Stalin's War of Extermination by Joachim Hoffmann

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 10

All Along the Front, the First Prisoners of War Are Murdered as Early as June 22, 1941

The criminalization of the German Wehrmacht began immediately after the outbreak of the war and became the true field of activity of the Main Administration for Political Propaganda of the Red Army (GUPPKA, soon to be the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army) and its subordinate agencies. “Death to Fascist Vermin” was the leitmotif of Regulation № 20, issued to the “Divisional Chiefs for Political Propaganda among the Units and Armies” on July 14, 1941.This was published by the Chief of the Main Administration, Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis, as well as Guideline № 081 of the GUPPKA, issued on July 15, 1941, to the “Politruks of the Companies and Batteries” “for unconditional implementation.” German soldiers were accordingly described to the Red Army as “Hitlerite fascist trash,” “fascist barbarians,” “fascist predators,” and “fascist reptiles.” Slogans included “Smash the Fascist Vermin From the Sky,” “Smash the Enemy’s Viper Nests,” “Grind the Enemy Hordes to Dust,” “Smash the Hitlerite Gang with Rifle Butts, Crush Them with Steel, Eliminate Them with Fire,” and “May the Fascist Vermin Perish from Starvation.”

These, and other, similar proclamations issued by the Main Administration, were immediately seized upon and repeated, as illustrated by a speech held on October 14, 1941, by Mushev, the newly-appointed official of the Political Administration of the 22nd Army, before the staff of a infantry division. Mushev criminalized the German army as a dissolute gang of robbers, as thieves and drunkards dedicated to “plundering with impunity, murdering the defenseless population, raping women, and destroying and burning cities and villages.” Where criminalization of the Germans was concerned, the military command was in no way far behind the political organizations of the Red Army. Marshal of the Soviet Union Budenny, Commander-in-Chief of the Southwest Front, in his Order № 5 of July 16, 1941, referred to German troops as “Hitler’s gangs of cannibals,” “fascist beasts,” and “fascist carrion.” Marshal of the Soviet Union Voroshilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Northwest Army (Member of the Military Council Zhdanov), in Order № 3 of July 14, 1941, referred to the Germans as “beastly fascists,” “fascist vultures,” and “fascist bandits.” Marshal of the Soviet Union Timoshenko, former People’s Commissar of Defense, Commander-in-Chief of the Western Front (Member of the Military Council Bulganin), in a proclamation to the inhabitants of the occupied territories of August 6, 1941, scourged the German soldiers as “Hitler gangs,” “Hitler hordes,” “fascist monsters,” “German robbers,” whose extermination by any method was justified. “German officers and soldiers are not human beings in green greatcoats, but wild animals,” a leaflet from the Political Administration of the Northwest Front stated on March 25, 1942: “German officers and soldiers must be exterminated, as one strikes down mad dogs.”

The indiscriminate vilification of all German soldiers, as revealed by these, and other similar, statements by the highest military and political leadership agencies, were clearly intended to prevent Soviet soldiers from surrendering to the enemy. The claim that Soviet soldiers could expect only certain death in captivity was constantly made in the Red Army. For example, on March 29, 1940, in his speech before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR following the Finish Winter War, President of the Council of People’s Commissars, Molotov, had formerly attacked the alleged “unprecedented barbarity and bestialities of the White Finns against the wounded and captured members of the Red Army.” Such accusations could, of course, only be held to be doubly true of the German Wehrmacht. In this sense, Mekhlis, on July 14, 1941, and on the days following, similarly proclaimed that the Germans would “mistreat, torture, and murder” their prisoners “in a bestial manner.” To the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, it was now a question of inspiring Soviet soldiers with an “irreconcilable, raging hatred against the enemy” while instilling the Red Army with an “insatiable thirst for vengeance for [German] atrocities.” This was also the intended purpose of a propaganda text “Fascist Atrocities Against Prisoners of War,” published in Leningrad in 1941. This, in conjunction with a corresponding speech and note on alleged crimes against prisoners of war by Molotov on November 6, 1941, practically established the Soviet propaganda line to be applicable in this regard from that date until 1943, and thereafter until the end of the war.

In view of the above, it is not surprising that, as early as the third day of the war—i.e., June 24, 1941—Pochinko, a Soviet prisoner of war, testified that members of the Red Army were being encouraged “to show no mercy to German soldiers, since one [the Germans] will pay no heed to us [the Soviets] either and will torture us,” and will, as it reads, “cut off our fingers, noses, ears, and heads, or will cut open our backs and remove the spinal column, before shooting us.” High-ranking officers of the Soviet 6th and 12th Armies subjected to thorough interrogation were found to be aware of these conditions as well by readily admitting, on August 16, that “the murder of German prisoners of war might be possibly due to inflammatory anti-German propaganda.” After all, what else could one expect if members of the Red Army were constantly filled with atrocity stories, as in the leaflet mentioned above? “Every day, drunken Nazi officers were depicted as mistreating prisoners, putting out eyes, breaking or chopping off arms, tearing flesh off bones, and burying many prisoners alive.”

Characteristically, the murder of captured German soldiers and wounded began even before the inflammatory proclamations of the Soviet leadership agencies in regard to the German invaders had even had time to become effective. To be sure, these murders began without warning, on the first day of the war, on June 22, 1941, along the entire front. According to the record of the military court investigation, Lieutenant Hundrieser, a forestry teaching trainee in civilian life, on the morning of June 22, 1941, followed in the wave of the attack. A few kilometers from the German-Soviet border he witnessed the murder of ten wounded members of the 311th German Infantry Regiment who had remained behind. Other testimony relates to the murder of a helplessly wounded member of the 188th German Infantry Regiment at Javorov on June 22, 1941, as well as to the murder and robbery of large numbers of wounded and captured soldiers of the 192nd German Infantry Regiment near Jagodzin on the same date.i0 Captured air- craft crews were killed during the first days of the war almost without exception. In the early hours of June 22, 1941, a non-commissioned officer of the 77th Air Combat Regiment who parachuted from his plane was immediately killed after landing at Kedainiai by Soviet soldiers who rushed to the spot A gold dental crown was then torn out of his jaw. The Polish housewife Maria Morocz witnessed Soviet soldiers near Sokho Wola shooting a wounded aviator whom she had desired to help. Violations of international law by members of the Red Army became, in fact, so frequent in the final days of June 1941 that only a few of the cases investigated in accordance with the military courts and confirmed by eyewitnesses can be mentioned here.

On June 24, 1941, twelve wounded members of an infantry regiment who were left behind were found horribly mutilated after participating in an attack with the 23rd German Engineer Battalion at Surazh, west of Bialystok. One of the wounded soldiers was found nailed fast to a tree, with his eyes gouged out, and his tongue cut out. On June 25, 1941, members of a reconnaissance troop of the 36th Infantry Regiment in platoon strength were found driven together and “bestially slaughtered,” in a village in East Poland. On July 1, 1941, the bodies of Major Söhngen of the 7th Infantry Regiment as well as that of a First Lieutenant, two Master Sergeants, and several other soldiers were found in the Skomorocchy fortifications, north of Sokal, having been mutilated the day before. A medical investigation by Medical Captain Dr. Stankeit and Acting Medical Officer Wendler confirmed that severe violence, in the form of knife cuts, particularly in the vicinity of the eyes, had been inflicted. First Lieutenant Hufnagel of the 9th Panzer Division, following in the wake of the border crossing in late June 1941, found approximately eighty massacred German soldiers, including three officers of an unnamed infantry regiment, on the Busk-Tarnopol’ road. Similarly, also in late June 1941, members of an advance detachment, apparently of the 9th Infantry Regiment, were cut off while crossing a small river near Bialystok, and were killed and mutilated. In late June 1941, the staff and support sections of the 161st Infantry Division were surprised by Soviet troops near Porzecze, with the resulting capture of a number of wounded officers and soldiers. The Wehrmacht evangelical Protestant clergyman Klinger and Catholic military priest Sindersberger made the following eyewitness statements before a military court on June 8 and June 15, 1941: Lieutenant Sommer and six other soldiers were burned alive; Lieutenant Wordell and the others were either shot or beaten to death and then robbed. German medical personnel, clearly recognizable due to their Red Cross armbands, including Medical First Lieutenant Dr. Adelhelm and Medical Second Lieutenant Dr. Hottenroth, were also murdered by the Soviets, and lay in rows with other murdered soldiers. On June 28, 1941, Soviet soldiers surprised a clearly recognizable column of the 127th Motor Ambulance Platoon in the region of Minsk and butchered a great many of the wounded and accompanying medical personnel. According to the testimony of a survivor, “the terrible screams of the wounded” could be heard for a very long lime. The victims of acts of violence that were contrary to international law occurred at numerous locations, even during the very first days of the war, and included medical personnel, in addition to wounded combat personnel.

A distinction must, of course, be made between the “spontaneous” murders of German prisoners of war by Soviet soldiers that began on June 22, 1941, and continued “all along the entire front”—no matter how “bestial” they may have been—and the mass murders organized and committed by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) that also began upon the outbreak of the war. As stated by the American Congressional Committee, chaired by Representative Charles J. Kersten, in the Conclusions to Special Report № 4 of December 31, 1954, members of the NKVD shot “all political prisoners in every city of the western Ukraine in the first days of the war, with the exception of a few who survived as if by a miracle.” Victims of these mass murders included the inmates of the prisons and concentration camps in the western Ukraine, i.e, eastern Poland, as well as those in the Baltic States, White Russia and, with the continued advance of German troops, inmates in the hinterland of the Soviet Union as well. Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, Latvian, Estonian, and, of course, Russian civilians, in addition to ethnic Germans and others, of all ages and both sexes, fell victim to these deliberately planned, cold-bloodedly systematic executions by shooting in all localities, all over the country. The great numbers of localities in which prison inmates were murdered, included, to cite just a few: Dubno, Luck, Dobromil, Zolkiev, Brzeznay, Rudki, Komarno, Pasichna, Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanislav), Chortkov, Rovno, Sarny, Drogobych (Drahobych), Sambor, Tarnopol’, Stalino (Jusowka), and, of course, Lemberg in eastern Poland (the western Ukraine); Pravienishkies, Rumshishkes (near Kaunas), Kaunas (Kovno) Telshiai, and Globokie (east of Vilna) in Lithuania; and Riga, Dünaburg (Daugavpils), Rositten in Latvia; Dorpat, and Reval in Estonia. Since liquidations occurred almost everywhere, it is practically impossible to list all locations; it should, however, be mentioned that over 4,000 corpses were found in Lemberg; 1,500 in Dubno; and 500 in Luck.

The NKVD not only shot their prisoners but, in many proven cases, tortured them to death by tearing out their fingernails, scalding and tearing off their skin, and comparable horrors. This was often done in the torture chambers that formed an integral part of all NKVD prisons in accordance with the traditions of the Cheka, founded by Lenin. The doctor of forensic medicine, Medical Captain Dr. Buhtz, listed a number of such cases on behalf of the Army Medical Investigation, in a “Preliminary Report on the Findings of the Forensic Medical Criminal Investigation of Bolshevik Violations of International Law in the Regions of the Army Group North (AOK16 and 18)” of December 4, 1941. For example, he investigated the case of three Roman Catholic priests murdered during the first few days of the war in Lankishkiai, one of whom was crucified and another of whom had his mouth sewn shut; he also investigated the murder of three doctors and a nurse in Panevezhys. In addition to male prisoners, women and children were also liquidated or tortured to death in the prisons and camps of the NKVD in the first days of July. A report of the Advanced Unit of the Secret Field Police of the XXXXVIII German Army Corps of July 1, 1941, stated that the bodies of 550 persons, murdered a few days before, including 100 women, had been found on July 26, 1941, in the prison of Dubno, adding:

“On entering the prison cells, the sight was so horrible that it cannot even be described in words. Over one hundred bodies, of men, old people, women, and girls approximately sixteen years of age, lay in the cells, shot, and mutilated with bayonet wounds.”

Corporal Steinacker of the Staff of the Signals (61st Infantry Division) declared, during a military court interrogation:

“All persons were completely naked. Approximately three or four women hung in each cell with their heads downward. They were fastened to the ceiling by cords. As far as I can remember, all the women had had their breasts and tongues cut out. The children lay crumpled up on the floor.”

It was found possible to identify a few of the perpetrators by name, such as NKVD Commissar Vinkur and a female NKVD agent Erenshtein.

The horrible details of the massacre of over 4,000 Ukrainian and Polish prisoners in the city of Lemberg (such as Brigidki Prison, Zamarstynow Prison, and the NKVD prison) have already been the object of detailed military court and forensic medical studies and post-war international investigations and require no further comment here. The forensic medical officer, Medical Captain Dr. Schneider, a professor of medicine, stated in an official letter to Medical Major General Dr. Zimmer on July 21, 1941:

‘'It has become clear to me that the atrocities against Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and, unfortunately, against captured members of the Wehrmacht as well, committed by the GPU in Russia shortly before the evacuation of the cities, far exceeds everything previously... known in terms of atrociousness and cruelty... My assistant, who spent two days in Lemberg, told me that these events could neither be described nor even intimated. The murder victims were without any doubt sadistically tortured before death, in torture chambers installed for the purpose”.

As already mentioned and confirmed by extensive source material, in the present connection it is relevant that captured members of the Wehrmacht were also discovered among the civilian victims of the NKVD terror in Lemberg. The Soviets enforced a basic regulation that German prisoners, in violation of international law, were to be transferred from the military departments of the Commissariat of Defense (NKO) to the police departments of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). For this purpose they were immediately transferred to the custody of NKVD convoy troops after interrogation, in keeping with a directive of August 4, 1941, of the Commander of the NKVD troops, Major General Appolonov. Just what it meant for prisoners of war to be transferred to the NKVD is best illustrated by the fact that Krivenko, who was responsible for the executions of the Polish POW officers in the Ostashkov camp in 1940 as Brigade Commander of the NKVD, and who was later to become a Lieutenant General of the NKVD, was appointed Chief of the Main Administration for Prisoners of War and Internees (GUPVI).

In addition to German soldiers of the ground forces, captured members of the Luftwaffe, in particular, were very soon transferred to NKVD prisons, where they met with violent deaths from the very outset of the war. Several airmen of the German Luftwaffe were even discovered among the mountains of bodies in the Lemberg NKVD prison; NKVD Commissars Loginov and Maslov shot three wounded German fliers, including two officers, in the Lemberg military hospital on June 29, 1941, before the Soviet retreat. On June 25, 1941, after an emergency landing near Tarnopol, several crew members of a Ju 88 bomber of the 51st Bomber Wing, including Master Sergeant Harenburg, were transferred to the local NKVD prison. There they were murdered in an inconceivably cruel manner, together with other captured crew members. One crew member, Master Sergeant Scheurich, who was hidden by an Ukrainian farmer named Picum and a few women, as well as First Reserve Lieutenant Küster, a mayor with a doctor of law degree, and Lance Corporal Kaluza, a lecturer on photography in civilian life, both from the staff of the 129th Artillery Command, described their impressions under oath in a military court deposition. According to them, the bodies of the aviators murdered in Tarnopol prison were in some cases chained, after which their eyes were put out, their tongues, ears, and noses cut off; and in some cases, the skin on the hands and feet was partially torn off.

A horrifying discovery was made on June 27, 1941, in the central office of the NKVD in Luck. Technical Military Administrative Advisor Brugmann, of the 14th Panzer Division testified under oath that the mutilated bodies of four members of the German Luftwaffe, including Second Lieutenant Sturm and an unknown First Lieutenant, were found with their limbs hacked off, accompanied by horrible bums caused by a soldering iron found next to them. On October 9, 1941, two medical officers of the Luftwaffe, Medical Major Dr. Golla and Medical First Lieutenant Dr. Knak, autopsied the bodies of eleven German fliers (including a First Lieutenant) and two army soldiers found in the NKVD prison of Proskurov. A Ukrainian prison supervisor, Kolomyets, testified in his military court deposition that the men were transferred on June 27-28, 1941, and killed in the cellar by a shot in the back of the neck during the night of July 4, 1941. In this case, as at Lemberg, at least some of the perpetrators were identified by name: the Deputy Chief of the NKVD in Proskurov, Deputy Chief of the NKVD Prison, and Watch Commander Kasanshy, and the “Chekists” Vassermann, Makhnevich, and Lubchak. The bodies of other murdered German fliers were discovered in the prison of the NKVD Border Troops in Slobodka on June 28, 1941.

Although a distinction must be made between the systematic murder actions of agencies of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the unrestrained murders committed by members of the Red Army, increasing numbers of violations of international law, committed by regular troops of the Red Army were observed under the influence of the then-current atrocity propaganda of July 1941 that absolutely exceeded all bounds of hatred. The seriousness of such violations may be illustrated by a series of randomly selected examples. On July 1, 1941, 165 wounded and unwounded members of the II Battalion of the 35th (motorized) Infantry Regiment of the 25th (motorized) Infantry Division were shot, or, as may be inferred from the investigation reports of July 2 and 5, 1941, “bestially” stabbed or beaten to death, west of Broniki, between Rovno and Luck. According to the testimony of a few survivors, these acts were committed deliberately, after robbing and partially undressing the soldiers, and chaining the “service rank” soldiers. This was done to the accompaniment of inflammatory shouting by, and even the personal participation of, a group of Soviet officers. On June 30, 1941, an unknown number of wounded were murdered in the district of the 119th (motorized) Infantry Regiment.

On July 1, 1941, Soviet soldiers in the Rokitno region mutilated 20-30 wounded members of the 465th Infantry Regiment, including Second Lieutenant von Ponigau; a few of these men were burned alive.36 Also murdered were 80 wounded members of the 295th Infantry Division who were left behind on the battlefield near Dabrovka (south of Rava Ruska) in early July 1941. Approximately 30 members of a medical company, some of them wearing Red Cross armbands, were killed in a Soviet massacre west of Minsk in early July 1941. According to eyewitness testimony, 26 members of an assault troop mission were mutilated near Bialyslok on July 8, 1941; near Suprashl on the same date, 20 members of the 23rd Anti-Tank Battalion were mutilated, almost all of them “to the point of unrecognizability”, following an ambush. Medical Second Lieutenant Dr. Berge testified that 48 members of the 1st Battalion of the 111th Infantry Regiment, “including the wounded and prisoners, were slaughtered by shooting, stabbing, or beaten to death with bludgeons” near Romanovka, west of Berdichev, on July 10, 1941. Seventeen wounded members of the 272nd Infantry Regiment left behind in a patch of forest near Raja north of Dorpat in mid-July 1941 were laid next to each other and strangled or shot by the Soviets after the crudest mutilations. As Medical Major Dr. Schmidt testified under oath in the military court investigation, 12-15 wounded German soldiers, captured by the Soviets on the Bobrujsk airfield before they could be evacuated, were killed on the same day, some of them after horrible tortures, such as gouging out their eyes, cutting out their tongues, and crushing their testicles.

Near Are in Estonia on July 29, 1941, a wounded Lance Corporal of the 1st Artillery Regiment, having survived by accident, watched as uniformed and armed Soviet women murdered his wounded comrades, cutting open the abdomen of one of them, whose both legs had been shot off, with a curved knife. Medical Master Sergeant Dr. Stock testified under oath to the bestial murder of the battalion doctor of the 171st Infantry Regiment, Medical First Lieutenant Dr. Reichardt, near Chelovka not far from Korosten on August 6, 1941. On August 16, 1941, the 16th Panzer Division reported that 40 members of the 79th Infantry Regiment and a few Hungarian soldiers had been found murdered at the Grejgovo railway station. According to the report of the commander of the III Battalion, Major Lenz, 48 members of the 164th Infantry Regiment, including a Lance Corporal Graf von Granier-Turawa, were obviously murdered after the battle near Barishovka on September 23, 1941. The wounded soldiers of an artillery battalion having fallen into Soviet captivity near Vjazma in early October 1941 suffered a frightful fate. As described under oath by Medical Master Sergeant Dr. Sonnleitner of the 2nd Medical Company of the 23rd Panzer Division, the men were burned alive in a nearby bam, together with 60 other wounded. By contrast, the mere shooting of 11 unwounded and 8 wounded soldiers at Rzhavej (Tula district) on the order of an unknown politruk in the fall of 1941, described under oath by Mazel, a Russian, seems almost merciful. Medical Captain Dr. Buhtz, a professor of medicine, autopsied or otherwise medically examined a total of 44 murdered German soldiers, including 9 fliers, II infantry soldiers, 14 anti-tank soldiers, and other soldiers and medical ranks in the district of the Army Group North between August 28 and November 11, 1941. His report of December 4, 1941, to which reference has already been made, indicates that, in the majority of cases, death was caused, not merely by shooting, but also by terrible tortures, by multiple cuts, in one case by “bestial gagging,” by blows with blunt instruments, gouging out their eyes, cutting their throats, cutting or hacking off their limbs, cutting off or crushing their genitals, and burning them alive.

The killing of German prisoners of war and wounded by Soviet soldiers that began on the first day of the war all along the entire front, and that soon rapidly increased, raises the question of how the leadership agencies of the Red Army felt toward these actions. The Soviet government, in reply to an initiative of the International Red Cross, and with a view toward the attitude of the Western powers, attempted to give the impression that they would, “on the condition of reciprocity,” recognize the principles generally applicable between civilized states relating to the legal treatment of prisoners of war under international law. The “Decree on Prisoners of War” of the Council of People’s Commissars of July 1, 1941, the Circular Letter of the Chief Administrative Officer of the Red Army on the standards of care for prisoners of war of July 3, 1941, and the Proposal of the Chief of the Medical Administration of the Red Army on adequate hospital treatment for prisoners of war of July 29, 1941, which was confirmed by the Chief of the Main Administration for Prisoners of War and Internees of the NKVD, were not, and there is clear evidence for this, enforced among Soviet troops, and were, in any case crassly ignored everywhere, as has been proven in all cases.

These decrees were obviously intended, primarily, to deceive foreign countries, for example, like the much lauded Stalin Constitution of 1936, guaranteeing and proclaiming every conceivable form of human rights and civil rights in the USSR, not a single one of which, in practice, ever existed, but that were, quite the contrary, cynically twisted to imply the exact opposite in every instance.

Were it not so, it would, for example, be impossible to understand how the prohibition of the Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, Marshal of the Soviet Union Shaposhnikov, directed to the Staff Chiefs of the Fronts and Armies, against the confiscation of “personal valuables, money, and papers from prisoners” could have been quite so ostentatiously ignored. The commander of the Crimean troops, Vice Admiral Levchenko (together with Member of the Military Council, Corps Commissar Nikolaev, Chief of Staff, Major General Ivanov), by Order № 091 of November 1941, openly declared that all sums of money and valuables of prisoners of war were the property of the People, immediately ordering their surrender to the agencies of the Soviet State Bank by Directive № 0146 of the Council of the People’s Commissars. In practice, the treatment of prisoners of war was determined, not by the directives and decrees of the central authorities, which were only intended to serve as window-dressing, but rather, by the orders of the commanders, commissars, and political leaders, who were inspired by Soviet hate-propaganda slogans.

