Soviet Union? The capitalists and the lords of the manor!” This produced no effect at all.

“True hatred of the Wehrmacht” as Ehrenburg admitted, was "unknown” in the Red Army “at the beginning” of the war. Clear-cut conditions needed to be created if "criminal fraternization” on the battlefield was to be avoided or, even worse, Red Army soldiers were to be prevented from surrendering to the Germans en masse. What Stalin wanted was “hate, hate, and more hate”—not only against "fascism,” but against everything German, according to Lieutenant General Vlassov, who was present when Stalin directed a request in this sense to Beria in the Kremlin after the battle of Kiev. The propagandistic preconditions for such hatred had long since been created. One need only recall inflammatory productions such as the 1938 Moscow film production of Alexander Nevsky, with the screenplay written by Pyotr Pavlenko, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, and music by Sergei Prokofiev. The challenge, however, was much broader than this.

During the opening days of the war, Ehrenburg was informed by Deputy Foreign Commissar Losovsky of the decisive significance accorded by Stalin to foreign propaganda in Great Britain and the USA. The member of the Politburo responsible for these matters, Shcherbakov, now gave him the major official assignment of writing for the Western Allies "on a daily basis.” Guided by Stalin’s definitive instructions as much as by the hate feelings emanating from his depraved mind and warped psychology, Ehrenburg began an activity that, as he said himself, no longer had anything to do with literature, even in the Socialist interpretation of the term. In fact, from now on, he wrote one or more, and often up to five articles per day, every day, for the government newspaper Izvestia, the party newspaper Pravda, and, in particular, the Army newspaper “Krasnaya Zvezda”, but also wrote for other Soviet newspapers, and—under various guises—pro-Soviet newspapers in foreign countries. “Krasnaya Zvezda” formed the principal active basis for the excessive degree of political propaganda required for the Red Army. Articles from this newspaper were hammered into the heads of Soviet soldiers with stifling monotony: "We went to bed with Ehrenburg’s articles at night, and woke up with them in the morning.” Ehrenburg’s name, as stated on September 21, 1944, was known to every Red Army soldier: “The Soviet people regard him as one of their best writers and their greatest patriot.”

The Soviet troops, often before attacks, to enhance their fighting spirit were given, not liquor right away, but “Ehrenburg’s articles were read to them before the start of battle.” These articles repeated the same basic theme in innumerable variants, i.e., the Germans were not human beings
and needed to be pitilessly exterminated. The generalization of this stereo- type, though naturally corresponding to the desires of the Soviet government, apparently raised doubts on several occasions, even in the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg was sometimes asked how he could constantly write about one and the same thing, the non-humanity of the Germans. “Can they really be such butchers?” asked the people of Moscow in the summer of 1944. The novelist Grossman, himself a committed spokesman of Soviet war propaganda, reproached Ehrenburg, to say the least, for failure to distinguish between Germans, "fascists,” and “Hitlerites.” Objections were also raised in Western countries. When, for example, the pro-Soviet Swedish newspaper “Göteborgs Handelstidingen” began to print Ehrenburg’s articles in 1942, not only did the German government intervene, but other Swedish newspapers, such as “Stockholms Tidningen”, “Göteboigs Morgonpost” and “Aftonbladet”, protested as well. “Dagposten” wrote: “Ehrenburg beats all records for intellectual sadism. Why should we refute these filthy lies and prove that Ehrenburg accuses the Germans of things that are everyday occurrences in the Red Army?”

It is not true that Ehrenburg’s articles, some of which were translated into the English language, were received with approval everywhere in Great Britain and the USA. In 1945, for example, a well-known New York magazine called for a protest against the “cruelty of Soviet writers such as Alexei Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg.” On October 26 and November 23, 1944, Ehrenburg was publicly compelled to reply to a Lady Gibb, of Great Britain, who had written to him as follows:

"You call forth a very, very old evil in the hearts of the Russian people, i.e., the desire for revenge after the victory has been won. This old, old, evil...brings the victors no blessings... We are very anxious to see you place your great talents in the service of Russia on behalf of a just and lasting peace, which can never be based on self-righteousness and the lust for revenge.”

Soviet propaganda, which at this time was already quite busy defending enormous Soviet territorial acquisitions, began to put massive pressure upon Lady Gibb, in an attempt to nip any impulse of justice and humanity in the bud. Ehrenburg answered in the hate-filled tones of an “un-human,” quoting from the alleged letter of a Lieutenant Zinchenko, who was said to have written in shock: “My mother is religious too, and in the name of religion she asks, ‘kill the Germans with my blessings, One must not pity a wild beast,” said Ehrenburg, “rather, one must destroy it... that is the opinion of our people, dear Lady.”

Ehrenburg could be quite assured of his job in any case. Even the alleged reprimand from an ideologue in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Alexandrov, published in a leading article entitled “Comrade Ehrenburg Is Oversimplifying,” in the party newspaper Pravda on April 14, 1945, shortly before the end of the war, was nothing but a tactical subterfuge undertaken upon Stalin’s direct instructions, and not directly against Ehrenburg personally, as he was immediately given to understand, but rather, simply to take propagandistic account of the changing political situation.26 Enjoying the unrestricted trust of Stalin—with a short hiatus in 1949—Ehrenburg was assigned to the countries of East and Central Eastern Europe as a sort of traveling salesman after the end of the war, with the important assignment of preparing for and solidifying a Communist takeover through agitation. The high value placed upon Ehrenburg’s services by Stalin personally at this time, was revealed when the American Secretary of State, Byrnes, threatened to publish American correspondence reports relating to Soviet acts of violence and encroachment in Romania in 1945. Stalin is said to have dismissed these threats “with a contemptuous wave of the hand, ‘Then I will send Ilya Ehrenburg to Romania and have him report what he sees. His word will carry more weight than the word of your man. Soviet Communist ranking system—of the worldwide Soviet “World Peace Council,” Ehrenburg was engaged in intensive international subversion in the following years. His many personal acquaintances and connections now revealed the extent to which left-wing intellectuals, and well-known personalities in the intellectual and political life of many countries, were prepared to degrade themselves, deliberately or foolishly, as lackeys of the Soviet regime. Even the former left-wing Center Party politician and German Chancellor Dr. Wirth did not disdain to have amicable dealings with Ehrenburg in Switzerland. Where Stalin prize winner Dr. Wirth is concerned, this comes as no surprise, since a “voluminous” CIA file entitled “The Back- ground of Joseph Wirth” has traced his activities as a Soviet agent all the way back to the early 1920s.

To Ehrenburg, who was always a prolific writer, his output during the “Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union,” in his own words, had nothing to do with literature, even as the word is interpreted in the Soviet Union; rather, it consisted of political agitation, i.e., incitement. Nearly three thou-sand of his leading articles and proclamations were collected in a three-volume anthology called Vojna (The War) between 1942 and 1944. Ehrenburg, however, did not appear to wish to be reminded of these writings at a later time. His memoirs, Goda, Lyudi, Zhizn, partly intended to conceal the past, discourse verbosely upon the personal legacy of those fateful years. Of his wartime articles, he said briefly: “What remains to me of those years? Thousands of articles of the same type, which, at best, may be of interest to a conscientious historian.” The reasons for this modesty will soon be obvious to anyone who actually penetrates this material with the spirit of “a conscientious historian.”

An analysis of this tidal flood of articles is also likely to awaken memories of another writer of somewhat similar articles, Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Franconia deprived of his offices for personal failings in 1940, and publisher of the inflammatory anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which was, one might add, broadly rejected even within the NSDAP for its low cultural level. Indicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-1946, Streicher was convicted and sentenced to death because, as stated in the grounds for the judgement: “Week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution.” “A leading article in September 1938 was typical of his teachings, which termed the Jew a germ and a pest, not a human being, but ‘a parasite, an enemy, an evil-doer, a disseminator of diseases who must be destroyed in the interest of mankind.’” Streicher was alleged to have unmistakably called for an extermination of the Jews.

If Streicher was sentenced to death by hanging under Article 4 of the indictment (crimes against humanity) at Nuremberg—what can one say of Ehrenburg, who polluted the minds of the peoples of the Soviet Union (and the Western countries as well) with the poison of anti-Germanism, inciting people to active persecution and extermination of Germans—for years, “week after week, month after month,” even day after day—not just in a remote local rag, but in the leading newspapers of the Soviet Union, under the highest official orders? If Streicher was “Jew Baiter No. 1,” then it seems not only justified, but even necessary, to call Ehrenburg “German Baiter No. 1”. “Streicher was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews,” wrote Ehrenburg in the capacity of trial observer at Nuremberg on December 13, 1945. As will be seen, and in more detail, Ehrenburg was in no way inferior to Streicher, but perhaps in many occasions even exceeded him in evil.

On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union, without lifting a finger, was suddenly freed from the camp of the aggressors, and was now numbered among the attacked, making her propaganda machinery available in order to cause former Soviet complicity with National Socialist Germany to be forgotten. This enabled the Soviet Union to be depicted as the defender of the “peace-loving peoples.” The above-mentioned Soviet complicity had included the following: on September 17, 1939, by prior agreement with the German Government, the Soviets attacked Poland; “bombarded,” the regions east of Lemberg during the night; “dealt with” or “annihilated” “Polish troops”; “annihilated” “Polish infantry divisions and cavalry brigades”; “shot down” Polish planes; “captured” or “destroyed” war material and artillery; captured prisoners; took cities; “purged” or “mopped up” the battlefields, forests, terrain, and countryside “of the Polish army”; and “solemnly” accepted the transfer of the fortresses of Osowiec and Brest, as well as the city of Biatystok and other localities, from German troops. At Lemberg, 8,500 Polish soldiers, including 100 officers, fled toward the Germans to avoid capture by the Soviets—a wise decision—since they were treated according to the principles of the Geneva Convention instead of being shot in the back of the neck. The 15,000 Polish officers who fell into the hands of the Soviets and, in addition to these professional soldiers, thousands of “university professors, doctors, scientists, artists, secondary school teachers,” “the flower of Polish society,” “doing their duty as reservists,” were shot by the NKVD near Katyn, at Kharkov, and other places on the orders, as is well-known, of Stalin, Kalinin, and other Soviet leaders. Of 250,000 Polish prisoners of war, 148,000 perished in the Soviet Union; of 1.6 to 1.8 million Polish civilian deportees, 600,000 perished in the Soviet Union; of 600,000 Polish Jews deported into the Soviet Union, 450,000 disappeared without a trace.

The Soviet government had accused the Western powers of starting an imperialistic war under the pretext of defending Poland; then accused them of expanding the war to Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The Soviets had provided propagandistic, diplomatic and, at least to some extent, military support to the German military campaigns, ostentatiously taking account of the changing facts of the situation to lull the Reich into security. As early as 1939, Moscow had severed relations with Czechoslovakia despite treaty obligations requiring Soviet assistance, then recognized the independence of the secessionist Republic of Slovakia. In May 1941, Moscow had withdrawn recognition from the exile governments of Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands, on the grounds that they no longer exercised sovereignty over their countries. Shortly afterward came the break with Greece, and then—in a manner that must have amazed “even the most experienced and callused observer of Soviet methods”—the break with Yugoslavia, whose integrity and independence had been recognized by Moscow hardly a month before, “even before the Germans had had a chance to open their mouths.” Now, from one day to the next, this was all to be forgotten. Stalin, wrote Ehrenburg on February 8, 1942, “had no intention of attacking other countries...We built cities, we worked and studied... We educated human beings... while the Germans were building tanks”—this despite the six or eight-fold superiority in tanks enjoyed by the Red Army on June 22, 1941.

On January 4, 1945, Ehrenburg, Stalin’s propaganda mouthpiece, wrote in regard to the policies of the Western powers of that time (but not, of course, the Soviet Union): “Europe and the world now recognize the lessons of this immoral policy in the ruins of Warsaw, the sufferings of Paris, and the wounds of London.” During the Polish campaign, the Soviets had provided German aircraft with their positions in order to enable them to reach their objectives. Now the Germans were the sole “arsonists.” “They dropped bombs on Warsaw and laughed themselves sick.” The Soviet Union had treacherously attacked Poland from the rear on September 17, 1939. “We greet our Sister Poland,” wrote Ehrenburg hypocritically on November 7, 1941, and on December 14, 1941: “The spirit of Chopin still lives in the cities of tortured Poland... The Poles say one to another: ‘Beauty still lives. Poland still lives.’” “We want freedom for ourselves and for all nations,” wrote Ehrenburg on January 1, 1942. “We do not want Poland to be a land of German galley slaves.” In 1939-40, Moscow instructed the Communist party of France to sabotage the French war effort. After the capitulation of Compiegne, the Soviet government had congratulated the Reich Government and hastened to extend diplomatic recognition to the ‘'French State of Vichy.” Now, at a single stroke, Marshal Petain was called a paid traitor, the Judas of France. Ehrenburg now insulted Premier Paul Reynaud and Generals Weygand, Georges, and Gamelin as “capitulationists,” referring to the Popular Front and th (treasonous) French communists, in particular, as the only true patriots. “The victories of Rostov and Kalinin were a death sentence to those who signed the cease-fire at Compiegne,” wrote Ehrenburg on March 21, 1942.

German troops in France, as is well-known, were subject to the strictest discipline, as Andre Malraux admitted by his own accord. Malraux, a member of the French Communist Party until 1939, later a member of the Resistance, writer, and Minister under de Gaulle, stated that he had had “only good experiences with the German army, and only bad experiences with the Gestapo.” Ehrenburg, nevertheless, wrote on July 14, 1941: “The Nazi murderers and gangsters marched on the boulevards” to plunder and rob the nation of France, murdering children and starving the population to death with rations of only fifty grams (two ounces) of bread per day. Soviet revenge was threatened for a trivial instance of property damage: “For the four spoiled jackets, you will exterminate 4,000 Germans who have trampled France.” Ehrenburg summed up his attitude toward the Ger- mans—whose Border Treaty and Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union had been valid until that very same date—in the following words, on June 22, 1941:

“They plundered happy peace-loving France. They enslaved our brother nations, the highly cultivated Czechs, the valiant Yugoslavs, and talented Poles. They raped the Norwegians, Danes, and Belgians”.
“German troops stagger like drunkards all over Europe: from Boulogne to Odessa, from Poland to Belgium, from Norway to Bulgaria,” he wrote, turning up the heat, on May 2, 1942. And, just a few days later, on March 5: “They entered Russia drunk on the blood of the Poles, French, and Serbs, the blood of old people, maidens, and small children.”

Ehrenburg was assigned to give propaganda effect to Stalin’s war speech of July 3, 1941, and to proclaim the new program.40 “We have millions and millions of faithful allies,” he wrote on July 4, 1941:

“All those who have lost their freedom and their country stand by our side: Czechs, Norwegians, French, Dutch, Poles and Serbs... Stalin’s words will reach the city of trampled freedom, the subjected, but irreconcilable Paris. They will reach the farmers of Yugoslavia, the students of Oxford, the fishermen of Norway, and the workers of Pilsen. They will call forth new hope in the hearts of all peoples suffering under fascist barbarism. Stalin’s speech will be heard by the people of London, who have experienced hundreds of barbaric air raids, by the miners of Wales and the weavers of Manchester... our Patriotic War will be a war for the liberation of Europe from Hitler’s yoke.”

At the cost of few propaganda phrases, the Soviet Union—which had been expelled from the League of Nations for attacking Finland, and had come close to a collision with the Western powers—now placed itself at the head of the countries drawn into the war, making herself their spokesperson. “All democratic countries” (naturally including the Soviet Union) “stand by us, all of progressive humanity is with us,” stated a proclamation of August 10-11, 1941, issued at an “All-Slavic Meeting” of so-called intellectual workers, held in Moscow. “All of humanity is now fighting Germany,” echoed Ehrenburg on August 24, 1941, without a side glance at the German military allies at war with the Soviet Union—Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia. “We want freedom for us and for all nations,” he claimed on January 1, 1945. And to ensure that his protector and employer would not be forgotten among the flood of phrases, he added the following: “Long live the Soviet Union! May thy peoples live, thy gardens, thy children, thy Stalin!”

On November 6, 1941, the anniversary of the “victory of the Great Socialistic October Revolution” Ehrenburg took it upon himself to instruct the Allies in the style of Communist Party agitators, calling upon them to join the common struggle. “The defenders of Moscow contemplate with pride the firm fortress of London. Fame for Britain! ... We greet you, pioneers of freedom, the invincible people of France, we greet the Czechs... We greet the people of warriors, the Serbs... We greet the brave Greeks... We greet the untiring Norwegians... we greet the patient Dutch... we greet the hard-working Belgians... We greet our sister Poland... We greet the arsenal of freedom—America.” To avoid all possible doubt that these peoples and countries were now to be indebted to the Soviets from that time on, he added: “Moscow is fighting... for you, distant friends, for humanity, for the entire world.”

In 1930, no less a personage than Winston Churchill had written of the “plague bacillus” Lenin, compared to whom “ ... no Asiatic conqueror, no Tamerlane or Ghenghis Khan” could be a match “in the destruction of men and women.” To Churchill, the victories of Bolshevism had shifted “the borders of Asia for the conditions of the dark ages... from the Urals to the Pripet swamps.” Russia was said to be frozen “in an endless winter of inhuman doctrines and inhuman barbarity.” On January 29, 1941, Ehrenburg informed the peoples of the world that the “reprehensible scandal of Bolshevism”—in Churchill’s words—had now raised a torch:

“We have raised the torch to the sky... the torch of our culture, and the culture that we rightly believe to be the possession of all of humanity. It is the torch of ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth Century [i.e., the Enlightenment]—all that in humanity that has opposed slavery, stagnation, and atavism. Our struggle against Germany is guided by an illuminating moral principle... the principle of reason, spiritual purity, freedom, and dignity.”

Such phraseology should be judged in fight of the fact that, at the head of the Soviet Union, stood Stalin, “the greatest criminal of all peoples and times.” Stalin with the help of creatures placed in power by him— Yagoda, Ezhov, Beria, Kruglov, Abakumov, Kobulov, Serov, Dekanozov, Merkulov, Canava and others—had erected a system of tyranny that could decide the “fate of any citizen in the country, without exception, at Stalin’s own bloody whim.

Since July 3, 1941, at the latest, the Soviet Union claimed for propaganda purposes that it had been unprepared for the German attack, of which it had had no inkling. It was, therefore, waging a purely defensive war, pursuing no expansionist goals. The historical legend of the “treacherous fascist surprise attack on the unsuspecting, peace-loving Soviet Union” is demonstrably untrue, and has no basis in fact. Of the many Ehrenburg propaganda lies, only a few need to be cited by way of example. November 23, 1944: “We do not need any ‘living space.’” November 30, 1944: “The world looks upon the Red Army as a liberator... [the Soviet Union] does not force its ideas on anyone.” January 11, 1945: “We do not want to force our ideas or customs on anyone.” May 24, 1945, after the victory: “We won the war because we hate wars of conquest”.

As the end of the war approached, and the Red Army penetrated deep into the heart of Europe, the purely defensive protestations came to be increasingly admixed with offensive overtones. The Soviets, conscious of their enormous power, began to make political demands in the form of the propaganda phrase, drummed into the ears of the world, of the Red Army’s great “Mission of Liberation.” The first vaguely expansionist passages appeared in Ehrenburg’s writings in October 1944, as Soviet troops crossed the German border into East Prussia. On October 12, 1944, Ehrenburg wrote: “We rescued European culture... our people is positively concerned with the fate of European culture. The Soviet land produces no isolationists.” On April 12, 1945, Ehrenburg was even more overt: “It is time to say that the victories of the Red Army are victories of the Soviet system. We draw attention to the fact that it was our people which rescued Europe and the world from fascism.” Or on May 17, 1945, he stated rather inartfully:

“We rescued human culture, the ancient stones of Europe, its cradle, its working people, its museums and books. If Britain is destined to produce a new Shakespeare, if new Encyclopaedists appear in France... if the dream of a Golden Age is ever to become a reality, then this will happen because the soldiers of freedom marched thousands of miles to plant the banner of freedom, fraternity, and light. That is why Stalin’s name is linked to the end of the night and the first dawn of happiness, not only in our country, but all over the world.”

And on July 12, 1945, continuing in the same vein: “The Soviet Union rescued the peoples of Europe. Stalin shook everyone’s conscience awake... we love Stalin.”

According to Ehrenburg on January 10, 1946, the Soviet Union— which was even said to have decided the fate of Prague, Paris, and Rome— was “no longer a geographical and political concept, but rather, a moral concept” in the mind of the nations. In other words, therefore, it had become an ideal for all nations by virtue of its military victories, automatically deriving the right to intervene in the affairs of other countries as well. Stalin had no thought of “attacking other countries”; instead, he thought about “creating a new world,” as Ehrenburg alleged on February 8, 1942.

Now that victory had been achieved, Stalin could begin to realize his dreams of a "new world,” “a new Europe,” a Europe—as Ehrenburg immediately claimed—in which "all the microbes of fascism” would be eliminated. Who, now, were the “microbes of fascism”? Henceforth, the “fascists” were no longer to be understood as merely German, the disciples of Hitler, but rather, all those who opposed Soviet designs for conquest and Bolshevization on any grounds whatever. This included all those whose understanding of the concepts of “government, reform, and progress” differed from that of the Communists—in particular, the hated bourgeoisie of all nations, the advocates of a State of Law according to Western traditions, the whole “spiritual underground of apparently normal people.” Stalin had revealed the political objective; Ehrenburg and his ilk set to work to propagate it in their usual way.

On May 17, 1945, a few days after the unconditional German surrender, Ermashev wrote:

“The collapse of the Hitler Reich does not automatically liberate mankind from all the dangers with which the dark powers of fascism and reaction are still capable of threatening the world”

Ominous words as far as the future was concerned. Thus was announced a principal inclination of the Soviet regime: the urgent desire to see the “fascist criminals,” “the war criminals,” punished as severely as possible. An international show trial, organized on the tried and true Soviet model with the leading participation of the Soviet Union, was to exert a deterrent effect on all powers of “reaction,” i.e., the potential opponents of Stalinist claims to domination, all of whom were described as “followers of Hitler and Mussolini.”

In defiant language, speaking on February 8, 1945, Professor Tarle, the above mentioned Soviet historian, justified Stalin’s claim to the right to shape “the future of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations” on the grounds of alleged past experiences, stating:

“But the great role of the Soviet people is not yet over, even if it has freed humanity from the deadly German nightmare. The fifth column, although temporarily relegated to the shadows, is still alive in the world. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers still exist and are preparing to resume the task in which they were engaged for so long and, furthermore, so successfully in Europe. The European democracies—and not only the European democracies—will face a highly extraordinary struggle in the coming years, because fascism has not the slightest intention of abdicating... it will, however once again face the same invincible obstacle: the Soviet Union, the Soviet people The victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War has created a firm basis for the triumph of the world democracy. The immortal service of Stalin’s strategy and of the fighters of the Russian army is that they have cued world civilization. Those who understand that the struggle for freedom and democracy must continue, pending the complete moral and political defeat of fascism, even after the defeat of the Hitlerite war machine, look upon the USSR with profound confidence.”

Stalin’s expansionist intentions need hardly be expressed clearly. This implied a continuation of the pattern of aggression that had begun with the pact of August 23, 1939, and that was now taking on a new shape—for the third time. Stephane Courtois, editor of the Black Book of Communism, has stated with unequivocal clarity:

“As appears from numerous statements by Stalin, it was Stalin’s firm determination and intention to thrust forward to the Atlantic Ocean. As early as 1947, Stalin told Maurice Thorez, at that time the General Secretary of the French Communist Party, that he would have preferred to see the Red Army in Paris than Berlin.”

Thus he brilliantly confirmed the conclusion drawn by Professor Ernst Topitsch in his book “Stalins Krieg”, published in 1985. Thrusting through to the Atlantic, however, implied the imposition of Leninist-Stalinist domination as well. “Anyone who occupies a territory imposes his own social system as well,” Stalin told Tito, a close confidant, and Dilas, a partisan leader, in 1945. “Everyone introduces his own system as far as his armies get. It cannot be otherwise.” The invasion of the Anglo-American expedition forces temporarily put a stop to Stalin’s ambitions in 1944. The following motto, considered valid until very recent times by “socialist” activists and the spiritual accomplices of “socialism” must be understood as implying a propagandistic preparation for an expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence that had never been abandoned: struggle against “fascism’ as understood by the Soviets. According to this definition, anyone who opposes the aggressive designs of Soviet imperialism, is ipso facto a fascist” or “Nazi,” to be destroyed by any means possible, no matter how reprehensible. The Stalinist concept of “fascism” has even survived the Soviet Union itself; it is now generally used, for example, in the Federal Republic of Germany, as a defamatory smear word applied to political dissenters. Anyone attempting to use the Bolshevik “anti-fascist” fighting word in any way differing from the concepts of the Stalinists and their apologists and heirs in Germany, no longer need wonder at the repression that inevitably follows.

In reality, of course, Soviet propaganda began as early as spring 1945 to produce its effects far beyond the territories occupied by the Red Army. Hardly anyone saw this more clearly than Winston Churchill, who in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 warned that “far from the Russian frontier ... Communist Fifth Columns are established” representing a “growing peril” to peace and to “Christian civilization” as a whole.

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 7

Responsibility and Those Responsible
The Atrocities on Both Sides

A major element of Soviet war propaganda consists of the atrocities actually or allegedly committed by the Germans. Endlessly increasing numbers of accusations have been made, both with and without justification. If an accurate sense of proportion is to be maintained, these accusations must be considered in the context of extensive Soviet crimes against humanity. An effort must be made to separate the wheat from the chaff in any examination of the possible grounds for the Soviet accusations selected from among the multiplicity of examples cited, while simultaneously examining the political motivations that lie concealed behind the propaganda. The fact is that the Bolsheviks had themselves already killed many millions of innocent people long before the Germans ever had a chance to commit any crimes in the Soviet Union or German-annexed territories. Terror was a constant feature of the Soviet system, and was established immediately after the October Revolution. A terror intended to accomplish, not only the social, but often, the physical liquidation of entire classes: the extermination of the nobility, priests, and bourgeoisie, as well as the followers of non-Bolshevik socialist parties, such as the Menshevik and Social Revolutionaries, and the followers of the bourgeois parties such as, for example, the much-libeled Constitutional Democrats (“Cadets”).“Workers!” the party newspaper “Pravda” proclaimed on August 31, 1918: “The time has come to destroy the bourgeoisie!” The slogan was duly put into effect: the People’s Commissar for the Interior, Petrovsky, quoted by the governmental newspaper “Izvestia” on September 4, 1918, called for “mass executions... at the slightest resistance... No weakness or hesitation may be tolerated in the introduction of mass terror.” On November 1, 1918, Latsis, deputy head of the Cheka, gave orders to his organization for the elimination of “the bourgeoisie as a class.” As stressed by Nicolas Werth in the Black Book of Communism, the merciless class warfare against whole sections of the population and entire professions acquired the features of true genocide.4 Both the extermination of the Cossacks—or “de-cossackization”—which began in 1920, and the extermination of the peasantry—or “de-kulakization”— which began later, met the definition of genocide in terms of both objectives and implementation.

In a letter addressed to and intended only for the members of the Politburo, years after the revolution, on March 19, 1922, Lenin remarked to Molotov: “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we can shoot in this regard, the better.” Winston Churchill’s book “Nach dem Kriege” (After the War), published in 1930, quotes a statistical study by Professor Sarolea showing that the Bolshevik dictators had already murdered the following number of persons by 1924:

“28 bishops, 1,219 priests, 6,000 professors and teachers, 9,000 doctors, 12,950 landowners, 54,000 officers, 70,000 policemen, 193,290 workers, 260,000 soldiers, 355,250 intellectuals and tradesmen, and 815,000 farmers.”
Churchill continued:
“These figures have been confirmed by Mr. Heamshaw, of King’s College, London, in his brilliant introduction to A Survey of Socialism. They do not, of course include the monstrous losses of human life among the Russian population having perished from starvation.”

If this were possible even under Lenin—who was described by Churchill as a “plague bacillus”—then what was it like under Stalin, described by his biographer, Colonel General Professor Volkogonov, as a “monster” without equal in world history? Only a few of the principal phases of the Stalinist reign of terror need be recalled at this point. According to unanimously accepted opinions and demographic studies, between seven and ten million people died during the forced collectivization of agriculture that began in 1929 and the related, carefully planned and implemented “Holocaust by Hunger,” or genocide of the Ukrainian people, which took place in silence between 1932 and 1933. The mass executions of so-called “Enemies of the People,” which began in the very early 1930s, culminated in the delirium of the “Great Purge” of 1937-1939, with another five to seven million deaths either from execution by shooting or following deportation to GULags. According to data supplied by President Jakovlev of the Russian Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, approximately two hundred thousand priests and members of the religious orders of various faiths were “shot, hanged, crucified, or died of exposure or froze to death” during the Stalinist period. Approximately one million more people died after the annexation of Eastern Poland and the Baltic Republics between 1939 and 1941. The number of persons suspected of espionage and shot on Stalin’s orders, beginning immediately after the outbreak of the war in 1941, as well as the murder of political prisoners by the NKVD prior to the Soviet withdrawal, once again on Stalin’s orders, are incalculable. According to the findings of a U.S. congressional investigative committee under the chairmanship of Representative Charles J. Kersten, eighty thousand to one hundred thousand people died in the Ukraine alone. The bodies of execution victims were found in the Ukrainian cities listed below, in addition to other locations in all parts of the Ukraine, White Russia, and the Baltic Republics. Similar massacres were committed in cities such as Brest, Minsk, Kaunas, Wilno, and Riga, to name only a few cities cited solely for purposes of example. Mass executions also took place in the hinterland of the Soviet Union, in Smolensk, Berdichev, Uman, Stalino, Dnepropetrovsk, Kiev, Kharkov, Rostov, Odessa, Zaporozhe, Simferopol, Yalta, the Caucasus, and elsewhere.

Nor should one forget the heavy losses in human life as a result of the deportations of the Volga Germans and the other ethnic Germans from the Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Caucasus organized by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKP (b) and the Council of the People’s Commissars in 1941. These deportations were carried out under inhumane conditions and constituted the international crime of genocide… just as much as the deportations of the peoples of the Kalmucks, Karachayers, Chechens, Ingushs, Balkars, certain segments of the Karbardinian people, as well as the Tatars of the Crimea, all of which occurred in 1943-44. Mention has already been made of the executive instruments of the Border Troops and Special Troops of the NKVD—comparable to the German Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD—which followed in the footsteps of the regular troops of the Red Army, carrying out “mass purges” of the populations in the reincorporated territories. ..
…As stated above, hundreds of thousands of people were shot by the NKVD in the wake of the reprisals and purges that then began. According to detailed German investigations, no fewer than four thousand people, without regard to age or sex, were shot in the city of Kharkov in March 1943 alone, following the brief Soviet capture of the city.

Socialism left its murderous traces all over the national territory of the Soviet Union. “There are more than 100,000 unmarked mass graves, scattered all over the Soviet Union,” says the Ukrainian researcher Carynnyk, “the whole country is built on skeletons.” Every individual city, every individual stretch of land, had “its own mass graves.” The remains of 200,000 to 300,000 men, women, and children were found in the Ukraine alone—at Bukovina, in the Damica Forest, and Bielhorodka, not far from Kiev; while the city cemeteries of Kiev itself were filled with shooting victims. Mass graves were also found at Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Zhitomir, Odessa, Poltava, Vinnytsia, and Doneck, to mention only a few principal locations. In White Russia, 102,000 people are presumed to have been buried in mass graves near Kuropaty, not far from Minsk, as well as a total of 270,000 victims in the vicinity of Minsk itself. In Greater Russia, mention should be made of Smolensk and Katyn (the forest of Kozy Gory) where the bodies of 50,000 shooting victims were transported on conveyor belts beginning in 1935. In the Urals, mention should be made of Sverdlovsk and Gori. Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov maintains that not a single district city in the Urals is without its own mass graves—and not just in the Urals. At Lyssaja Gora, near Cheljabinsk, in the 1930s, 300,000 men, women, and children were shot and the bodies dumped in abandoned mine shafts. The butchers of Bolshevism also practiced their murderous handiwork in Central Asia, in the Altai Mountains, and, in the Far East, as far as Sachalin.

The soil in the vicinity of the Soviet Union’s eighty “concentration camp systems,” with their hundreds of individual camps under the authority of the GULag—for example, at Vorkuta and Karaganda—was literally fertilized with the bodies of slaughtered “Enemies of the People.” At least three million people died from atrocious living conditions in the concentration camps near Kolyma alone, at temperatures down to minus 60 degrees Centigrade (minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit). The discovery of new mass murder sites is a constant phenomenon in Russia—for example, in 1997 at the mass graves near Sandormokh in the Karelian peninsula, nine thousand victims were found. Priests, public figures as well as common people, and surviving labor slaves from the White Sea canal were shot there in October-November 1937.

Almost unknown is the exacerbating circumstance that Soviet agencies of the NKVD also used toxic gas for the extermination of human beings, years before the agencies of the Reichsfuhrer SS. The technical basis for the manufacture and utilization of toxic gases on a large scale—a corresponding chemical industry—was in fact quickly created in the USSR, beginning in the1920s. The manufacturing centers for the production of poison gas and local schools for training in the technology of poison gas warfare under the cover name “Tomka” (Torskij) built by the German-Russian “Bersol” company at Trock, near Samara (Kuibyshev), during the phase of cooperation with the Reichswehr in the 1920s and early 1930s, should also be mentioned in this regard. The Soviet Union produced no less than 140,000 metric tons of substances for chemical warfare between 1933 and 1945, while the Germans produced 67,000 metric tons over the same time period, including 12,000 metric tons of the highly toxic Tabun and small quantities of Sarin, which was six times more toxic.

The Soviet Union had already used various toxic gases in the subjugation of unruly ethnic groups and rebellious peasants, as in the forests of Tambov. “Gas chambers similar to those of Auschwitz were in operation at Vorkuta as early as 1938,” according to the British Count Tolstoy in his book Victims of Yalta. A fact that, in itself, was, therefore, no longer any secret was once again confirmed by a former KGB officer in 1997 in the context of the controversy in France relating to the Black Book of Communism, edited by Stephane Courtois. To the limitless surprise of the French television viewing public, the former KGB officer reported “that trucks with gas chambers were used in the GULag. ” “Gas Chambers in the GULag,” read the headlines of innumerable French newspapers. “The statements of the first dissidents in the 1930s were obviously in accord with the truth,” was Le Figaro's reaction. Jürg Altwegg, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on December 20, 1997, inferred that the existence of gas chambers proved the existence of extermination camps in the Soviet Union as well, a fact that the informed had, of course, never doubted. To appraise the significance of this information, in Altwegg’s view, it was necessary to recall “that the [German] gas chambers made possible the repression of the GULag.”

The Black Book of Communism is of inestimable value in the intellectual situation of the year 1997: not that it provides fundamentally new information, or arrives at estimated numbers of victims equaling the estimates of earlier researchers. The estimate of “at least twenty-five million victims” of Leninism-Stalinism, calculated by editor Stephane Courtois in his masterly introduction and accompanying comments, is only equal to the lower limits of past estimates. But the Black Book of Communism is a true compendium of Communist crimes against humanity, casting light on the spiritual darkness of the twentieth century. In this regard, it is comparable to the Gulag Archipelago by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and, like the latter work, has achieved an unexpectedly widespread distribution in a short time.

The findings of Stephane Courtois, like those of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in past years, are in accordance with the basic theme of the present book, which may be summarized as follows:

1. Soviet domination was only made possible by mass crimes. Any analysis of the Soviet system must consider mass crimes—methodical mass murder and other crimes against humanity—to have been a central feature of the Soviet system.
2. Both Lenin and Stalin were guilty of the social and physical elimination
of all persons thought to represent open or covert opposition to Leninist-Stalinist rule.
3. Lenin and Stalin were guilty of creating the concentration camp
system.
4. Lenin and Stalin were guilty of the deaths of at least 25 million
people. In practice, mass murder was a constituent element of
Bolshevik rule.
5. Hitler started the world war, but proof of Stalin’s responsibility is
overwhelming.
6. Stalin was an even greater criminal than Hitler, and was, in fact,
the greatest criminal of the century.

The Black Book of Communism therefore strikes at the very heart of the Leninists-Stalinists. The physical extinction of a total of 100 million people—25 million by the socialist Soviet power structure alone—cannot simply be palliated on the pretext that Communism, in theory, consisted of an “ideology of liberation,” The merest knowledge of the revolutionary figures who usurped absolute power in Russia by an act of violence in October 1917, simply to reduce their subjugated peoples to the condition of rightless helots, reveals the infamy of those who parrot the “anti-fascist” propaganda phrase still current today—that “Communism was initially based on a love of the people.” One reason why the findings of the Black Book of Communism weigh so heavily is because the authors were personally sympathetic with Communism to some degree in the past, and perhaps still are today, and because editor Stephane Courtois is a “proven expert on Communism and a serious historian” who cannot be refuted with the usual hair-splitting and deceptive dialectics; he can only be personally defamed.


How humiliating it must be for the ideologues and demagogues—the so-called “anti-fascists,” who presume to determine what free citizens shall or shall not be allowed to think—to see Courtois drawing historical parallels, making comparisons, and drawing up estimated calculations relating to both Communism and National Socialism, i.e., performing the natural duty of a historian without regard to “anti-fascist” taboos and distortions. Like Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Ernst Nolte, and Francois Furet before him, Stephane Courtois holds the opinion that the presumed prohibition against “historical comparison” no longer applies: after all, to compare is to think. Not only is the comparison legitimate, but Courtois considers it the elementary precondition to historical understanding, in a manner similar to Albert Camus’ postulation of the comparability of Communism and National Socialism in 1954. The pretexts offered by the “anti-fascist” opponents of all comparison between “racial genocide” and “class genocide,” a comparison rightly undertaken by Courtois, have, in fact, always been truly dis- graceful. This last taboo, this last desperate argument, is rendered obsolete by the proof that Lenin and Stalin not only committed gigantic acts of class murder, but also of racial mass murder—falling under the definition of “genocide” according to the “United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948.” Even the left-wing ideological German weekly newspaper Die Zeit could not help featuring its several-page discussion of the Black Book of Communism under the devastating headline: “The Red Holocaust.” Courtois believes that the concept of “uniqueness” and “singularity” doesn’t apply, on the grounds that the Bolsheviks, in his view, committed the same, or very similar crimes as the “fascists”—almost the only ones whose crimes, in the absence of justification, continue to be harped upon today. The “fascist” method of procedure may have been different, but, as stressed by Courtois, there is no specificity for genocide. The Black Book of Com- munism makes it unmistakably clear that the crimes against humanity committed by Lenin and Stalin not only preceded those of Hitler by decades in terms of time, but exceeded them many times over in terms of scope, and, to some extent, in horror of execution. “The facts regarding Leninist and Stalinist Russia,” writes Courtois, "make one’s blood run cold.”


As for the total number of victims of Soviet domination, the concurrence of opinion is that there was a true hecatomb, even if the data varies considerably and the real number of victims can perhaps never be determined. The Russian historian Medvedev, a former dissident of Jewish origin who drew closer to the Communists again in 1992, attempted, in 1989, to establish a total of 40 million victims of repression, nevertheless, arrived at a number of fifteen million victims based on his own research. The American historian Robert Conquest, after detailed analysis, suggested a total of 20 million victims under the Stalinist terror alone, but considers 10 million additional deaths to be probable. In Courtois’s view, as stated above, Lenin and Stalin were the murderers of 25 million people. Soviet historian Professor l. A. Kurganov, in number 7 of the Moscow periodical Novyj Mir in 1994, on the other hand, proposed a total number of 66 million victims of Lenin-Stalin between 1917 and 1947, including “20 million deaths during the Second World War,” a research finding confirmed in issue 63 of the Petersburg periodical Nashe Otechestvo in 1996 and mentioned by the historian V. V. Isaev. Nobel Prize winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn speaks of 40 million victims of “the constant interior war of the Soviet government against its own people.” The number of 40 million people killed by the socialism of the Soviet Socialist Republics, has been mentioned several times, for example, in the Welt-Nachrichtendienst on June 30, 1993: “According to careful estimates, approximately 40 million victims fell victim to the dictator J. V. Stalin”; this naturally leaves open the question of the total number of murder victims falling under Lenin’s responsibility.