Many orders, reports, and statements of Soviet officers and soldiers, in any case, reveal the lack of restraint with which prisoners of war and wounded were simply massacred. Thus, before June 28, 1941, the Soviet commander of the 36th Machine Gun Battalion, near Rava Ruska, ordered all German prisoners of war to be shot. The Commander of the 225th Mountain Infantry Regiment, Major Savelin, ordered the shooting of 400 Romanian prisoners of war and a few captured German officers and non- commissioned officers west of Starozynine in Bucovina, on July 2-3, 1941, on the grounds of mere transportation problems. When the nurse Elena Ivanovna Zhivilova protested against the intended shooting of a wounded German soldier on the battlefield at Bjel, not far from Sukhari, in early July 1941, she was reprimanded in the presence of First Lieutenant Tolkach, Lieutenant Khaliulin, and a few politruks, and threatened with proceedings by the responsible battalion commissar, who had already shot a German prisoner of war at the end of June. The order was drummed into her to shoot all future captured officers personally, or, as she testified: “Even we nurses were supposed to shoot them with our ‘Nagans.’”

“Captured officers were all shot without exception,” say the notes of a member of the Red Army having returned to his parents at Usovka: “I have seen many executions of prisoners of war... thirty in one place alone.” At Khomutovka, the same Red Army officer observed the manner in which a politruk killed a wounded officer and wounded soldier. The Combat Report of a № 304 tank, signed by Second Lieutenant Efremov, the crew of which was said to be inspired by “the ardent desire ... to exterminate a whole load of fascist reptiles...” is typical of the manner of Soviet thinking on a lower level. This report contains an entry, dated August 31, 1941, reading: “Destroyed one medical vehicle consisting of two horses and ten wounded fascists.” The Chief of the 1st Company, Captain Gadiev, reported on August 30, 1941: "Shot 15 wounded,” while the political leader of the company, Junior Politruk Bulanov, reported on September 5, 1941: “Destroyed one medical unit.”

Numerous documents also reveal the responsibility of higher command agencies for the murder of prisoners of war. Thus, a major on the staff of the 21st Infantry Corps, commanded by Major General Borisov, shot two German officers by order of the Corps Staff on July 4, 1941. A driver on the staff of the 154th Infantry Division testified that 22 German prisoners of war were shot in the neck after interrogation by the divisional commander and divisional commissar in early August, after being forced to dig their own graves. The Chief of Staff of the 26th Armored Division, Lieutenant Colonel Kimbar, and the Chief of the Operations Branch, Major Khrapko, reported the shooting of 80 prisoners of war in Operational Report № 11 on July 14, 1941, quite casually, as if it were a matter of course: “80 men surrendered, and were shot”.

That such crimes could be committed on the basis of official military orders has been confirmed by Colonel Gaevsky of the 29lh Armored Division, in his testimony of August 6, 1941, relating to the shooting of lower- ranking German officers. That an order to give no quarter should be issued prior to the attack on Prokopovka on September 9, 1941, as testified to by Soviet Second Lieutenant fon Granc, Battalion Adjutant in the 800th Infantry Regiment, was, therefore, quite consistent. Shooting the wounded officers was reserved for the Regimental Commissar personally. Like other captured Soviet officers, the captured Commander of the 141st Infantry Division, Major General Tonkonogov, in his interrogation in August 1941, objected that he had no knowledge of the shooting of German prisoners, and that the wounded could be shot only as the result of “lack of discipline on the battlefield.” It was later discovered that Major General Tonkonogov had personally ordered the shooting of a German officer for refusal to provide information. Another Soviet general demanded information from a wounded sergeant, Seyboth, of the 35th Motorized Infantry Regiment, relating to a position not yet occupied by the Germans on September 19, 1941. The interrogated soldier testified under oath “that he would slowly torture me to death” for failure to provide the correct information. This Soviet General was also later captured by the Germans.

Refusal to provide information, which is permissible under international law, was repeatedly cited by Soviet staffs as grounds for shooting prisoners of war, perhaps even as a matter of basic principle. Thus, to cite a few examples, the chief of a German Engineer Company was personally shot by the Chief of Staff of the 53rd Infantry Division at Ilinskoe on October 14, 1941, after being given twenty minutes to consider, and being permitted to write a letter to his family. A German corporal was similarly shot on the order of Lieutenant Colonel Chicherin, the Chief of Staff of an unidentified division. Although similar actions can also be proven in relation to the Army, Corps, and Divisional Staffs, a “general order” for the shooting of prisoners does not appear to have existed during this phase of the conflict. The large numbers of such killings, which can be proven on the basis of testimony by Soviet officers, political officials, doctors, and soldiers as early as July 1941, were attributed by the Germans to “individual or special orders” of the various Soviet command agencies.

Captured officers and commissars accused each other of issuing such orders, but the commissars appear to have been chiefly responsible, as they had the earliest opportunity to do so, and were, furthermore, inclined to liquidate “capitalists” and “fascists” in addition to German officers. “The Soviets committed horrible murders all along the front, from the first days of the Eastern campaign onward,” stated a summary by the Wehrmacht Operations Staff on September 15, 1941. The argument, heard on occasion, that these murders were, in fact, committed in reprisal for application of the notorious Commissar Order by the Germans, must be excluded since the order was, of course, unknown to the Red Army during the early phases of the war.

The fact that Soviet command authorities can be proven to have issued repeated orders to shoot prisoners of war for refusing to make statements, in no way contradicts their simultaneous efforts to prevent the shooting of prisoners of war by Soviet troops on their own initiative—due to the desire of the Soviet leadership to keep prisoners of war alive for interrogation purposes. A great deal of material is available in this regard; for example, the Commander of the 168th Cavalry Regiment of the 41st Independent Cavalry Division, Colonel Pankratov, and the Regimental Commissar, Senior Politruk Kutuzov, protested against the shooting of prisoners of war during the most difficult phase of the winter, on December 28, 1941, simultaneously conceding that subordinate unit leaders were shooting all “captured German fascists” immediately instead of delivering them to the staff, thus hindering the intelligence gathering about the enemy. The Chief of Staff of an unnamed Infantry Division, apparently the 65th, Major Kotik, and the Commissar of the Staff, Battalion Commissar Kitsa, warned against taking the law into one’s own hands and simply shooting captured soldiers and officers “without even asking any questions.” Since such cases were becoming constantly more numerous, especially in the 38th Infantry Regiment, the Regimental Commander and Regimental Commissar were threatened with severe punishment in the event of repetition. Colonel Kashanskij, Chief of Staff of the 30th Infantry Division, in an order dated early July 1941, referred to the urgent need to deliver captured prisoners of war to the divisional staff for interrogation, even “if they are severely wounded. The Chief of Staff of the 62nd Army, Major General Moskvin, the Military Commissar of the Staff, Regimental Commissar Zaytsev, and the Chief of the Department for Enemy Reconnaissance, Colonel German, prohibited the subordinate units (31st, 87th, 196th, 131st, 399th, 112th Infantry Divisions, 33rd Guards Infantry Division, and 20th Motorized Infantry Brigade) from “shooting prisoners on the battlefield, regardless of the numbers involved,” under the threat of severe punishment, leaving the question of subsequently shooting them apparently open. Also, the Chief of Staff, of the 14th Army in the section of Murmansk, Colonel Malitsky, and the Commissar of the Staff, Battalion Commissar Burylin, in an order issued on September 8, 1941, complained that the subordinate units, such as the 88th Infantry Division, had simply begun to liquidate all prisoner transports en route, instead of delivering them to staff headquarters.70 The objection was not, however, made on the grounds, for example, that the executions constituted a crime against humanity or a violation of international law, but simply that it amounted to a “failure in the military training organization.”

The methods of interrogation in the staff headquarters have been described by a person who should know: a captured Regimental Commissar. In the winter of 1941-42, he stated that a form of “simple interrogation” existed in the Regimental Staff, as well as a form of “severe interrogation.” A form of “most severe interrogation” also existed in the Army Staffs, con- ducted by the Special Department of the NKVD. If the prisoner of war was unwilling to testify, then during the “severe interrogation” by the Regimental Staff:

“The soldiers present each held him tight by the head or feet, after which the prisoner received five to ten blows on the buttocks and back with a club, in the presence of the Regimental Commanders and Regimental Commissars. If the prisoner was still unwilling to testify, the beatings continued for approximately five to ten minutes, in increasing severity. He was again intermittently interrogated. The beatings only stopped when the prisoner was unconscious or dead.”

As for the “most severe interrogation” in the Army Staff, Major Kyanchenko of the Army Staff of the 19th and, later, the 33rd Army, reported:

“that the prisoners, stripped naked by the NKVD, were beaten with rubber truncheons, and that their ears were battered off at the same time since the face was also beaten. Their fingernails were also torn out. Another method was to cut off the tips of the fingers with sharp knives. To increase the pain, the fingertips were not cut off with a single blow, but gradually, with several blows.”

During comparable interrogations in the Divisional Staff, braided leather straps were used on prisoners of war, who were naked in these cases as well. If the prisoner of war gave testimony of slight value after a “severe interrogation,” he was “finally shot on order of the regimental commander.”

When the interrogation was completed, the command authorities took no further interest in the fate of the prisoner, but rather handed him over to the Special Department of the NKVD, “which is known to have shot all prisoners.” Thus, for example, according to the testimony of the Chief of the Operations Branch in the Staff of the 1st Motorized Proletarian (Infantry) Division, Lieutenant Colonel Liapin, Quartermaster Colonel Rosentsvaig of the 57th Armored Division personally shot two German officers shortly after interrogation on September 16, 1941. On February 21, 1942, a Soviet Colonel reported the shooting of a German flight officer even in the presence of the Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd Army, Lieutenant General Kuznetsov, and other high-ranking officers of the Army Staff.

The Chief of Staff of the 47th Army in the Caucasus, Colonel Vasilev, the Military Staff Commissar, Senior Battalion Commissar Makov, and Department Chief for Enemy Reconnaissance Lieutenant Colonel Baranov, in reference to the usual murders of prisoners of war in the units in 1942, cited the case of two fliers shot by the 83rd Independent Marine Infantry Brigade. The commanders and commissars of all units were not, for example, fundamentally prohibited from shooting prisoners of war, but, rather, only from “shooting prisoners of war without permission by the Military Council of the Army.” The usual Red Army manner of procedure in dealing with German aircraft crews after interrogation was described by the liaison officer on the Operational Staff of the Defense District of Tuapse (TOR), Second Lieutenant Redko, on November 26 and December 1, 1942:

“At the staff of the 47th Army, three German fliers were interrogated for three days, they were given nothing to eat, then they had to take their uniforms off, dig their own graves, and were shot.”

A directive of December 1941 from the Chief of the Political Department of the 9th Cavalry Division to the commissars of all units states:

“Inform the combatants and commanders that, in this sense, the enemy will never find any protection, anywhere, even among the highest staffs...there will always be time to settle accounts with them. None of the invaders will leave our land alive.”

The Wehrmacht Investigation Office for the Violation of International Law issued its express conclusions after an evaluation of captured documents and hundreds of prisoner testimonies in a memorandum of March 1942, stating that the Soviet prohibition against the murder of German prisoners of war was “not based on any concern for the legality of treatment of prisoners of war under international law, but rather, and exclusively, upon the Russian staff interest in the delivery of the prisoners of war for intelligence purposes”.

Many documents, nevertheless, reveal something approaching a political motive in addition to considerations of purely military expediency. Thus, the Commander-in-Chief of the 5th Army Major General Potapov (together with Member of the Military Council, Divisional Commissar Inkishev, Chief of the Political Propaganda, Brigade Comissar Kolchenko) in his Order № 025 of June 30, 1941, referred to the shooting of German officers and soldiers as, of course, “perfectly legal,” while, nevertheless, prohibiting “arbitrary” shootings in the future, not merely to get a chance to interrogate German soldiers before they were shot, but for the political purpose of encouraging the disintegration of the German army.

The Chief of the Department for Political Propaganda of the 31st Infantry Corps, Brigade Commissar Ivanchenko, apparently still imbued with erroneous precepts of class consciousness, in his Order № 020, addressed to the political agencies of the 193rd Infantry Division of July 14, 1941, not only complained “that prisoners of war are being strangled and stabbed to death,” but that “shameful acts... of robbery”—i.e., the violent confiscation of “watches, pocket knives, and razors”—were taking place as well. The same Brigade Commissar, who was obviously rather naive, cited the political hazards of this “prisoner procedure that is unworthy of the Red Army.” He explained to his subordinate political agencies that “German soldiers—workers and farmers—are not fighting voluntarily; when a German soldier surrenders, he is no longer an enemy.” It was therefore necessary to take “all possible steps to ensure the capture of soldiers and officers in particular.” And, in complete ignorance of the Party line and actual conditions, he added: “Remember that prisoners are permitted to keep all personal possessions, to wear their uniforms, and even retain their medals.”

Similarly, the Chief of Staff of the 21st Army, Major General Gordov, who was later subject to reprisals, i.e., persecuted, and the Staff Commissar, Brigade Commissar Pogodin, in an order to the troops on August 8, 1941, which was also brought to the attention of the Military Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Chief of the Special Department of the NKVD of the 21st Army, once again emphasized the alleged “governmental prohibition” against “the mistreatment of prisoners, or the theft of their personal effects,” whether it involved a “gold watch” or a “handkerchief.” This was an extremely naive misconception of customary practice among soldiers in the Red Army. The order further stated that the Red Army should put an immediate stop to the “disgraceful excesses” of these marauders. The political motive in other cases was perhaps not so evident, for example, when the Commander of the 6th Infantry Corps, Major General Alexeev, the Military Commissar, Brigade Commissar Shalikov, and the Chief of Staff, Colonel Eremin, stated on July 23, 1941, that it was impossible for the leadership agencies to obtain information on the situation of the enemy “since many units of the corps have shot all the prisoners taken thus far.” The Chief of Political Propaganda of the 159th Infantry Division, Battalion Commissar Sevastianov, and the Chief of the Special Department, Rakhuv, were at least reprimanded for a “terrible case” of arbitrary execution. At the same time, the Divisional Commanders and the Commander of the Corps Troops were warned that they would be strictly called to account for any violations of international law. As late as December 2, 1941, the Chief of Staff of the Coastal Army in Sevastopol objected, by Order № 0086, to the widespread practice of “exterminating” prisoners of war without prior interrogation. He also believed that the “common practice of shooting prisoners immediately after capture makes us an object of dread to the enemy and prevents the enemy from surrendering.

Orders of this type originated from a phase of the war when the old slogans of the Communist class warfare “Proletarians of the World, Unite” still existed pro forma, This slogan, it was now stated, had led to “uncertainties” in some cases, and, therefore, “to disorient a certain stratum of members of the army.” Since it was now admittedly a matter of “destroying all fascist villains,” it was now thought advisable to replace the “Proletarians Unite” slogan with another one. On December 10, 1941, the Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Army Commissar First Rank Mekhlis, by Directive № 278, caused the slogan “Proletarians of the World...” to be immediately deleted and replaced by the clearly visible words: “Death to the German Occupiers!” in the letterheads and headings of all political organizational texts—from the Army newspaper “Krasnaya Zvezda” to the most insignificant leaflet. This slogan was accordingly believed, by the entire Red Army, to constitute the unchanging guideline, and, in that sense, was now understood to be taken literally.

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 11

“To the Last Man”
The Endless Murders of Prisoners of War

The principle of “national” extermination in Soviet political propaganda, as opposed to the formerly applicable principle of international class warfare (which had hitherto always been adhered to and had not yet been forgotten), made its first appearance in Stalin’s official call for a war of extermination against the Germans in his speech upon the occasion of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow on November 6, 1941. He proclaimed to the representatives of the party and social organizations during the commemorative session of the Moscow Soviet:

“Well now, if the Germans want a war of extermination, they will get it (thunderous, long drawn-out applause). From now on, it will be our task, the task of the peoples of the Soviet Union, the task of all the fighters, commanders, and political officials of our Army and Navy, to exterminate to the last man all Germans having invaded the territory of our homeland as occupiers (thunderous applause; shouts of 'Quite right!’; cheers). No mercy to the German occupiers! Death to the German occupiers! (Thunderous applause.)”

Of course, Stalin’s wish was his command. His Soviet propagandists took him literally, and the new slogan was disseminated throughout the Red Army in accordance with the established rules of political agitation. The manner in which Ilya Ehrenburg, in particular, gave free rein to his instinctive hatreds has been clearly described elsewhere. Ehrenburg seized upon Stalin’s proclamation, constantly adding new variants in his calls for the indiscriminate murder of all German soldiers. “Five million... bodies will be buried in our earth,” he wrote on December 2, 1941. “We have decided to kill all the Germans invaders,” he proclaimed to the soldiers of the Red Army on December 3, 1941:

“We quite simply intend to kill them. The accomplishment of this humanitarian mission has now become the responsibility of our people. We are continuing the work of Pasteur, who discovered the anti-rabies vaccine. We are continuing the mission of the scientists who discovered the means of destroying deadly microbes.”

“The Germans... must be driven into the ground. They must be killed, one after the other,” he wrote on December 22, 1941, and on February 20, 1942: “Your assignment is to kill them—to put them below ground.” On March 13, 1942, he reiterated: “You must wipe the Germans from the face of the earth.”

Ehrenburg’s proclamations, as confirmed by a document found on the body of a dead Soviet soldier, had by 1942 become a long since established commonplace in the Red Army. The document found on this particular soldier was entitled: “Topic of Presentation for the Politruks,” based on the Ehrenburg slogan already quoted:

“When you have killed one German, kill the next, the third...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. Do not let a single one escape....”

“Let us destroy the fascist villains to the last man,” stated the lead article in the daily army newspaper “Leninskij Put” (Lenin’s Way) and quite accordingly on November 30, 1941:

“Every one of us must faithfully carry out Comrade Stalin’s order to exterminate all German occupiers to the last man. To kill ten, twenty, one hundred fascists villains—is the responsibility of every Soviet fighter, officer, and political worker.”

Ehrenburg’s remarks, and those of the Political Main Administration, were in every respect in accordance with the High Command agencies of the Red Army.

The Commander-in-Chief of the West Front, General of the Army Zhukov, with Member of the Military Council and Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR Bulganin, on December 14, 1941, jointly issued an order that contained slogans such as: “Not one Hitlerite bandit having invaded our country must escape alive... our holy duty consists of taking cruel revenge... and destroying the German occupier to the last man.” The Military Council of the Leningrad Front addressed a proclamation to the inhabitants to the rear of the German lines on January 1, 1942, directing them not to permit German soldiers—referred to as “Hitlerite dogs” and “fascist cannibals”—to escape anywhere, “except in the earth, in their graves.” All methods were said to be justified in this “unmerciful war of extermination ”“rifles, grenades, axes, scythes, crowbars.” On occasion of the turn of the year 1941/42, the Commander-in-Chief of the 54th Army, Major General Fediuninsky, Members of the Military Council, Brigade Commissar Sichev, and Brigade Commissar Bumagin as well as the Chief of Staff, Major General Sukhomlin, in an “Order to the Troops of the 54th Army”, demanded that they “exterminate the German two-legged beasts at the entrances to the great city of Leningrad,” Another order, this time issued jointly with Member of the Military Council, Brigade Commissar Kholostov, and Chief of Staff, Major General Berezinsky, called for “the extermination of all fascist bandits to the last man.” Stalin’s words of November 6, 1941, also formed the motto of Colonel General Yeremenko, appointed Commander-in-Chief of the 4th Shock Army on December 30, 1941. Upon the transfer of command, Yeremenko’s order of the day, issued to the troops of the 4th Shock Army jointly with Member of the Military Council, Brigade Commissar Rudakov, and Chief of Staff, Major General Kurassov, read:

“I call upon all members of the Army to exterminate and destroy all occupiers to the last man in execution of the orders of our great political and military leader, Comrade Stalin.”

According to the findings of the German General on Special Assignment with the High Command of the Army, in the Red Army, Stalin’s words were generally “understood and interpreted...” to mean that “every member of the Wehrmacht—whether in combat, wounded, or captured—was to be killed.” Captured documents and the testimonies of Soviet prisoners leave no doubt whatsoever that Stalin’s words were to be considered an order. Thus, according to the testimony of a captured regimental commissar, “Stalin’s order of November 1941” stating that “all prisoners of war ... are to be shot,” was decisive in the treatment of German prisoners of war. Although this particular commissar, nevertheless, wished to make the restriction that German deserters should be transferred to the rear as prisoners. He was, however, contradicted in the deposition of Red Army member Kisilov of the 406th Infantry Regiment. Prior to the attack on Leskij on January 17, 1942, so Kisilov, his platoon leader, Second Lieutenant Kolesnichenko, announced the following order from the regimental commissar: “No prisoners are to be taken; all Germans are to be killed. Not a single one must be left alive.” Also found among the papers on a dead Soviet officer was a reference to corresponding treatment of the matter in the approaching Party meeting of the 8th Battery on December 28, 1941. According to this reference, the oral propaganda and agitation that formed the central emphasis of Party work “extends in particular to execution of Comrade Stalin’s order: All Germans... are to be exterminated to the last man.”

According to the comment in the politruk’s notebook, “the task of exterminating the fascists having invaded our territory, as established by Stalin,” also formed the topic for political education in the 5th Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 870th Infantry Regiment of the 287th Infantry Division on February 10, 1942. According to the testimony of Second Lieutenant Paramonov, Stalin’s Order also advocated killing the wounded, “since, after all, they could not work, and therefore represented no advantage to us.” Master Sergeant Marushak of the 28th Mechanized Infantry Regiment and other prisoners of war unanimously confirmed that Stalin’s order “to take no more German prisoners, and to shoot all captured German prisoners and wounded immediately,” was read out to the troops by the political leaders in all units on a daily basis, and sometimes by the officers as well, starting on November 6, 1941. According to Red Army soldier Seibel of the 337th Infantry Division, a copy of Stalin’s order to exterminate every German soldier was handed out to every Red Army soldier. According to Master Sergeant Shcherbatiuk, leader of the Independent Signal Detachment of the 351st Infantry Division, “Stalin’s Order to destroy all Germans was universally made known.” Shcherbatiuk added that he had personally heard of “numerous shootings and massacres.”