It should be recalled that the mass crimes of the Soviet Republic, unprecedented in scope, were committed long before the German Wehrmacht and the German-allied armies followed by the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD ever even appeared on the scene in 1941, the latter, for their part, left a trail of blood in the East. An extensive literature about the German crimes, even though they were of a different quality, has already been published. These crimes have already been scrutinized from nearly every point of view, so that only a brief discussion of the principal types of procedures used by the apparatus of the Reichsführer SS for the elimination of the racially, ethnically, or politically undesirable persons in the Eastern territory must suffice at this point. These procedures were the methods of killing of the Security Police and SD behind the army lines and the extermination operations or mass deaths in the concentration camps in the territory of the former Polish State, i.e., Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. Auschwitz, in particular, was burned deep in the public consciousness after the war as the image of National Socialist atrocities, although it never acquired its present-day symbolic character until long after the war—not even during the Nuremberg trial before the International Military Tribunal against the (German) “Major War Criminals.” “Auschwitz was not characteristic of the murder of the Jews,” Stephane Courtois remarks, parrying one of the questions still lurking in 1997, and raised by a spokesman for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. The name of the “Auschwitz extermination camp” is no doubt primarily linked to the image of the existence of the gas chambers; it is solely this “industrial killing method” that Courtois believes to be valid in regard to the question of “uniqueness.” Since “Auschwitz” began to play an important role in Soviet war propaganda in 1945, the topic necessarily requires a brief discussion in connection with the present work.

On November 25, 1942, in the wake of prior press conferences, the New York Herald Tribune published a report entitled: “Wise Says Hitler Ordered the Murder of 4,000,000 Jews in 1942.” Regardless of the sensational nature of this report—put into circulation by the President of the American Jewish Congress, Dr. Wise—the State Department gave it little credence, and the American government and even President Roosevelt refused to draw any conclusions in regard to it. The Soviet Union however, already fully engaged in a hate campaign against Germany, greedily grasped at the news and attempted to provide it with an official veneer. The People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs issued a declaration on December 19, 1942, on the “execution of a plan of the Hitlerite authorities to exterminate the Jewish population in the occupied territories of Europe.” A few American newspapers are said to have mentioned “over two million gassed Jews” as early as 1942, but this cannot be confirmed. In any case, an inconspicuous notice, nevertheless, appeared in the British newspaper The People (Sunday, October 17, 1943) in reference to a statement by the Institute of Jewish Affairs in the United States, stating that Hitler was supposed to have already murdered over three million European Jews by that time.

As of yet, there was still no mention of poison gas—merely extermination by “planned starvation, pogroms, forced labor, and deportations.” The use of poison gas for killing purposes was only brought to the aware- ness of the general public in the Soviet Union in connection with the Kharkov show trial in December 1943, the first “war crimes trial” ever held against German defendants, after earlier allegations had failed to achieve their full effect. The use of so-called “murder vans by the Germans for the extermination of Soviet citizens” was mentioned, and definitively introduced into Soviet war propaganda in the trial of German prisoners of war Captain Langheld, SS Second Lieutenant Ritz, and Sergeant Rezlaw before the Military Tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front, which opened on December 15, 1943, in Kharkov. The Soviet writer and propagandist Alexei Tolstoy, Member of the “Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Invaders,” who was present as special trial reporter, disseminated several mendacious commentaries intended for foreign propaganda, stating that the “murder vans” were used on “order of the High Command of the German Army for the mass extermination of peaceful inhabitants of the German-occupied territory.” This attempt to bring the German Wehrmacht into connection with these matters, was, of course, absurd, and in no way corresponded to the facts. However, the “murder vans” already mentioned in the communique of the “Extraordinary State Commission” of August 7, 1943, in the Stavropol case now became an established element of Soviet propaganda. For purposes of increased credibility, an SS Lieutenant Colonel Heinisch even appeared during trial as a witness, pretending to know from hearsay that “the killings by gas were painless and humanitarian.”

The existence of so-called "murder vans” was immediately assumed to be a “proven fact,” repeatedly mentioned in the numerous investigation reports of the “Extraordinary State Commission.” For example, a communique of March 23, 1944, under the headline “They Murdered 2,000,000 People,” in which it was claimed, apparently referring to the slogan coined in the USA, that the Germans had murdered more than two million people in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, in particular, prisoners of war, as well as civilians, “by means of gas in ‘murder vans’ or by mistreatments.” Discussion in this regard gained renewed momentum after Soviet troops crossed the border of the former General Gouvernement of Poland and captured the Majdanek concentration camp in August 1944. The Soviet writer and propagandist Simonov, who devoted elaborate coverage to this event in an official report, as early as August 17, 1944, for the first time stated in one of his articles that fixed gas chambers, disguised as disinfecting chambers, also existed in the extermination camp of Lublin, in addition to murder vans of the usual type for killing purposes—which Ehrenburg called the “gas-van method.” Simonov wrote a detailed report on the gassing of people allegedly having occurred in Majdanek in an article under the headline “Nazi gas chambers” on August 24, 1944, but without solid proof; in so doing, he unreservedly admitted, or at any rate made no effort to conceal the following: “By the way, Cyclon [ Zyklon] (the killing gas) is, in reality, a disinfection agent.”

The report of the “Extraordinary State Commission” on the concentration camps of Majdanek, The Majdanek Inferno, published on September 28, 1944, claimed that mass shootings were in first place as the principal killing method—apart from mistreatment—and beside that mentioned “murder vans,” and likewise the existence of “gas cells,” which allegedly had been technically examined by the Soviets in regard to their functional efficiency. The ultimate source of information appears to have been the testimony of NKVD witnesses; on this basis, the official Soviet communique then reached contradictory conclusions, and inevitably so. One is first given to believe that the killing of people by poison gas was rather more the exception than the rule, and was used, in particular, in cases of illness and physical exhaustion—and, moreover, used to a relatively limited extent. On the other hand, the “Extraordinary State Commission” assumed that hundreds of thousands of people had been exterminated by poison gas during the almost three years of the existence of the Majdanek concentration camp. This contradiction was never explained, but still applies: for example, the historian Helmut Krausnick considered it proper, as early as 1956, to state that Majdanek was “not a camp of immediate extermination.” Thus the communist Polish Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes in Majdanek claimed a total number of 200,000 victims.

Still greater significance than Majdanek concentration camp was understandably attributed to Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet propaganda. If a comparison is now made between the reporting on Auschwitz concentration camp and the reporting on Majdanek, it, likewise, becomes clear that shootings and mistreatments played the chief role as the method of killing in Soviet propaganda until the end of the war, while gassing played a subordinate role only. The report sent to the Secretary of the Central Committee, Malenkov, in Moscow, by the Member of the Military Council for the 1st Ukrainian Front, (political) Lieutenant General Krainiukov, on January 30, 1945, three days after the capture of the camp, merely says, for example: “According to preliminary inmate testimonies, hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death, burned, or shot in Auschwitz.” There is no mention of gassing, which would have been sensational enough. The final communique of the “Extraordinary State Commission” on Auschwitz also contains a remarkable deviation from the text in this regard. The Russian edition of the official Soviet communique, published in the party newspaper Pravda on May 7, spoke of killing by “shooting, hunger, poisoning, and monstrous mistreatment,” while the propaganda newspaper Soviet War News, published by the Soviet Embassy in London on May 24, 1945, i.e., the English edition, spoke of “shootings and monstrous mistreatments,” i,e., there is no longer any mention of “poisoning,” although the Auschwitz case was being thoroughly exploited by Soviet propaganda, and Auschwitz concentration camp was being appropriately described as even more horrible than Majdanek. Certainly the report of the “Extraordinary State Commission” of May 7, 1945, on Auschwitz, analogous to the report on Majdanek, mentioned the existence of gas chambers, in the vicinity of the crematoria. Thus, a total of four crematoria were said to have existed in connection with such gas chambers in Auschwitz beginning in the summer of 1943. However, these gas chambers, astonishingly enough, were not the central point of emphasis of Soviet propaganda. Their existence was assumed to be so little known that the Germans were alleged to have been able to disguise them from the unsuspecting victims as “baths of special designation”.

As for methods of killing, the Soviet communique on Auschwitz therefore mentioned, primarily, “shootings and monstrous mistreatments.” Although gassings, as in Majdanek, were mentioned in the Soviet propaganda of that time, poison gassings ranked behind vivisection, medical experiments on living human beings, and similar crimes. It was even enumerated that allegedly 5,121,000 corpse cremations could have theoretically been performed in the four—later five—crematoria, during the entire duration of the camp. In this context, the recently published records of the interrogations of the “Auschwitz engineers” Prüfer, Sander, and Schultze by NKVD authorities during 1946 are interesting as well. According to these records, the gassings apparently involved only relatively small groups of persons after all—in the order of a few hundred on each occasion. The communique of May 7, 1945, moreover, contains no mention of the destruction of Jews, but rather, of citizens of the Soviet Union and those of many other European countries. The investigation findings of the “Extraordinary State Commissions” on Majdanek and Auschwitz were presented to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on the basis of article 21 of the London Agreement, as well as the investigation results of Katyn, and accepted without reservation as officially probative governmental material of the Soviet Union. They were introduced into evidence by the Soviet prosecutor, Chief Justice Counselor Smirnov, in the session of February 19, 1946.48 The International Military Tribunal, nevertheless, proved itself remarkably reticent in relation to the question of the gassings; the grounds for the judgement of September 30, 1946, merely stated tersely:

“Some of them [namely of the gas chambers with ovens for the burning of corpses] were in fact used for the extermination of Jews as part of the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem.”

The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, whose questionable competence, composition, and practices cannot be discussed at this point, also based its findings in this regard upon the testimony, which is generally considered credible, of SS Major and Judge, Dr. Morgen, and Deputy Bureau Chief of the Main Office of the SS Court and Chief Justice of the Supreme SS and Police Court, SS Colonel Dr. Reinecke, on August 7 and 8, 1946. The above-named SS judges and others had drawn up lengthy reports against the commandants and guard personnel of seven to ten con- centration camps on behalf of Himmler in 1943-44, but only for “irregularities” having occurred in the camps in question. In the course of these investigations, they accidentally stumbled across clues of the systematic extermination action. In Lublin in 1943, Morgen became aware of the existence of a related “Secret Special Mission of the Führer of the Highest Importance” in Auschwitz in 1944, and, in connection with the same, the existence of gas chambers (camouflaged as “large bath installations”) in connection with crematoria for the extermination of human beings in a place called by Morgen the “Monowitz extermination camp.” The fact that, according to Morgen’s testimony offered under oath, leading groups of the SS obviously had no knowledge of the extermination actions was, moreover, one of the reasons why the prosecutors refrained from cross-examining the witness, who had been called by the defense. The blanket accusation against all members of the SS had to be maintained at any price.

The Auschwitz problem has recently become the object of intensive journalistic debate, generally conducted both knowledgeably and intelligently in all its aspects, both in Germany and abroad, even if many groups zealously exceed the proper limitations of this debate due to their political motivations. This controversy is being conducted less in the "official” literature than in rather remote publications, and is not a little influenced by official prohibitions against certain forms of thought and speech, suspiciously watched over by a system of political denunciation. The related prevention of free discussion of an important problem of contemporary history, no matter how unfortunate it may be today, will, of course, be ineffective in the long run. Experience shows that free historical research can only be temporarily hindered by criminal law as it exists in many European countries, Historical truths usually continue to exert their effects behind the scenes, only to emerge triumphantly at a later time. In regard to the problem of Auschwitz, moreover, it is not a question of "obvious” facts relating to the cruel persecution and extermination of members of the Jewish people, which is beyond discussion; rather, it is solely and merely the question of the killing mechanism utilized and the question of how many people fell victim to persecution. Major discoveries are emerging in this regard, to such an extent that many current preconceptions must inevitably be corrected.

Although, for example, a total number of six million death victims is still believed to represent the expression of an indisputable historical fact— a established axiom today—the question then arises as to when, and where, the six million figure originated and on what it is based. Courts in the Federal Republic of Germany regularly indict and prosecute the expression of doubt as to the accuracy of this number on the grounds of "denial,” which is a misconception. What is involved is a clear inability to believe. If asked about the origin of these figures, however, these courts are unable to give an answer. A few remarks in this regard are therefore called for.

After the troops of the Soviet 60th Army occupied the territory of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945, it was not until March 1, 1945—ignoring a few reports considered rather vague—before any official Soviet declaration was forthcoming. That, based on dubious investigations, stated "at least five million people had been exterminated” in Auschwitz concentration camp. The number of victims first mentioned by Lieutenant General Krainiukov to Malenkov on January 30, 1945 (hundreds of thousands), now underwent a huge increase and became so large that even Soviet propaganda considered it necessary to cut it down a little. The communique of the “Extraordinary State Commission” published in the party newspaper Pravda on May 7, 1945, only speaks of “over four million citizens” having died at Auschwitz. This figure of four million remained the number to be defended in the immediate Soviet bloc (Soviet Union and Republic of Poland) until 1990. In its grounds for the judgement of August 1946, even the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, under the impression of the “probative material” of Soviet “Document 008-USSR,” had only acknowledged three million victims in Auschwitz. “The disgrace of the determination of the number of murder victims should have been sufficient warning,” Professor for Economic and Social History and Curator for Research Inquires at the Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau, Waclaw Dhigoborski, wrote on September 4, 1998.

"The figure was established by a Soviet Investigative Commission, without further investigation, at four million, shortly after the end of the war. Regardless of the existence of doubt as to the accuracy of the estimate, it became a dogma from the beginning. It was against the law to doubt the number of four million murder victims in Eastern Europe until 1989; employees of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum who doubted the accuracy of the estimate were threatened with disciplinary proceedings.”

Conditions in the Federal Republic of Germany were hardly better. The Soviet propaganda number of four million was considered “obvious” in Germany until 1990, although no one knew exactly how it was calculated. An ignorant political judiciary prosecuted doubters, simply for not believing—and therefore “denying”—the Stalinist propaganda figure.

In the meantime, the Director of the State Museum of Auschwitz, Dr. Franciszek Piper—who sometimes seems to know more than he would have it appear—caused the memorial inscriptions to the four million Jews in Auschwitz, which had been carved on nineteen memorial tablets in nineteen languages, to be secretly removed in April 1990. Remarkably, the new number of 1 to 1.2 million, alleged in turn, was to have a short life span as well, and would soon be reduced to 800,000. 74,000 dead victims are confirmed in the registers of the Sterbebücher (Death Registers) released from Soviet archives, but this includes only victims of those deportees who were registered at their arrival in Auschwitz. These registers naturally refer to a partial number of victims only; the true total remains in the dark. The difference of 726,000, according to the most recent reports, was rather summarily estimated based on an evaluation of "available technical data,” and, therefore, in a manner rather similar to the Soviet communique of May 7, 1945, based on speculating about the capacity of the crematoria in Auschwitz. These numbers could not, therefore, be considered definitively proven either. Jean-Claude Pressac now states a total figure of 631,000-711,000 deaths at Auschwitz.

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which was methodically deceived by the falsifications of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission, nevertheless, agreed with the Soviet war propagandists as to the total number of Jewish victims. The International Military Tribunal calculated the number of Jewish death victims in its grounds for the judgement at six million. Although even the British prosecutor, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, showed signs of doubt as to the credibility of the Soviet figures in speaking hypothetically of three million Jewish death victims on March 21, 1946, and although, shortly before, on January 3, 1946, former SS Captain Wisliceny from the Jewish Office of the Reichs Security Main Office had testified that SS Lieutenant Colonel Eichmann (Department Head of Office IV) had spoken to him of four to five million in February 1945, the Tribunal based its findings on another declaration from the Reichs Security Main Office: the affidavit of former SS Major Dr. Höttl (document PS-2738 of November 26, 1945). Höttl is the one to whom Eichmann, the expert adviser on Jewish affairs, is supposed to have spoken of a total of six million Jews killed during a conversation in Budapest at the end of August 1944, "after he poured the Barack, a Hungarian apricot brandy.” Höttl alleged that he had provided more detailed information in this regard to an American agency in a neutral country (Allen Dulles in Switzerland), "even before the German collapse” (i.e., in the spring of 1945). So that it is at least explicable if the six million number was already current in September 1945 in the US prisoner camp at Freising, but was not believed by the shocked inmates. When Höttl, who was imprisoned there, once more repeated what he had heard from Eichmann in August 1944, his testimony was immediately deposed by the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). The number given by Eichmann was in the meantime “clearly considered to be too high” “in view of the knowledge of historical science”; Dr. Höttl today, who had known Eichmann since 1938, also speaks of Eichmann’s tendency to exaggerate.

Even if we assume that the six million figure, which was to acquire imperishable historical political symbolic power, only reached the Americans in the spring of 1945, it is in any event strange that the Soviet foreign propaganda was already using the six million figure months before. Exactly five weeks before the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp with its alleged five million victims, the weekly newspaper Soviet War News, published by the Soviet embassy in London on December 22, 1944, headlined in an article by leading Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg: “Remember, Remember, Remember.” In it, the following was reported, apparently with the greatest naturalness:

“In regions they seized, the Germans killed all the Jews, from the old folks to infants in arms. Ask any German prisoner why his fellow countrymen annihilated six million innocent people, and he will reply quite simply ‘Why, they were Jews.”’

This article by Ehrenburg was reprinted on January 4, 1945, i.e., twenty-three days before the liberation of Auschwitz, under the headline “Once Again—Remember!” in the Soviet War News weekly, with the same passage word for word.

As early as October 5, 1944, Ehrenburg inserted his claims into another article in Soviet War News: “They [the Germans]” he wrote, “made no attempt to disguise their acts in Poland, as they installed 'extermination camps’ in Maidanek, Sabibur, Bolzyce, and Treblinka and slaughtered millions, I repeat, millions of defenseless people.” In using the related propaganda claim that remains commonplace to the present day, he added significantly: “If the Germans killed millions of Jews, then the fact that these were Jews is only of importance to ‘racists.’ For human beings, it is of importance that these victims were human beings.” The slanderous conclusion then ran: “Hundreds of thousands (of Germans) are guilty of crimes and millions of complicity.”

The six-million figure, stated exactly for the first time by Ehrenburg in the Soviet War News on December 22, 1944, at first inconspicuously, and then repeated by him once again on January 4, 1945, in the same Soviet propaganda newspaper, then appeared on March 15, 1945, in another article by Ehrenburg in the Soviet War News weekly under the headline “Wolves They Were-Wolves They Remain”—in bold print, as a fact no longer to be disputed by anyone. Although the total number of victims, according to the Soviet Press on March 1, 1945, had been increased by another 5 million to a new total of eleven million, Ehrenburg, unmoved by this, wrote on March 15, 1945: “The world now knows that Germany has killed six million Jews,” a claim of which the world knew absolutely nothing at that time.

The stereotypical repetition of a total figure of six million murder victims, already claimed with precise clarity on December 22, 1944—and this in the propaganda newspaper Soviet War News, intended for English-speaking readers—gives rise to the conclusion that the six-million figure, just like the Auschwitz figure of May 7, 1945, is a product of Soviet propaganda, intended to influence and indoctrinate public opinion, particularly, the thinking of the Anglo-Saxon countries. The evidence, from Soviet War News of December 22, 1944, January 4, 1945, and March 15, 1945, that it was Ehrenburg who introduced the six-million figure in the Soviet war propaganda, is not without importance to scientific discussion of this emotionally charged topic.

We now know that the reports of National Socialist atrocities were published in the Western world, but were not immediately believed. In Great Britain, the word “Auschwitz,” was unknown until June 1944, as shown by Martin Gilbert. When two escaping inmates, Vrba and Wetzler, reported gassings at this time, they were not believed. The Allies rejected related Jewish demands on the grounds that the Jewish organizations involved had been “tricked by a deliberate Nazi deception.” Still in November 1945, the discouraged President of the Jewish World Congress, Chaim Weizmann, wrote in his memoirs: “The English government did not wish to adopt the attitude that six million Jews in Europe have been killed.

For Soviet propaganda—which had previously been concerned with distracting attention from Soviet crimes—a rich field of related activity now opened up. Ehrenburg, as has been stated, was very soon entrusted with the assignment of enhancing the receptiveness of public opinion in the USA and in Great Britain to Soviet whisperings. As a prominent Soviet Jew, he also appeared especially predestined to act as a link between the Soviet Union and the very influential Jews in the USA, although he had himself once seemed to be rather “anti-Semitic.” Still on October 12, 1941, for example, he disputed that National Socialism was theoretically opposed to all Jews, writing, at that time:

“They say: We are against the Jews. That is a lie. They have their own Jews, which they favor. These Jews have passports, marked with the letters W.J., which means ‘Worthy Jews’ [perhaps: Geltungsjuden, Declared Jews].”

As early as August 24, 1941, he had therefore appealed very influentially, “as a Russian writer and a Jew,” to the Jews of a still-neutral United States, in an article entitled “To the Jews”:

“Jews! The wild beasts have oppressed us... We will not forgive those that are indifferent. We will curse those that wash their hands. Come and help England! Come and help the Soviet Union!”

In his memoirs, Ehrenburg reports that he had received the assignment in the summer of 1943 of sending “a letter to the American Jews on the bestialities of the German Fascists,” to stress the “urgent necessity” of smashing Germany quickly, which meant—since this was what was at stake in concrete terms—an early opening of the second front.

In these same memoirs, Ehrenburg, in an attempt to justify his anti-German hatred orgies, argued: “I have held soap in my hand made of the corpses of shot Jews. ‘Pure Jewish Soap’ was stamped on it.”66 And then he says quite casually: “But why remember it? Thousands of books have been written about it.” It is not true that thousands of books have been written about it; rather, what is true is that the Soviet prosecutor, Chief Justice Counselor Smirnov, made the accusation, before the International Military Tribunal on February 19, 1946, based on fabricated material (USSR-196, USSR-197, USSR-393) that the Germans had manufactured soap out of the bodies of murdered Jews on an industrial basis. This Soviet propaganda claim, carried on and believed, right down to the present day, is without any basis in fact; even the Israeli documentation center Yad Vashem in Jerusalem felt itself compelled to issue an official denial in 1990, stating: “There is no documentary evidence that the Nazis made soap out of human fat”— proving how persistent legends can be, and how carefully and critically one must deal with accusations having their origins in the dark recesses of Soviet propaganda, and the writings of Ilya Ehrenburg to boot.

The adjustment of political historical statements to truly verifiable facts, which is inevitable in the long run, is a process that has only just begun. This must not, of course, distract attention from the fact that frightful atrocities were committed against the Jewish people in the occupied territories by the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD, as stated above, as well as by related groups of the camp personnel of the SS assigned to the concentration camps of the then General Gouvernement. The Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg, Chief Justice Counselor Smirnov, who, with his colleagues, attempted to introduce the Soviet war propaganda claims into the procedures of the International Military Tribunal, in speaking of “hundreds of thousands and millions of criminals” among the Germans on February 19, 1946, was making a blanket accusations against the entire German people. In truth, however, the genocide against the Jews was carried out behind a veil of strict secrecy. If even the British government failed to believe the related reports that, moreover, were only received in 1944; if the otherwise not exactly squeamish Western Allied war propagandists wasted not one word in this respect; if even leading circles of the SS were unaware of what was going on—for example, the investigative committees of the Main Office of the SS Court only stumbled across clues of a systematic mass extermination of human beings in Lublin and Auschwitz by accident after lengthy investigations—then some credence should be given to the oft-claimed ignorance of representatives of the other agencies in the complex power apparatus of Hitler’s Germany. It would otherwise be almost impossible to understand, for example, how the notorious SS Brigadier General Ohlendorf, who, according to his own confession, murdered at least 90,000 Jews as chief of the Einsatzgruppe D of the Security Police and SD in the Ukraine could find employment in 1945 as Ministerial Director with the executive Reich Government under Grand Admiral Dönitz, a government that was very concerned with its own reputation under the victorious powers.

In April 1943, Himmler is said to have described the group of those immediately responsible for the “Final Solution” as being restricted to 200 SS leaders. Dr. Höttl, in his affidavit, alleged that Eichmann had told him that the whole action was a “great Reich secret.” The American expert on international law, Professor Dr. de Zayas, and a few American and British authors, make no secret today of their belief that the “number of persons who knew of the Holocaust during the war was extremely restricted. Zayas writes:

“More and more historians are coming to the conclusion that knowledge of the Holocaust during the war was much more restricted than we had previously believed.”

This is particularly true of the mass of German people. It was urgently necessary to conceal the genocide because, for example, in the words of Ministerial Director Dr. Fritzsche, who was acquitted at Nuremberg on all counts:

“the German people would have refused to follow Hitler if they had known of the murder of the Jews; their trust of him would have been very badly shaken at the very least.”

An informative confidential informational circular letter from the Party Chancellery to the Gauleiters and Kreisleiters of October 9, 1942, quoted by the International Military Tribunal in the grounds for the judgement against the “corps of Political Leaders of the Nazi Party” at Nuremberg in 1946, shows clearly that even the leading officials of the NSDAP were left in the dark as to the real fate of the Jews. In view of the rumors circulating in Germany on the “conditions among the Jews in the East,” which, it was openly admitted, “some Germans perhaps would not under- stand,” the Party apparatus was now asked “to keep German public opinion from rebelling against the measures being taken against the Jews in the East.” However, even this confidential circular letter, intended for the information of the Gauleiters and Kreisleiters, contained, in the belief of the International Military Tribunal, “no express statement that the Jews were being murdered; rather, it was indicated that they were being confined to work camps...”

Hitler, moreover, expressed himself accordingly during the continuing deportations, when he stated in the Führer Main Headquarters on May 12, 1942, that the Jews were “the most climate-resistant people in the world...” followed by the admission "... naturally, no individual here crying crocodile tears about Jews transported to the East takes this into consideration,” “our so-called bourgeoisie lament about the self-same Jews who stabbed Germany in the back over the war loan in 1917, when they are transported to the East today.” Even Hitler, in the circle of his closest confidants, therefore, only spoke of transporting Jews to the East, not of exterminating them.

In accordance with the above, the well-known female political journalist and editor of the left-wing Zeit, Dr. Gräfin Dönhoff, who can hardly be suspected of “trivialization”, also credibly testified that she only heard “of the name of Auschwitz after the war for the first time.” As she told her portrait artist Alice Schwarzer: “We knew that people were being transported to the East. But I only learned after the war that the camps were not work camps, but extermination camps. No one could imagine that they were being killed…”

The confidential circular letter of the Party Chancellery of October 9, 1942, not only indicates that the planned murder of the Jews was being concealed or shielded even from the Gauleiters and Kreisleiters assigned to influence public opinion, but that the German population, to a significant extent at least, cannot have been in agreement with the deportation of the German Jews. According to Fritzsche, the Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who must be considered to always have remained a sober judge of the situation, was said to have been “extremely embittered” over the sympathy of many Germans for the Jews. This statement is also confirmed by the diaries of Dr. Goebbels in relation to the deportation of the Berlin Jews. That the Germans could not have been in agreement with purely anti-Jewish persecution is also clear from the Himmler speech in Posen quoted by the American prosecutor Thomas J. Dodd on December 13, 1945, in which Himmler admitted the following in his profligate speech: “And then there come 80 million upright Germans and each one has his decent Jew. Of course, the others are swines, but this one is an A-1 Jew.”

If the Germans did not even know of the cruel events occurring behind their backs, events of which they would never have approved, then they cannot be held responsible. The main thing is that even if citizens of the Greater German Reich were involved in these crimes, it is no proof to the contrary; the Russian people, by the same logic, would have to bear responsibility for the mass murder of millions of people under the Soviets; the Georgian people could also be held responsible on the grounds that, in addition to Dzhugashvili (Stalin)—a Georgian—Beria, Dekanozov, Canava, Goglidze, Rukhadze, Karanadze, and other Georgians headed the murder apparatus as leading NKVD officials. To stretch the analogy a bit further, the Jewish people could also be held responsible because—as Sonja Margolina, an author of Jewish origin from the Soviet Union, stressed in her book Das Ende der Lügen (The End of Lies)—Jews in Bolshevism appeared, not only as victims, but as criminals, for the first time in history. That Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Yoffe, Krestinsky, Radek and innumerable other leading Bolshevik officials were Jews, is very well-known. The Central Committee that met in Smolnyj in 1918 was popularly known as the “Jewish Central Committee”; according to Sonja Margolina, Bolshevik rule in the 1920s actually bore “certain Jewish features.” “The fact that a significant proportion of the known Bolshevik party leaders were Jews...” as Nicolas Werth writes in the Black Book of Communism, “justified the equation of Jew = Bolshevik in the eyes of the masses.” After all, Wolfgang Strauss, a Slavist and political journalist, refers to the ethnic breakdown of the principal Communist Party leaders during the period from 1918-19, in the appendix to the new edition of the well-known work by Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs, first published in New York in 1920, which shows the following:

“17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35 Letts [Latvians], 15 Germans, one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles, three Finns,
one Czech, one Karaim, and 457 Jews.”

Less well-known is the relatively high proportion of Jews in the unleashing and organization of the Bolshevik terror (Cheka, GPU, NKVD). As stressed by Nicolas Werth in the Black Book of Communism, Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs [and de facto head of the Red Army], speaking before the Delegates of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets as early as December 1, 1917, (new calendar: December 13) announced: “In less than one month, the terror will acquire extremely violent forms, just as it did during the great French Revolution.” Nicolas Werth also quotes Grigori Zinoviev, “one of the most important Bolshevik party leaders,” who on September 19, 1918, writing in the newspaper Severnaja Kommuna, demanded that, of the one hundred million residents of Soviet Russia, ten million “must be annihilated” through “our own socialist terror."

Trotsky (Lev Bronshtein) and Zinoviev (Hirsh Apfelbaum), in addition to other Jews, were also decisively involved in the murder of the family of the Czar and their retinue. Zinoviev advocated the shooting and forwarded the telegram to Lenin, accompanied by a request for confirmation; together with Lenin, Trotsky issued the order. Lenin’s order for the murder was drawn up by Sverdlov, President of the Central Executive Committee in Ekaterinbuig (later Sverdlovsk); the murder record was signed by Beloborodov (Vaisbart), President of the “Regional Workers’ Soviet of Farmer and Soldier Delegates from the Urals.” The murder squad was led by the Jewish Yakov Yurovsky, who is supposed to have killed Czar Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, and Crown Prince Alexis in the Ipatev-House with his own hands on July 17, 1918—a claim that two of his accomplices, nevertheless, later made for themselves. According to the register of names of the “Squad for Special Duty” of the “Extraordinary Commission”, signed by Yurovsky at Ekaterinburg on July 18, 1918, at least two other members of the ten-man squad were also Jews: Izidor Edelstein and Viktor Grinfeld. The others were either Russians or German-Austrian prisoners of war: A. Fisher, E. Feketi, Nikulin, P. Medvedev, S. Vaganov, V. Vergaesh, and L. Gorvat. Among the murderers listed in this Spisok (list) was a Hungarian, Imre Nagy (Imre Nad), later Minister President during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, who continued to work closely with the secret police of the GPU-NKVD until fate finally caught up with him.

Although Stalin gradually restricted the influence of the Jews, and subjected many of them to severe persecution as “Trotskyites,” or, later, as “cosmopolitans,” they were still to be found in leading positions everywhere during the Second World War. An important propaganda role in regard to the United States, for example, was played by the “Jewish Anti- Fascist Committee,” which was expressly founded for this purpose, but liquidated in 1948 by Stalin. One of Stalin’s closest collaborators, to the end of his life, was Lazar Moisseevich Kaganovich, chiefly responsible, in addition to other persons, for “an unprecedented act of genocide”—the carefully planned murder of seven to nine million Ukrainian farmers during the 1932- 33 famine. Kaganovich was “responsible for the death of an entire generation of intellectuals,” and personally signed execution orders for 36,000 people. According to Medvedev, a historian of Jewish origins, Kaganovich had "his hand in the murder of millions,” and had more crimes on his conscience “than the men hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.” The order to shoot the 15,000 Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere—a crime that, in itself, would have sufficed for the imposition of a death sentence according to Nuremberg standards—was signed by Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich, in addition to Stalin.

Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda—a "scoundrel and common criminal,” according to Colonel General Volkogonov—was for years the head of the Bolshevik mass terror apparatus and was responsible for the murder of millions as the head of the GULag Archipelago and People’s Commissar of the Interior.

The terror in the Red Army was organized by the head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Army Commissar First Rank Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis. NKVD Colonel General Abakumov, who sur- rounded himself with a whole group of Jewish collaborators, was a close confidant of Beria. Beria, who was in turn called a "Jew from birth” by NKVD General Sudoplatov, was one of the chief persons responsible for the monstrous crimes under the authority of the NKVD-MVD. NKVD General Raikhmann, head of the regional administration of the NKVD in Kharkov, which was praised by Ezhov for its particular brutality during the 1930s, played a decisive role in the shooting of the Polish prisoners of war at Katyn in 1940. General of the Army Chernyakhovsky, Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd White Russian Front, was responsible for atrocities against the civilian population and against prisoners of war in East Prussia. The list could be extended indefinitely.

Even if, in Margolina’s opinion, the active cooperation of many Jews in the Soviet terror organizations truly requires a chapter of its own, responsibility for crimes committed by the Bolsheviks can never be attributed to the Jewish people as a whole. It was not peoples as a whole—Germans, Russians, Georgians, Latvians, or even Jews and others—who were responsible for the atrocities, but rather, individual persons in all cases. As for Germans in particular, no one can say that the persecution and murder of peaceful populations form any part of the traditions of the German people.

Where tradition is concerned, the tradition is a political one—dating back to the recent era of Jacobinism during the French Revolution. It is the tradition of a des Convent, who demanded and carried out the total extermination of the Vendee, the extermination of the population by guillotine, mass drownings, “vertical deportation,” “Republican marriages,” and similar achievements of the glorious Revolution during the delirium of 1793-94. It was not the French people as such who massacred 250,000 people, but rather “Republican citizens”; it was not the German people, but rather National Socialists, followers of Hitler and Himmler, who committed the relevant crimes of our era; it was not the Russian, Georgian, Latvian, or Jewish people who were the scourge of Soviet socialism, but rather Communists, followers of Lenin and Stalin.

It should be added that the guilty parties, insofar as they were German instead of Soviet, were strictly called to account whenever they were apprehended. President Gorbachev permitted some crimes to be called by their proper names in the Soviet Union, but never the criminals; nor were they ever brought to court. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former security advisor to the President of the United States Jimmy Carter, recently wrote the following, speaking of his increasing anger:

“Hitler’s crimes continue to be justly punished. But there are literally thousands of former killers and former torturers in the Soviet Union, who live off official pensions and attend the various revolutionary celebrations, decked out with their medals.”

Some of them are even said to continue to brag of their crimes. Brzezinski stressed that the Gestapo and SS were declared criminal organizations at Nuremberg, adding that it was high time for the NKVD-KGB, and perhaps the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to be declared criminal organizations as well.

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 8
“Hitlerite Villains”
Soviet Crimes Are Attributed to the Germans

In examining the manner in which German atrocities have been exploited for the purposes of Soviet war propaganda, particularly in view of the general context already described, it should be recalled that all enemies of the Soviet Union have been accused of committing atrocities. This was true during the unprovoked Soviet war of aggression against the Poles—the “White Poles,” in September 1939—as well as during the unprovoked Soviet war of aggression against the Finns—the “White Finnish gangs,” the “Finnish cut-throats,” the “White Finnish scum of humanity,” in November 1939. The manner in which Soviet soldiers were indoctrinated to believe that captivity in these countries was equivalent to a “dreadful death by torture” by a dehumanized enemy has already been described. Nor was any distinction made between Germans and German allies in 1941. The official propaganda slogan “Death to the German invaders!” was accompanied by another slogan, “Death to the Finnish invaders!” The decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “Regarding Measures for the Punishment of the German-Fascist Criminals,” published on April 19, 1943, included the Italian, Romanian, Hungarian (naturally, including the Slovakians), and Finnish “Fascist violent criminals.” The decrees signed by Kalinin and Secretary of the Presidium Gorkin applied, not only to the Germans, but to the “Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Finnish villains,” “Hitlerite agents,” the “spies and traitors to the homeland among the Soviet citizens,” and their “tools among the local population” as well, all being threatened with death by public hanging “in the presence of the people,” for their alleged “monstrous acts of violence.” With the further stipulation that:

“The bodies of the hanged guilty parties shall remain on the gallows for several days so that all may know the nature of the punishment and reckoning that awaits all those who commit acts of violence or crimes against the civil population and the homeland.”

What caused the Head of State of the Soviet Union to resort to such revolting threats of reprisals? Kalinin’s decree was intended to accomplish a two-fold purpose: first, to distract attention all over the world from the devastating propaganda effect of the mass graves of thousands of Polish officers murdered by the Bolsheviks and discovered at Katyn in February 1943, and secondly—a motive that was perhaps even more pressing—to deter Soviet subjects in the German-occupied territories from joining the Russian Army of Liberation under General Vlassov, which, prior to being hobbled by Hitler, was just beginning to exert an influence in the spring of 1943, a factor of great concern to the Soviet Union.

For a communique of the “Extraordinary State Commission” of August 24, 1944, entitled “Finland Unmasked” to accuse the “Finnish-fascist invaders” of most severe crimes in the “territory of the Karelo-Finnish Socialist Soviet Republic” was, therefore, at least thoroughly consistent. The “Government and Supreme Military Command of Finland” was said to have deported the entire “Soviet” population of the occupied Soviet territories—“men, women, old people, and children”—to concentration camps, where 40 percent of the inmates were alleged to have died from “monstrous tortures inflicted by the Finnish butchers”—7,000 in Petrozavodsk alone— after which they were said to have been buried in mass graves. In the German-Soviet war—viewed as a continuation of the Winter War with Finland—Soviet prisoners of war were said to have been massacred by “Finnish White Guard bandits,” just as they had been during the preceding Winter War. Finland’s political objective was alleged to consist of the “deliberate extermination of the Soviet population.” Annexed to the communique was a list of names of Finnish war criminals of all ranks, from generals on down, including many Finnish civilians.

Accusations similar to those hurled against Finland were also made by the Extraordinary State Commission on June 22, 1944, against Romania, where the government was said to have attempted the extermination of the populations—Russians, Ukrainians, and Moldavians—in the regions between the Bug and the Dniester Rivers (“Transdnistria”), while plundering the countryside. Twenty-five thousand civilians were alleged to have been burned alive by the “Romanian butchers” in powder magazines in Odessa alone on October 19, 1941, while a total of 200,000 people were alleged to have been “shot, tortured to death, or burned” in Odessa and in the concentration camps of the region. Ehrenburg acted as the spokesman of slander in this instance as well, referring to the Royal Romanian army on September 7, 1941, as a band of “lousy soldiers and syphilitic officers,” and an “underworld.” On October 11, 1945, in an article regarding the fate of the Romanian Jews, entitled “Meeting with Romania: Rebirth of a people,” Ehrenburg claimed that Romanian “fascists” had slaughtered 500,000 out of 800,000 Romanian Jews. To Ehrenburg, of course, the Royal Italian Army fighting in the Soviet Union was, similarly, nothing but a “gang of robbers and murders.” “In the coming century,” he wrote on November 7, 1941, in an article entitled “Love and Hatred,” “the Italians will be unable to look eastward without trembling in their boots.” Even neutral Switzerland—the “little fossil” in the heart of Europe, in Ehrenburg’s words—would receive the same sort of treatment after the end of the war. On June 21, 1945, the official news agency TASS claimed that 9,000 Soviet citizens interned in Switzerland (refugees from Germany) had been subjected to “intolerable conditions,” being treated “in the same brutal manner as under the Hitlerites,” including fatal shootings.