As early as November 15, 1941, the Divisional Doctor of the 20th German Infantry Division, Medical Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Mauß, and the Battalion Doctor, Medical Captain Dr. Buchard, performed autopsies on the bodies of seventy soldiers of the 90th Infantry Regiment who had fallen into the hands of the enemy near Borovik. The conclusion was that most of them were murdered after being wounded in combat. By order of the Commissars of the 1st Soviet Motorized Guards Infantry Division one hundred German prisoners of war were shot at Naro-Fominsk in this region between December 1 and 6, 1941, while an additional number, as stated in a report by the Chief of the Reconnaissance Department of the Staff of the 33rd Army, Captain Potapov, were shot by other units, for example, the 222nd Infantry Division. Seventy-two members of the German 76th Infantry Regiment, (20th Motorized Infantry Division) some of whom were wounded, were mutilated, murdered, and robbed at Budogoch west of Tikhvin in mid-December. Amadeo Casanova, a member of the 250th Spanish Infantry Division, described the murder of a wounded Spanish lieutenant and four wounded Spanish soldiers north of Novgorod on December 27, 1941, under oath in his military court deposition. Wounded soldiers of the “Blue Division” were also murdered and mutilated at another location.

“One of the worst atrocities of this terrible war,” according to Sir Reginald T. Paget, the British defender of Field Marshal von Manstein before a British military tribunal—at least concerning the hideousness of the homicides—was the systematic murder of German prisoners of war, especially the wounded, captured by the Soviets during the landing operations at Feodosija (Crimea) in very late December 1941. In the hospitals of Feodosija alone, approximately 160 severely wounded soldiers who were left behind, and a medical second lieutenant and six medics of the 715th (Motorized) Army Medical Company, as well as a Russian male nurse remaining with them, who all “exhibited the highest degree of sacrificial courage,” were shot, thrown out of the window, beaten to death with iron bars, or allowed to freeze to death in the breakers of the sea, or otherwise gruesomely murdered by Soviet soldiers, and to some extent by Red sailors. The unanimous testimonies of Russian and German eyewitnesses, including Medical Captain Burkhardt, provide an unequivocal picture of these cruel events while simultaneously indicating the identity of the persons responsible.

The Russian (most likely Tatar) male nurse Kalafatov testified under oath to the murder of wounded soldiers in the hospital located opposite the Villa Stamboli on January 6, 1942, after a Soviet army officer who acted properly was replaced by a hate-filled junior grade lieutenant from the Black Sea Fleet by the name of Aidanov. At another location, the Tatar male nurse Bursud, in fear of being personally shot, watched the murder of wounded German soldiers from a hiding place while they were being stabbed, cut, or hacked to death, during which he was able to hear the “horrible cries of the Germans.” According to a shocked Russian married couple, a German soldier left lying on the street with a severely wounded thigh who “whimpered day and night” and whose limbs were frozen in the mean-time, was killed by shots in the face by members of the Soviet Navy called over for that purpose by a uniformed Soviet woman (“a doctor or commissar”).

When the Russian Dr. Dmitriev cautiously asked the Commissar of the 9th Infantry Division (mistakenly referred to as the 9th Infantry Corps), in the presence of other commissars, why the wounded were being shot, he was told that the executions were being committed according to instructions based on “Stalin’s speech of November 6, 1941, stating that all Germans... were to be exterminated.” The commissar “therefore thought it perfectly logical that the German wounded should also be annihilated.” German wounded were also “cruelly mutilated” by Soviet soldiers during a landing attempt at Evpatorija (Crimea) on January 5, 1942.

It is obvious that the incidents cited above represent only the tip of the iceberg; there is a great deal of proof that indicates that this is so. Technical Administrative Officer 2nd Rank Malyuk mentions the shooting of twelve German prisoners of war within the immediate staff zone of the 2nd Shock Army near Paporotno on January 13, 1942, by order of the Chiefs of the Special Department of the NKVD and the Army Commissar of the 2nd Shock Army, Brigade Commissar Vasilev. The general mentality of the troops of the Red Army is also revealed by a front-line report by the Soviet writer Oleg Erberg, broadcast by Radio Moscow on January 24, 1942, relating to the shooting of a captured German officer by a “heroic” Soviet tank crew. The tank commander was said to have declared: “I want to shoot this dog from in front, using my revolver, so as to feast my eyes on his fear.” The Chief of Staff of the 636th Infantry Regiment, Major Sushinsky, reported emotionlessly to the Chief of Staff of the 160th Infantry Division, together with Junior Politruk Duchkov on February 4, 1942, that Master Sergeant Kabulov had stabbed a wounded German to death with his bayonet at Besedino “because he was seriously wounded.” Wehrmacht Corporal Emmerich testified under oath during his deposition by a military court that thirty wounded German soldiers left behind the day before at Shellesharo on February 17, 1942, were found in the following condition: “Their eyes had been poked out, some of them had had their ears, noses, tongues, and sexual organs cut off... they were all tortured to death”.

Rector Ziekur of the Staff of the German 62nd Infantry Division, in his capacity as burial officer, had to identify the bodies of 42 horribly mutilated soldiers from the 179th Infantry Regiment at Trojchatyj (on the Kharkov-Lozovaja highway) on February 24 and 25. He reported:

“The first impression was unnerving in several cases, their noses had been cut off and their eyes gouged out. In very many cases, their ring fingers had been cut off... On one soldier, all the fingers of the left hand had been cut off, while the left arm was dislocated and tom off.” Rector Ziekur stated that the Russian population was “disgusted and shocked by these mutilations.”

In testimony before the 570th Squad of the Secret Field Police, two partisans who had been caught in the act, Kleshnikov and Kusmenkov, described the manner in which the partisans usually treated their captives. According to their testimony, six German soldiers were forced to dig their own graves in the snow by order of Commissar Yudenkov after their interrogation by partisan staff at Gortop near El’nja on February 27, 1942, a very cold day, and were then slaughtered in the following manner:

“They were lined up and then pushed out individually and stabbed in the back with a bayonet. Several partisans then stabbed the wounded with their bayonets. After each individual killing, the bodies were thrown to one side, and the next one was killed. The prisoners were taken to the place of execution bare-footed and dressed only in a shirt and underwear. I myself stabbed them several times.”

Technical Administrative Officer 2nd Rank Kalepchenko, head of the burial detail of the 1260th Infantry Regiment of the 380th Soviet Infantry Division, testified to having buried 40 German soldiers at Griva in mid-March 1942, all of whom showed signs of severe mutilation.32 All these examples, selected from among innumerable others, can, of course, only provide a general idea. Information relating to the Soviet murder of prisoners of war often reached the Germans only by accident. For example, that a German “transport of wounded soldiers had been captured by the Russians near Toropec, and that all the wounded had been shot or horribly stabbed” during the winter of 1941-1942 only became known to the Germans at a later time.

It has already been stated that the mistreatment of prisoners of war for which the Stalin regime was responsible was not universally understood by the Soviets either, and was sometimes the matter of objections that were at least partly politically motivated. In Uspenovka on March 1, 1942, Efrosinia Mikhailova was an eyewitness to the consultation between a Soviet Major, a First Lieutenant, and a Commissar in her house as to what to do with eight German prisoners of war. When even the commissar advised further transport of the prisoners, he was overruled by the Major who said: “But you know Stalin’s order.” The eight German prisoners of war were thereupon taken out behind the house and shot. At Komary (Sevastopol) in November 1941, a Soviet platoon leader shouted at a Soviet soldier, Demshenko, who wanted to help a wounded soldier: “Leave the German devil alone, he will be shot.” Demshenko was only able to delay the shooting temporarily by saying: “The poor wounded fellow can’t help it, it’s our humanitarian duty to bandage his wounds.”

It was not, however, humanitarian considerations that finally led to a new interpretation of Stalin’s Order of November 6, 1941, but rather interest on the part of the command agencies, an interest that still existed during this phase of the war, as before, in obtaining enemy intelligence through prisoner of war interrogations. This was accompanied by an even more compelling interest in furthering the disintegration of the German army. After all, it was obvious that if German soldiers knew that they were going to be shot or mutilated after falling into Soviet captivity, the result would be a stiffening of German resistance. On November 6, 1941, Stalin left no doubt in the minds of the Red Army that all Germans invaders of the Soviet territory were to be “exterminated to the last man,” and his words were interpreted accordingly. On February 23, 1942, Order № 55 was issued by Stalin on the founding anniversary of the Red Army in his capacity as People’s Commissar of Defense. His prior interpretation was now suddenly construed to mean something entirely different. Stalin now claimed, in particular, that the assumption that the Red Army would “fail to take German prisoners due to hatred for everything German...“ was a “stupid lie and a foolish slander” against the Red Army, which was said to be imbued with feelings of respect for other peoples and races—a truly shameless allegation in view of the hate propaganda being propagated by Stalin himself on the Soviet side. Nevertheless, it was unmistakable what Stalin’s words contained in Order № 55 meant:

‘'The Red Army captures German soldiers and officers and spares their lives if they surrender. The Red Army annihilates German soldiers and officers if they refuse to lay down their weapons...”

The Commander-in-Chief of the West Front, General of the Army Zhukov, who, on December 14, 1941, together with Bulganin, a Member of his Military Council, had called upon his troops to “take cruel revenge” and not to permit a single “Hitlerite bandit” to escape alive, now felt himself compelled to make an about-face. In an order directed to the “Commanding Officers and Members of the Military Councils,” Zhukov, together with Member of the Military Council Khokhlov, in regard to the Order of Stalin № 55, now prohibited “all shooting of prisoners... no matter who they are.” He suddenly made the allegation that “Comrade Stalin has never mentioned the shooting of enemy soldiers if they lay down their weapons, allow themselves to be taken prisoner, or voluntarily desert to us.” According to an order of Army Commissar 2nd Rank Kuznetsov of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, German troops were to be exposed to a heavy propaganda barrage designed to convince them that the Red Army “feels no racial hatred against the German people, and does not have the idiotic intention to destroy the German people and German Reich.” Consequently, German soldiers and officers who surrendered would be taken prisoner and the Red Army would guarantee their lives.

The mere fact that the anti-German hate propaganda disseminated by Ehrenburg and others continued to rage without restraint reveals the deception. Stalin personally used ambiguous language in his order of the day of May 1, 1942, speaking of the duty to exterminate the “German” invaders— not “fascist” invaders—”to the last man, unless they lay down their weapons”. Order of Stalin № 130, also disseminated among the units of the Red Army in 1942, called for irreconcilable hatred from Soviet soldiers. The Germans had received information relating to an alleged Stalin “secret order” to take no more individual German prisoners but rather, only in groups, on the grounds of practicality. Soldiers offering resistance to the last, aviators, and so-called “fascists,” were also to be shot, as revealed by many reports that, in fact, mention the shooting of officers, National Socialist party members, or prisoners of war expressing “fascist” ideas. This was a clear counterpart to the shooting of commissars and political leaders partly practiced by the Germans until the spring of 1942.

The Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle fur Verletzungen des Völkerrechts (Armed Forces Department of Inquiry for Violations of International Law) of the German High Command of die Wehrmacht, which evaluated the relevant material, considered the Soviet “change of course” initiated since February 23, 1942, to be a pure propaganda measure directed, in any case, at foreign countries. They observed, in September 1942:

“an incessant series of brutal violations of international law, not decreasing in the slightest degree. The methods and systems of Russian actions have remained the same from the beginning of the campaign against Russia until September 1942.”

In fact, the mistreatment of prisoners continued, as will be seen from a number of examples.

Thirty-eight bodies of German soldiers, found chained together after the end of the winter frost near Promenaja, showing “signs of the crudest torture” inflicted to their heads, may have been murdered even before February 23, 1942. According to the report of the 6th Panzer Division to the High Command of the 9th Army of April 29, 1942:

“For example, their eyes had been gouged out, the tips of their noses cut off, and their tongues tom out. Others had their jaws and limbs smashed, probably with rifle butts, after which they were finally killed by pistol shots. A few of them were completely naked, others again wore only a few items of clothing. There were also clear indications of strangulation.”

After February 23, 1942, an isolated case is reported in which a culprit, platoon leader Second Lieutenant Kudriavtsev of the 1264th Infantry Regiment of the 17th Guards Infantry Division, was handed over to a Soviet court martial for murdering four German prisoners of war, but only because his actions prevented the gathering of enemy intelligence. Otherwise, Order of Stalin № 55 remained broadly disregarded.

First Lieutenant Shevanov, a Battalion Commander in the 1129th Infantry Regiment of the 337th Infantry Division, stated in evidence during his military court deposition that the leader of the Infantry Regiment, Major Ashkinaze, had ordered a severely wounded non-commissioned officer shot, and that Regimental Commissar Kondratev had ordered two wounded Germans shot at Glasunovka between March 14-17, 1942. He was said to have learned from First Lieutenant Shoftyak, the leader of the Infantry Platoon of the Special Department of the NKVD of the Division, that all officers and severely wounded Germans and Finns were, on principle, to be shot. First Lieutenant Nishelsky, Company Chief in the 3rd Battalion of the 15th Infantry Brigade, testified on July 8, 1942, that the Brigade Commander of the 15th Infantry Brigade, Balabukha, had issued him an order to “gouge out the eyes of German soldiers,” an order that Nishelsky personally considered a “shame and a disgrace,” and that he had therefore not forwarded. Sergeant Yurchenko of the 764th Infantry Regiment of the 393rd Infantry Division reported under interrogation on July 20, 1942, that his Battalion Commander, Captain Bursky, had by his own hand shot five wounded German soldiers with a pistol behind the hospital in Chemoglasovska near Kharkov. In Besabetovka in July 1942, two mass graves were discovered of German soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Regiment who, according to the doctor of forensic medicine, Medical Major Dr.Panning of the Army Medical Inspectorate, had either been killed by shots to the back of the neck, or who had been tortured to death, like the Commander of the 1st Battalion, Major Schönberg. According to testimony of Red Army member S.F. of September 26, 1942, Commissar Andropov of the 851st Infantry Regiment, before an attack, described another commissar as a “brilliant example” because he killed 150 Italian prisoners of war near Serafimovichi. In July 1942, at Aleevka, between Lozovaja and Kharkov, First Lieutenant Sutyagin was an eyewitness to the shooting of forty-six German prisoners of war, including four officers, who had not been interrogated and were forced to dig their own graves. The order for the executions was issued by the Commander of the 123rd Infantry Regiment of the 22nd Infantry Division, Major Kulikov, and Regimental Commissar Otmikhalsky. When nearby Soviet officers gave voice to their disgust, they were accused of treason and threatened with being shot by Regimental Commissa Otmikhalsky.

The circumstances surrounding the mass murders near Grishino, Postyshevo and Krasnoarmejeskoe have been unequivocally elucidated. Here, over 600 members of the Wehrmacht and allied armies as well as members of the army entourage, including Red Cross nurses and female communication assistants, were either shot or horribly butchered in the days after Stalingrad, between February 11 and 18, 1943. According to incomplete data, it was possible to identify the following persons in particular: 406 German, 89 Italian, 9 Romanian, 4 Hungarian, and 8 Ukrainian soldiers; 58 members of the Organization Todt; 15 railway workers; and 7 German civilian workers. The investigation of the occurrence began immediately after recapture of the territory by the German 7th Panzer Division on February 18, 1943. The record of a subsequent military court legal investigation reads in part: “All the bodies were naked...almost all the bodies had been mutilated... many bodies had had their noses and ears cut off. Other bodies had had their sexual organs cut off and stuck in their mouths.” “Truly animalistic” attempts had also been made “to cut off the breasts” of the Red Cross nurses. The chief of an anti-aircraft battery of the 14th Guards Armored Brigade, Second Lieutenant Sorokin, named as responsible persons for this massacre, among others: the Political Department of the 4th Guards Armored Corps, under Major General Poluboyarov, and its subordinate 14th Guards Armored Brigade, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Shibankov, who apparently had been killed some time before.

The unanimous testimonies of prisoners of war, in addition to captured documents and radio conversations intercepted by the Germans, therefore leave no doubt that prisoners of war continued to be murdered in 1942-1943 as before. It must, furthermore, be noted that it was only possible to discover and investigate crimes such as those of Feodosija, Grishino, Krasnoarmejskoe, and other places when German troops managed to recapture the scenes of such massacres, which became more and more rare with the progress of war. The dehumanization evoked in the Red Army as a result of Soviet war propaganda is further illustrated by two reports. For example, in the 875th Infantry Regiment of the 158th Infantry Division, prisoners of war were murdered on a daily basis with the personal participation of the Chief of Staff, Major Borisov, and other officers. Sina Krasavina, a female medical auxiliary in the (above mentioned) regiment, admitted to personally murdering a German prisoner of war in March 1943 at the order of the Chief of the Special Department of the NKVD, Samarin, an act for which she was decorated with the Order of the Red Flag. In the region of another division, according to one eyewitness, able-bodied German wounded were led in groups to a ravine in October 1943,

“where the bodies of men shot previously lay in rows; they were shot with machine guns and machine pistols. I saw the shooting of two such groups... In the valley, I saw at the place of execution approximately two hundred corpses of persons already shot.”

The reaction of the German Wehrmacht to the uninterrupted series of murders of German soldiers must now be examined. It has already been mentioned that the High Command of the Wehrmacht prohibited all reprisals as early as July 1941 on the grounds that “reprisals would fail because of the mentality of the Russians, thus unnecessarily contributing to the bitterness of the war.” The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, was also of the opinion that reprisals would be ineffective in regard to the Soviet Union in contrast to the Western powers, and would, furthermore, have a negative influence upon the abstractly favorable prospects for German front-line propaganda where the Red Army was concerned. An order to this effect was issued to all divisions of the German Army of the East, without regard to “serious violations of international law by the Russians.” At the same time, on July 1, 1941, a decision of the “Führer and Supreme Commander” was issued to treat the wives of all “officers and commissars,” and all Soviet women, “carrying weapons in accordance with orders as prisoners of war when found in uniform.” Whereas, if captured in civilian clothing, they were to lose all protection under international law and be treated as partisans.

On July 5, 1941, the Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Army, Field Marshal von Reichenau, ordered Red Army Major Turta of the 781st Infantry Regiment of the 124th Infantry Division summarily shot because, as stated in the execution order, the division had since June 22, 1941, “deliberately mistreated, tortured, mutilated, and murdered German soldiers of all ranks following capture, whether wounded or not, in a manner so cruel and bestial as to be hitherto inconceivable.” These bestialities were done “under the very eyes of, and with the toleration of, officers fully and entirely responsible for the crimes of their subordinates.” Although von Reichenau continued to grant Soviet soldiers ordinary treatment according to the customs relating to the treatment of prisoners of war, he believed himself obligated to administer a “hard and justified atonement” to the officers of the Red Army’s 124th Infantry Division on behalf of his “murdered comrades.” This was, after all, simply an isolated case of reprisal, the victim of which may perhaps have been the person responsible.

Generally, the German command authorities do not appear to have deviated from the provisions of international law in regard to prisoners, even on the eastern front. For example, on July 10, 1941, the battalion doctor of the II Battalion of the 53rd (Motorized) Infantry Regiment reported to the divisional doctor of the 14th Motorized Infantry Division that one officer, eight non-commissioned officers, and sixty-five soldiers of his regiment, some of them wounded, had been captured by the Soviets, and that, as proven by an investigation, all had been murdered “deliberately and according to order” by shooting them in the back of the neck, stabbing them with bayonets, or beating them with rifle butts, at the bridgehead at Dzisna on July 8, 1941. A number of the wounded men showed signs of the “cruelest forms of mutilations.” When the shocked head physician asked his professional superiors for instructions on the proper future treatment of wounded Russians, on the grounds, as he wrote, that “it was difficult for me to continue to act as I would have previously considered it my duty to do, after learning of this criminal attitude on the part of the enemy in relation to our wounded,” he received an order that was characteristic. The Chief of the General Staff of the 3rd Panzer Group, Major General von Hunersdorff, reported, through the battalion doctor on July 13, 1941, that “on the grounds of fundamental considerations, there could be no question of a change in attitude on the part of German soldiers toward enemy wounded.” He simply ordered that there should be no reduction in the quality of care for the fellow German wounded as a result.

When it was proposed to the High Command of the 17th Army that high-ranking officers of the Soviet 6th and 12th Army be shot in reprisal for the murder and mutilation of nineteen German wounded soldiers and two medics in a Red Cross vehicle in August 1941, the army commander, Lieutenant General von Stülpnagel, rejected this idea as well, with quite analogous justification. When German soldiers became enormously embittered after the massacre of Grishino-Krasnoarmejskoe, the Commanding General of the XXXX German Panzer Corps, Lieutenant General Henrici, issued an order of the day on his own initiative on March 3, 1943, warning the troops against permitting themselves to become carried away to the point of engaging in acts of revenge as a result of these occurrences. The order read in part:

'‘We, nevertheless, wish to adhere closely to the soldierly principle that an enemy who has been captured in uniform, who is no longer capable of fighting and is unarmed, belongs in a prisoner of war camp.”

At Nuremberg on March 22, 1946, the President of the International Military Tribunal, Judge Lawrence, rejected an application by defense lawyer Dr. Stahmer for admission into evidence of the White Book of the German Reich Government on “Bolshevik Crimes against the Laws of Humanity and the Laws and Customs of War,” first series, 1941, as evidentiary material for the defense. Lawrence concurred with the application of Soviet Chief Prosecutor General Rudenko, who permitted himself to portray the legal investigation documents collated in the White Book as “inventions” and “forged documents” characteristic of “fascist propaganda,” purely and simply intended to “hide the crimes which were perpetrated by the fascists.” Since the victims of the crimes investigated and analyzed in the White Book consisted solely of German and German-allied soldiers, the International Military Tribunal considered such material “irrelevant” in full accordance with the London Agreement. It is precisely this fact that justifies the presentation of a few of the innumerable documented cases of mistreatment of German prisoners of war who are otherwise consciously and methodically relegated to forgetfulness by the journalistic profession in relation to the German-Soviet war.

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 12

“No Mercy, No Leniency”
Atrocities of the Red Army
upon Entering German Territory

The Soviet Union had disavowed the Hague Conventions on Land Warfare and refused to recognize the Geneva Prisoner of War Conventions. The occupation of the eastern provinces of the German Reich in 1944-1945 was, therefore, carried out by Soviet troops in a spirit of contempt for the international laws of war. The Red Army’s invasion of East Prussia, West Prussia, and Danzig, of Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Silesia, was - everywhere, and in the same manner - accompanied by atrocities that have no equivalent in the modem history of war. The mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians of all ages and both sexes; the mass rape of women, including old women and children, under the most disgusting conditions— repeatedly, and sometimes until death ensued; the deliberate destruction by arson of houses, villages, city districts, and entire cities; the systematic robbery, plundering, and destruction of private and public property; and, finally, the mass deportation of men—and, very often, of women and young people—for slave labor in the Soviet Union (the mothers, as usual, separated from their children, and the families tom apart); were the common characteristics of an event that was in flagrant violation of all the principles regulating the conduct of war.