The Soviet Union has always described the blockade of the city and fortress of Leningrad, which began in September 1941, as one of the “most frightful crimes of the German-fascist conquerors,” the “methodical murder of the peaceful residents of the city.” Leningrad—“the majestic Saint Petersburg,” “the most beautiful city in the world,” “in which every stone is holy”—in Ehrenburg’s words, on October 8, 1941, was being oppressed by Berlin, the city of “vulgarity, barracks, and beer halls,” “the ugliest” of all German cities. The hypocrisy of all these ever-shifting accusations is revealed by the incontrovertible fact that the blockade, bombardment, and starvation of fortified, defended cities and fortresses are permitted by the laws of war, being entirely in compliance with all applicable international law relating to the laws and customs of war. Soviet troops also resorted to such methods of blockade without any hesitation at all, attempting to bring about the capitulation of enemy cities such as Königsberg, Breslau, and Berlin in 1945, through encirclement and bombardment by all available methods. The former defender of Leningrad, Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, considered it an honor to have fired no fewer than 1,800,000 heavy artillery shells at the defended city of Berlin between April 21, and May 2, 1945. “Smoke the rats out of Königsberg” was the official Soviet slogan on February 15, 1945.

The cost in human life to the blockaded city of Leningrad was in fact high, and no one familiar with the frightful details will be unable to sympathize with the victims of the blockade. It was, however, war; and blockade is a permissible method of waging war under international law. As Yuri Ivanov, writer and President of the Kaliningrad section of the Russian Cultural Fund and Joint Publisher of the Kenigsbergskij Kur’er (Königsberg Courier) remarked in 1992: “When I was starving and eating rat meat in Leningrad, Zhdanov, the fat official, had his schnitzel flown into the city every day.” There is another notable difference as to the victims of the blockade. Books are written about the victims of Leningrad; solemn wreath laying ceremonies and memorial commemorations are regularly held in Leningrad cemetery, while the victims of Königsberg—mostly old people, women and children—lie buried and forgotten. At the same time, according to the detailed studies by the Königsberg professors of medicine Schuberth and Starlinger, 90,000 of the 120,000 civilians captured by the Soviets in April 1945 either died of starvation or from epidemics—not during the blockade, but rather, after the end of the fighting, and even after the end of the war, under Soviet administration, for which there is no justification under international law.

Soviet propaganda describes the blockade and bombardment of the city of Leningrad as criminal, while totally suppressing the fact that the Soviet Union never paid the slightest attention to civilian populations when- ever it suited their political or military purposes. Thus, the attack on tiny Finland on November 30, 1939, began with surprise bombing attacks by Soviet combat aircraft units on the residential districts of the cities of Helsinki, Hangö, Kotka, Lahti, and Wiborg, to achieve the immediate destruction of the morale of the unprepared civilian population and paralyze all resistance. According to a Finnish empirical report of February 13, 1940, the Finnish “industrial centers (in the cities of Kymi and Vuokseniska) and transport junctions (Antrea, Kouvola)” were only “secondary” objectives of Soviet aircraft. On August 17, 1941, Ehrenburg gloated over the appearance of a few Soviet aircraft over Berlin. On April 30, 1942, he called the destruction of the cities of Lübeck and Rostock by the Royal Air Force “a good start,” simultaneously stating: “We shall strike the beast wherever we can.”

The Germans continue to be held solely responsible for the "crime” of blockading and bombarding the city of Leningrad, right down to the present day; yet contemporary Soviet war propaganda invariably mentioned the Finns as well—in the same breath, as it were. According to reports from the Soviet information bureau, Finnish officers had always been “the chief instigators of the bombardments.” “Now the Finns are bombarding Leningrad” wrote Tikhonov in an article on January 27, 1944, piling up insult after insult against the Finns, calling them “assassins,” “vile stepsons of nature”, “lunatics,” and “crazy creatures.” Tikhonov also accused the Finns of rejoicing over the sufferings of Leningrad during the hunger blockade, claiming that it was their wish to “wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth.” Since the Finns failed to do so, they were accused of committing atrocities against the peaceful Russian population in the Finnish-occupied section of the Karelian peninsula, in a manner overshadowing “even the most sadistic Gestapo agents in baseness, cruelty, and terror.”

The same Soviet war propaganda apparatus that accused the Germans and German allies of committing atrocities from the very outbreak of the war, nevertheless, fell into a certain disarray when it came to the production of truly convincing evidence. The rage of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD against the Jewish population appear to have become known, if not in terms of the systematic nature of such actions, at least as far as their general outlines were concerned. As early as December 18, 1941, Ehrenburg himself quoted a captured German army order, which is revealing insofar as it prohibited soldiers from even witnessing the measures of the Einsatzgruppen, which were described as “inevitable.” Against his will, and perhaps unintentionally, Ehrenburg therefore felt himself compelled to admit that the machine-gunning of “thousands of citizens” was, perhaps, not the act of the Wehrmacht, but, rather, the responsibility of the Einsatzgruppen. “It is a victory of the Gestapo over the German generals,” Ehrenburg claimed: “Himmler obtained a monopoly over the gallows, while the Gestapo was granted the privilege of burning down villages, shooting women with machine guns, and murdering Russian children.” On the whole, these accusations, nevertheless, remained vague; even Ehrenburg was unable to produce truly solid evidence in the early years. Where atrocities were concerned, the Soviet Union felt itself placed on the defensive during the first half of the war. Even the Lemberg case shows that it was not so easy to accuse the Germans of committing atrocities when the mass murdering was in fact started by the Soviets.

In execution of an Order of Stalin to prevent the capture of Soviet political prisoners by the Germans, approximately 4,000 Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners and other civilians of all ages and both sexes, as well as a number of German prisoners of war, were systematically shot by the NKVD in the prisons of Lemberg, such as Brigidki Prison, Zamarstynow Prison, and the NKVD prison in the days preceding June 30, 1941. In some cases, the prisoners were horribly mutilated and showed signs of severe torture. This atrocity was exploited by Einsatzgruppe C of the Security Police and SD as providing a suitable opportunity for the shooting of up to 7,000 residents of Jewish origin, who had taken no part in the crimes at Lemberg or the surrounding regions, in a so-called “reprisal for the inhumane atrocities” before July 17. The fact, nevertheless, remains that it was the Soviets who left behind the 4,000 corpses of murdered civilians, some of them mutilated, a fact immediately seized upon by the Germans.

German press reports on Soviet atrocities in Lemberg were confirmed by Polish reports reaching Great Britain through unofficial pathways and not doubted by official circles in London. The British Foreign Office, immediately convinced of Soviet guilt as in the later Katyn case, sent the Moscow Foreign Commissariat a note requesting clarification, to which Molotov hastily issued a categorical Soviet official denial on July 12, 1941. Soviet propaganda immediately busied itself with concealing the Soviet crimes at Lemberg by blaming the prison massacres on the Germans. Lemberg thus set the precedent for the Soviet propaganda tactic of covering up Soviet crimes by attributing them to the Germans.

The Soviet authorities next occupied themselves with the preparation of so-called “witnesses,” a tried-and-true procedure; after all, the NKVD, in view of its experiences during the “Great Purge” of the 1930s, was well able to obtain any kind of statement it liked, from any kind of witness to any crime. On the basis of such falsifications, the Soviet news agency TASS published a report on August 8, 1941, immediately disseminated by the Associated Press agency, alleging that German “storm troops” had killed 40,000 people in Lemberg. The eyewitness statements in question were described as “irrefutable,” and as proof that the “fantastic inventions of Hitler propaganda relating to the so-called Bolshevik crimes at Lemberg [were] in fact a crude attempt to conceal the unprecedented bestialities and cruelties of the German bandits themselves against the Lemberg population.” When the Soviets found themselves driven into a comer following the discovery of the mass graves at Katyn in 1943, they immediately adopted the same tactic as in the case of the Lemberg accusations. On April 29, 1943, the party newspaper Pravda, in an article printed under the absurd headline “Hitler’s Polish collaborators,” claimed that the “German bandits” and “Hitlerite liars” “[were] now acting in exactly the same manner as they did in 1941, in regard to so-called victims of the Bolshevik terror in Lemberg.” Exactly as in the Lemberg case, the Germans were then alleged to be trying to accuse Soviet agencies of atrocities committed at Katyn by the Germans themselves, thus slandering “the Soviet people.” These attempts at justification continued with the publication, on January 4, 1945, of the investigative findings (“The Lvov Evidence”) of the “Extraordinary State Commission.” These were then presented to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as an official governmental document of the Soviet Union possessing “probative value,” of which judicial notice was taken after being accepted into evidence as true and proven on the basis of Article 21 of the London Agreement which established the International Military Tribunal.

Only the Germans could, therefore, be deemed guilty. There was no mention of mass murders previously committed by the Soviets. While it is true that Einsatzgruppe C killed 7,000 people at Lemberg, this figure was now inflated to 700,000, one hundred times as many. To enhance the credibility of this claim, the following allegation was made:

“The Hitlerite murderers used the same methods in concealing their crimes at Lemberg as in concealing the killing of the Polish officers in the forest of Katyn. The Expert Commission has established that the methods used to conceal the graves were the same as were used to conceal the graves of the Polish officers killed by the Germans at Katyn.”

The value of this official Soviet governmental document, sanctioned by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, may be judged from the claim, presented both orally and in writing at Nuremberg, that the children of Jewish residents of Lemberg were made available, “as usually,” to the Hitler Youth—which is well-known only to have existed in the territory of the Reich and which were, moreover, unarmed—as “living targets.” Or the claim, for example, that, every week, 1,000 runaway French prisoners of war having refused to work for the Germans (for which purpose they were, after all, obliged by the Geneva Convention) were transported to a concentration camp near Lemberg, where they were allegedly tortured or shot, together with Soviet, British, and American prisoners of war and Italian military internees.

Lemberg was the first occasion upon which the Soviets found them- selves compelled to conceal their own crimes. The Lemberg case was then dished up as an alibi when the Germans found the mass graves of the Polish officers in the forest of Kozy Gory near Katyn, west of Smolensk, in February 1943. There the bodies of 50,000 other victims of the NKVD are known today to have lain buried in addition to the bodies of the Polish officers. When the mass graves at Vinica were discovered shortly afterward, in May 1943, Katyn had to take the rap in order to distract from Soviet guilt at Vinica. Three years earlier, on March 5, 1940, the People’s Commissar of the Interior, Beria, in a letter to “Comrade Stalin,” had mentioned that 14,736 “former” Polish officers and civilians were interned in “NKVD prisoner of war camps of the USSR” (i.e., the officers’ camps at Starobelsk and Kozelsk and the special camp of Ostashkov), while 10,685 more Poles believed to be dangerous were interned in the prisons of the western Ukraine and western White Russia. In view of the fact that all these Polish internees were “embittered and irreconcilable enemies of Soviet rule,” Beria requested that “the highest penalty: death by shooting” be passed against 14,700 “former” officers and civilians, as well as against more than 11,000 other persons, by a three-man NKVD board. Lists containing the names of the Poles to be shot were to be drawn up for Beria by his Deputy, Chief of the 1st Special Department of the NKVD, Merkulov. The other two members of the troika were Kobulov and Bashtakov. In a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKP (b) held on the same day, Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and other leading Soviet officials, approved the application and signed the corresponding Report No. 13. 4,404 Polish officers from Kozelsk were shot a few weeks later in Katyn; 3,891 officers from Starobelsk were shot at Kharkov; while 6,287 state prisoners from Ostashkov were shot at Kalinin (Tver). The remaining 10,685 Poles were shot at an unknown location.

When the Polish government in London requested an investigation of the case by the International Committee of the Red Cross after the discovery of the mass graves at Katyn, the Soviet government broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile on April 29, 1943, on the monstrous pretext of Polish complicity with Hitler. Foreign Minister Molotov justified this step in a note to the Polish ambassador with the allegation that both the Polish government and the Hitler government had simultaneously invited the International Red Cross to the “investigative farce invented by Hitler,” thus initiating an anti-Soviet propaganda campaign “simultaneously, in the German and Polish press.” On the same day, the party newspaper Pravda pilloried the Polish government in insulting terms for its alleged collaboration with the “Hitler cannibals,” and its “direct and open support to the Hitlerite butchers of the Polish people,” a version that, incidentally, was immediately repeated by the left-wing circles of other countries as well, such as, for example, Willy Brandt, who described “Katyn” in 1945 as proving “that openly fascist elements might work their evil among Polish troops and groups in foreign countries.”

The allegation made by Molotov in his note of April 29, 1943, and repeated by Soviet propaganda in a thousand different variations—that the German “fascists” were themselves guilty of the brutal murders of the Polish officers—continued to constitute the official Soviet position long after the truth about the shootings had been established by a Committee of the American Congress, long after the war, and long after the incident had been described in detail in numerous international publications. For example, as late as 1977, a “respected Soviet legal scholar,” Professor Dr. Minasjan, in his book “International Crimes of the Third Reich”, expatiated upon the “blood bath of the Hitlerite butchers against the Polish officers in the Katyn forest,” adding that “the peoples of the world will never forget, and will never pardon, the Nazi crimes.” In 1969, during the Stalinist Brezhnev period, a concrete monument bearing a pathetic Soviet propaganda text was even erected in the previously unknown White Russian village of Chatyn, whose 149 residents had apparently fallen victim to reprisals by the punishment units of the infamous SS Colonel Dr. Dirlewanger during the partisan war. The more gullible groups of foreign visitors were then crudely led to believe that the historical Katyn, near Smolensk, was in fact identical with the village of Chatyn, in White Russia—a village that, prior to that time, could not “even be found on detailed maps.”

It was not until 1990 that the Soviet government, under the crushing weight of evidence, considered it proper, at long last, to admit Soviet guilt for the crime. Once again, however, the admission was associated with a lie. Although all previous party leaders and heads of state, including the incumbent, Gorbachev, had known “the whole truth about this crime,” the Soviet news agency TASS published an explanation as late as April 13, 1990, alleging that the organization and execution of the “tragedy of Katyn”— allegedly “one of the worst crimes of Stalinism”—had been the responsibility of the “People’s Commissariat for Interior Affairs” under “Beria, Merkulov and their lackeys” alone, but under no circumstances the responsibility of the Soviet government as such. It was only under the Presidency of Yeltsin, on October 14, 1992, that the Polish government was provided with documents containing the names of the true guilty parties: in addition to Stalin, the entire governmental and party leadership of the Soviet Union. Even Gorbachev’s semi-confession was not acknowledged by the Stalinists, who, then as before, continued to set the tone in the Soviet Union. They published a series of articles as late as 1990-1991 in the Voermo-istoricheskij zhurnal (Journal of Military History; an official publication of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR, infamous even in the Soviet Union for its falsifications of history), that continued to disseminate the claim that the Germans were guilty of this heinous crime against the Polish people.

To mislead the conscience of the world in 1943, therefore, the Extraordinary State Commission set to work once again. After a remarkably long period of gestation during which a mantle of snow rendered any local investigation impossible, on January 24, 1944, it issued a communique with the expressive headline:

“The Truth About Katyn: Report of the Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation and Examination of the Circumstances of the Shooting of the POW Polish Officers by the German-Fascist Invaders in the Katyn Forest.”

This extensive Soviet official document, a tissue of lies from the beginning to the end, claimed to have arrived, with “irrefutable certainty,” at the conclusion that the mass executions of the Polish officers at the forest of “Kozy Gory” near Katyn had taken place in the fall of 1941, during the German occupation, and had been committed by the Germans, utilizing a “German military organization disguised under the conventional designation of the ‘Headquarters of the 537th Engineer Battalion’” for that specific purpose. The communique was signed by the Academician Burdenko, the Academician and writer Tolstoy, the Metropolitan of Kiev and Galich, Nicolay, the President of the Executive Committee of the Union of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Kolesnikov, as well as by well-known Soviet doctors of forensic medicine and other personalities, and was accepted into evidence by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in the same manner as all other investigative reports of the Extraordinary State Commissions.

The theoretical basis for all of this originated with Professor Trainin, a leading Soviet authority on international law, whose attitudes are best illustrated by the fact that, on May 24, 1945, he declared it permissible and imperative for millions of German citizens to be deported to the Soviet Union for purposes of slave labor. It is to Trainin—who signed the London Four Power Agreement on the “prosecution and punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis” on behalf of the Soviet Union together with Chief Soviet Judge, Major General Nikichenko on August 8, 1945—that Article 21 of the Statutes of the International Military Tribunal is to be attributed. This is the article that stipulated that all official governmental reports of member states of the United Nations—which, therefore, included the falsifications of the Extraordinary State Commissions of the U.S.S.R., including the Soviet Katyn report of January 24, 1944, (ironically) entitled “The Truth About Katyn”—were to be introduced and accepted into evidence at Nuremberg as officially probative material, in the absence of any examination whatever. It was on this basis that the deputy chief Soviet prosecutor, Colonel Pokrovsky, stated at Nuremberg on February 14, 1946, that “one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible, is the mass annihilation of the Polish officers, which was undertaken in the forests of Katyn near Smolensk by the German-fascist invaders.” While Soviet attempts to pin the blame for Katyn on the Germans were an ultimate failure, it should be recalled that the Soviets at Nuremberg deliberately besmirched the honor of an innocent man, Lieutenant Colonel Ahrens, Commander of 537th Signals Regiment of the German Army Group, in their efforts to distract attention from an atrocity committed by the Soviets themselves.

One aspect of this Soviet forgery, which, as probative document USSR-54, was intended to deceive the non-Soviet judges of the International Military Tribunal, merits particular attention: the claim that the “forensic medical experts” of the Commission had established “beyond any doubt” that “the German executioners, in shooting the Polish prisoners of war, used the same method of pistol shots in the back of the neck as in the mass execution of Soviet citizens in other cities.” In other words, when the Extraordinary State Commission claimed to have established that the method of killing used at Katyn was identical to the method used elsewhere, the suspicion naturally arises—since Katyn was a proven Soviet crime— that the crimes committed elsewhere were Soviet crimes as well, and not German crimes. Thus, it appears that the Extraordinary State Commission was concerned, once again, not with the elucidation of German crimes, but with blaming Soviet crimes on the Germans for purposes of propaganda. The cases of Vinica, Kharkov, Kiev, and Minsk are sufficiently clear examples of this tactic.

A few weeks after the discovery of the mass graves at Katyn, in May 1943, the Germans discovered other mass graves at Vinica, containing approximately 10,000 Ukrainian victims of the NKVD. An International Commission of Forensic Experts, convened by the Germans from eleven European countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia and Hungary), as well as an independently constituted commission of German experts in forensic medicine and criminology, arrived at the unanimous conclusion, after detailed investigations, that the killings were committed between 1936 and 1938, using a method typical of the NKVD, i.e.t bullet wounds to the back of the head and neck. These findings were fully confirmed after the war by a sub-commit- tee of the American Congress under the chairmanship of Representative Charles J. Kersten, who presented his findings to the U.S. Congress on December 31, 1954. Following publication of the findings of the German forensic medical experts on August 9, 1943, the Soviet government once again exerted itself to destroy the credibility of the forensic medical authorities from Germany, as well as from all the other countries involved, at all costs, libeling them as “gangs of Gestapo agents” and “paid provocateurs.” On August 19, 1943, the Soviet information bureau published a report characteristically entitled “Katyn No.2,” in which the “German butchers,” “cutthroats,” “blood-thirsty beasts,” “Hitlerite villains,” “Hitlerite cannibals,” “fascist wolves,” “murderers,” “bandits,” “swindlers,” and “marauders” were accused of committing the crimes at Vinica, just as in they had previously been accused of the crimes at Katyn, in an alleged attempt to blame “the Soviet people for their own—German—crimes.”

The verbal attacks and propaganda smokescreen betrayed only too clearly the disarray of the Soviets, once again publicly revealed as mass murderers. As much as possible, Vinica was passed over in silence ever since; but the Soviet regime was, nonetheless, alarmed, and attempted to preempt their German enemies by seizing the propaganda initiative. On April 19, 1943, a few days after the German announcement of the discovery of the mass graves of Katyn, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, as already stated, issued a decree “Relating to Measures for the Punishment of German-Fascist Criminals...”—initially, at least, simply an impotent gesture. The decree was then utilized in staging the Kharkov show trial, the precursor of all “war crimes trials.” The fact is that the NKVD had committed unprecedented atrocities at Kharkov, “many thousands” of people were liquidated by the regional administration of the NKVD under Raikhmann and Seleny between 1937 and 1941 alone; in the spring of 1940, the victims included 3,891 Polish officers, buried, among others, at “map grid 6” of a wooded expanse. Following the brief Soviet recapture of Kharkov in the spring of 1943, NKVD border troops, according to detailed German investigations, as described above, shot no fewer than 4,000 people, nearly four percent of the remaining population, in a few weeks, under the pretext of collaboration with the German occupation authorities, “including girls who had relations with German soldiers.” Kharkov now became the showplace for a “war crimes trial” held there between December 15 and 18, 1943. It was suited for the purpose precisely because it had been a center of Soviet mass executions in the Ukraine, as well as of the mass murders of thousands of members of the Jewish population during the winter of 1941-1942 by Einsatzgruppe C of the German Security Police and the SD, more specific by Einsatzkommando (Special Action Squad) 4a under SS Colonel Blobel.

The renewed necessity to besmirch the German enemy, was of course, only a legal problem in part; basically, it was a propaganda problem, duly assigned to a proven expert, Tolstoy, in his capacity as a writer and member of the Extraordinary State Commission. In several articles published in chiefly Western foreign countries under headlines such as “We Demand Vengeance,” “Why We Call Them Monsters,” and “Nazi Gangsters Stand Before Soviet Judges,” Tolstoy used the crimes of Ein-salzgruppe C being tried at Kharkov as an occasion to pillory, not only the German Wehrmacht, but the German people as a whole, with many hateful allegations. Tolstoy, of course, produced no proof of Wehrmacht responsibility, but, nevertheless, considered himself justified in writing sentences like the following:

“The German armies invaded our country like monsters from another planet. We are constrained to speak of these Germans as monsters, even when we merely state the facts investigated by the Extraordinary State Commission. In the present case, the facts concern the city of Kharkov.”

He added: “We had to kill millions of Germans.” “The Nazis did not deceive Germany,” thus he finally attempted to accuse the entire German people:

“They said quite openly: raise your sons to be unscrupulous murderers and thieves, and your daughters to be merciless overseers of those who will be your slaves. Prepare for the conquest of the world! Germany approved this action.”

This was a statement that was as mendacious as it was nonsensical, leading, in Tolstoy’s view, to the following conclusion:

“German civilization, the entire German nation, is responsible for the crimes committed by them... I accuse the German nation, German civilization, of endless crimes committed by Germans in cold blood, in full possession of their faculties; I demand vengeance!”

This was just a foretaste, in crude form, of a propaganda theme, the far-reaching effectiveness of which remains unfortunately perceptible to the present day.

The Soviet tactic of using German crimes to cover up Soviet atrocities was later resorted to at Kiev, and repeated at Minsk. 200,000 to 300,000 corpses, a small fraction of the victims of Soviet terror in the Ukraine—the exact numbers may perhaps be impossible to determine—were buried in the Damica Forest, in the vicinity of Kiev, and near Bykovnia (Bikivnia), in the 1930s. According to the estimates of many historians, a million people were liquidated between 1939 and 1941 in the western Ukraine, i.e., eastern Poland, alone, an estimate that, in this case, is perhaps too high. In any case, seven to eight million inhabitants of the Ukraine died during a catastrophic famine deliberately organized by Stalin and his henchmen in the 1930s.

The fact that Kiev has, on the other hand, also come to be viewed as a symbol of the crimes of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, German crimes, must be viewed against the above described background of Soviet crimes. Like the German army in 1918, during its withdrawal to the “Siegfried Line,” the Red Army resorted to demolition and arson in Kiev, but more brutally and on a larger scale, causing heavy loss of life after the German capture of the city, even within the Ukrainian population, in addition to serious and widespread destruction of property. As a reprisal for these provocative occurrences, 33,771 Jewish residents, who did not participate in the sabotage, were shot by Special Action Squad 4a of Einsatzgruppe C between September 29 and 30, 1941. The remarkably exact figure of 33,771 executed civilians is taken from data originating with Einsatzgruppe C, and was apparently communicated to superiors by this same group on several occasions, for example, in Event Report No. 101 of October 2, 1941, even if only very concisely and, rather remarkably, “failing to make any mention of the method of execution and location of the massacre of the Jews at Kiev.”

The number of victims of these reprisal killings remained disputed throughout the following period; in fact, the most widely varying estimates were current. The American High Commissioner John J. McCloy, in his decision on the petition for clemency filed by the leader of the Special Action Squad 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, SS Colonel Blobel, following the latter’s death sentence in the Einsatzgruppen Trial (Case 9), considered it proper to remark on January 31, 1951 “that in his (Blobel’s) opinion, the number of people shot near Kiev only amounted to half the indicated figure.” Thus, even this American document, published by the “Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany,” left open the possibility of a much lower number of victims. That “the data relating to the number of victims of the Kiev massacre contains riddles” was Friedrich’s opinion as well, in his book “Das Gesetz des Krieges”, published in 1993. In one of the studies published by the Polish Historical Society in Stamford Connecticut in 1991, Wolski, the Polish expert, made a comparative study of the various numbers of victims at Kiev; in so doing, he made some remarkable discoveries. He established that the estimated figures contain margins of error ranging from 3,000 to 300,000. The lowest figure—3,000—is from the Encyclopedia of the Ukraine (published in Toronto, 1988), while the highest figure— 300,000—was published by Korotykh, characteristically, a member of the NKVD/KGB, and a close collaborator of Gorbachev, on April 23, 1990, also in Toronto. The other figures are: 10,000 victims, in the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopedique Larousse (published in Paris in 1982); 50,000- 70,000 victims in the Bolshaja Sovetskaja Enciklopedija (published in Moscow in 1970); and 100,000 victims in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (published in Jerusalem in 1971).

There are also discrepancies in the accounts, not only of the numbers of victims, but in the circumstances of the shooting of the Jews remaining after the evacuation in Kiev in September 1941, as well as relating to the shooting and burial locations. According to Wolski, the name of the “Ravine of the Old Woman,” “Babi Yar,” northwest of Kiev, so heavily charged with symbolism today, does not appear in the following major reference works: Bolshaja Sovetskaja Enciklopedija (1950 and 1955 editions, Moscow); the Grand Larousse Encyclopedique (1960 edition, Paris); the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1972 edition, Chicago); the Enciclopedia Europea (1977 edition, Rome), Enciclopedia Universal Nauta (1977 edition, Madrid), and the Academic American Encyclopedia (1991 edition, Danbury Connecticut). The heading “Babi Yar” (Babij jar) appears for the first time in the Bolshaja Sovetskaja Enciklopedija (1970 edition, Moscow), and in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971 edition, Jerusalem). The Encyclopaedia Judaica' s highly exaggerated figure of 100,000 victims, however, was derived from the NKVD, and was mentioned for the first time in a report of the New York Times from Moscow on December 4, 1943. It is quoted again below.

The NKVD introduced the previously unknown Ravine of the Old Woman into Soviet war propaganda in November 1943 for the first time in connection with the desperate attempts at concealment in the Katyn case. Soon after the recapture of the Ukrainian capital, a party of Western press correspondents was invited by the Soviets to inspect the ravine of Babi Yar, now alleged to be the location of the massacre. Material proof, however, seems to have been a bit scanty. An evaluation of the numerous air photos in recent years apparently leads to the conclusion that, in contrast to the clearly visible, extensive mass graves dug by the NKVD at Bykovnia (Bykivnia), Damica, and Bielhorodka, and in contrast to the clearly visible mass graves at Katyn—final proof, incidentally, of Soviet guilt, according to an article in the New York Times on May 6, 1989—the terrain of the ravine of Babi Yar remained undisturbed between 1939 and 1944, i.e., including the years of German occupation. To shore up the allegation that the Germans shot “between 50,000 and 80,000 Jewish men, women, and children with machine guns,” in the ravine of Babi Yar, the NKVD rehearsed three so-called witnesses in 1943, whose tales, however, merely aroused the skepticism of news correspondents, particularly Lawrence, the experienced representative of the New York Times. On November 29, 1943, the New York Times published an article, purged of the crudest Soviet untruths relating to “Soviet partisans” and “gas vans,” entitled “50,000 Jews Reported Killed,” nevertheless, accompanied by the remarkable subtitle, “Remaining Evidence is Scanty ” indicating that the NKVD efforts to convince the world had been something of a failure. The presentation of so-called “eyewitnesses” in the case of the previously unknown Ravine of the Old Woman was, according to writer Michael Nikiforuk, however, considered a “test case,” a kind of “general test of the mendacious eyewitness accounts extorted by the NKVD in regard to the Katyn forest massacre, reason, the NKVD hastened to restore its injured credibility by calling up further reserves.

As early as December 4, 1943, the New York Times, in a later article entitled “Kiev Lists More Victims,” reported that, according to the title page of Moscow newspapers, 40,000 residents had allegedly sent “a letter to Premier Stalin,” in which “the estimated number of persons killed and burned in the Ravine of Babi Yar had been increased to over 100,000,” This was, of course, simply an NKVD stage production, since only the NKVD could have organized a letter writing campaign to Comrade Stalin. However, the figure of 100,000 victims, claimed by the NKVD, henceforth became a standard property of Soviet propaganda, just like the shooting and burial location itself, in the Ravine of the Old Woman. They are already mentioned in the spring of 1944 in the report of a Special Commission headed by Khrushchev, who, as is well-known, was himself guilty of serious crimes against the lives and property of the Ukrainian people in the 1930s. The report alleges: “Over 100,000 men, women, children and old people (were) murdered in Babi Yar,” and 25,000 more in the German labor camps of Syrets near Kiev, where, in reality, however, according to Ukrainian estimates, only 1,000 victims died from acts of violence, illness, or hunger.

The report of the Khrushchev Commission, with the participation of leading officials of the Party, government, and scientific circles, merits particular attention insofar as it mentions Damica, in addition to Babi Yar, Syrets, and a few other, unknown locations: Damica was where the Germans—it was now claimed—murdered “over 68,000 Soviet prisoners of war and civilian residents.” The stated total of 195,000 victims of the German occupation forces in Kiev, alleged by Khrushchev’s Special Commission, therefore nearly approximates the total figure of 200,000-300,000 victims of the NKVD, believed to lie buried in mass graves in the Damica Forest, as well as at Bykovnia and Bielhoradka. This figure also formed the central assertion of the communique of the Extraordinary State Commission about Kiev of March 9, 1944. Since this investigative report, like the investigative report on the Katyn case, was accepted into evidence as Soviet probative material on the basis of Article 21 of the London Agreement of the International Military Tribunal (Document USSR-9), the assistant Soviet prosecutor, Chief Justice Counselor Smirnov, was then able to state, at Nuremberg on February 14, 1946:

“From the report of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union about the city of Kiev, which will later be submitted to the Tribunal, it is evident that during the terrible so-called action in Babi-Yar not 52,000, but 100,000 were shot.”

And on February 18:

“In Kiev, over 195,000 Soviet citizens were tortured to death, shot, and poisoned in the gas vans, as follows: (1) In Babi-Yar, over 100,000 men, women, children, and old people....”

No proof was forthcoming; the Soviet prosecutors simply took as precedent, as in the Katyn case, the alleged testimonies of witnesses produced by the NKVD.

The Soviets were, of course, unsuccessful in their accusations in the Katyn case at Nuremberg; it was due, not least of all, to the association between Katyn and Babi Yar that the latter case was forgotten for many years. Ehrenburg, for example, attempted to rehash the story of the Ravine of the Old Woman in his novel The Storm, published in 1947, but in vain. It was only after the NKVD/KGB caused a carefully instructed "eyewitness” to appear in a court case in Darmstadt in 1968—the New York Times article in this regard, on February 14, 1968, was entitled: “At Babi Yar Only Four Spectators”—and only after the publication of an “inflammatory” poem on Babi Yar by Soviet poet Yevchushenko and an orchestral piece by Shostakovich on the same topic—that the affair acquired noticeably greater symbolic power, which was immediately exploited by Soviet propaganda.

The Soviet authorities exploited the favorable atmosphere thus created to erect a monument, at long last, in commemoration of the victims who allegedly, according to a Kiev newspaper in 1971, “were cruelly tortured to death” and buried by the “fascist invaders of 1941-43.” The monument was erected on NKVD terrain at Bykovnia (KOU NKVD), which is also in the vicinity of other extensive mass graves from the Stalin era—such as the mass graves at Damica and Bielhorodka, in the region of Kiev. The deceptive inscription was, nevertheless, removed under the mounting pressure of publicity in March 1989. On March 17, 1989, the Soviet news agency TASS reported that, according to the findings of a “State Commission”—the fourth of its kind—mass graves containing the remains of 200,000-300,000 so-called “enemies of the people” murdered during the Stalin era had been discovered at Bykovnia, as well as in the Darnica Forest. At the same time, the journal of the Soviet Writer’s Association, Literaturnaja Gazeta, in April 1989, considered it proper to stress that the massacres had been committed, not by “the Germans,” but the Stalinists—“our own people.” Frightful details of these mass murders committed by the NKVD, which began in 1937 and continued until immediately prior to the occupation of the city by German troops in September 1941, were provided by Carynnyk in an article entitled “The Killing Fields of Kiev,” in the October 1990 edition of the magazine Commentary, published in New York by the American Jewish Committee.

In Germany, of course, such findings were only grudgingly acknowledged, if at all. In Germany, the Soviet propaganda figure of 100,000 victims in the Ravine of Babi Yar, which was not even accepted at Nuremberg, has penetrated deeply into the public mind, as was proven by related news- paper articles from the commemorative year, 1991.On September 14, 1991, a certain Wolfram Vogel, in a memorial article published the regional news- paper Südkurier, succeeded in outdoing the claims of Stalinist war propaganda by alleging that “the mass grave of Babi Yar on the edge of Kiev” must have been capable of “concealing the bodies of 200,000 people murdered during the occupation.” The female President of the German Bundestag, Süßmuth, turned a memorial speech on the Ravine of the Old Woman on October 5, 1991, into an occasion for an unjustified attack upon the entire German people, which had nothing to do with the executions of 33,771 Jews, or perhaps only half that number—which would have been bad enough—by Special Action Squad 4a of the Security Police and the SD. Executions that were committed without the knowledge or approval of the German people, and for which the German people cannot therefore be held responsible. Süßmuth’s speech also caused a scandal in Kiev because of her failure to mention the Ukrainian victims of Stalinist terror, consisting of up to 300,000 people buried in mass graves at nearby Bykovnia—which, for the Ukrainians, at the present time, is almost a point of national honor (“The mass graves have become a point of national honor for Ukrainians”). In the Soviet Union, Babi Yar must be maintained to shore up Katyn, and Katyn must be maintained to shore up the credibility of Babi Yar. The tardy success of Soviet propaganda in the Babi Yar case even encouraged the Stalinists to have another go at pinning the executions of the Polish officers at Katyn (and other locations) on the Germans, through the publication, this time in 1990-1991, of a series of articles under the characteristic title “Babi Yar pod Katyn’ju?” (Babi Yar at Katyn?) in Voenno-istoricheskij zhurnal, as described above.

Minsk was the last locality on Soviet territory where attempts were made to cover up the mass murders of the NKVD by concealing them among the crimes of the Einsatzgruppen. Exactly as at Kiev, murders were in fact committed on a huge scale in the capital city of the White Russian Soviet Socialist Republic between 1937 and 1941. The operational administration of the NKVD in Minsk buried some of their victims in an area near Kuropaty, not far away, where extensive fields of graves were discovered in 1988. As many as 102,000 estimated victims, out of a total of 270,000 estimated victims of the NKVD in Minsk and the surrounding regions, are believed to lie buried in these mass graves at Kuropaty.53 Cheljuskin Park, in the midst of the city of Minsk, even contained a mass grave over which a dance floor was erected during the Stalinist Brezhnev era. Significantly, Minsk was also an operational center of the German Security Police and the SD, whose primary objective, after the beginning of the German occupation in the late autumn of 1941, consisted of the extermination of the Jews. Within a year, thousands of local Jews of all ages and both sexes, as well as Jews deported from the territory of the Reich, were shot at Maly Trostinets, a village near Minsk, and perhaps a few other locations as well; in some cases, they were poisoned in four gas vans that also appear to have been in use here.

As in the Kiev case, the Soviet authorities created a Special Commission after the recapture of Minsk in 1944, this time under the President of the Council of the People’s Commissars of the White Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, Ponomarenko, who, as leader of the Central Staff of the Partisan movement, had been one of the persons chiefly responsible for the waging of partisan warfare, which was illegal under international law. The communique of the Extraordinary State Commission entitled “Minsk Accuses Hitler,” published on October 12, 1944, alleged, with reference to the findings of the Ponomarenko Commission—once again, of course, based mostly on the dubious testimony of NK.VD witnesses—that the “Hitlerites” and “German villains” had exterminated approximately 300,000 Soviet citizens through hunger, exhaustion caused by inhumane forced labor, as well as through gassings and shootings in Minsk and its suburbs. Soviet mass graves, such as those in the “Park for Culture and Relaxation,” were once again attributed to the Germans, in Minsk as elsewhere. The indicated total figure of 300,000 victims nearly approximates the estimated figure of about 270,000 NKVD victims rather than the number of the Jews murdered by the Security Police and SD, which must, nevertheless, also have been high in the region around Minsk. According to incomplete data contained in activity reports of the German “Gruppe Arlt,” which have accidentally survived, over 17,000 local Jews, or German Jews from Berlin or Vienna, were murdered near Minsk during the summer of 1942.

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 9

Criminalization of the Wehrmacht
Racial and National Anti-German Incitement

From the very outbreak of the conflict, neither Hitler nor Stalin considered the German-Soviet conflict an “ordinary European war” waged between two armies in the ordinary way, but rather, as a war of annihilation between two totalitarian systems that could only end with the destruction of one or the other. Although Stalin’s radio speech of July 3, 1941, depicted the war as the Soviet Union’s struggle, in alliance with the German people, to defeat “fascism,” Soviet propagandists lost no time in raising the specter of a distinctly new and mortal enemy: not merely “fascism”—National Socialism—but the German nation as such. The German nation was in effect described as criminal almost from the first day of the war, along with the German Wehrmacht, all German military personnel, and, ultimately, the entire German people. Ehrenburg, in particular, was responsible for whipping up Soviet soldiers and workers to blind, raging fanaticism against everything German, through constant incitement to anti-German racial and national hatred.

An exact examination must now be made of the image of the German nation and people, as depicted by Soviet propagandists like Ehrenburg, Tolstoy, Simonov, and Zaslavsky, to mention only a few, as well as by historians and military men like Tarle, Bruevich, Velichka, and countless others. Ehrenburg, the principal spokesman for Soviet propaganda, never described the Germans as having advanced beyond “barbarism.” “They clothe themselves in the skins of wild beasts and offer bloody sacrifices to their god Wotan.” Even during the brilliance of the early Middle Ages, when the German Realm was governed by the Ottoman und Hohenstaufen Emperors, the Germans—according to Ehrenburg—still “roamed the forests, covered in the skins of wild beasts.” Apart from the well-known historical fact that Russia and Poland derived enormous benefits from the heritage of their powerful expansions to the East, it was precisely the German colonization of the East during the Middle Ages—the “glorious traditions of the Teutonic Knights” as even Ehrenburg admitted—which was now vilified by Soviet propagandists in the context of the German-Soviet war through a series of misconceptions. “We are familiar with these traditions,” wrote Ehrenburg on February 20, 1942: “The Germans were robbers, and robbers they have remained. They used to be bandits with spears and swords. Now they are bandits with machine pistols.” Ehrenburg saw no difference between the various German tribes, past and present. To him, the Germans were always the “same.” “There is something frightful about the Germans themselves,” he wrote on January 14, 1942. “The Teutonic hordes plundered Rome,” and in the ancient Hanseatic city of Novgorod, the German peddlers attempted “to swindle the Russians.” “Cunning and intrigue are the German style”— allegedly a Russian proverb, according to Ehrenburg.