Murder, the most serious crime, was committed in every conceivable way, in endless variations on a theme. Lines of fleeing refugees were crushed by tanks or blasted to bits; men and women were shot, beaten to death, or stabbed by infantry troops and tank crews leaping down from their tanks, the women often after being raped.2 Civilians were murdered every- where: in private homes, on the street, in public buildings, forester’s houses, barns, and sheds, and were sometimes burned alive. Men attempting to protect their wives and daughters from rape were usually killed, as were women who attempted to defend themselves against rape. There are endless reports of sadistic sexual attacks and murders and sometimes even of the rape of persons already murdered. During the so-called “de-Nazification,” members of the NSDAP and their membership organizations were shot, along with other “fascists,” such as local farming village leaders and, very often, the officials and employees of civil service administrations and, of course, members of the police and all persons wearing the uniforms of the German civil service, regardless of whether they were railway workers, postal employees, members of the fire department, or forestry officials, in addition to members of the Reich Labor service and the Organization Todt. Often killed were the so-called “capitalists,” such as landowners, farmers, shop-owners, and homeowners. Also killed, were all those who could in any way be considered potential "partisans,” such as members of the Hitler Youth, and, very often, the residents of houses in which German soldiers or weapons had been found. The formal basis for all of this was Order № 0016 of the NKVD of January 16, 1945, issued by the People’s Deputy Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Beria. During the deportation of “mobilized Germans”, all those who were unable to keep pace due to exhaustion were beaten to death or shot by the Soviets, while many others died under interrogation from inhuman tortures in NKVD torture chambers. The residents of entire localities—men, women, and children—were sometimes massacred simply because they were German, as illustrated by the examples of Nemmersdorf in 1944 and Metgethen in 1945. There were no established guidelines for the unrestrained activities of the inflamed Soviet soldiery.

In his memoirs, Field Marshal Montgomery, to whom some knowledge of events in the Soviet zone of occupation later penetrated, called the “Russians” (meaning the “Soviets”) “truly uncivilized Asians.” He added: “Their behavior disgusted us, especially in regard to women. In some areas of the Russian zone, there were practically no Germans left. They fled before the assault of the barbarians.” To an American, General Keating, who only knew of circumstances in Berlin, the “unrestrained actions” of the Russians were “similar in many cases to those of Ghenghis Khan.” George F. Kennan once again orally confirmed to the American expert on international law, Alfred M. de Zayas, what he had written in his memoirs: that the Soviets “swept the local population from the face of the earth in a manner which has no equal since the days of the Asiatic hordes.”

The number of prisoners of war murdered in the German eastern provinces alone will never be known. Concerning the number of civilian victims, the investigations of the German Federal Ministry for Victims of Expulsion and the German Federal Archives, based on resident population statistics, provide at least an approximate idea, although their estimates are very conservative and only include the victims of immediate acts of violence. According to these estimates, 120,000 men, women and children were murdered, most of them by Soviet soldiers, while 100,000-200,000 more perished in various prisons and camps. More than 250,000 others died during the deportations—which began on Februaiy 3, 1945—and in Soviet work camps as “reparations deportees.” Many more died from the inhumane living conditions under the Soviet military administration of the following occupation period—90,000 in Königsberg alone. There was also an extremely high proportion of persons who put an end to their own lives out of desperation. This does not include the tremendous losses in human life caused by immediate acts of violence in the prisons, concentration camps, and extermination camps of Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, such as the 43,000 civilians—at a minimum—who died of hunger or epidemics in the NKVD concentration camps of the Soviet occupation troops.

As for conditions in Bohemia and Moravia in particular, one need only quote the proclamation broadcast over British radio on November 3, 1944, by the commander of the Czech armed forces in exile, General Ingr:

“When our day comes, the entire nation will follow the old war cry of the Hussites: Strike them, kill them, leave no one alive! Everyone should start looking for the best possible weapon with which to hit the Germans as hard as possible, right now. If there are no firearms available, some other weapon should be prepared and hidden—one that cuts, stabs, or hits.”

In the spirit of this and other, similar proclamations, to cite just one example, the Commander of the 3rd Infantry Brigade of the 1st Czechoslovakian Army Corps in the Soviet Union, General Klapalek, who left London to join with the Soviets, was jointly responsible for the mass murder of 763 German civilians at Postelberg (Postoloprty) in June 1945. Czech military personnel were also involved in the massacre at Aussig (Usti nad Labem) on July 31, 1945, where up to 2,000 German civilians were murdered following a provocative explosion incited by the Benesh government, under circumstances of horror that exceed the normal powers of imagination. A total of up to 270,000 defenseless Germans were murdered in Czechoslovakia (CSR) beginning in May 1945, some in an animalistic manner. In general, an estimated total number of 2.2 million “unsolved cases” were reported in the so-called “Expulsion areas,” most of which, upon broader interpretation of the term, must be viewed as “crime victims,” i.e., the victims of anti-German genocide.

The present exposition is primarily concerned with the zone of responsibility of the Red Army, which had already committed serious crimes against the civilian population in Yugoslavia in 1944. It will be seen that Stalin, the Politburo, the Members of the State Defense Committee, the political and military leadership of the Red Army, the subordinate army and unit leaders, and their subordinate officers of all ranks, bear immediate responsibility for everything that occurred. The commanders and other officers are especially responsible, since they not only failed to restrain their troops from committing acts that were criminal under international law, but, on the contrary, incited them to commit such crimes, tolerated and encouraged such acts of violence, and, to a great extent, even participating in them. Particular responsibility falls upon the Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd White Russian Front, General of the Army Chernyakhovsky, and of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, and their Military Councils, the full texts or extracts of whose criminal orders have been found. Similar orders issued by the Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd White Russian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Rokossovsky, and the Commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Konev, have apparently not been found, but the conditions in their zones of responsibility were in no way different.

Fundamentally, the above mentioned men were, like Chernyakhovsky and Zhukov, as well as the Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Malinovsky, responsible in each case for the deportation of peaceful residents for slave labor in the Soviet Union, a crime under international law similar to that for which Alfred Rosenberg and Fritz Sauckel were sentenced to death, and Albert Speer to twenty years imprisonment, by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The deportation of all able-bodied ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia to compulsory labor in the Soviet Union had been ordered by Directive № 7161 of the State Defense Committee signed by Stalin as early as December 16, 1944. According to the implementation order issued (on the basis of the above directive) by Marshal of the Soviet Union Malinovsky, all able-bodied ethnic German men aged 17-45, and all able-bodied ethnic German women aged 18-30, on the territory of Hungary and Romania (Transsylvania), were ordered arrested for this sole purpose. On February 3, 1945, the State Defense Committee, by Directive № 7467, also ordered the mass deportation of German men and women from the territory of the Reich itself. In addition, all able-bodied Reich Germans aged 17-50 were now to be arrested, organized in labor battalions, and deported to the Soviet Union for slave labor. The document, signed by Stalin in collaboration with Colonel General of the NKVD Serov and the Deputy of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Beria, instructed the Commander-in-Chief of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, and his Military Council, “to take consistent measures” in this regard.

Professor Semiryaga who held a position of responsibility in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) for five years, wrote:

“For two and a half months, transport trains traveled eastward, loaded with tens of thousands of German women and old people (since the entire population of young males was at the front).”

In reality, minors, and even children aged 12-13, were also deported under terrible conditions resulting in innumerable fatalities, often during transport. Professor Semiryaga does not conceal his awareness of the fact that “Soviet military authorities in all the countries liberated by the Russian Army” had undertaken the “illegal deportation” of peaceful German civilians. Through their collaboration with Stalin’s order, which was “in fact, criminal,” the leadership of the Red Army had become guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including those in the sense of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

As far as military discipline was concerned, the Red Army was in fact experiencing an increasingly rapid degeneration into savagery even in 1944. During the reincorporation of former Soviet territories, such as the Ukraine, but also in Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, excesses and acts of violence against the local population reached such proportions that the Soviet Command authorities were compelled to take severe measures. Colonel General Petrov, Army Commander of the 4th Ukrainian Front, in Order № 074 of June 8, 1944, denounced the “disgraceful excesses” by members of the Army of his Front in the Soviet Territory of the Crimea, excesses “that even included the armed robbery and murder of local residents.” He referred to the guilty soldiers, including high-ranking officers, as “bandits,” “rogues,” and “armed criminals” who, exploiting “the helplessness of the population,” had tarnished the honor of the Red Army. Directive № 0017 from the Chief of the Political Administration of the 1st Ukrainian Front, Shatilov, of April 6, 1944, which is quite similar, mentions “plundering,” “murders,” “terrorist attacks,” “marauders having grown bold,” and “criminals” from “many units and agencies,” and other crimes committed against the populations of the western regions of the Ukraine, i.e, eastern Poland, very often with the tolerance of political officials. The tenseness of the situation in Poland is revealed by the diary of an officer in the 2nd Guards Artillery Division of the 5th Artillery Corps of the 1st Baltic Front, Yuri Uspensky, who was later killed. “Amongst ourselves, we speak of the Poles with great hostility,” this highly meditative officer writes in regard to the conditions in Vilna: “The soldiers even say that the Poles must all be hanged, adding the following cultural platitude: ‘The Polish people, historically, are totally unfit to live.’”

Of course, a single occurrence, such as the “Violation of International Law” reported on November 1, 1944, by the Chief of Staff of the German 16th Army, cannot be generalized in regard to the non-German region; but it, nevertheless, illustrates the crimes of which some Soviet soldiers had already become quite capable. On September 20, 1944, behind the Soviet lines, in a small forest belonging to the farm-hand Araji in the municipality of Grünhof, not far from Mitau (Latvia), at about 10 o’clock in the morning, three Latvian soldiers in the German army became aware of “inhuman screaming, moaning, and death-rattles.” They observed the following from a hiding place:

“The screams came from a woman, apparently twenty to thirty years old, completely naked, fastened to a wooden support, apparently in a kind of crucifixion, her back upward, her face turned downward toward the under support, which was leaning up against a tree at an angle of 45 degrees. The body of the woman was inclined diagonally to the right, on top of this wooden support, the arms stretched outward sideways and apparently fastened, the palms of the hands turned upward, the legs together, reaching to the ground. I consider it possible that the body was held in place by the nails driven through the plank-like under-support, and may perhaps even have been held up by them. Two to four Soviet soldiers, recognizable from a distance only as uniformed soldiers of unknown rank, went walking around from time to time, without stopping, but, nevertheless, apparently gloating at the woman’s suffering, the real cause of which could not be discerned. They walked around mostly in groups of two, at a distance of 20 meters from the woman, walking around her, as far as I could tell, but otherwise making no other movement, which led me to assume that tortures of this kind are not at all unusual amongst them. We all three heard the cries for about two hours. The cries continued for the most part without interruption and grew mule toward the end of this time, apparently due to exhaustion on the part of the woman. The cries were so inhuman, that one of us, whose family had been unable to flee from the Soviets, lost control over his nerves for a while, although we were all three old veterans of the former Latvian army. We conclude that the woman’s sufferings must have been quite inhuman.”

It proved impossible to provide any assistance.
In the non-German countries, the Soviet command authorities, though often in vain, continued to intervene occasionally against excesses and plundering by members of the Red Army. Upon entering the territory of the German Reich, however, all inhibition was lost. Thus, the Corps Commander of the 43rd Infantry Corps, Major General Andreev, threatened his soldiers in Poland with court martial in January of 1945 in the event of excesses, then simultaneously continued: “But as soon as we get to Germany, I will not waste one word over such things.” The basic attitude of the Red Army soldiers after crossing the Reich border was characterized by the hate propaganda of I. Ehrenburg, A.N. Tolstoy, E.V. Tarle, M.A. Sholokhov, K.M. Simonov, A.A. Fadeev and many others who deserve to be mentioned here. On August 24, 1944, Ehrenburg, who was the spokesman for the inciters, wrote:

“On the German borders let us once again repeat the holy oath to forget nothing ... we say this with the calm of a long ripening and invincible hatred, we say this at the border of the enemy: ‘Woe to thee, Germany!’”

“We will kill,” was Ehrenburg’s unmistakable proclamation to the Red Army soldiers in the front newspaper “Unichtozhim Vraga” (We Will Exterminate the Enemy) on September 17, 1944.25 “We will put an end to Germany,” he wrote on November 16, 1944. “It is not enough to defeat Germany. Germany must be extinguished.” “There can be no mercy, no leniency given,” he repeated on February 8, 1945. “The only historical mission, as I see it,” Ehrenburg wrote on March 3, 1945, “consists, modestly and honorably speaking, in reducing the German population.”

The articles and proclamations of Ehrenburg and other inciters, disseminated in “Pravda”, “Izvestia”, “Krasnaya Zvezda”, “Krasnoarmejskaja Pravda” and in the newspapers on the frontline, were hammered into the minds of the troops and recalled into awareness again and again by the numerous cadres of the political bodies, all the more fiercely before attacking. In the German cities, there were signs with “Red Army soldier, you stand on Ger- man soil—the hour of vengeance has come! Tremble, cursed Germany! We will pass through you with fire and sword and, in your heart, stab to death the last German who has trodden Russian soil,” wrote the frontline newspaper “Boevaja Trevoga” (Combat Alarm) on October 20, 1944. However, it was not true, as it is continually claimed in Soviet propaganda even today, that Soviet soldiers were filled with infernal hate feelings and desire for vengeance from the outset. Rather, such feelings first had to be systematically inculcated in them by means of deliberate and cold calculation. Soviet soldiers were incited with a quite definite intention. Since Stalin and the military and political leadership of the Red Army were quite well aware of the often deficient “Soviet patriotism” and increasing war weariness of the Soviet soldiers, and since one could not appeal to higher human sentiment, it was necessary to arouse the baser instincts in order to achieve a maximum degree of combat effort. The History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union makes no secret about it when it states, among other things, “that one cannot defeat an enemy unless one hates him with all one’s soul.” For this reason, it was said to be one of the most important tasks of the political work of commanders and political workers to inculcate in Soviet soldiers an “ardent hatred of the fascist occupiers.” For this purpose even the most reprehensible methods were justified.

The well-known Germanic scholar and former political officer of Jewish descent, Major Kopelev, a witness of many crimes, in his military memoirs “To Keep for All Time!”, quotes his superior, the Chief of the 7th Department of the Political Administration of the 50th Army, Lieutenant Colonel Sabashtansky, as saying:

“What can one do to make the soldiers maintain their joy in fighting? Firstly, he must hate the enemy like the plague; he must wish to exterminate him root and branch. And secondly, to keep him from losing his will to fight, so that he knows why he is jumping out of the trench and crawling through mine fields toward machine-gun fire, he must know: He is coming to Germany, and everything will belong to him—property, women, everything! Do anything you want! Hit them so that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren may still tremble! ...by far, not everyone kills children ... but now that you mentioned it: Let those who kill in blind, passionate, boiling rage, also kill little Fritzs....”

This was not the attitude of soldiers, but of robbers and murderers. Kopelev attempted in vain to talk his comrades into some feelings of conscience:

“...and all of us—generals and officers—are acting according to Ehrenburg’s formula... just imagine, what is to become of our soldiers, after pouncing upon a woman by the dozens? After raping schoolgirls, murdering old women? ...They will turn into hundreds of thousands of criminals, they will be the criminals of the future, cruel and bold, but demanding the glory due to heroes.”

Denounced by his own comrades, Kopelev was arrested and spent years in the concentration camps of the GULag for slandering the Red Army and favoring the Germans.

The invasion of Germany by Soviet troops was preceded by a campaign of “systematic, propagandistic incitement,” “in which hatred of everything German” was blown into a flame “in a manner previously inconceivable,” as the Chief of the Foreign Armies East Branch of the General Staff of the German Army, Major General Gehlen, stated after an analysis of captured Soviet documents on February 22, and March 23, 1945. However, it was not just the agitation of the political apparatus that incited Soviet soldiers to take cruel revenge against the Germans. The military command authorities were no less zealous. Orders of the day were also issued by the Staffs of the Fronts and Armies, the contents of which were generally interpreted and intended as instigation to “murder and robbery.” In any case, the average soldier in the Red Army was left in no doubt that he would be given a free hand in Germany, and would be allowed to do as he liked with the civilian population and their property. Stalin’s permission to send army postal service packages and captured properly (generals: 16 kilograms (35 lbs.); officers: 10 kilograms (22 lbs.); non-commissioned officers and lower-ranking soldiers: 5 kilograms (11 lbs.)) to the Soviet Union, issued orally and in writing in October 1944 for the first time, and reaffirmed by Major Koshalov of the Staff of the 3rd Ukrainian Front in January of 1945, must have aroused the criminal instincts of unstable persons and, as shown by army postal service letters and the testimonies of prisoner of war, was actually understood to mean that “plundering was expressly permitted by the supreme leadership.

The supreme leadership, as illustrated by the following, continued to set a bad example. Even the Hero of the Soviet Union (the highest military decoration) Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, the former Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army who had accepted the capitulation of the German Wehrmacht in Berlin-Karlshorst on May 8, 1945, as Commander- in-Chief of the 1st White Russian Front, was no exception to this rule. In late August 1946, long after Zhukov had exchanged his position as Soviet Representative on the Allied Control Council and Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Occupation Troops in Germany for that of Commander of the Troops in the Military District of Odessa, Deputy Defense Minister Bulganin, reported in a letter to Stalin that the customs authorities had stopped seven railway carriages with “a total of eighty-five boxes of furniture from the firm ‘Albin Mai’ in Germany,” being transported to Odessa for Zhukov’s personal use. In a later report to Stalin of January 1948, Colonel General of the Ministry of State Security Abakumov stated that a “secret search” of Zhukov’s Moscow dwelling and dacha had revealed large quantities of looted property. The following items, among others, were inventoried in particular: 24 gold watches, 15 gold necklaces with pendants, various gold rings and other jewelry, 4,000 meters of wool and silk material, more than 300 sable, fox, and Persian lamb furs, 44 valuable carpets and tapestries, some of them from Potsdam and other castles, 55 very valuable paintings as well as chests with porcelain dishes, 2 boxes of silverware, and 20 hunting rifles. Zhukov admitted his plundering in a letter to Member of the Politburo Zhdanov on January 12, 1948, in conclusion swearing “an oath of honor as a Bolshevik” “that similar acts of foolishness and mistakes will not happen again.” He only barely escaped arrest.

In view of the actions of the Commander-in-Chief, it is not surprising that even the Deputy General Director of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, Colonel General of the NKVD Serov, and other high State Security officials, committed “the most serious crimes” in Germany, “i.e., robbery and pillaging,” so Professor Semiryaga. According to the testimony of the Chief of the Operational Sector in Berlin, Major General Sidnev (Serov’s “right hand man”), Serov, himself an organizer of international mass terror, shuttled his plane back and forth between Berlin and Moscow to transport “large quantities of furs, carpets, paintings, and other valuables” to his dwelling while evading border controls. “With similar freight and loaded with automobiles,” it was stated, “he even sent railway cars.” When Sidnev’s agencies found “approximately 100 sacks with 80 million Reichsmarks” in the cellars of the Reichsbank, “Serov personally decided not to surrender it to the Soviet State bank. He appropriated part of the money for himself, and used the rest of it to bribe useful persons.” Major General Sidnev himself, General Bezhanov, Chief of the Operational Group in Thuringia, from whom Theodor Plievier in the “Berlin” volume of his trilogy got his characterization of Serov as cool and deliberate, and General Klepov, Chief of the Operational Group in Saxony, also committed similar crimes of plundering and pillaging.

An order of the day issued to the troops of the 3rd White Russian Front by the Commander-in-Chief, General of the Army Chernyakhovsky, Member of the Military Council, Major General Khokhlov, and Chief of the Political Administration, Major General Razbitsev, appealed to the “basest instincts of the broad masses of the Red Army” before entering the territory of East Prussia in October 1944. Crossing the border of the Reich now served as an opportunity to incite the Soviet soldiers with the factually inaccurate allegation that German soldiers had “murdered Russian children, raped wives, brides, and sisters, [and] shot mothers and fathers.” In his order of the day, the Military Council of the 3rd White Russian Front stated:

“The torments of the murder victims, the moaning of persons buried alive, the unquenchable tears of the mothers, call out to you for merciless revenge... May the bloodthirsty hated enemy who has brought us so much suffering and torment, tremble and drown in the streams of his own black blood.”

Since, as this shows, the leading command authorities had depicted acts of revenge as a “holy duty,” it is not surprising that subordinate command agencies “not only tolerated the senseless cruelty and destruction, but rather encouraged the subordinate units in such actions.” Thus, for example, an order of the Divisional Commander, Colonel Eliseev, to the 1st Battalion of the 557th Infantry Regiment of the 153rd Infantry Division in early October 1944, announced the following:

“We are marching into East Prussia. Soldiers and officers of the Red Army will be permitted the following: 1.To exterminate any living German. 2.To plunder property. 3.To rape women. 4.To commit arson. 5.There will be no arrests of soldiers of the ROA [Russian Liberation Army]. Every bullet for them is wasted. They will be beaten to death or trampled under-foot.”

Similarly, the Commander of the 352nd Infantry Division also informed the Red Army in a speech that they would now have an opportunity “to revenge themselves on the Germans.”

According to German investigations, the following persons—the “actual chief guilty parties in spirit and deed”—were “to the fullest extent” responsible for the atrocities committed in East Prussia in the Goldap district, as early as the fall of 1944: the Commander-in-Chief of the 31st Army, Colonel General Glagolev, and the Members of his Military Council, Major General Karpenkov, Major General Lakhtarin and Major General Riapasov, and particularly the Commander of the 88th Infantry Division, Colonel Kovtunov, as well as a few other officers mentioned by name. The Commander of the 87th Guards Infantry Division, Major General Tymchik, and the Commander of the 2nd Guards Artillery Division, Colonel Kobtsev, whose units were already notorious “for their excesses and robbery sprees” on Soviet soil, were named as responsible for shootings, rapes, and senseless destruction in the Memel region, as well as in Heydekrug. Of course, these names which were documented only by chance are only a few from the long list of responsible persons.

The “excesses and bestial atrocities” committed in the fall of 1944 in East Prussia were, therefore, in no way isolated phenomena; on the contrary, these events were repeated throughout the German eastern provinces on a gigantic scale after the beginning of the Soviet winter offensive on January 13, 1945. No one would reproach an army commander or squad leader who, in the orders of the day always issued to soldiers before decisive battles, calls upon his troops to show courage and stubborn determination in order to win victory; such orders are always very verbose in this sense. But when, as it so happened, the Commander-in-Chief of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov, appealed to the basest feelings of hatred and revenge, when he incited his troops to commit acts of violence against the civilian population—almost openly, in full awareness of how his words would be interpreted by the political organizations—he was acting, not least of all, in violation of the traditions of the Russian army. A model of Russian military virtues like the Czarist Russian Field Marshal Count Suvorov, to whom Soviet Marshal Zhukov sometimes compared himself without justification, commanded his troops in a spirit of generosity and mercy toward the defenseless and the defeated on all occasions, reminding his troops of soldierly virtues at every opportunity like, for example, at Warsaw in 1794.

In contrast to this, Zhukov, who had already demanded the indiscriminate killing of all German prisoners of war on December 14, 1941, slandering them as “Hitlerite bandits,” issued an order of the day before the beginning of the winter offensive in January 1945, also signed by the Members of the Military Council of the 1st White Russian Front, Lieutenant General Telegin, Colonel General of the Artillery Kazakov, Colonel General of the Air Force Rudenko, and the Chief of the Front Staff, Colonel General Malinin. This order of the day, addressed “to the soldiers, non-commissioned officers, officers, and generals of the units of the 1st White Russian Front,” and referring to the “historical task” set “by our beloved Stalin... to finish off the fascist beast in his own lair,” stated among other things:

“The time has come to reckon with the German-fascist rascals. Great and burning is our hatred! We have not forgotten the torments and suffering visited upon our people by the Hitlerite cannibals. We have not forgotten our burned cities and villages. We are thinking of our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our wives and children, who were tortured to death by the Germans. We will revenge ourselves for those burned in the devil’s ovens, for those suffocated in the gas chambers, for those shot and martyred. We will take cruel vengeance for everything. We are going to Germany, and behind us lie Stalingrad, the Ukraine, and White Russia. We are walking through the ashes of our cities and villages, and the bloody traces of our Soviet people, tortured to death and torn apart by the fascist beast. Woe to the land of the murderers! ... the fascist robbers must pay for the death, for the blood of our Soviet people, with multiple quantities of their low-down black blood...this time, we will crush the German brood once and for all!”

Taken in the same way was General of the Army Chernyakhovsky’s proclamation to the troops of the 3rd White Russian Front on January 12, 1945:

“There shall be no mercy—not for anyone, just as no mercy was shown to us... there is no need to ask the soldiers of the Red Army to be merciful. They are burning with hatred and thirsting for revenge. The land of the fascists must be made a desert, like our land, which they have devastated. The fascists must die, as our soldiers have died.”

The term “fascist” was always understood to refer to the Germans generally.

According to evidence established by the High Command of the German Army in the theater of various Soviet Armies, the immediate consequence of these proclamations, disseminated and commented upon by the political apparatus in accordance with all the rules of agitation and propaganda, was a command to “shoot or beat to death all captured German soldiers (including the wounded).” Also, in violation of international law was the order that “members of the Volkssturm were to be treated, not as members of a military unit, but rather as partisans, and, therefore, shot.” German radio-reconnaissance intercepted again and again radio messages from various zones of the front that indisputably revealed the reality of such murders of prisoners of war.

On January 27, 1945, the following order was intercepted being sent to an unknown unit: “Don’t take any prisoners, taking prisoners cannot be tolerated, every enemy soldier must be killed.” On February 4, 1945, a report was intercepted from the region of Zakopane (4th Ukrainian Front): “I took 35 prisoners, including two First Lieutenants; they have all been shot.” A unit from the 2nd White Russian Front sent this radio message on January 20, 1945: “I only know that we took 15 prisoners. But none of them arrived; they were all shot on the way.” A unit of the 70th Army from the same Front reported on February 9, 1945: “We only took 30 prisoners today... we slew them, just like all the others.” The following order was issued in the region of the 39th Army of the 3rd White Russian Front on February 13, 1945, from Mandeln near Königsberg: When the Germans “arrive in large groups, you are to take no prisoners.” Also, in the region of the same Front, the 331st Infantry Division reported to its corps staff from the Heilsberg-Landsberg district on January 30, 1945: “I took 22 prisoners, including a battalion commander. I killed the rest...” And on February 2, 1945: “Have taken prisoners, 14 of them. I sent one of them to you, and shot 13.” The 129th (or else the 269th) Infantry Division of the 3rd Army also reported to the superior staff from the region of Mehlsack an increase in the number of murders of prisoners on February 19, 1945. This division was ordered to shoot all prisoners of war: “Exterminate them, even when you capture them alive.”

The manner in which the proclamation of the command authorities was in fact put into effect may be illustrated by the following individual example. The Commander of the 72nd Infantry Division, Major General Yastrebov, guaranteed full freedom of action to every Red Army soldier before entering the territory of the German Reich, while simultaneously issuing an order to shoot all prisoners. This was once again expressly confirmed by the Regimental Commander of the 14th Infantry Regiment of this Division, Lieutenant Colonel Korolev. The commander of the 3rd Battalion, First Lieutenant Vasilev, having informed his subordinates to this effect, the very same day, raped a young girl on January 29, 1945, in Stöblau near Krappitz while threatening to shoot the despairing mother, and finally ordered six or seven prisoners of war shot. Units of the 72nd Infantry Division murdered eighteen residents, including an infant, alone in Burgwasser near Krappitz on the same day. In Krappitz, the units murdered twelve juvenile Luftwaffe orderlies, together with their corporal, by shooting them in the back of the neck. After recapturing the territory, German troops discovered “numerous murdered German soldiers and civilians.”

The effects of hate propaganda upon the Red Army were faithfully echoed in captured Red Army postal service letters, a few of which will be quoted here. All these letters were written by members of the motorized units of Army Postal Service Number 20739 in East Prussia in January-February 1945. “Every day, we continue to advance further forward through East Prussia,” Smolkin, for example, wrote to his parents in Smolensk: “And we are taking revenge upon the Germans for all the atrocities that they committed against us... We are permitted to do anything we want to the German villains.” On January 29, 1945, an unidentified Soviet soldier wrote to his girlfriend near Kalinin:

“How the heart grows joyful when one drives through a burning German city. We are finally beating the Germans in their own land, in their cursed hideaway. We are taking revenge for everything and our revenge is just. Fire for fire, blood for blood, death for death!”

“The Germans are all trying to escape, they are afraid of our revenge,” says another letter, written by Laptev, in the Tiraspol region on January 30, 1945, “but not everyone succeeds in escaping us. The German mother shall curse the day on which she bore a son. The German women shall now feel the horror of war. They must now experience what they have intended for other peoples.” Such phrases were taken almost word for word from Ehrenburg’s inflammatory articles.

“The civilian population is no longer fleeing,” writes Klimov on January 30, 1945, in the Vladimir region. “What is happening generally is really uncanny.” Ivanishev informed his wife in Tambov on January 31, 1945: “We have occupied almost all of East Prussia. We spend the nights in their houses and drive all the Germans out into the cold... we are taking all kinds of loot, all kinds of beautiful things....” Poletaev wrote to his parents in Alma Ata on February 1, 1945:

“Now we are waging war in the truest sense of the word, smashing the villains in their hideaway in East Prussia... Now our soldiers can also see their burning dwellings, their families wandering about dragging their breed of vipers with them. They still hope to stay alive, but there is no mercy for them.”

On February 1, 1945, the Red Army female soldier Nina wrote to her mother Demidova near Kostroma:

“Among the Germans, there are only old people and children left... There are few young women, and even they are being killed. Really, what is happening here one can neither say nor describe...”

“There are enough German women,” wrote Yefimenko on February 3, 1945, “you don’t need to sweet-talk them, just point your Nagan revolver at them, bid them ‘lie down,’ finish the job, and go away.” A letter to a Captain Kliushin dated the same day states: “We are smoking out the Prussians, and the feathers are flying. Our boys have already ‘tried’ all the German women. There is really a lot of loot.” The letter of one unidentified Soviet soldier puts the monstrosity of hate propaganda in a nutshell: “German women and children who fall into our hands are killed with a shot in the head. That is our revenge for everything they destroyed in our country for two years.”

It is superfluous to attempt to supplement the irrefutable evidential material through the immense quantities of unanimous testimonies of prisoners of war and deserters that merely provide more and more terrible new details of increasingly horrible new atrocities. A very few testimonies are sufficient for purposes of illustration. One eyewitness, for example, Master Sergeant Razygraev of the 358th Infantry Division, stated in evidence:

"The adjutant of the 11 Battalion of the 919th Artillery Regiment, First Lieutenant Pugatschew, took three girls approximately eighteen years of age (including a Pole), dragged them into his room, and raped them one after the other. Afterward, he gave the girls to Red Army men, who severely mistreated them ... and then raped the girls each in turn. One of the girls was shot afterward. The civilian population was considered free game, you could do anything you wanted with them. There was also complete freedom to plunder. The Soviet Jewish propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, is the chief proponent of this method of treating the German population.”

A captured Soviet soldier from the 343rd Infantry Division:

"saw the first murder victims in Sensburg. They were two elderly women. He saw the next murder victims a few kilometers east of Sensburg,.. On the road east of Sensburg, he saw more and more murder victims on the road, including a rape victim about five kilometers from Johannesburg. She lay there with her skirts lifted up, and with the handle of a whip stuck up her vagina. Even though the prisoner says he had seen very many murder victims, he could not indicate a number, such a number would be very hard to estimate. On the road between Sensburg and Johannisburg, he saw new murder victims every kilometer. Very many Soviet soldiers spoke openly of the numbers of civilians they had murdered and, at the same time, how many women they had raped first. Many said that, upon entering German houses, they immediately threw the first woman who came along on the bed and raped her in the presence of the family...the last one had then shot the woman involved.”

Another member of the 343rd Infantry Division, not mentioned by name, attributed such crimes to Stalin’s order that, as his comrades told him on January 31, 1945, in a village near Johannisburg burned by the Russians,

“instructed them that Soviet soldiers in East Prussia could wreak havoc anywhere they wanted. The leadership said they could devastate cities and villages and rape women. If a German girl resisted, they were to rape her while threatening her with a pistol, easily five to six men, one after the other, and then kill her with a pistol shot to the head.”

Even Yuri Uspensky, the above mentioned officer of the 2nd Guards Artillery Division, himself a meditative almost philosophically inclined individual filled with “humanitarian” instincts, long since sick of the war and deploring the victims and destruction, was unable to remain unaffected by the hate propaganda. With some satisfaction, he wrote the following entry in his diary in the burning city of Insterburg on January 24, 1945: “This is the revenge for everything that the Germans have done in our country. Now their cities are being destroyed, and their population is now experiencing the meaning of the word: War!” In Starkenberg, he admitted on January 27, 1945:

“We feel tremendous hatred for Germany and the Germans... in one house, for example, our boys saw a murdered woman with two children. We often see murdered civilians on the road as well ... of course, it is horribly cruel to kill the children... but the Germans have deserved these cruelties.”

But Uspensky, who was killed in Samland in February, repeatedly rejected the vicious circle of Soviet hate propaganda in favor of his basic humanitarianism, albeit distorted by socialism, when, at Fuchsberg, near Königsberg, he learned the details of the gang rapes of women, and even of 13 to 15 year-old girls (sometimes in the house of a Soviet divisional staff), of murders and atrocities “against the peaceful population,” of arson, and all the many acts of vandalism. He wrote at Kraussen, near Königsberg, on February 7, 1945: “Horrible atrocities are being committed on the earth.” "It is terrible.” On February 13, he noted:

“The civilian population looks wretched. They wander around exhausted, afraid, and starved. The old men and women are completely helpless... as for the soldiers, they have not one ounce of pity. There are horrible scenes. О God, what is happening in the world!”

Incited by Soviet war propaganda and by the command authorities of the Red Army, soldiers of the 16th Guards Infantry Division of the 2nd Guards Armored Corps of the 11th Guards Army, in the last ten days of October 1944, began to slaughter the rural population in the invasion zone south of Gumbinnen. After recapturing the territory in this region, which was an exception, the Germans once again conducted exact investigations. At least seventy-two men, women, and children were killed in Nemmersdorf alone; the women and even small girls were raped beforehand, while a few of the women were even nailed to a bam door. Not far away, a great number of Germans and French prisoners of war, formerly in German captivity, fell in Soviet murder hands. The bodies of bestially murdered residents were found everywhere in the surrounding localities, as in Bahnfelde, Gut Teichhof, and Alt Wusterwitz, where the remains of several people were found who had been burned alive in a stable, in addition to other villages. First Lieutenant Dr. Amberger reported:

"By the side of the road, in the courtyards of houses, lay piles of civilian bodies... Among other things, I saw numerous women who had been... raped and then killed with a shot in the back of the neck, some of them next to their children, who had also been killed.”

In his deposition before a military court, German gunner Erich Czerkus of the 121st Artillery Regiment described his observations in Schillmeyszen, near Heydekrug in the Memel region, which had been penetrated by units of the 93rd Infantry Corps of the 43rd Army of the 1st Baltic Front on October 26, 1944, as follows:

"In a bam, I found my father, face down, with a bullet wound in the neck... In one room lay a man and a woman, their hands tied behind their backs, both tied up together with cord... in another farmstead, we saw five children with their tongues nailed to a large table. I found no trace of my mother, despite the most laborious searches ... On the way, we saw five girls, tied up with cord, their clothing almost completely removed, and their backs showing severe abrasions. I had the impression that the girls had been dragged a long way. Besides that, on the road, we also saw several lines of refugees crushed to death.”

It is hopeless to attempt to describe all the frightful details, or even attempt to provide a complete survey of these events. A series of selected examples may give an idea of the actions of the Red Army in the eastern provinces after the resumption of the Soviet offensive in January 1945. The Federal Archives, in its report on “The Expulsion and Related Crimes” of May 28, 1974, have published exact data from so-called evaluation sheets of atrocities in two selected districts, the East Prussian border district of Johannisburg, and the Silesian border district of Oppeln. According to these official investigations, the crimes that were thus emphasized in the Johannisburg district, which were committed in the sector of the 50th Army of the 2nd White Russian Front, included, in addition to innumerable other murders, the murder of 120 civilians (according to other data, 97 civilians), as well as a few German soldiers and French prisoners of war from a line of refugees on the Nickelsberg-Herzogsdorf road south of Arys on January 24, 1945. Thirty-two refugees were shot on the Stollendorf-Arys road, and on February 1, on the order of a Soviet officer, approximately fifty people—mostly children and young people who were tom away from their parents and relatives in refugee carts and wagons—were shot on the Arys-Drigelsdorf road, near Schlagakrug. At Groß Rosen (Groß Rosensko) in late January 1945, the Soviets burned approximately thirty people alive in a bam. On the road to Arys, an eyewitness saw “one body lying on top of another.” A “great number of people were shot dead” in Arys itself, at an assembly place, while cases were recorded of “the worst kinds of mistreatment” resulting in death in an NKVD torture chamber.

In the district of Oppeln, in Silesia, members of the 32nd and 34th Guards Infantry Division of the 5th Guards Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front murdered at least 1,264 German civilians by the end of January 1945. Russian workers from the east, mostly deported for compulsory labor in Germany, as well as Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity, shared the same fate in several cases. In Oppeln, they were driven together on an open square and massacred after a short propaganda speech. A similar event occurred at the Kruppamuhle camp for eastern workers on the Malapane in Upper Silesia. Here, on January 20, 1945, after Soviet tanks had reached the camp, several hundred Russian men, women and children were called together and slaughtered by machine gun fire or crushed by tanks as “traitors” and “fascist collaborators.” In Gottersdorf on January 23, 1945, Soviet soldiers shot approximately 270 residents, including small children and 20-40 members of the Marian Congregation. In Carlsruhe, 110 inhabitants were shot, including the residents of the Anna Stiftung, a charity foundation. In Kupp, 60-70 residents were shot, including the residents of an old people’s home and a pastor who had attempted to protect the women from rape, and so on and so forth in other localities. Johannisburg and Oppeln, however, were only two of a great many districts in the eastern provinces of the German Reich that were occupied by the troops of the Red Army in 1945.

Based on the reports of the German Field Command Agencies, the Foreign Armies East Branch of the General Staff of the German Army drew up several lists “of the atrocities and violations of international law committed by the Red Army in the occupied German territories” that document many Soviet crimes with some reliability under the fresh impression of the events, although they likewise do not offer an overall picture. Thus, German Army Group A reported on January 20, 1945, that all residents of the villages of Reichthal and Glausche, near Namslau, which had been recaptured during the night, had been shot by Soviet soldiers of the 9th Mechanized Corps of the 3rd Guards Armored Army.53 The German Army Group Center report on January 22, 1945, that a line of refugees four kilometers long near Grünhayn in the Wehlau district, “mostly women and children,” had been “crushed, and shot with armor piercing shells and machine gun fire” by tanks of the 2nd Soviet Guards Armored Corps, “while the rest were shot by infantry with sub-machine guns.” Something similar occurred on the same day at Gertlauken, where fifty people from a line of refugees were killed by Soviet soldiers, some of them with a shot in the back of the neck. Also in West Prussia at the end of January, in a locality not specifically named, a long line of refugee wagons was overtaken by Soviet tanks. It was reported by a few surviving women that the tank crews (from the 5th Guards Armored Army) poured gasoline over the horses and wagons and set them on fire.

“Some of the civilians, mostly women and children, jumped down from the vehicles and attempted to run away, some of them were already living torches. The Bolsheviks opened fire at this point. Only a few were able to save themselves.”

Likewise, in Plohnen in late January 1945, a line of refugees was attacked and shot to pieces by tanks from the 5th Guards Armored Army. In this locality, near Elbing, all the women between thirteen and sixty years old were unceasingly raped by Red Army men “in the most brutal manner.” German soldiers from a tank reconnaissance company found a woman with her abdomen ripped open by a bayonet; another young woman lay on a wooden plank, her face completely smashed. Destroyed and plundered refugee wagon trains on both sides of the road and the bodies of the passengers lying in ditches by the side of the road were also found in Meislatein near Elbing.

Cases of wanton crushing by tanks or machine-gunning of lines of refugee wagons and carts, fleeing everywhere on the roads and clearly recognizable as refugees, were reported from all parts of the eastern provinces, as well as from the operational zone of the Soviet 2nd Guards Armored Army. In the Waldrode district on January 18 and 19, 1945, refugee wagon trains were stopped, attacked, and in some cases crushed in several localities: “The women and children were shot or crushed as they jumped down off the wagons.” According to another report, “most of the women and children were killed.” Soviet tanks at Waldrode bombarded a German hospital train with cannons and machine guns, with the result that “it was only possible to save 80 out of 1,000 wounded.” Reports of attacks by Soviet tanks on stretches of refugees were also received from Schauerkirch, Gombin, where “approximately 800 women and children were killed,” as well as from Diet-ftirth-Filehne and other localities. On January 19, 1945, several such wagon trains were overtaken near Brest, south of Thorn, in what was then the Warthegau, all the passengers, in many cases women and children, were shot down. According to a report of February 1, 1945:

"in this region, approximately 4,500 women and children out of a total of approximately 8,000 persons were killed in three days, the rest being entirely dispersed; it may be assumed that most of them were killed in a similar manner."

The figures stated are not, of course, guaranteed to be accurate, and in this case appear exaggerated, but, nevertheless, indicate that particularly heavy losses must have been suffered by the civilian population of this region.

Only a few examples, of course, can be selected from the multiplicity of reported violations of international law. For example, it was an established rule of the Red Army to massacre all German prisoners of war without delay. In late January 1945, Members of the Soviet 38th Army in Makau, at the southern border of what was then the General Gouvernement, murdered 30 German soldiers by way of putting out their eyes, cutting off their hands, and crushing their heads. At Meseritz, Soviet soldiers, apparently from the 8th Guards Army, murdered the entire Volkssturm assigned there from Fürstenwalde, with the exception of two men, who were abused but escaped. On January 19, 1945, a few kilometers from Warthebrücken, Soviet soldiers from the 8th Mechanized Guards Corps of the 1st Guards Armored Army killed 15 prisoners of war. On January 22 at Hohenkirch in the Briesen district, members of the 162nd (or else the 186th) Infantry Division of the 65th Army killed ten soldiers and nine civilians, including one woman, all shot in the back of the neck.

Near Krotoschin, on the same day, members of the 3rd Guards Army murdered fifteen members of the Volkssturm. At Petrikau, south of Lodz, nine German soldiers were murdered by members of the 9th Guards Armored Corps. At the Palzig-Nickem intersection, members of the Soviet 33rd Army murdered 20 soldiers, including a medical first lieutenant, apparently members of the medical personnel, along with two women. Five young non-commissioned officer cadets were murdered near Seefeld, in the vicinity of Reppen, presumably by members of the Soviet 69th Army, and so on and so forth in innumerable localities. In a forester’s house at Soldin, the forester’s family, and all refugees stopping there, were killed by Soviet soldiers of the 2nd Guards Armored Army. Not far away, German soldiers, having concealed themselves in a barn, were burned alive. A mass grave with the skeletons of 120 civilians was found near Soldin (Mysciborz) in 1995.

It is only possible to indicate a few of the atrocities being constantly recorded in Hast Prussia. Near the small village of Tollnicken, a family of seven, including small children, was shot by Red Army soldiers of the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps after the parents resisted the rape of their two daughters; a young man, a farmer, and three German soldiers were also shot. Detailed investigations, as in Gumbinnen, Goldap, Elbing, and in other localities, could, of course, only be carried out after the recapture of lost territory by German troops—which seldom occurred, for example, in the villages surrounding Preußisch Holland, which was occupied by units of the Soviet 10th Armored Corps of the 5th Guards Armored Army between January 28 and 30, 1945. A report of the German Army Group North of February 2, 1945, states, for example, that local residents had been beaten to death or shot in Göttchendorf, Döbern, and Bordehnen:

“In Göttchendorf, near Preußisch Holland, seven civilians, including two elderly women, two men, and a boy approximately 14 years of age, lay beaten to death in one room alone. A nine-year-old boy lay crumpled up in the comer with his skull completely crushed, and on top of him was a 15 year-old girl with stab wounds in her hands and scratches on her face, bayonet wounds in her breast and abdomen, and her lower body completely naked. An 80-year-old grandfather lay shot before the door.”

Here again, “captured German soldiers, as well as a few members of the Wehrmacht on furlough, were shot on the street” by Soviet soldiers.

In late January, when German troops succeeded in liberating the small Pomeranian city of Preußisch Friedland and the surrounding localities “from the Soviet fiends,”—the 175th Soviet Infantry Division under Colonel Drosdov, a member of the 47th Army commanded by Colonel General Gusev—legal and medical officers of the German 32nd Infantry Division conducted interrogations of the survivors. One report from the High Command of the 2nd Army of February 14, 1945, stated:

"On January 29 and 30, most of the men of Preußisch Friedland and the village of Ziskau were shot after horrible tortures. Houses and dwellings were plundered, demolished, and set on fire. Women and children attempting to flee to safety were shot by the Bolshevik murderers with rifles and machine guns.”