Ehrenburg’s particular hatred was directed at the historical development of Brandenburg-Prussia, regardless of Prussia’s ancient, and very close, dynastic and political links with Czarist Russia, to which Soviet propagandists drew all too frequent attention when it suited their purposes. In this distorted view, Brandenburg was a “cancerous growth,” a “robbers’ cave,” from which the bandits sallied forth to terrorize “the Slavic and Lithuanian tribes in Pomerania and Prussia,” whose lord and protector, in 1945, was now the Soviet Union headed by Stalin—in truth, of course, the largest slave state in the history of the world. In Ehrenburg’s view, the sole purpose of the royal city of residence, Berlin, consisted of “the slaughter of human beings.” Berlin, this “evil growth,” had become “a deadly danger” “to all of Europe, and all civilized humanity” (naturally including the Soviet Union). “It is lucky for the world,” Ehrenburg added that “Stalin is cauterizing this growth with fire and sword.” “Stalin is saving the world by trampling to pieces the cradle in which the cruel Prussian monster was born 250 years ago.” Proof of Prussia’s alleged monstrousness included its "piratical attacks” upon Denmark in 1864, the Prussian-Austrian federal execution in the matter of Schleswig-Holstein, Austria in 1866, i.e., the Prussian-Austrian battle for the dominant position in Germany, and France in 1870-1871, although Prussia-Germany was, at that time, well assured of Russian benevolent neutrality, and despite the fact that both Marx and Engels referred to the Franco-Prussian war as a justifiable war of Prussian-German national defense against the imperialistic ambitions of Napoleon III’s France.

On May 17, 1945, a Soviet propagandist, Professor Tarle, published a revealing paper entitled “Berlin: The Cancerous Growth of Europe.” Tarle, a prominent Soviet historian, claimed that Prussia had been "a powerful gangster camp in the heart of Europe” for more than two hundred years, and that the plan “to conquer” Europe, Russia, two continents, and “the entire world,” had been accordingly drawn up in Berlin. Robbery and plunder were alleged to be the “principal aim of Germany’s political existence.” In Tarle’s view, the long line of historical figures alleged to have hatched the “plans of Germanic imperialism and plunder,” included Frederick the Great, regardless of his alliance with Czar Peter III and, for a time, with Czarina Catherine II; the generals of the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation, such as, for example, Scharnhorst, specifically mentioned by Tarle, all of whom were, nonetheless, allied with Czarist generals still highly respected in the Soviet Union; Bismarck and Moltke, also highly respected in Russia; and, finally, General von Seeckt, under whose military leadership close and amicable collaboration had existed between the Reichswehr and the Red Army. The “German General Staff,” which had, as such, only existed since 1870-1871, was alleged to have stood immovably firm by its imperialistic objectives throughout the entire historical period in question, busily forging the instruments “for the extermination of millions of human lives, the complete enslavement of peoples, and the achievement of German domination of the world.” What a contrast between these claims and the statements of Lenin, who, in regard to the history preceding the First World War, once spoke of the “three great thieves,” Russia, England, and France, which had been preparing for centuries “to attack and plunder Germany”!

Against this distorted background of the history of Brandenburg- Prussia as depicted by this well-known Soviet historian—an interpretation simultaneously and deliberately aimed at a planned annexation of German territory, even at that time—a centrally-controlled hate campaign was deliberately initiated, early in 1945, against the ancient Prussian commercial and university city of Königsberg. This city, the site of the coronation of Prussian kings, had, nevertheless, remained completely isolated from the German centers of political and military decision-making as the mere capital city of an agrarian province. On February 8, 1945, Radio Moscow claimed that East Prussia, “the cave of reactionary Prussianism, the vanguard of bestial German chauvinism,” was no more German territory than “any of the rest of the so-called German territory east of the Elbe.” The Red Army— such was the depiction of Soviet intentions of conquest—was said to be on the march “to rectify an ancient historical injustice.” It was irrelevant to the Soviets that the Prussian-SIavic tribes had never been “exterminated” in the Prussian provinces, but had, rather, long since merged with the Germans into a unified body of peoples over the centuries. The fact that the Soviet Union, moreover, possessed not the slightest territorial claims on East Prussia, was irrelevant, too. The slogan of Soviet propaganda on February 15, 1945—the same Soviet propaganda that waxed sentimental and indignant when describing German and Finnish barbarism in blockading and bombarding the defended city of Leningrad—was, as stated: “Smoke the Rats Out of Königsberg.”

The ideological justification for all this, as expostulated in the Soviet press, was provided by an official specifically assigned for the purpose, Guards Lieutenant Colonel Velichka. “Königsberg was a threat to the entire world,” he claimed on March 22, 1945, in an article entitled “Woe to Thee, Germany!”, he glotaed:

“Königsberg was said to have been the strong point of German barbarism... for 150 years ...day by day, decade by decade, plans for campaigns, invasions, and revenge were worked out in Königsberg. The German plan to enslave the world was drawn up in Königsberg...The stupid Königsbergers grew fat off their blood-drenched wealth... We have Königsberg by the throat!... The blockade of Königsberg has now begun... like toads, the Germans are huddling in cellars, catacombs, under the rubble, and in primitive drains... Königsberg is like a criminal with a weight around his neck... the weight of its crimes is pressing the city to the ground.”

Alluding to Soviet atrocities in the suburb of Metgethen, as described below, he added menacingly: “Königsberg has looked the Red Army in the face and sees its fate written in the features of the Red Army... The city is moaning and stumbling about.” Thus, were the soldiers of the Red Army prepared for the forthcoming capture of the city of Königsberg. The aftermath of the city’s capture was in accordance with the propaganda build-up. Murder, rape, robbery, persecution, and utter anarchy raged throughout the ruined city. Entire rows of houses were deliberately burned down, some- times with the residents still inside. The Soviet occupation authority, as stated, permitted 90,000 of the surviving 120,000 residents to simply starve to death in the months following the city’s capture.

Anti-German hate propaganda, after 1945, served the dual purpose of announcing as well as paving the way for the Soviet policy of expansion into Germany. Beginning in February 1945, Soviet propaganda exhibited an increasingly virulent shift of opinion against the alleged indulgent tendencies of Anglo-Saxon occupation policy, and the “hypocritical protectors” of the “poor Gentians” in the Western countries, which, as a matter of fact, did hardly exist at all. Ehrenburg particularly despised the Catholic Church, the Pope, and the Holy See, whom he referred to as the “founders of the Inquisition, the protectors of the Jesuits, cunning souls who traveled the long road from Torquemada to Himmler, and from Loyola to II Duce.” This, of course, was a statement that more accurately described himself rather than the historical facts. The repeated and massive propaganda attacks, in any case, revealed a Soviet anxiety about the stabilization of economic conditions in the non-Soviet zones of occupation. It was openly feared that the former (Catholic) Center Party politician and Chancellor Dr. Brüning who had emigrated to the United States and was employed as a highly respected secondary-school teacher, might attempt to become “Hitler’s successor” with the backing of certain American and British groups and the assistance of the Catholic Church. Thus, as Chancellor, he would encourage the “rehabilitation of Germany” and save “German imperialism” (i.e., Germany as an industrialized country) from destruction.

That the Soviet Union had very different objectives at this point6 was revealed by a brief but informative announcement of June 21, 1945, relating to the appointment of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. By Order №.1 of that authority, Colonel General Serov of the NKGB—in Colonel General Professor Volkogonov’s opinion, “one of the wickedest members of Beria’s entourage”—was now appointed Deputy of the General Director of the Soviet Military Administration (SMA) Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Occupation Troops in Germany. Serov, was also simultaneously the plenary Deputy of the NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security, i.e., the secret police of the now bifurcated NKVD) of the USSR within the group of Soviet Occupation Troops in Germany. Serov had, since the outbreak of the war, acted as Stalin’s chief tool in the practical implementation of mass deportations and other acts of violence, all falling under the legal definition of genocide and crimes against humanity. It was Serov who deported 1-2 million Poles, Ukrainians, White Russians, and Jews from the annexed Polish territory in 1939-1940 to the barren regions of the Soviet Union, followed by tens of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians from the annexed Baltic republics in 1940-1941. Usually the family units were tom apart, and the head of the family was often liquidated, as in the case of the Baltic States. Tens of thousands of residents of the annexed Romanian national territories of Bucovina and Bessarabia suffered the same fate. Serov then implemented the deportation of 1,209,400 Russian ethnic Germans under inhumane conditions to Central Asia and Siberia, as ordered by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on August 28, 1941. In 1943-1944, it was again Colonel General Serov of the NKGB who carried out the mass deportation and destruction of the Kalmuck, Chechen, Ingush, Kabardinian, and Karachay peoples, and, finally, the Crimean Tatars, upon the decision and order of Stalin, the Politburo of the Central Committee, and the State Defense Committee. Based on Order No.00315 of People’s Commissar Beria of April 18, 1945, Serov now made immediate mass arrests among the civilian population in the occupied parts of Germany, through the operational group of the NKVD/NKGB, which he commanded. The arrested persons, including women and young people (according to recent Russian data, a maximum of 260,000 people), were transferred to ten captured or newly built concentration camps, where tens of thousands of them perished from inhumane living conditions. Serov’s appointment to the politically decisive position of head of the Soviet occupation zone and the immediately implemented, brutal elimination of all persons in any way considered hostile, in any event left no doubt as to the type of future policy the Soviet Union intended to apply in Germany.

If the German-Soviet conflict, as a collision between two opposing socialist systems, could end only with the complete annihilation of one of the two systems, then the methods of waging war employed were entirely in accordance, in their pitilessness, with the totalitarian nature of both ideologies. “The Soviet-German war was an exceptionally cruel war on both sides,” Yakushevsky remarked in the periodical “Novoe Vremja” in 1993: “Both totalitarian systems waged war using similar methods.” Interpretations of history intended to give the impression in Germany that the German-Soviet conflict could have been conducted in a more humane manner had Hitler and the leadership of the Wehrmacht not unscrupulously abrogated the usual rules and customs of war, even in the planning of “Operation Barbarossa ” ignore the central reality of the situation, since these interpreters fail to consider corresponding realities on the Soviet side. This does not, of course, imply that unnecessary German severity could not have been avoided. Hitler’s cardinal error was certainly his failure to respect Russian honor and patriotism, as well as Russian bravery, thus squandering a unique opportunity to gain the sympathy of the Russian people—an act of blindness that made loss of the war inevitable.

The principle established by Hitler in his address to the military leaders on March 30, 1941, passed on by the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, General Haider, and repeated by the Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal Keitel, in his letter to Admiral Canaris of September 15, 1941, was: “We must deviate from the principle of soldierly comradeship. A Communist is no comrade to start with, and no comrade later on. This is a war of annihilation.” This was an exact mirror image of Stalin’s views from the very outset. To quote Stalin’s key radio speech of July 3, 1941, yet again, Stalin made it immediately clear that “the war against fascist Germany... must not be viewed as an ordinary war”; “it is not a war between two armies.” “This is no ordinary war,” Ehrenburg, his interpreter, immediately echoed, “and it is no ordinary army that is fighting against us”—a statement that was, of course, just as true of the Red Army itself.

The manner in which the war was to be waged by the Soviets was made immediately clear by innumerable examples from all sections of the front, beginning on the first day of the war. The British newspaper News Chronicle quoted Ehrenburg in this regard on March 9, 1943, writing mockingly in an article that, in “a certain country,” fallen German pilots were buried with full military honors. He naturally did not wish to interfere in the customs and uses of foreign countries, Ehrenburg gloated hypocritically, but he would like to tell the English something about the Russian way of dealing with the Germans:

“We cannot view the Germans as honorable fighters. In our eyes they are repugnant, plundering beasts. One does not negotiate for very long with such beasts: one destroys them!”

In this regard, Ehrenburg wrote on August 17, 1941, about a German air-force non-commissioned officer killed near Moscow: “When a man like Karle [naturally alleged by Ehrenburg to have killed English children near Swansea] is dashed to pieces on the ground, then one experiences not only joy, but moral satisfaction.” The manner in which German soldiers were criminalized and deprived of all human dignity from the very first day of the war is obvious from the merest selection of quotations from this leading Soviet propagandist. The delusion that the war in the East could have been waged in a humane, “chivalrous” manner collapses under the weight of evidence.

So, what was the typical Ehrenburg description of German soldiers? As early as the first day of the war, on June 22, 1941, German soldiers—the soldiers of a nation with which a Friendship Treaty had existed until that very day—were described as “robbers,” plundering other countries, murdering children, and destroying the “culture, language, and traditions of other peoples.” The question therefore arises: if these facts were known prior to the outbreak of hostilities, how could a Friendship Treaty ever have been signed with such a country? The same soldiers were “murderers, excelling in torture, which they now inflict on our wounded,” Ehrenburg wrote on July 18, 1941, and, shortly thereafter: “These creatures are not human beings. They are horrible parasites. They are harmful vermin.” Ehrenburg made many other, similar accusations, from the very first summer of the war, in 1941, describing the German Wehrmacht as a “gigantic band of gangsters,” with the proviso that “gangsters and lawbreakers are never brave”; and that German soldiers were “worse than wild beasts.” “No,” wrote Ehrenburg, “they are worse than predators: predators do not torture for pleasure” (September 5, 1941). “One feels ashamed for the earth trodden upon by such people. How basely they lived! How basely they died!” “Compared with the Germans, the Kaffirs and Zulus are cultivated” (September 14, 1941). On October 12, 1941, Ehrenburg wrote:

“They are perverts, sodomites, addicted to all forms of bestiality... They grab Russian girls and drag them into brothels... they hang priests... they wear belts with the motto ‘God with us’ but beat dying prisoners in the face with their belts... Culture, to them, means fountain pens and safety razors. They use the fountain pens to jot down how many girls they have raped; they shave with safety razors, then use straight razors to cut off the noses, ears, and breasts of their victims.”

In the exceptionally severe cold of the winter of 1941-1942, Ehrenburg’s hatred found a new source of satisfaction. At this time, on November 17, 1941, Stalin had ordered the arson and destruction of all villages and settlements to the German rear, without regard for the Russian populations thus exposed to utter ruin. Human life, comments Stalin’s biographer, Colonel General Professor Volkogonov, “never mattered a jot to him. Not one jot! Hundreds, thousands, even millions of deaths among his fellow citizens had long since become a habit with him.” Ehrenburg immediately became the most vociferous spokesman for Stalin’s inhumane new measures and orders, directed, as they were, not only against the Germans, but against the Russian civilian population as well. On November 11, 1941, he wrote:

“These bandits are totally accustomed to plundering under conditions of comfort. They expect central heating. The wild beasts must not warm themselves in our houses. Let them winter in the snowdrifts, these trade representatives from Düsseldorf and students from Heidelberg... We will turn their campaign for winter quarters into a campaign for graves.”

“Fighters, spies, guerrillas!” he wrote, in a proclamation on November 30, 1941: “If there is a single house left in which the Germans are warming themselves, smoke them out!”

Such was the tenor of Ehrenburg’s articles after Stalin’s proclamation to the country on July 3, 1941, to leave the enemy “not one liter of fuel, not one kilo of grain,” but, rather, to turn the countryside into a desert. “Shops, fields of grain, and villages” are being set on fire by the “inhabitants,” meaning, in reality, by Soviet “destruction battalions”, Ehrenburg claimed on July 20, 1941: “Even children are to be found among the guerrillas.” School children were, by preference, utilized by the Soviet commando as spies along the front, as Ehrenburg put it, to reconnoiter “the airfields and columns” of the enemy. “Russian children have learned to throw hand grenades,” he gloated triumphantly on November 18, 1941, knowing full well what this might imply in terms of consequences to the children. “The German soldiers found only empty stalls, blown-up warehouses, and burned-out factories. Instead of houses, they conquered rubble and snowdrifts”.

The abandonment of almost totally devastated territory to the enemy formed part of the Russian customs of war as early as the French-Russian war of 1812. “To the dumbfounded horror” of the Grand Armee, the Russian Gouverneur Rostopchin burned Moscow with most of its buildings prior to the Russian withdrawal. “So that’s the way they make war!” exclaimed Napoleon’s Cabinet Secretary, Baron Fain: “We were deceived by the civilization of St. Petersburg; they are still just Scythians!” Napoleon prohibited all reprisals against private individuals, since they “have already suffered enough.” During the French withdrawal, however, on October 20, 1812, Napoleon ordered all public buildings and barracks in Moscow to be burned, and the Kremlin destroyed. This was actually done during the night of October 23: “The most magnificent towers of the Kremlin were blown up with 1.8 million pounds of gunpowder.” The commanding artillery officer involved was rewarded with the Legion d’Honneur, “the only honor commensurate with such an act.” During the German-Soviet conflict, it was Stalin who, from the outset, immediately ordered that only a devastated country be abandoned to the Germans—and, vice versa, since the Germans attempted to destroy all objects of military value during their withdrawal from the evacuated territories. Hitler even issued a comparable order relating to the territory of the Reich on March 19, 1945. Ehrenburg, praised the work of destruction of the Red Army—particularly, the forms it acquired in Kiev—as true acts of heroism, while indignantly attacking similar actions taken by the Germans. “The arsonists themselves will bum,” he announced on January 20, 1942, referring to soldiers who had carried out destruction orders.

“The half-roasted body of a German lies under the rubble of the farmhouse. The face has been gnawed away by the fire, while the naked sole of a foot is tinted red by the cold, and seems alive... He now lies there like a mass of roasted flesh, an example of crime and punishment.”

The hatred of this Stalin-appointed master teacher to the Red Army was uninhibited and free from all moral scruples. It was a hatred characterized by “barbaric savagery” and, ultimately, the expression of a pathological deviant psychological condition. Ehrenburg himself made the following admission on March 16, 1944: “If I did not have enough hatred in myself, I should despise myself. But I have enough hatred in me for both them [the German soldiers] and my own life.” Such were the inner feelings of Ehrenburg himself, who applied every conceivable insult to the soldiers of the enemy army, from the first to the last day of the war, comparing them to dangerous animals and microbes in order to suggest the necessity of their extermination. To him, German soldiers, without exception, were “creatures born of the women of Germany,” “robbers on a huge scale,” “not soldiers, but unprincipled robbers,” “primitive creatures with automatic weapons,” “cruel, ruthless creatures,” “cursed butchers,” “the mass murderers of peaceful citizens,” “butchers, who courageously slaughter the defenseless,” “child murderers,” “the murderers of Russian children,” and “the murderers of women.” Ehrenburg described German military service as follows:

“They defile women and hang men; they get drunk and sleep off their orgies like pigs.” “Murder is a commonplace for Gentians.” “They torture children, hang old men, and rape girls.” “They torture children and torment the wounded.” “If a fascist soldier finds no booty in a house, he kills the housewife.” “The women-killers know how to murder.” “He strangles girls. He sets fire to villages. He erects gallows.” “The Germans buried the men alive.” “They buried children alive.” “They killed millions of innocent people.” “Hundreds of thousands of children have been killed by the Germans (and this in the Ukraine alone).” “They killed infants and branded prisoners, they tortured and hanged.”

“Blood clings to the hands of every German,” he told the soldiers of the Red Army on December 9, 1943: “Millions have become criminals.” “There are many different types of Germans,” he wrote on another occasion: “There are generals and non-commissioned officers, Prussians and Bavarians, fat ones and thin ones. But to me, they are one and the same: Germans. They have fishy eyes and long greedy hands.” “Mass murderers of peaceful citizens, with shameless, empty eyes,” was another description, written on February 3, 1942. Ehrenburg’s vocabulary also contained a wide variety of other, similar insults. Two years later, on March 16, 1944, he wrote: “These villains, large or squat, goggle-eyed, stupid and soulless, marched a thousand leagues eastward to trample the fife out of our children.” The baser instincts were further whipped up on March 16, 1944: “The Germans stuffed our mouths with frozen earth. The Germans slaughter us off. The Germans, large or small, the cruel, the sallow-eyed, with empty hearts.” “Hitler’s soldiers slaughtered millions of innocents,” we read on March 23, 1944: “They torture our children,” he claimed, adding: “They have slaughtered millions of good people for no reason, and again for no reason, out of greed, stupidity, and in-born savagery alone.” “Thus the miserable idiot, the ignorant, the exploiter, the ‘super human’ systematically began to hang, strangle, bury alive, and bum.” “Among millions of Germans, there is not a handful of conscientious men, to cry ‘Halt!’” The Germans murder coolly and deliberately.” “They strangle, hang, and poison, and they do so without shame or pangs of conscience.” Ehrenburg invariably referred to the members of the well-disciplined German Wehrmacht as "wild animals,” "beasts with eyeglasses,” "trained beasts,” "two legged beasts,” "Aryan beasts, ”young pigs,” "pigs from Schweinflirt and Swinemünde,” “doubtlessly similar to wild beasts,” "predators,” "rabid wolves,” “carriers of venereal diseases,” “dying scorpions,” "German monsters,” “starving rats who will devour each other,” and "poisonous snakes.” "These creatures are not human beings,” Ehrenburg warned Soviet soldiers: "They are horrible parasites. They are dangerous vermin... they must be exterminated.” The German soldiers of the 6th Army in Stalingrad in 1943 were described as follows: "Rats carrying the plague,” "They behave everywhere like beasts,” and “A wild beast must not be pitied, it must be exterminated.”