In Preußisch Friedland and the neighboring villages, the investigations "brought even more cruelties to light.” 15 German soldiers murdered by shots in the head were discovered in the vicinity of the Tannenhof estate after the liberation. In Linde, on January 29, 1945, "16 residents were murdered, at least fifty women raped, and at least four women murdered after being raped.” Among the rape victims was an eighteen-year-old girl who lay in her own blood after being shot. In Zikskau, civilians and soldiers having concealed themselves, including a member of the German navy, were shot after the "most painful tortures.” The women were raped, some of them many times, including a "86 year-old woman and an 18 year-old girl from Bromberg, who died after terrible suffering.” "In Ziskau,” concludes the report of the High Command of the 2nd Army, “the wife of an officer was nailed down on the floor. She was then raped to death by the Bolsheviks.”

to be continued

[Wolf Stoner]

Chapter 13

“Woe to Thee, Germany!"
The Crimes Continue

The political administrations and command agencies of the Red Army appealed to the hate feelings and thirst for revenge of Soviet soldiers in order to achieve the highest degree of combat readiness and performance. This procedure, as discreditable as it was risky, was resorted to for the purpose of generating heroism; yet the inevitable results of unleashing base human instincts soon made themselves apparent. An “unrestrained instinctual behavior, unworthy of human beings,” set in among Soviet soldiers with the rapidity of the wind, leading to a degree of demoralization and descent into savagery of such proportions that “control over the troops was lost in many units and formations.” Order № 006 of the Council of War of the 2nd White Russian Front, issued on 22 January 1945, discussed in more detail below, lamented that the discovery of large quantities of alcohol had led to “excessive indulgence” among Soviet troops, in addition to “robbery, plundering, arson”—the murders were hushed up—and “mass booze-ups” in all sections of the front, even with the participation “of the officers,” to the chagrin of the superior command authorities. The case of the 290th Infantry Division, assigned to the front line, in which the soldiers and officers drank so much that “they no longer even looked like warders of the Red Army,” was cited as one example. It was stated that wine barrels had been placed upon the chassis of tanks of the 5th Tank Army and that munitions vehicles had been so heavily laden with “all possible kinds of household goods, looted food and civilian clothing, etc.” that “they became a burden to the troops,” “reducing troop mobility” to the detriment of “the breakthrough capacity of the tank units.”

Individual examples in Soviet orders must be immediately generalized, here as everywhere else. Soviet soldiers began to wear “civilian hats instead of the regulation headgear,” or, as noted by Yuri Uspensky in his diary, to wear “Napoleon caps” and to carry “walking sticks, umbrellas, rubber raincoats,” immediately acquiring the outward appearance of robbers and marauders. Failure to obey orders also became quite prevalent. As observed by the Council of War of the 2nd White Russian Front, “these failings on the part of the rear units show no signs of abating; on the contrary, they are even increasing.” The needless destruction of “the dwellings required to quarter troops and staff, and to store military materiel”—i.e., the burning of existing German buildings—was very detrimental and referred to as a “shameful phenomenon” against which Soviet commanding officers not only failed to intervene, but, quite the contrary, even encouraged through their refusal to act. In this connection, the only mention made was of shortcomings having a detrimental effect upon the combat readiness of the Red Army. There was no mention of excesses and crimes committed against the German population, offences which, in comparison, were far more serious. Nevertheless, the need to restore some kind of military discipline, in addition, last but not least, to a concern on the part of Soviet leadership for the possible negative propaganda effect upon their Western Allies of the actions of Soviet troops—skillfully exploited by the Germans while Soviet troops continued their rapid advance into Central Europe—caused the leadership of the Red Army to take severe measures after only ten days.

The Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd White Russian Front, Marshall of the Soviet Union Rokossovsky, was the first to intervene. Order № 006, issued as early as 22 January 1945, signed by Rokossovsky himself as well as by Member of the Council of War, General Subbotin, and the Chief of Staff, General Bogomolov, and referred to above, was, remarkably enough, to be made known to all ranks, even down to platoon leaders.2 In the severest language, Marshall Rokossovsky ordered the Commanders-in-Chief of the Army, all corps and divisional commanders, and all commanders of all independent units of his front, “to extirpate these occurrences, which bring shame upon the Red Army,” “with red-hot steel,” in all units, squads, and divisions; to bring those responsible for plundering and drunkenness to account; and to “punish such behaviour with the severest penalties, including shooting.” The political administration of the Front, the military state prosecutor’s office, military tribunals, and SMERSH—an NKVD organization—were assigned to take all necessary measures to implement this order.

Marshall Rokossovsky now demanded that the entire officer staff establish “exemplary order and iron discipline” in all units. The widespread reality of the murders of prisoners of war received further confirmation in this regard as well, though only peripherally: Rokossovsky saw fit to remind his officers and soldiers that enemy soldiers were to be killed in combat, but taken prisoner when they surrendered. There was particular concern for the situation in the rear zones. The Chief of the Political Administration of the Rear Front Zone was called upon to establish the immediate order necessary in the units of his zone as well. But the principal matter of concern was simply the preservation of material values. The Chief of the Rear Zone and the Superintendent of the Front received a special order to “take all measures to ensure the seizure and confiscation of all loot,” and to prohibit “the misappropriation and black-market sale” of the same. The Commander-in-Chief of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshall of the Soviet Union Zhukov—who had incited his troops to the commission of acts of revenge and “inhuman acts of violence” in unmistakable language on 12 January 1945—now performed a perfect 180-degree turn, just as had done once before, in the winter of 1941-42, by suddenly announcing that his subordinates would be held personally responsible for “actions in violation of international law.”

Contrary to many reports in the relevant literature, Marshall Rokossovsky, the most nearly moderate among the four Commanders-in-Chief at the front as far as we know, never wasted one official word relating to the violations of international law committed by his troops against the German population, even though such violations were quite well known to him. The problem was nevertheless openly discussed in at least a few implementation orders. On 23 January 1945, and with reference to the demands of the Councils of War of the Front and the 48th Army, the Military Prosecutor of the same army, Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Malyarov, issued an order to all military prosecutors of the subordinate units, such as, for example, those of the 194th Infantry Division (the 0134th, 0135th, and 0137th). This order was chiefly concerned with the preservation of material values. The principle that “all material values in East Prussia, from the moment upon which they come into the possession of the troops of the Red Army, are to be transferred to the ownership of the Soviet Union, subject to seizure and transport into the USSR”—a principle in violation of international law—was now bluntly proclaimed. No distinction was made between private property and public or governmental German property. If the Soviet military authorities now complained of the “enormous material damage” caused “by wantonness and hooliganism” in the cities and villages, this was due solely to a preoccupation with a possible reduction in the harvest of loot which it was hoped could be collected from the Germans.

Simultaneously, however, the order of the military prosecutor of the 48th Army denounced the crimes against the civilian population and prisoners of war for the first time. Malyarov pointed out that there had indeed been “cases” of the use of firearms by military persons “against the German population, particularly, against women and old women.” It was also stated that “numerous cases of shootings of prisoners of war” under unjustifiable circumstances of pure “maliciousness” had been established. The military prosecutors were ordered by Lieutenant Colonel Malyarov to inform the members of the army, in cooperation with the political apparatus, that the destruction of captured property and the “burning of buildings and entire villages” constituted subversive action. Additionally, it was stated that “reprisals against the population are not customary in the Red Army, the use of weapons against women and old people is contrary to law, and those guilty of such actions will be severely punished.” It was furthermore added that it was in the interests of the Soviets to take German prisoners. The military prosecutors’ offices were ordered to organize an immediate “show trial” against “arsonists and other louts,” to notify the troops of the sentences imposed, to exercise strict control and, furthermore, in any case, to arrest the culprits immediately.

The fact—unequivocally admitted in the order of the military state prosecutor of the 48th Army, as well as in the order of the Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd White Russian Front—that an increasing demoralization and descent into savagery was now prevalent among the ranks of the Red Army, was, however, immediately hushed up by the subordinate troop leadership and political apparatus. This fact is illustrated by the manner in which shameful incidents of wanton destruction and drunkenness were interpreted for the benefit of subordinates. One example is order № 026, issued on 25 January 1945 by the Chief of Staff of the 174th Infantry Division, Colonel Romanenko, to the troop commanders, in this case, the 508th Infantry Regiment. In this order, the arsonists are no longer described as marauding Soviet soldiers, but rather, as enemy agents and provocateurs— i.e., Germans, who, “dressed in the uniforms of the Red Army,” were alleged to be seeking to prevent the advance of Soviet troops by “burning settlements and individual buildings.”

The official explanation for the widespread alcoholism among the members of the Red Army, accompanied by “mass booze-ups”—as Rokossovsky called them—with the participation of Soviet officers and with devastating consequences, was very similar. The Political Administration, which was best acquainted with the attitude of the Council of War of the 3rd White Russian Front, in an instruction leaflet addressed to the “Comrade combatants, sergeants and officers” even attempted to place responsibility for unrestrained Soviet drunkenness upon the Germans—the “reprehensible, treacherous enemy"—who was said to be deliberately poisoning the supplies of alcohol and food “in an attempt to cause casualties among our soldiers and officers and to harm the Red Army.” For example, if members of a Red Army unit commanded by First Lieutenant Klimets, or some other Soviet commander, drank huge quantities of methyl alcohol, or if a group of Soviet soldiers under the command of the officer Nikiforov quaffed “a barrel containing a fluid which smelled like alcohol,” and died horribly, the deceased were, of course, simply the victims of the “treacherous enemy”: an enemy which, in his efforts to harm the Soviet Army, never shrank from the “basest, most reprehensible, and horrible means of fighting.” The question now arises: how were excesses against the civilian population to be prevented if the impulsive lack of restraint of the Red Army soldiers was mendaciously attributed, as described above, to German treachery, countered with the mere proclamation that the “fascist beasts” and “German monsters”, were to be punished for these “treacherous methods” with “renewed, devastating blows”?

The orders issued by the Soviet command authorities, were, therefore, far from unanimous. Many prisoners of war informed the Germans that they had received knowledge of the new rules of conduct in February 1945. For example, Major of the Guards of the Superintendent Service Kostikov of the 277th Guards Infantry Regiment of the 91st Guards Infantry Division (39th Army, 3rd White Russian Front), on 17 February 1945, reported that “strict orders have been issued that the German civilian population is to be left alone, nothing is to be stolen, and German women are not to be molested.” According to the testimony of one Red Army soldier, Shevchuk, the “shooting of civilians and German prisoners of war,” which had been customary in the Red Army until that time, was now “strictly prohibited” in the 44th Motorized Infantry Brigade as of 6-7 February 1945. Similar, quite comparable, prohibitions were also issued with regards to other units. When Soviet soldiers wantonly set fire to the city of Gleiwitz, the burning of localities was “strictly forbidden” in that section of the front as well. The commander of the 1042nd Infantry Regiment of the 295th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Chaiko, informed his units that violations of the existing prohibition against plundering would be “severely punished.” Generally, the Soviet command authorities were not stingy about threats of punishment; the military tribunals appear to have intervened occasionally. But these were exceptions. Members of the Red Army unanimously maintained that the authorities only intervened in rare cases; in practice, everything continued as before.

German civilians and prisoners of war continued to be murdered as before, often upon the inducement of superior officers, usually the “battalion and regimental commanders involved,” although a few prisoners of war testified that there were units in “which such crimes were not tolerated.” German women and girls continued to be raped as before by “officers and younger soldiers of the Red Army,” despite of existing prohibitions, and were very often murdered afterwards. Arson and pillaging with the participation of officers continued just as before. That the numerous orders to the contrary remained a dead letter is illustrated by the fact that anti-German hate propaganda was not amended or modified in the slightest respect. A captured second lieutenant from the 266th Infantry Regiment of the 88th Guards Infantry Division testified that posters with inflammatory slogans were to be seen on the streets everywhere, even in February 1945, such as: “Strike the Fascist Beasts Dead! Take Revenge on the Fascists! Remember the Women and Children Murdered by the Fascists and Take Revenge for Them!” The watchword of agitation upon the 27th anniversary of the Red Army on 23 February 1945 was as follows:

“Let’s wreak vengeance on the German-fascist monsters for plundering and destroying our cities and villages, for raping our women and children, for murdering and deporting Soviet citizens to German slavery! Vengeance and death to the fascist fiends!”

Since the powerful political apparatus employed an entirely distinct language from the command authorities of the Red Army, which had only intervened half-heartedly so far, it is no wonder that violations of international law against German civilians and prisoners of war continued to be committed on a horrendous scale throughout February and March 1945.

The manner in which the orders of the Soviet leadership were put into practice is illustrated by the multitude of reports received by the Germans on atrocities by Red Army soldiers against prisoners of war and the civilian population even in February 1945, The available official material is naturally incomplete; some of it, furthermore, can only be mentioned briefly here, for purposes of example. Similar reports continued to be received from all parts of the regions of the provinces of Silesia, the Brandenburg district, Pomerania, and East Prussia, all of which were only partially occupied by the enemy. These reports unanimously described the same criminal acts, murder, rape, robbery, plundering, and arson, and provide, on the whole, a truthful picture of these frightful events. The selected cases are typical of innumerable similar atrocities committed in all parts of the four eastern provinces even in February 1945.

Silesia
Near the borders of the Reich, west of Welun, Soviet soldiers from the 1st Ukrainian Front doused the wagons in a fleeing line of refugees with gasoline and burnt them, together with the passengers. Innumerable corpses of German men, women, and children, some of them mutilated, with their throats cut, their tongues cut out, their stomachs slit open, littered the roads. Also, west of Welun, 25 members (Front workers) of the Organization Todt were shot by tank crews of the 3rd Tank Army of the Guards. In Heinersdorf, as well, the men were all shot, and the women raped, by Soviet soldiers. At Kunzendorf, 25-30 members of the Volksturm were shot in the back of the neck. At Glausche, near Namslau, 18 persons, “including members of the Volksturm and female nurses” were murdered by members of the 59th Army. At Beatenhof, near Ohlau, after the recapture of the village by German troops, all the men were found shot in the back of the neck, 14 murdered by members of the Soviet 5th Army of the Guards. In Grünberg, eight families were murdered by members of the 9th Tank Army of the Guards. The Tannenfeld manor near Grottkau was the scene of a cruel orgy of crime: Soviet soldiers from the 229th Infantry Division raped two girls and then murdered them after various acts of mistreatment. The eyes of one man were gouged out and his tongue cut out. A 43-year-old Polish woman received the same treatment and was then tortured to death.

At Alt-Grottkau, members of the same division murdered 14 prisoners of war, cutting off their heads, gouging out their eyes, and crushing them with tanks. Soviet soldiers from the same division were responsible for crimes committed in Schwarzengrund, near Grottkau: they raped the women, including the members of a nunnery, shot the farmer Kahlert, slit his wife’s abdomen open, hacked off her hands, shot the farmer Christoph and his son, as well as a young girl. On Eisdorf manor near Märzdorf, Soviet soldiers from the 5th Army of the Guards gouged out the eyes of an elderly man and woman, apparently a married couple, and cut off their noses and fingers. Eleven bodies of wounded members of the Luftwaffe who had been horribly murdered were found in the near vicinity. 21 prisoners of war murdered by Soviet members of the 4th Tank Army were also found at Gütersstadt near Glogau. In the village of Haslicht, near Striegau, all the women were raped by Soviet soldiers from the 9th Mechanized Corps, “each one participating in turn.” Maria Hainke discovered her husband, showing almost imperceptible signs of life, and dying in a Soviet guardroom. A medical examination revealed that his eyes had been put out, his tongue cut out, an arm fractured in several places, and the top of his skull crushed.

At Ossig, near Streigau, members of the 7th Tank Guards Corps raped the women, murdered six or seven young girls, shot 12 farmers, and also committed similar serious crimes at Hertwisswaldau near Jauer. At Liegnitz, the bodies of numerous civilians shot by Soviet soldiers of the 6th Army of the Guards were found. In the small city of Kostenblut, near Neumarkt, occupied by units of the 7th Tank Guards Corps, all the women and girls were raped, including an advanced pregnant mother of eight children. Her brother was shot for attempting to protect her. All foreign prisoners of war were shot, as well as six men and three women. Nor did the nurses in a Catholic hospital escape mass rape. At Pilgramsdorf, near Goldberg, numerous murders, rapes, and cases of arson were committed by members of the 23rd Mechanized Infantry Brigade. At Beralsdorf, a suburb of Lauban, 39 of the still remaining women were violated “under the cruelest conditions” by Soviet soldiers of the 7th Tank Guards Corps. During the rapes, one woman received a gunshot wound to the lower jaw, was locked in a cellar, and, days later, was “gang raped at gunpoint in the most brutal manner” by three Soviet soldiers even though she was running a high fever.

Province Mark Brandenburg (primarily Neumark
and the Stemberger region)
A report from the Russian agents Danilov and Chirshin assigned to the area by the 103rd Front Reconnaissance Unit between 24 February and 1 March 1945 provides a general idea of the treatment meted out to the population. According to the report, all the Germans aged 12 or upwards were ruthlessly put to work building fortifications, while all members of the population not assigned to such work were deported to the east; the old were simply left to starve. At Sorau, Danilov and Chirshin saw “piles of bodies of murdered women and men (butchered), shot (in the back of the neck or in the heart)..., lying on the roads, farms, and in the houses.” According to the statements of one Soviet officer, personally shocked at the extent of the terror, “all the women and girls, regardless of age, were ruthlessly raped.” Soviet soldiers from the 33rd Army also indulged in a “cruel and bloody campaign of terror” at Skampe near Züllichau. “Strangled bodies of women, children, and old people” were found in almost all the houses. The bodies of a man and woman were found a short distance from Skampe, on the road to Rentschen: the woman’s abdomen was slit open, her embryo torn out, and the aperture in the abdomen stuffed with straw and garbage. Three members of the Volksturm were found hanged nearby.

At Kay, near Züllichau, members of the same army murdered wounded members of a transport, including all the women and children, by shooting them in the back of the neck. The city of Neu-Bentschen was plundered and wantonly burned by members of the Red Army. On the Schwiebus-Frankfurt road, Soviet soldiers from the 69th Army shot so many civilians, including women and children, that the bodies lay “underneath and on top of each other.” At Alt-Drewitz, on the road to Calenzig, members of the 1st Tank Army of the Guards shot a medical major, a major and several medics, while simultaneously opening fire on American prisoners of war being retransferred from Stalag Alt-Drewitz; 20-30 of the prisoners were wounded and an unknown number killed. On the road to Groß-Blumberg/Oder, the bodies of approximately 40 German soldiers were found in groups of five to ten bodies each, murdered by gunshot wounds to the back of the head or neck, and then robbed. In Reppen, all the men in a passing line of refugees were shot by Soviet soldiers from the 19th Army and the women raped. At Gassen, near Sommerfeld, civilians were indiscriminately shot at by tanks from the 6th Mechanized Guards Corps. At Massin, near Landsberg, members of the 5th Assault Army shot an unknown number of residents, raped the women and young girls, and carried away looted objects. In an unknown location near Landsberg, members of the 331st Infantry Division shot eight male civilians, after robbing them.

When units of the Soviet 11th Tank Corps or the 4th Infantry Corps unexpectedly invaded the city of Lebus west of the Oder, they immediately began to rob the residents, shooting a number of civilians. Soviet soldiers raped the women and girls, two of whom were beaten to death with rifle butts. The sudden breakthrough of Soviet troops as far as the Oder and, in some localities, even across the Oder, had fearful consequences for innumerable residents and German soldiers. At Groß-Neuendorf/Oder, ten German prisoners of war were locked in a barn and machine gunned, apparently by Soviet soldiers from the 1st Tank Army of the Guards. In Reitwein and Trettin, all German soldiers, police officials, and other “fascists,” as well as entire families in whose houses members of the Wehrmacht had found lodgings, were shot by Soviet soldiers, apparently from the 8th Army of the Guards. In Wiesenau, near Frankfurt, two women aged 65 and 55 were found dying after being raped for several hours. At Zehden, a uniformed Soviet woman officer, of unknown rank, from the 5th Tank Guards Corps, shot a sales representative and his wife. At Genschmar, Soviet soldiers murdered a manor owner, the manor manager, and three workers.

An assault group from the Vlassov Army under Colonel of the ROA Sakharov retook the villages of New-Lewin and Kerstenbruch, in the Oderbruch, on 9 February 1945 with German support. The population in both villages, according to a German report of 15 March 1945, had been “mistreated in the cruelest manner” and were still suffering from the “frightful effects of Soviet terror.” At Neu-Lewin, the mayor was found shot, as well as a member of the Wehrmacht on furlough. In a bam lay the bodies of three women who had been raped and beaten to death, two of them with their feet tied. A German woman lay shot in front of the door to her own house. An elderly married couple were strangled to death. The 9th Tank Guards Corps was found to have been responsible, both here and in the village of Neu-Barnim, not far away. At Neu-Barnim, 19 residents were found dead. The body of the inn keeper, a woman, was found mutilated, her feet tied together with wire. Here, as in the other localities, the women and girls were raped; at Kerstenbruch, the rape victims included a 71 year-old woman with one leg amputated. Pillaging and wanton destruction also formed part of the pattern of violent crime committed by Soviet troops in these villages of the Oderbruch, as well as everywhere else in the German regions of the East.

Pomerania
Only relatively few reports are available for Pomerania during the month of February 1945, since the real breakthrough battles only began towards the end of the month. A report by the Georgian Lieutenant Berakashvili, who was commandeered from the Georgian Liaison Staff to the German officer cadet school at Posen, where he participated in the German defense of the Posen fortress with other officers from volunteer units and then managed to get through to Stettin, provides a few impressions relating to the region south east of Stettin. Persons wearing the uniforms of any German civil service—not only Party members and members of the Hitler Youth, but also railway employees, etc.—were shot everywhere. Soldiers and civilians killed by shots to the back of the neck often lined the roads; the bodies were “always half naked, and in all cases without boots.” At Schwarzenburg, Lieutenant Berakashvili witnessed the brutal rape of a farmer’s wife in the presence of her crying children, and saw signs of pillaging and destruction everywhere. The city of Bahn was “cruelly destroyed”, and many civilian bodies” lay piled up in the streets, killed “in reprisal,” as Soviet soldiers explained.

The conditions in the villages around Pyritz completely confirm these observations. At Billerbeck, the manor owners, as well as the old and sick, were shot. All women and girls, down to the age of ten, were raped, the dwellings plundered, and all surviving residents deported. On Brederlow manor, Soviet soldiers raped the women and girls, one of whom, as well as the wife of a German soldier on furlough who succeeded in escaping, were then shot. At Köselitz, the principal official, a farmer, and a lieutenant on furlough were murdered. At Eichelshagen, the Local Group Leader and a six-member family were murdered. The perpetrators in all cases were members of the 61st Army. A series of similar events took place in the villages around Greifenhagen south of Stettin. At Jädersdorf, ten evacuated women and a 15 year-old boy were shot, the surviving victims killed with bayonets and pistol shots, and entire families with small children “slaughtered” by members of the 2nd Guards Tank Army. At Rohrsdorf, Soviet soldiers shot numerous residents, including a wounded soldier on furlough. Women and girls were raped and frequently murdered afterwards. At Groß-Silber, near Kallies, Soviet soldiers from the 7th Cavalry Guards Corps raped a young woman with a broomstick, cut off her left breast, and crushed her skull. In Preußisch Friedland, Soviet soldiers from the 52nd Guards Infantry Division shot eight men and two women and raped 34 women and girls. A cruel crime was reported by the Commander of a German tank engineer battalion of the 7th Tank Division.

In late February 1945, Soviet officers from the 1st or 160th Infantry Division used several children aged 10 to 12 north of Konitz to clear a minefield. German soldiers heard the “horrible screaming” of the children, severely injured by exploding mines, “bleeding to death helplessly after being blown to bits.”

East Prussia
In East Prussia, the scene of heavy fighting, atrocities in February 1945 continued uninterruptedly despite any official Soviet prohibition. German soldiers and civilians were murdered on the road near Landsberg— stabbed with bayonets, beaten to death with blunt objects, or shot at point-blank range, and some of them severely mutilated—by members of the Soviet Is1Tank Army of the Guards. At Landsberg, Soviet soldiers from the 331rd Infantry Division drove the surprised population, including women and children, into the cellars, set fire to the houses, and shot at all those fleeing in panic. Many people were burned alive. In a village on the Landsberg-Heilsberg road, 37 women and girls were locked in a cellar for six days and nights by members of the same Infantry Division; many of them were chained together and raped several times a day with the participation of the Soviet officers. Two of the Soviet officers cut two women’s tongues out “with a curved knife” in front of everyone because of their horrible screaming. Two other women had their hands placed on top of each other and were pinned to the floor with a bayonet. A very few of the unfortunate victims were finally liberated by German tank soldiers; 20 women died of their injuries. At Hanshagen near Preußisch Eylau, Soviet soldiers from the 331st Infantry Division shot two mothers for resisting the rape of their daughters, as well as a father whose daughter was dragged out of the kitchen at the same time, and raped by a Soviet officer. A married couple, teachers with three children, as well as an unidentified young female refugee, an inn-keeper, and a farmer, whose daughter was raped, were also murdered. At Petershagen near Eylau, members of the same division murdered two men and a boy aged 16 named Richard von Hoffmann during the continuing rape of the women and girls.

Soviet troops made a surprise breakthrough into the western part of the Samland in early February 1945, with the result that a large number of localities fell into their possession. The Germans succeeded in defeating and to some extent forcing a withdrawal of the invading forces after a few days, and in restoring the broken land and sea link with Königsberg by means of a bold, large-scale counterattack on 19-20 February 1945. The High Command of the German Army Section Samland and the German Army Group North conducted investigations on the fate of the population in the recaptured regions with the help of the police, the results of which are of course only available for a few localities. Members of the 271st Special Motorized Battalion (motorcyclist) of the 39th Army murdered four civilians in Georgenwalde and threw the bodies into a burning house. Women and girls, including some no older than children, were cruelly raped by officers and Soviet soldiers. At Kragau, two young women were raped and strangled by members of the 91st Infantry Division; at Medenau, at least eleven persons were murdered by members of the 358th Infantry Division: the bodies of two murdered women, a small child, and an infant were found in front of a house. Two elderly men and a 14-year-old boy were beaten to death, as well as two women and two small girls after being raped. The completely nude body of a woman, approximately 30 years of age, was found with stab wounds in the breast, her skull split open, and the body riddled with bullets. At Groß-Ladtkeim, members of the 91st Guards Infantry Division shot two German prisoners of war and four civilians, including the mayor and his wife. There was no trace of their 18-year-old daughter. However, the body of a young girl was found with her breasts cut off, her eyes gouged out, and showing obvious signs of rape.

The Soviet 91st Guards Infantry Division penetrated the Krattlau-Germau region by way of Thierenberg and was then encircled and, to some extent, defeated on 7 February 1945 after heavy fighting. Serious violations of international law were established in the localities occupied by the same division. For example, at Thierenberg, 21 German soldiers were dragged out of a home for disabled war veterans near Sorgenau, taken to Thierenberg, and murdered. Elisabeth Homfeld was raped and killed with her father-in-law by pistol shots to the head, along with Minna Kottke, who had attempted to protect herself from rape, and the son of the tenant of the parsonage, Ernst Trunz. Three women and a man were shut inside a shed and killed by the explosion of a hand grenade thrown inside, several other persons being seriously injured. Soviet officers and soldiers later admitted in German captivity to having gang-raped women and even minor girls without interruption and in a “bestial manner.” In Krattlau, members of the 275th Guards Infantry Regiment of the 91st Guards Infantry Division murdered six men and two German soldiers by bayonet wounds or shooting in the head. All the women and girls, including thirteen-year old, were raped without interruption, many women being “sexually violated 5 to 8 times a day by 6 to 8 soldiers at a time.” Three to four of the youngest women were reserved for the officers, who handed them over to their subordinates when they were finished with their rape. At Annental, the German liberators found the bodies of two women who had been raped and then strangled, one of them on a dung heap.

It was possible to begin detailed investigations in Germau, which had been occupied by the Staff of the Soviet 91st Guards Infantry Division and the Staff with sections of the 275th Infantry Guards Regiment. The bodies of 21 murdered men, women, and children were found at Germau. Eleven persons were unable to withstand the horrible tortures and committed suicide. 15 German wounded soldiers were murdered by crushing their skulls, one of them with a harmonica crammed violently in his mouth. According to investigations carried out by medical captain Dr. Tolzien, one female corpse exhibited the following injuries: bullet wound to the head; crushing of lower left tibia; gaping, open cuts on the interior of the left lower leg, gaping, open cuts on the upper part of the left thigh, all inflicted by means of knives. Another woman, as well as a young girl found nude, died from crushing fractures to the back of the head. A married couple named Retkowski, as well as another married couple named Sprengel, with their three children, a young woman with two children and an unidentified Pole, were all found murdered. The bodies of an unknown female refugee, as well as a German woman named Rosa Thiel (maiden name Witte), and a 21 year-old Polish girl, were all found in a common grave, the girls cruelly murdered after being raped; the bodies of two master handicraftsmen of the village were also found, one of whom, the miller Maguhn, had been shot for attempting to protect his young daughter from rape. Two small girls were found on the Germau-Palmnicken road, at kilometer stone 5, having been shot in the head at close range; one of them had her eyes gouged out. The female population of Germau, approximately 400 women and girls, were confined in the church on the order of the commander of the 91st Guards Infantry Division, Colonel Koshanov, allegedly to protect them from excesses, according to Major Kostikov, a prisoner of war. But Soviet officers and soldiers stormed the church and committed “mass rapes” in the choir loft. The women in the surrounding houses were raped uninterruptedly during the following days, mostly by officers. Young girls were raped up to twenty-two times a night. 13-year-old Eva Link was raped eight times before the eyes of her despairing mother in the bell-loft of the church by an officer and several Soviet soldiers. The mother apparently suffered the same fate.

The events in the city suburb of Metgethen, west of Königsberg, which was occupied by units of the Soviet 39th Army (192nd, 292nd, and 338th Infantry Regiments) during the night of 30-31 January 1945, and liberated on 19 February after bloody fighting by sections of the German 1st Infantry Division, the 561st Volksgrenadier Division and the 5th Tank Division, have been described in detail many times in the literature, including, recently, in a publication of the Russian periodical “Novoe Vremija” under the headline '‘Crimes of the Red Army Soldiers”. The American expert on international law, Alfred M. de Zayas made a particular study of the atrocities committed at Metgethen; his work deserves mention here. German soldiers found horrible evidence of atrocities at Metgethen and the near vicinity. According to the former 3rd General Staff Officer (1c) in the Staff of the Commander of the fortress of Königsberg, Major in the reserves Professor Dr.G. Ipsen, the survivors were “in a condition bordering on madness.”

The bodies of several hundred German soldiers, some of them mutilated beyond recognition, lay in the access roads, while men, women, and children, beaten to death, lay in almost all the houses and gardens, the women exhibiting obvious signs of rape, often with the breasts cut off. In one location, according to the former ordinance officer on the Staff of the 561st Volksgrenadier Division, K. A. Knorr, the bodies of two girls approximately 20 years old, were found tom apart by vehicles. At the railway station stood at least one refugee train from Königsberg. Each carriage contained the bodies of “brutally murdered refugees of all ages and both sexes.” German prisoners of war and civilians had been driven together on the tennis court in Metgethen and then killed by explosives. Parts of human bodies were found even 200 meters from the gigantic crater. As late as February 27, 1945, a Captain on the Staff of the Fortress Commander, Sommer, accidentally discovered the bodies of 12 completely nude women and children in “a jumbled heap,” lying on top of each other in a gravel pit behind a house on the intersection of the road and railway lines near Metgethen. All had been cut to pieces by bayonet and knife wounds.

In addition to individual corpses scattered all over the entire residential suburb and numbering several hundred, large earth mounts were discovered, containing, as was later established, 3,000 corpses, according to Captain Sommer and Prof. Dr. Ipsen. The investigations of the commission of investigation created by the Commander of the Fortress, Infantry General Lasch, proved very difficult: the Soviets had poured gasoline over the bodies and attempted to bum them. It nevertheless proved possible to establish that most of the victims had not been shot. Instead, they were cruelly murdered, often with the use of blunt objects and cutting weapons. A great proportion of the dead, moreover, were not even German. They were Ukrainian refugees, approximately 25,000 of whom had been stranded at Metgethen, or members of the so-called Ukrainian “labor service,” recruited for compulsory labor service; like many of their compatriots in another location, these then fell victim to Soviet acts of revenge.

According to Captain Sommer, west of Metgethen, on the road to Powayen, the bodies of murdered civilians lay everywhere, killed by bullet wounds in the back of the neck, or “completely naked, raped, brutally stabbed to death with bayonets, or bludgeoned.” On the intersection before Powayen lay the bodies of four nude women, dragged to death behind a Soviet tank. A truly symbolic crime committed by Soviet soldiers in the church at Groß-Heydekrug is testified to by Captain Sommer, as well as by Major Ipsen, a professor of law: a young girl had been crucified between two German soldiers, who were hanged next to her on either side. All this took place before the very gates of the provincial capital of Königsberg. The indescribable orgy of cruelty and crime committed by inflamed Soviet soldiers after the fall of the city of Königsberg on 7-9 April 1945 is impossible to describe, and is mentioned in the diaries of the doctors Deichelmann and Count von Lehndorff only by way of suggestion.

The violations of international law committed on German soil placed large parts of the Red Army outside the tradition of ordinary military virtues. Criminal acts against the defenseless such as the above, which are described only by way of example and committed with the incitement and participation of the military leadership, were unknown in the armies of other European countries, even during the Second World War; they would never have been tolerated by the command authorities of any other country. The German Wehrmacht was no exception to this rule. Robbery and plundering, not to mention murder and rape, were punishable by severe penalties under the compulsory provisions of the German military criminal code. To maintain military discipline, German military tribunals, as a rule, even in the Soviet territories, punished criminal acts by members of the Wehrmacht against civilians with severe penalties, including the death penalty, often inflicted without hesitation. The question of responsibility for the war crimes committed in the German eastern provinces must now be raised. According to the ancient military principle that the superior is responsible in each case for the actions of his subordinates, the majority of the commanders and troop leaders assigned to these zones, as well as many members of the middle and lower-ranking leadership, would be “war criminals” under the terms of the Nuremberg statutes. Due to its expert knowledge, the Foreign Armies East Branch of the General Staff of the German Army was decisively involved in the “identification of enemy war criminals.” According to the “lists of war criminals” drawn up, and like, for example, the High Command of the German Anny Group Centre, the Foreign Armies East Branch was inclined from the outset to find Soviet commanders and unit leaders responsible for the crimes of their subordinates.30 The concept should, however, be more narrowly defined in the present connection. When we refer to a number of Soviet officers by name in the following paragraphs as bearing responsibility based upon documentation which is furthermore only available as a result of pure chance, this occurs solely where the existence of aggravating circumstances or joint responsibility in violations of international law has been proven on the basis of documentary evidence, or insofar as compelling grounds exist for suspicion to this effect.

The following officers have already been referred to as bearing responsibility for violations of international law committed in the German eastern provinces: the Commander-in-Chief of the 1st White Russian Front, Marshall of the Soviet Union Zhukov and leading officers of his front staff, such as Member of the Council of War, Lieutenant General Telegin; Colonel General of Artillery Kazakov; Colonel General of Aviation Rudenko; Chief of the Front Staff, Colonel General Malinin, and, even more clearly, the Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd White Russian Front, Army General Chernyakhovsky; Member of the Council of War, Lieutenant General Khokhlov; and, finally, the Chief of the Political Administration of the Front Staff, Major General Razbitsev. Among the many persons implicated, the following officers bear particular responsibility: the Commander-in-Chief of the 31st Army, Colonel General Glagolev; the Members of the Council of War of the 31st Army, Major General Karpenkov, Major General Lakhtarin, and the Chief of the Political Administration of the Army, Major General Riapasov; the Commander of the 43rd Infantry Corps, Major General Andreev; the Commander of the 72nd Infantry Division, Major General Yastrebov; the Commander of the 87th Infantry Guards Division, Major General Tymchik; the Commander of the 88th Infantry Division, Colonel Kovtunov; the Commander of the 153rd Infantry Division, Colonel Eliseev; the Commander of the 2nd Artillery Guards Division, Colonel Kobtsev; the Chief of the 7th Department of the Political Administration of the 50th Army, Lieutenant Colonel Sabashtansky, whose subordinates included two German collaborators, Major Bechler and Lieutenant Graf von Einsiedel, so-called “Front Delegate” members of the NKFD (Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland, National Committee for a Free Germany); the Commander of the 611th Infantry Regiment of the 88th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Sotkovsky; the Commander of the 14th Infantry Regiment of the 72nd Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Korolev; the Commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment of the 72nd Infantry Division, First Lieutenant Vasilev; and, finally, Adjutant of the 2nd Section of the 919th Artillery Regiment, First Lieutenant Pugachev.

The following Soviet officers, identified on the basis of documents available solely as the result of chance, are responsible for the commission, advocacy, or deliberate toleration of war crimes on German soil; Lieutenant General Okorokov, Chief of the Political Administration of the 2nd White Russian Front, personally participated in “extensive plundering” and other serious crimes committed in his sector of the front. At Petershagen near Pr. Eylau on 2 February 1945, Major General Berestov, the Commander of the 331st Infantry Division, accompanied by one of his officers, raped the daughter of a farmer's wife, after personally being served food and drink by her; he also raped a Polish girl. He is also fully responsible for the many war crimes committed by his division at Pr. Eylau and Landsberg, “only a very small proportion of which could be investigated.” Major General Papchenko, the Commander of the 124th Infantry Division, and Major General Zaretsky, the Commander of the 358th Infantry Division, bear responsibility for the crimes committed at Medenau between 1 5 - 2 1 February 1945, as well as for the crimes committed at Kragau and Groß-Ladtkeim on 4 February 1945 by the Commander of the 91st Guards Infantry Division, Colonel of the Guards Koshanov. The latter is moreover responsible for “the murders and rapes committed by his soldiers at Thierenberg.” Lieutenant Colonel Muratov, the Commander of the 1324th Infantry Regiment of the 413th Infantry Division, bears responsibility for inciting Soviet soldiers, through his political representative (Zampolit ), to commit acts of vengeance against the Germans: “You may now revenge yourselves. Combat troops may do whatever they want with German prisoners...”

Lieutenant Colonel Bondarets, Zampolit of the 510th Infantry Regiment of the 154th Infantry Division of the 2rd Army of the Guards of the 3rd White Russian Front, informed Soviet soldiers in East Prussia that “of course, they could rape German women,” but that they ought not to shoot them. Lieutenant Colonel Tolstukhin, the Commander of the 85th Guards Infantry Regiment of the 32rd Infantry Guards Division, a well-known “German hater ” caused “most of the German prisoners of war” in East Prussia “to be shot”. Lieutenant Colonel Rosentsvaig, Zampolit of the 72nd Guards Infantry Regiment, informed the soldiers of the Red Army through their unit leaders that they “had full freedom to plunder”. Lieutenant Colonel Sashenko, the Commander of the 275th Infantry Regiment of the 91st Guards Infantry Division, is fully responsible for the “war crimes committed by his soldiers between 2 and 8 February 1945 in Germau and Krattlau.” Major Beliaev, Chief of the “Anti-Fascist School” of the 2nd While Russian Front, shot a helpless old woman at Neidenberg, and three wounded soldiers at another location, in addition to other crimes. Major Sadykov, the Commander of the 870th Infantry Regiment, personally committed rapes in Upper Silesia and “had many prisoners of war shot” purely on the grounds of personal hatred. Major Kobuliansky, the Commander of the 271st Special Motorized Battalion of the 39th Army, and several of his officers, including company leader Alt-Metveden and platoon leader Zinoviev personally participated in aggravated rapes in the Ostsee bathing resort of Georgenwalde between 3 and 5 February 1934, and are responsible for a number of murders in the immediate vicinity. A few of the immense numbers of Soviet top-ranking officers who committed crimes or morals offences in the German eastern provinces include the following: Captain Sobolev; Adjutant of the 2nd Battalion of the 691st Infantry Regiment of the 383rd Infantry Division, First Lieutenant Sherebsov; Chief of Staff of a section of the 788th Artillery Regiment of the 262nd Infantry Division, First Lieutenant Sliusarev; Chief of Staff of the 1st Battalion of the 72nd Guards Infantry Regiment of the 24th Guards Infantry Division, Lieutenant Shilkov of the same battalion; and Lieutenant Kalinin, Political Representative of the 2nd Battalion, who expressly incited Soviet soldiers to the commission of crimes, stating that “they should spare no one and nothing.” These are just a few of the names which could be listed here. But they make it suffi- ciently clear that officers of all ranks, from Marshall of the Soviet Union down to the ranks of lieutenant, general, staff officer, as well as top-ranking officers in the Red Army, were equally guilty of the commission of war crimes against the civilian population and against defenseless prisoners.

Was the Red Army, taken as a whole, guilty of participation in violations of international law? The constant and enduring campaign of inflammatory propaganda conducted by the Political Main Administration and its subordinate political organizations, coupled with the fact that the sudden countermanding orders, issued by the troop leadership, were in total contradiction to the initial proclamations, that they were not emphasized and were furthermore only enforced in exceptional cases, hardly encouraged humanitarian intervention. Not a few Soviet officers and soldiers took offense at the horrible crimes and excesses of their own comrades. The Soviet agents active on the German side, Danilov and Chirshin, for example, spontaneously reported the case of an unidentified officer who voiced disgust at the extent of the terror. In view of the atmosphere of incitement and hatred prevalent in the Red Army, however, criticism of the barbaric treatment of the civilian population and prisoners of war, which “made a mockery of all human decency,” was rendered difficult and dangerous by the immediate possibility of intervention by the political supervisory bodies.

Soviet prisoners of war “unanimously” confirmed that it was “strictly prohibited to express one’s moral outrage to the leadership, since there was the danger of being called a Hitlerite and being treated accordingly.” For example, when Captain Beliakov, referred to once again below, reported to his superiors relating to the brutal rape of a 17 year-old girl in the presence of her mother by eight Red Army soldiers, he was reprimanded by his Zampolit, Lieutenant Colonel Bondarets, with the rhetorical question of whether he “wished to defend the civilians?” If not, he should get out, and go back to his battalion. Other critics were treated more harshly. Captain Efremov, Battalion Commander in a regiment of the 4th Guards Tank Corps, who had raped a woman in Lindenhagen near Cosei on 2 February 1945, shot out of hand a Red Army soldier who condemned this act. At another location, as testified to by a captured Second Lieutenant of the 287th Infantry Division, several Soviet officers were shot by inflamed Red Army soldiers for “trying to intervene on behalf of the civilian population and to prevent the excesses.”

There are reports of tank crews who warned the residents of the cruelty of the following units, and there were always Soviet officers and soldiers who helped women and children or distributed bread to them. Shining examples of humanity were set by Captain Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Major Lev Kopelev, who paid for their intervention on behalf of the mistreated civilian populations of East Prussia with years of deportation to the concentration camps of the GULag, having been accused and convicted of “bourgeois humanitarian propaganda, sympathizing with the enemy population, and slandering the Soviet military leadership.” This series of cruel occurrences was described in prosaic form for posterity by the later Nobel Prize winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his publication “East Prussian Nights.”

Soviet officers occasionally succeeded in intervening against the uniformed criminals, in some cases because they had superiors who felt the same, since a great deal always depended upon the “attitude of the particular commander” Attitudes were not unanimous, even in the “Duchachina” 91st Guards Infantry Division. Horrible atrocities were committed at Germau and the surrounding vicinity by the 275th Guards Infantry Regiment, including the divisional staff, although no murders or rapes at all were reported in localities like Willkau, occupied by other units of the same division. When one newly assigned commanding officer was informed of the many crimes committed in Germau, he issued orders, including to sentries surrounding the church, that mistreatment of women would no longer be permitted: “otherwise it will be necessary for you to fire on your own men.” Conditions in the 72nd Infantry Division, commanded by war criminal Major General Yastrebov, were quite different. For example, the 3rd Battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment committed serious atrocities, while Soviet soldiers in the 3rd Battalion of the 187th Infantry Regiment were warned against the commission of any criminal acts against civilians.

But all things considered, these appear to have been exceptional cases. The Chief of the Foreign Armies East Branch of the General Staff of the German Army, Major General Gehlen, whose agencies gathered all relevant reports, reported the “correct behaviour” of Soviet officers and soldiers in individual cases, but felt simultaneously compelled to add that “a large proportion of the officers tacitly tolerated excesses, and very often even committed them personally”. Captain Beliakov, the Commander of the 1st Battalion of the 510th Infantry Regiment of the 154th Infantry Division of the 2nd Army of the Guards of the 3rd White Russian Front, mentioned above, deserted to German troops on 10 February 1945 at Dulzen near Pr. Eylau because, as he explained: “I could no longer stand by and watch the way Soviet soldiers treated the German civilian populations in the areas we conquered.” Captain Beliakov, who had already shot a sergeant of his battalion and another Soviet soldier caught in the act of brutally raping a totally deranged minor girl in a remote barn, believed that he could only escape forthcoming arrest by the military counter intelligence SMERSH (under Colonel General of State Security Abakumov) by deserting to the Germans.