What then was the typical propaganda view of German soldiers presented by Ehrenburg? The German Wehrmacht was described as a “gigantic horde of gangsters,” “cruel primitive creatures,” "millions of murderers.” German field marshals were described as “rabid wolves,” “rats carrying plague,” "frightful villainous gangsters.” Field Marshal von Witzleben for example, a participant in the conspiracy against Hitler on July 20, 1944, was solely concerned with “shooting hostages, and beheading, torturing, and hanging women.” German generals were "cannibals.” German majors were “evil-smelling skunks in a Major’s uniform.” German officers were “two legged beasts, who torture imprisoned men.” German soldiers were described as "digging up corpses and tearing the flesh off the bones. They are corpse-eating demons and vampires.” Every individual soldier in the Waffen SS, it went without saying, “has the blood of hundreds of Poles on his conscience.” German medics were "butchers, there is no other name for them.” A German Luftwaffe soldier, apparently clean and courteous, was typical of them all, since he “has shot and burned over 1,200 Soviet human beings.” To the German infantry itself, Ehrenburg applied on May 5, 1942, the watchword: “We regard them not as human beings, but as murderers, hangmen, morally perverted, cruel fanatics, and that is why we hate them.” An average German, a billeted non-commissioned officer, was described by him as follows on July 8, 1943: "One evening, he came in drunk and grabbed Nina (fifteen years)... he then began to torture Hima, the little son of the family...he took the little boy in the forest, cut his hands off, put out his eyes, and broke his legs.”

An army that committed such deeds could not, of course, be courageous. U-boat crews, in Ehrenburg’s view, were mere “pirates,” while the “exhibitionism” of German paratroopers “has nothing to do with human bravery” but was mere “perversion.” If one were to believe the propaganda put about in the Federal Republic of Germany today, the Soviet Union allegedly desired humane treatment of prisoners of war in accordance with international law and “desperately” advocated the recognition of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare and the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, which it always refused to recognize… Ehrenburg, the leading propagandist of selfsame Soviet Union, described German prisoners of war as follows on various occasions, such as, for example, on December 9, 1941, and January 14, 1942:

“When they are captured, they moan and whine. They swear that they are innocent... The butchers pretend to be lambs.” “They sit and cry, not because they have any feelings—what kind of feelings could these beasts have? —but because it is cold.”

“A defeated German is wild and inhuman,” he wrote on February 17, 1942: “In the summer he murdered women. Now he murders children.” On August 17, 1944, Ehrenburg incited the soldiers of the Red Army as follows: “In a single day, sometimes only an hour before they surrender, they torture defenseless people to death.” On November 23, 1944, he wrote: “Every prisoner of war knows that he is a criminal... every time they lose a battle, they hang women or torture children.”

Ehrenburg passed blanket judgements on German soldiers, citing individual cases that were so atypical that they must have been invented, while alleging them to be typical of the millions of members of the German Wehrmacht. Apart from “not even a handful” of decent German soldiers, there were, he claimed, no exceptions. Innumerable passages in his libelous writings disseminated during the war reveal his view as to what was at stake: Soviet soldiers were to be incited to a merciless war of extermination against all Germans. “Our business consists of killing Germans—it does not matter how,” he wrote on September 20, 1941…

“Shoot to kill, Comrade!” he incited Red Army members on July 31, 1941, and on February 20, 1942: "You are ordered to kill them—put them under the ground!” Similarly, on March 16, 1944: “Kill the Germans!” Ehrenburg claimed on January 14, 1942: “A farmer’s wife with a friendly Russian face told me [about a German soldier]: ‘They are afraid to go to the front. One of them cried. He said to me: ‘Pray for me, little Mother!’ and pointed to the icon. And I really prayed for him. ‘May you be killed, you devil!’” “Even the old people,” said Ehrenburg, “have just a single wish: ‘Kill the whole heap of them!’” On March 11, 1942, he praised a young tank crewman who could no longer even say how many Germans he had killed: “His words,” in Ehrenburg’s opinion, “are typical of the modesty and strength of an artist who has just completed a great painting.” Ehrenburg reiterated on March 30, 1942: “Our answer is the blood of the invaders! In winter, it melts the eternal snow. In summer, it will drench the dry ground.” Ehrenburg found innumerable new ways in which to propagate his murder lust:

“The Germans must be killed. One must kill them... Do you feel sick? Do you feel a nightmare in your breast? Kill a German! Do you want to get back home faster? Kill a German! If you are a righteous and conscientious man—kill a German!...Kill!”

A colonel described to him what happened to the German defenders when Soviet troops reached the fortress installations at Brest: “Inside the installations, we killed them, stabbed them, and slaughtered them”. Another Ehrenburg quote:

“The viper’s nest must be trampled! We wish to march through Germany with swords...and when it is intolerably hard for me, as it is for you, I think of the beautiful word: Stalin!”

“We are exterminating this tribe [the Germans]...” wrote Ehrenburg on October 25, 1942. “The Germans are not human beings,” he claimed in his notorious proclamation “Kill!”, written during the same period, widely distributed among Soviet troops, and repeatedly hammered into the heads of all Soviet soldiers:

"From now on, the word ‘German’ is the worst curse. From now on, the word ‘German’ will only cause us to empty the magazine of our weapon. We have nothing to discuss. We will not get excited. We will kill. If you have not killed at least one German in the course of a day, then that day has been wasted for you. If you believe your neighbor will kill the German instead of you, then you have not recognized the danger. If you fail to kill a German, he will kill you. He will arrest your family, and torture them in his cursed Germany. If you cannot kill a German with a bullet, then kill him with your bayonet. If your section is quiet and there is no fighting, then kill a German before battle. If you permit the Germans to live, the Germans will hang the Russian men and rape the Russian women. If you have already killed a German, then kill a second one—to us, there is nothing more joyous than German corpses. Don’t count the days. Don’t count the kilometers. Count only one thing: the Germans you have killed! Kill the Germans! Your aged mother begs this of you. Kill the Germans! Your children beg this of you. Kill the Germans! The earth of your homeland calls out to you. Don’t fail! Don’t make a mistake! Kill!”

Ehrenburg’s hatred pursued the German soldiers beyond the grave; his writings are filled with unmistakable symptoms of moral insanity. It must, however, be kept in mind that Ehrenburg’s words were the words of the Soviet Union: it was Ehrenburg who stamped Stalin’s will, the will of the Soviet leadership, upon the troops of the Red Army. In the introduction to the British edition of his book Russia at War, published in 1943 (with an enthusiastic commentary by the writer J. B. Priestley), he waxed rhapsodically:

“The moon casts its poisonous green light on the snow, Germans, thousands and thousands of them, some of them tom apart by grenades, some of them crushed by tanks, others frozen like waxworks... a colonel shows his old yellow rat-incisors... Germans lie crushed, blown to pieces, hacked to bits... here lie the beer brewers, swine butchers, chemists, hangmen, here lie the Germans... lumps of flesh that look like ruined pieces of machinery...mouth organs...shreds of human bodies... hands without torsos... naked, pink soles of feet, protruding from the snow like ghostly plants.”

“Not many of the German soldiers who crossed the border on June 22,” he triumphed, “have survived... where are they now? They are rotting in the earth.” “It is as if the rivers were vomiting up their rotting bodies and the earth were spewing out their remains.” On several occasions, he even objected to burying the dead as it was practiced by the Soviet troops in eastern Germany in 1945, drawing conclusions in keeping with his depravity. “The Germans,” he says on January 14 and January 31, 1942, “prefer to be buried in town squares, next to schools or hospitals. Even in death, the Germans want to disturb sleeping children.” “They want to deprive us of our courage, even from the grave... the Germans, the lousy Fritzes, gangsters and criminals, want to lie next to Leo Tolstoy....” He added: “There is no place for German graves in the squares of Russian cities.” Depicting the effects of Ehrenburg’s perversities upon the Red Army, and the consequent atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers, is a central task of the present work. However, the hate-filled expressions applied by Ehrenburg to Germans not affiliated with the Wehrmacht, German men, women, and children, require more detailed discussion before it is possible to continue.

Ehrenburg never concealed the fact that he made no distinction between German military personnel and civilians. To him, Germany was “a huge criminal organization,” the German people were “a gang of gangsters, consisting of many millions of people,” "a horde of nomadic pirates.” In effect, therefore, he recognized only a division of labor between soldiers and civilians: “The men take off in search of loot. The women wait for them to return carrying Dutch cheeses, Paris stockings, and Ukrainian bacon.” On November 2, 1944, he called the Germans “a cursed tribe”; on April 12, 1945, he counted the reasons why all Soviet human beings should be filled with a “great, righteous, passionate hate,” “not merely hate, but a profound contempt for the Germans as well.” To Ehrenburg, hatred and contempt were admittedly one and the same. Even the briefest samplings of Ehrenburg’s stated reasons for such hatred would undoubtedly be sufficient to constitute the crime of “incitement to racial and national hatred,” if one were to replace the ethical designation of “German” with that of some other racial, religious, or ethnic group—such as, for example, the group to which Ehrenburg himself belonged. Posing as the spokesman of all Russians, he wrote:

“We despise the Germans, because they are morally and physically shameless.” “We despise the Germans for their stupidity.” “We despise the Germans for their lack of elementary human dignity.” “We despise the Ger- mans for their greed.” “We despise the Germans for...their bloodthirstiness, which is related to sexual perversion.” "We despise the Germans for their cruelty—the cruelty of the weasel, which throttles the defenseless.” “We despise the Germans for their crimes, for their thoughts and feelings, for their malignant sores.” “We despise them, because we are human beings, and Soviet human beings to boot.” “The sight of German men and women turns one’s stomach.”

Ehrenburg, for his own part, deliberately refused to participate in any of the “re-education” programs of 1945, or in any other attempt “to elevate the Germans, these humanoid beings, to the lowest level of development of retarded human beings,” or to “teach them become human beings, or at least resemble human beings.”

And how were German women depicted by Ehrenburg for the “education” of Soviet soldiers? For the women, as for the soldiers, Ehrenburg had only blanket judgements: “The women of the Germanic tribe are waiting in their caves for their loot.” According to Ehrenburg, all German women were either “bloodthirsty” or “absolutely shameless.” On December 7, 1944, Ehrenburg wrote:

"German women arouse only feelings of abhorrence in us. We despise them because they are the mothers, wives, and sisters of butchers. We despise them because they wrote to their sons, husbands, and brothers, ‘Send us a beautiful fur coat!’ We despise them because they are thieves and temptresses. We need none of these flaxen-haired hyenas. We are coming to Germany for something else—for Germany. And these particular flaxen-haired witches will not easily escape us.”

The real concern of German women was not, as Ehrenburg so wickedly claimed, the wish for packages of any kind—quite apart from the fact that Soviet population, oppressed, exploited, and exhausted by socialism, had nothing to surrender or sell, or that the mailing of packages from the Eastern Front was in any case prohibited and impossible. In reality, German women were profoundly concerned with the survival and wellbeing of their men fighting in the Soviet theater of war. Ehrenburg was very well aware of this, and exploited this fact in a manner that was as infamous as it was characteristic: “Hundreds of thousands of German dead rot in Russian earth,” he gloated on October 7, 1941. “Every evening” he wrote on December 7, 1941, “millions of German women are tortured by fear. Thousands of new widows wake up in Germany every morning. The stink of human flesh seems to float over the East.” “Your Gustav has been killed,” he announced sarcastically to a Mrs. Gertrud Holmann on November 26, 1941: “He lies buried in a snowdrift in Volkhov... Here, there is nothing but white, pitiless snow, and Gustav lies dead in it, face downward... The bodies will lie there until spring, like meat in cold storage.”

The mourning of wives and mothers was Ehrenburg’s particular delight and the object of his mockery. On December 25, 1941, Ehrenburg wrote:

“We see the greedy German hyenas licking their lips; and we say briefly, ‘My lady, you are waiting for presents. You have already gotten what you deserve... Weep, German woman! ... and when you get sick of weeping, then dance and be merry... in spring, the snow will melt, and you will smell the stink of the bodies!”

“We will make these women cry their eyes out,” he published on November 7, 1941. Over and over again, Ehrenburg delighted in the sufferings of women having lost members of their families, particularly, and most shockingly, on December 10, 1941, in reference to the son of a Frau Frieda Behl, whose son, a German soldier, had been shot, apparently from ambush. “Now she weeps,” Ehrenburg gloated, “and other German women are weeping, too. Weep, my ladies...” In Paris, three German officers were shot in the back, allegedly in reprisal for ratification of the cease-fire of Compiegne in 1940, which was, nevertheless, legal and in compliance with all provisions of international law. “Frau Müller,” Ehrenburg mocked, “does your son still drink champagne in the bars of Paris? Keep your mourning clothes ready, my lady...” In Norway, under the cover of darkness, four German soldiers were done away with by “brave fishermen” via a trap: “The sea washes up a body. Frau Rascal, is your first-born still drinking aquavit in Oslo? Keep a pile of handkerchiefs ready, and forget about thinking of a grave with flowers on it... people hate even dead Germans.” In Piraeus, partisans blew up a military depot, killing eighteen German soldiers: “Frau Schuller, is your beloved son still drinking muscatel in Athens? ...The Germans will certainly bury him with honors. But the Greek women ... will spit on the grave of your son.” “Weep louder, women of Germany!” called Ehrenburg gleefully: “You will not see your sons again, nor find their graves,”

As long as German troops occupied Soviet soil, the Soviets could only mistreat prisoners of war, the anti-Soviet population, or residents of recaptured territories, who perhaps only maintained bearable relationships with German occupation troops. When Soviet troops first crossed the borders of the Reich in September 1944, however, the Red Army came into contact with the German civilian population for the first time. Ehrenburg did everything in his power to steep Soviet soldiers in his notions as to the way to deal with Germans. “Woe to thee, Germany!” he had written on January 20, 1942. “Woe to thee, Germany!” he now repeated. “Woe to the land of assassins!” “Woe to the land of the villains!” According to his program in an article published on August 24, 1944, in relation to the forthcoming Soviet crossing of the German border, Ehrenburg placed great store upon the stipulation that the Red Army should no longer act as an army of liberators upon reaching Gentian soil. “Now we shall be judges,” he proclaimed; but judgement, in his eyes, was synonymous with vengeance.

"Let us once again swear a holy oath, on the German border, to forget nothing... It is Stalin who led us to the German border, Stalin, who knows the meaning of mothers’ tears. Stalin knows that the Germans buried children alive and, in the darkest hour, vowed that he would defeat the German villains. We say this with the calm of a long-ripened and irreconcilable hatred. We say this yet again on the enemy border: ‘Woe to thee, Germany!’”

On January 25, 1945, during the Soviet winter offensive he wrote: “We have grabbed the witch by the hair, and she will no longer escape us; now we are in Prussian and Silesian cities.”

“There must be no mercy, no indulgence,” was Ehrenburg’s message, hammered into the heads of Soviet soldiers on February 8, 1945.

“We are marching through Pomerania. Vengeance has overwhelmed the Germans... But Germans remain Germans, wherever they are...The 30 of January...found the male and female Germans howling, whining, crying out. They stumble about, they whimper under the grenades and snowstorms, the witches and vampires of Germany. They run, but there is nowhere to escape...Run, burn, howl thy death cry!”

Ehrenburg then continued in the same vein: “It is not gloating over other’s misfortune, but rather, pure joy that fills my heart, when I behold the biggest pirate province in Germany [i.e., the peaceful agrarian province of East Prussia] in flames and confusion....” “Why am I so joyful, when I walk through the streets of German cities?” he asked on March 1, 1945, in an article under the headline “The Rats Are Shedding Their Tiger Skin.” On March 15, 1945, he reverted to another favorite simile: “Wolves they Were, and Wolves they Remain.”

And Ehrenburg, the man who rendered the official Soviet propaganda line of hatred, was not alone in this opinion. “They are captured predators,” wrote Gorbatov and Kurganov on March 8, 1945, in reference to the Germans. “Their predator incisors have been broken out of their mouths, but their evil remains.” Polevoy asked a Soviet soldier on February 1, 1945:

“What are they like, these Germans?”—’’Nothing but beasts!” was the response, as if it were self-evident. “Let them howl in the dark, moonless nights just before the end,” wrote Ehrenburg on March 22, 1945, in reference to German women: “Germany will weep so many tears that the horrid river Spree will form a broad river... We have come to Germany to crush them completely.” “We shall put an end to Germany,” Ehrenburg said on November 16, 1944. Over and over again, he reverted to the same destructive impulses: “It is not a question of defeating Germany. Germany must be obliterated,” was Ehrenburg’s message, reappearing in constantly newfound turns of phrase.

Ehrenburg, in his desire to witness the deaths of millions of German soldiers, justified his blood lust by claiming that the Germans were not human beings, but, rather, a lower form of life, like vermin and microbes. He was thus being at least logically consistent in his statement of December 16, 1943: “Among themselves, the microbes probably thought Pasteur was a murderer. But we well know that anyone who kills rabies or plague microbes is a true benefactor of humanity.” When the Red Army crossed the German border on November 30, 1944, Ehrenburg, impudently assured of what appeared to be his readers’ short memories, including his readers in foreign countries, alleged: “We have never preached racial hatred. We do not intend to exterminate all Germans... Zaslavsky, another Soviet propagandist, made a similar allegation: “The Red Army in no way intends to kill all Germans, since racial and national hatred is foreign to us.” Of course, the extermination of all Germans was technically impossible. The possibility of extermination on a smaller scale, unmistakably expressed by Ehrenburg on March 8, 1945, nevertheless, remained: “The only historical mission that I see, in all modesty and candor, consists of reducing the population of Germany.

In the fall and winter days of the years 1944-1945, the British occupation powers in the western zones had a hard time to prevent acts of revenge against the German population by Russians or Poles deported for compulsory labor and to bring incipient looting and disorder under control. This was a problem that was to cause the British military governor, Field Marshal Montgomery, to take draconian measures. Ehrenburg, however, expressed his desire in this regard in a persistent and conclusive manner. On October 19, 1944, one day before Soviet troops cruelly slaughtered the residents of Nemmersdorf and the surrounding regions in the governmental district of Gumbinnen, Ehrenburg published an article (but which was, perhaps, a reprint of a previously published article). He wrote:

“They [the foreign workers] are not concerned with what happens to the Germans, whether we should teach morals to what remains of them or feed them oatmeal broth. No. This young Europe has long known that the best Germans are the dead Germans... the problem that the Russians and Poles are presumably attempting to solve is whether it is better to kill the Germans with axes or clubs. They are not interested in reforming the inhabitants... they are only interested in reducing their numbers

Then Ehrenburg, with whom retired Chancellor Dr. Wirth conversed on friendly terms in Switzerland after the war, and the same Ehrenburg, who was subsequently considered as at least a candidate for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, added: “And it is my modest opinion that the Russians and Poles... are right.”

Millions of copies of Ehrenburg’s inflammatory writings were distributed to soldiers of the Red Army in the context of the political education that formed a central part of the preparation for combat in the Soviet Union; again and again these are called to mind. The incitement of hatred against the Germans and against German soldiers, however, did not remain restricted to Ehrenburg and the Soviet writers and journalists assigned to propaganda hack work. The military and political leadership apparatus of the Red Army was deliberately engaged in the generation of the anti-German racial and national hatred that was a major factor in the Soviet war effort. The consequences of this incitement to racial and national hatred among the soldiers of the Red Army will have to be shown.


to be continued