Conclusions

The German-Soviet war was inevitable. The only open question was which of the two competing powers would strike first to preempt its adversary The rapidly increasing superiority and strength of Soviet armaments, especially in tanks, aircraft, and artillery, over the troops of the Wehrmacht, dispersed over all parts of Europe, led the Germans to view June 1941 as the last possible opportunity for German initiation of preventive war. Further delay would have eroded the only factor favoring the Germans, which was their level of training. The most recent discoveries in Soviet archives illustrate the extent to which Soviet military preparation and deployment had in fact already been completed. To all appearances, Stalin moved the attack date forward from 1942 to the months of July-September 1941. This would offer a plausible explanation of Stalin’s desire to postpone the initiation of hostilities “even if only for...a month, a week, or a few days,” to complete his own military preparations—without the slightest fear of German attack. Soviet research has also arrived at the conclusion that the “military struggle against Germany might have begun in July 1941.”

The actual strength of the Soviet army remained unknown to the Germans, although they obviously recognized that preparations for an attack were taking place on their eastern border. The German command authorities were nevertheless surprised by the enemy potential encountered in the East after 22 June 1941. Statements alleged to have been made by Hitler, and confirmed by Goebbels in his diaries, indicate that the decision to attack would have been much more difficult to make had Hitler been aware of the full strength of the Red Army. The results for Germany, and the rest of Europe, if Hitler had not given the order to attack on 22 June 1941—if Stalin, on the contrary, had been permitted to initiate his planned war of extermination in Europe—are best left to the imagination. This does not, of course, constitute a justification of the politically and morally detrimental methods employed by Hitler in Russia (and Poland). Hitler planned a war of conquest, too. The National Socialist war on the Soviet Union was conducted in the spirit of a statement once made by Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield: “The racial question is the key to world history.” It should be borne in mind, in this regard, that, by the very nature of things, no conflict between the National Socialist German Reich and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, could possibly resemble an “ordinary” war; the war was inevitably fated to acquire extraordinary features from the very outset. Militarily speaking, the great initial successes of the troops of the Wehrmacht and their rapid penetration of Soviet territory resulted in an underestimation of Soviet strength and powers of resistance which ultimately proved fatal.

Stalin’s intent was to destroy the forces of the Wehrmacht concentrated on his western border in several heavy blows constituting one huge attack operation; he was not even swayed from this concept by Hitler’s preventive attack. Stalin and the Soviet leadership, in full awareness of the enormous superiority of the Soviet Union, and quite well-informed as to the many weaknesses of the Wehrmacht, fighting on two fronts, retained an absolute confidence in the certainty of victory, even after 22 June 1941. These illusions only evaporated after the unexpectedly successful German attack. After a brief phase of lethargy, however, the Bolshevik regime (Stalin, the Politburo, and the newly-founded State Defense Committee) proclaimed a “patriotic war,” the radicalism of which made the so-called “total war” proclaimed in Germany only after the defeat at “Stalingrad” appear a mere figure of speech.

Stalin’s initial concern, and that of the STAVKA was, essentially, to restore the stability of the wavering front. This was achieved through the ruthless application of the tried-and-true Stalinist methods: first, utterly shameless propaganda, and, secondly, the most brutal terror. The system was as simple as it was effective: anyone who did not believe the propaganda, experienced the terror. Of course, the Soviet leadership was perfectly well aware that any attempt to inspire Soviet soldiers with “ardent and self-sacrificing Soviet patriotism,” with “limitless dedication to the cause of the Communist Party,” with enthusiasm and “endless love for the Party and government, for Great Comrade Stalin,” and whatever other words might come to mind, would be doomed to failure. The solution was believed to lie in a far deeper, more wide-ranging, appeal to the baser instincts. It was considered necessary to generate feelings of hatred and thirst for vengeance against the foreign invader, against the “fascists”—the German occupier and German allies. In this respect, Soviet propaganda, with decisive assistance from Ilja Ehrenburg, was to descend to a level of primitive baseness and degeneracy which could hardly be surpassed.

The primary necessity was to generate an atmosphere of fear and terror in the Red Army and Navy fay creating conditions which would leave Soviet soldiers and sailors no choice but to fight and die—“to the last bullet,” “to the last drop of blood”—for the “Soviet homeland” (whatever that might mean), “for the Party and government,” “for our beloved Stalin.” Contrary to the allegations of certain German historians, the possibility of escape through surrender to the Germans, or German-allied armies, never for a moment existed where members of the Red Army were concerned. In this regard, Stalin, Molotov, and other leading Soviet officials, including Soviet woman Ambassador Kolontay, never left the slightest doubt in anyone’s mind. The Soviet Union was the only country in the world to denounce the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, and had refused to ratify the 1929 Geneva Prisoner of War Convention. In the Soviet Union, the concept of “prisoner of war” was simply unknown. The provisions of Soviet military law and the Soviet Criminal Code only recognized the terms deserter and traitor, flight to class-enemy occupied territory and anti-Soviet collaboration with the enemy. The Soviet Air Force is known to have carried out deliberate bombing attacks against columns of Soviet prisoners of war. The principle of brutal retaliation against the families and relatives of Soviet prisoners of war, including shootings, was also standard practice.

The measures taken to prohibit flight into captivity were also accompanied by other measures intended to prevent flight to the rear. A system of spying and surveillance by the political apparatus, by the NKVD organizations of the Special Departments and their spies operating in secrecy, by terrorist activities of blocking units, by military tribunals as well as by the measures announced in Stalin Orders № 270 and 227 was intended to leave Soviet soldiers no alternative. All this is inconceivable in the armed forces of any other state. But this—plus the mass shootings of soldiers and even members of the command authorities, including many generals up to the rank of Commander-in-Chief of the Front—generated the state of mind which continues to be praised as the “mass heroism” and “Soviet patriotism” of the “Great Patriotic War.” Generally speaking, bravery and contempt for death are common characteristics of Russian soldiers in any case. But true heroism is not generated by terror. The casualties resulting from driving Soviet soldiers forward into enemy machine gun fire, like cattle, were horrendous, amounting, during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, to at least five times the casualty rate inflicted upon the Finns. “Human life must not be spared”: such was the Stalinist motto upon which the Soviet military strategy was based, even where Soviet soldiers and civilians were concerned.

In describing the Stalinist war of extermination, it proved inevitable, no matter how delicate the entire topic may be, to make a brief comparison between the mass killings perpetrated by the Stalinist regime on the grounds, oversimplifying somewhat, of class struggle, and those of the Hitler regime, committed on the grounds of racial struggle. These politically-ideologically motivated crimes, which have no equal in the history of the world, were committed, in part, as a result of the propaganda war conducted parallel to the military conflict between the Soviet Union and Germany. It must, of course, be borne in mind, if a proper sense of proportion is to be maintained, that, in the unanimous opinion of all persons having studied the matter, the Soviet authorities killed at least 40 million people even before the murder squads of the Reichsführer SS ever even could go into action. Kolyma, with its three million deaths, was only one of the central concentration camps in the system of the GULag, preceding Auschwitz in time. In accordance with Stalin’s orders, the shootings of real or imagined political adversaries began in all parts of the country—in Eastern Poland, in the Baltic States, in White Russia, the Ukraine, in Greater Russia, and finally in the Caucasus—immediately following the beginning of the German-Soviet War. The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, which began to shoot the totally innocent Jewish population in so-called retaliation for the Soviet massacres already committed in Lemberg and leaving a trail of blood throughout the country, simply followed in the footsteps of the NKVD. Hugo von Hofmannsthal has stressed that the Austrians and Germans of the occupation regiments of the Commander-in-Chief for the East during the First World War acted in a spirit of justice for all, including the Jewish populations— which were very pro-German. The events now taking place in the occupied eastern territories would have been quite inconceivable under the ancien regime of the Kaiser, and were the expression of a new age of barbarism. In any case, these actions had no precedent in German tradition, and they were carried out without the knowledge or even approval of the German population.

A series of murder locations have acquired particular significance in the war of German-Soviet propaganda. Lemberg, Kiev, Kharkov, Minsk, are symbolic of the crimes of the two belligerents, although in differing respects. Beria was responsble for Katyn and Vinica, while Himmler was responsible for Majdanek and Auschwitz, their superiors being Stalin and Hitler respectively. The concentration camps of the system of the GULag nevertheless lay outside the eastern theatre of war, and were therefore not taken into consideration in this context. The Soviet Union, initially on the defensive both military and politically, appears to have been increasingly successful in regaining ground, politically, when the anti-Jewish excesses of the Einsatzgruppen came to light during the German withdrawal. An “Extraordinary State Commission” was created to serve as the suitable instrument for the concealment of Bolshevik crimes and for the propaganda exploitation of fascist crimes. Katyn and Vinica were mendaciously represented to the normally well informed Allied Governments as “fascist” crimes. The endless mass graves of Bykovnia, Damica, and Bielhorodka, with their hundreds of thousands of victims, in the vicinity of Kiev, disappeared behind the propaganda smokescreen of Babij jar—the Ravine of the Old Woman—which nevertheless continues to cast up certain unsolved riddles. The massacre of the NKVD and its Chekist predecessors at Kharкоv, Minsk, and Lemberg were also concealed by the Soviet propaganda roaring about the “fascist crimes” also committed there.

Soviet propaganda gained the upper hand after the further advance of Soviet troops into the concentration camps of the General Gouvernement of Poland, particularly, Auschwitz and Majdanek, in late 1944/early 1945. The locations of horror in the extermination camps of Poland, immediately exploited with self-satisfaction by the “Extraordinary State Commission,” appeared to confirm all previous Soviet allegations and made a devastating impression, particularly in the Allied countries. That the numbers of victims were exaggerated in this context was irrelevant within the dispute and is still considered irrelevant. Today, it is considered almost a criminal offence “to speak of Jewish losses as having been horrendously exaggerated.” Historians are particularly disturbed by this situation, since it means that they are caught between a system of political justice and spying and informants on the one hand, and their professional duty to the truth on the other hand, i.e., their duty to determine the number of victims with the greatest possible accuracy: Hans Delbrück, for good reason, stressed the demand for strict critical analysis of figures; even Friedrich Engels once called the statesman Adolphe Thiers a “big swindler” because of the alleged incorrectness of all of his numerical statements.

With regards to the losses in life caused by the Anglo-American air raids on the open city of Dresden in February 1945, mentioned purely for purposes of example, the minimum figure of 35,000, dictated by the Soviet occupation authorities on political grounds in early 1945, continues to be quoted to this day, even though the municipal administration of the regional capital of Dresden, in a letter dated 31 July 1992, described a figure of 250,000 - 300,000 deaths, mostly women and children, as “realistic,” based on “proven data.” With regards to the losses in human life occurring in Auschwitz extermination camp, however, the maximum figure of four million deaths continues to be considered valid, although the figure can be proven to originate from the Soviet NKVD. The number of victims at Auschwitz was, however, seriously reduced in 1990, and now amounts to 631,000 to 711,000 according to the latest reports; this is, of course, just as frightful, but appears to be approaching a realistic order of magnitude. That the figure of 74,000 supported by the documents, only relates to a part of the actual total, cannot be doubted. Generally, however, the mere fact that it can be proven to have been none other than the perpetrator of crimes against humanity, Ilja Ehrenburg, who first mentioned the figure of Six Million Jewish victims of National Socialism on 22 December 1944, and then introduced that figure into Soviet propaganda, must nevertheless give rise to caution. How, one must ask, did he arrive at this figure? Auschwitz concentration camp with its four to five million deaths—or so we were told—was only captured by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945! This question remains unanswered.

Stalin’s war of extermination, by contrast, began with the mass murders at Lemberg in June 1941, although he only used the term personally on the 24th anniversary of the “Great Socialist Revolution” for the first time on November 6, 1941. The murders of German prisoners of war, which began spontaneously on 22 June 1941 along the entire front, were not, as often alleged, in reprisal for the Commissar guidelines, which were unknown to the Soviets at the outset, and were furthermore rescinded in May 1942 as a result of protests within the German army. The murders of helpless German prisoners of war, and prisoners from the German-allied armies, were frequently ordered, or at least tolerated, by Soviet officers, often of higher rank, although many command agencies repeatedly, and in vain, attempted to prohibit the arbitrary shooting of prisoners, if only on the grounds of the need to capture Germans for reconnaissance purposes. But what could one expect of the mass of Soviet soldiers if they were incited to “kill all German invaders,’' “just destroy them,” “fulfilling this humanitarian mission,” in continuation of “the work of Pasteur,” “the work of all those scientists” having “discovered the means of destroying all deadly microbes”—to “put the Germans underground,” or, quite simply, “wipe them off the face of the earth”—all in the space of just a few days, by the front propaganda led by someone like Ilja Ehrenburg? In view of the genocidal attitude generated in the Red Army—an attitude which was not directed against “fascists” at all, but rather, against all Germans—it was very difficult (and very often quite dangerous) for the moderate segments of the Soviet command agencies to attempt to stop the unrestrained activities.

Following the breakthrough of Soviet troops into the territory of the German Reich in October 1944, the victims of inflamed soldiery, often incited by their officers, were no longer limited to defenseless German prisoners of war, but rather included German civilians, men, women, and children. At least 120,000 German civilians were killed outright, and at least 100-200,000 others perished in Soviet prisons and camps. More than 250,000 civilians died during or after deportation to the Soviet Union for slave labor, while innumerable others simply starved to death: 90,000 in Königsberg alone. A total of 2.2 million “unexplained” fatalities are estimated to have occurred in the subsequent “deportation regions,” fatalities which must, for the most part, upon a closer examination, be viewed as “victims of terrorism,” i.e., anti-German genocide. The internationally known expert, Prof. Dr. Dr. de Zayas, furthermore, considers that the actual number of victims may have been lower—“while it may also have been higher”—than the official figure of 2,379,000 “‘deaths testified to by eye- witnesses’, plus unexplained fatalities.” The Soviet Commanders-in-Chief at the Front, who had themselves personally called for acts of revenge, soon found themselves compelled to intervene against the descent into savagery and sadism on the part of considerable numbers of their troops. All such efforts nevertheless remained without effect in view of the anti-German hate propaganda, which, under the Ehrenburg’s leadership, continued una- bated until shortly before the end of the war, culminating in the demand to “put an end to Germany,” as well as in a demand, which Ehrenburg considered “modest and honorable,” to “reduce the German population,” in which case the only decision that remained to be made was whether it was preferable to “kill the Germans with axes or clubs.”

Stalin personally was fully aware of all these monstrous measures and procedures; it was he who personally ordered them; it was he who bore immediate responsibility for them. This is clear from an order of the Head- quarters of the Supreme Commander, signed by Stalin and the Chief of the General Staff, Army General Antonov, on 20 April 1945, which speaks of the “cruel measures” of the Soviet armed forces—not on humanitarian grounds, or out of any concern for international law, but purely and simply on the basis of political considerations. As explained by Professor Semiryaga, this order from the STAVKA, signed by Stalin, constitutes an admission that Stalin personally considered the acts of the Red Army to be cruel, “both against prisoners of war and the civilian population.”

The German-Soviet conflict, conducted by both powers as a war of extermination, each in its own way, would have represented an absolute low in German-Russian relations had there not, despite everything, been an aspect of hope. During the initial phase of the war, the friendship with which a large proportion of the Soviet population greeted the German troops is quite obvious—if not in the large industrial centers, then at least in the cities and villages of the steppes and plains generally. This was true of the Baltic States and Eastern Poland, of White Russia and the Ukraine, of Greater Russia as far as Smolensk and beyond, of the Crimea in 1942, and even of the Caucasus. “The further east we go,” reported the Supreme Command of the Army on 12 July 1941, “the friendlier the attitude of the civilian population towards the German Wehrmacht seem to be, particularly in the countryside.” In many localities, the Germans were actually welcomed as liberators. But even where this was not directly true, even where the population merely greeted the Germans with amicable reserve or expectant curiosity, the situation was still in absolute contradiction to official Soviet doctrine. Unjustified requisitions and, in certain cases, plundering and other excesses by German soldiers, against which the German command authorities naturally intervened, led to disillusionment in certain areas without, however, seriously disturbing the reciprocal relationship. A sudden change in the attitude of the population set in with further developments. This change in attitude resulted from the absence of any constructive German occupation program, combined with many repressive measures and irresponsible actions in reprisal tor the actions of partisans in guerrilla warfare. This partisans warfare was, of course, illegal under international law and was initiated by the Soviets in a spirit of cold calculation. The persecution of the Jews may also have made a greater impression on many segments of the Russian population than the Germans were aware. It should, however, be noted that the areas controlled by the German Army and Wehrmacht, despite many injustices, often contrasted very favorably with other zones under German civilian administration. Army Group A, for example, assigned to the Caucasus, was granted full political authority: the result was that relations with the minority nationalities living in the region, the Cos- sacks as well as Russians, were extremely positive. In the Caucasus, the foundations of preliminary forms of independent states for these nationalities, including a Cossack state, were even laid with German assistance.

When it is furthermore recalled that, regardless of all the Soviet deterrent terror and horror propaganda, a total of no less than 3.8 million Soviet soldiers, from enlisted men up to the rank of generals, surrendered to the Germans in 1941 alone—a total of 5.3 during the entire war—it becomes clear how favourable the prospects for a political and military cooperation between the “Russians” and the “Germans” actually were. The unconditional precondition for such cooperation, would, however, have been the recognition of Russia as a German-allied state. The essential preconditions for Russian cooperation with the Germans against the Stalinist regime were stated, from the very beginning of the war and throughout the years that followed, by Soviet officers of all ranks in German captivity, including a considerable number of Army Commanders-in-Chief, corps and divisional commanders. These conditions were: the formation of a “Russian national government and Russian army of liberation under entirely Russian leadership,” the “actual recognition of a Russian national government,” and their “own national liberation army.” Soviet officers and commanders stating these requirements included the Commanders-in-Chief of the 22nd (20th) Army, Lieutenant General Ershakov; of the 5th Army, Major General Potapov; of the 12th Army, Major General Ponedelin; of the 19th Army, Lieutenant General Lukin; of the 3rd Army of the Guards, Major General Krupennikov, and other military leaders, of whom the following deserve particular mention: Generals Abranidze, Alaverdov, Besonov, Egorov, Kirillov, Kirpichnikov, Kulikov, Ogurtsev, Sibin, Snegov, Tkachenko.

It was Hitler who destroyed the attractive possibilities of a German- Russian alliance, substituting “racial-ideological” principles for realistic negotiation, as a result of which his policy of conquest, oppression, and exploitation was doomed to failure. And yet, although they never received the slightest concession, a small group of Soviet generals as well as hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and officers, trusting in an ultimate, inevitable change in German attitude, decided to take up the struggle on the side of Germany. These generals included the Representative Commander-in-Chief of the Volkhov front, Lieutenant General Vlassov; Army Commissar and temporary leader of the 32nd Army Zhilenkov; and Major Generals Artsezo (Assberg), Blagoveshchensky, Bogdanov, Malyshkin, Shapovalov, Sevastianov, Trukhin, and Zakutny.

The resulting military cooperation, arising from the most insignificant beginnings in 1941 and contrary to Hitler’s original intentions, was also, politically speaking, perhaps the most positive phenomenon of the German-Soviet war. Although political considerations may have been less decisive than military considerations on the German side, at least initially, the deployment of these volunteer units, consisting of members of all nationalities of the Soviet Union, was the only way in which Hitler’s efforts in the East, doomed to failure, could successfully be countered. Hitler declared on 8 June 1943 that he will never build a Russian army, since that would mean abandoning “complete control over the war aims from the very outset. The creation of volunteer units, however, conducted with the support of nearly all Commanders-in-Chief and commanding officers of the Army of the East and Central Army Agencies with the de facto cooperation of the responsible Group Leader II in the Organizational Division of the General Staff of the Army, Major on the General Staff Count von Stauffen- berg, could no longer be countermanded, and now acquired, on the contrary, new momentum. National armies of liberation were now created, recruited from the peoples of Turkestan and the Caucasus, of the eastern legions of non-Russian minority nationalities of Turkestan, the North Caucasus, Azerbajdzian, Georgia, Armenia, and Volga Tatars. Units of Crimean Tatars, of Kalmuck and Cossack cavalry corps, now arose to liberate the Cossacks of the Don, Kuban, Terek, and Siberia, parallel with a Ukrainian liberation army in divisional strength.

All soldiers of Russian nationality within the structure of the German army after 1943 could consider themselves members of a Russian Liberation Army, although it existed in name only. But with the creation of the Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Peoples (KONR) in Prague on November 1944, a Russian Liberation Army (ROA) actually came into being, with its own Supreme Command and all arms of the service, including a small air force, referred to as the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Peoples (VS KONR). General Vlassov, as Chairman of the Committee—equivalent to a government-in-exile—also became the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of a Russian national army which was entirely independent, both de jure and de facto, and simply allied with the German Reich. Thus, was Hitler’s stated principle turned upside-down. If, as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn writes, hundreds of thousands, but in reality, as we know, one million Soviet soldiers of all ranks took up the struggle against their own government on the side of the enemy, in a war described as a “great patriotic struggle,” the reason for it lay, not in any variety of treason, no matter how that word may be defined, but rather, in an elementary political phenomenon which never before existed on such a scale at any time in history. This unique historical phenomenon would, in itself, suffice to refute the mindless catchword of the unlimited validity of a so-called “Soviet patriotism” and “mass heroism.”

The war between the German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was conducted with methods reflecting their ideology on both sides. After the battle of Kiev in 1941, Stalin personally ordered Beria in the Kremlin to spare no means in the generation of “hate, hate, and more hate.” On 6 November 1941, he expressly proclaimed a war of extermination against the German Reich. Ultimately, however, it was the soldiers on both sides who bridged this gap of hatred for the first time. “In the years of the common struggle,” General Vlassov announced to his troops upon assuming Supreme Command on the Münsingen drill ground on 10 February 1945, “a friendship arose between the Russian and German peoples. The errors committed on both sides, as well as their means of rectification, prove the existence of common interests. The main thing is the trust, the mutual trust, in the task of both sides. I wish to thank all German and Russian officers having participated in the deployment of this unit.” These were expressions hardly ever before heard in this war of extermination. Vlassov closed his speech, which was joyfully received, with the following appeal: “Long live the friendship between the Russian and German peoples! Long live the soldiers and officers of the Russian Army!” Hitler and Stalin were never even mentioned with as much as a single word. The Russian liberation movement, which also pursued the objective of a renewed Germany, naturally failed, as a result of the unfavorable turn of events in 1945, but it was not in vain; nor were the failed attempts at liberation in the history of other peoples, bequeathing a particularly brilliant power of example to the annals of history.