Barbarossa (80 page)

But the dreaded
Schwarze Landsknechte
went to pieces in the
race to save their own skins.

Some succeeded. Others met uncomfortable ends, like SS
Gruppenführer Paul Greiser, who was paraded around Poznan in a
cage before being hanged, and Hans Pruetzmann, the chief of the SS
police in the Ukraine, who died in agonies from cyanide poisoning in
a dry stomach. Pruetzmann's superior, Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of
the Ukraine and East Prussia, and one of the most detestable figures
to rise in the whole Nazi era, survived. He escaped deportation to
Poland until 1950, and seems never to have been brought to trial
there. Another figure from the period of
Ostpolitik
, Heinrich
Lohse, who had tried to found the hereditary margravate of Belorussia
[See Ch. 3.] and had written, asking if he was to select Jews for
execution "regardless of the requirements of industry,"
received a short term of imprisonment and is currently (1964)
drawing a pension from the Bonn government.

Certainly more of the real villains escaped than were caught. They
had had too much time to prepare their getaways, open their
numbered accounts in Zurich, purchase their nominee properties in
Spain and South America, Ireland and Egypt.

Among these were Gruppenführer Gluecks, chief of the
concentration camp inspectorate; Wirth, who had commanded the
extermination network at Plaszow, in Poland; and Heinz Lammerding,
Himmler's Chief of Staff of Army Group Vistula and one of the senior
SS officers who had made the mistake of not confining his atrocities
to the East. (He had been responsible for the "liquidation"
of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane while his division,
Das
Reich
, had been moving across France in August 1944.)

Generally speaking, those who had been involved in the East
only
fared surprisingly well if they could sidestep the first wave of
extraditions, for the immediate outbreak of the Cold War made their
calling to account a fairly leisurely affair. (General Reinecke,
personally responsible for the death of three million Russian
prisoners, got a life sentence.) And if trial could be postponed long
enough it usually resulted in their going before a German court, in
pursuance of General Clay's theories that German self-respect would
be enhanced thereby. Thus Bach-Zelewski drew a ten-year (suspended)
sentence from a Munich court. Max Simon, commander of
Totenkopf
until 1943, was acquitted altogether, and Gottlob Berger, sentenced
to twenty-five years, was released after serving two.

Dirlewanger, probably the worst of the lot, was surrounded with
the remnants of his brigade at Halbe in April 1945. In one of the
most gruesome massacres of the Eastern campaign the whole unit and a
large number of German civilians were put to the sword by the
Russians. Dirlewanger is rumoured to have escaped by hiding under a
pile of bodies. He surfaced in Egypt in 1955, and currently lives in
fine style in a villa in Cairo, although it is rumoured that the
Israelis periodically send him explosive packages.

The sinister Dr. Gebhardt, who had anticipated "trouble"
by persuading Hitler to make him head of the German Red Cross and had
made a special journey to the bunker in the Jast days of April, so
that this immunity might be officially conferred upon him, found (it
is satisfactory to record) that the British brushed it aside and,
after a disagreeable two-year period of reflection, hanged him.

Sturmbannführer Rascher, who had been in charge of the
freezing and altitude "experiments" on Russian prisoners
(including the notorious "human warmth" experiments with
naked gipsy girls) had already been liquidated by Himmler in the
course of the brief attempt to clean up the camps during the
Reichsführer's consultations with Bernadotte. General
Blaskowitz, the Ger-man Army commander in Poland, and an upright man
who had the courage to protest several times to OKH about SS
behaviour, had been arrested by the Americans and was gar-rotted by
SS guards employed as "trusties" by the prison camp
commandant.

The most ignominious and probably one of the most painful demises,
was that of the National Leader. After a few miserable days at
Flensburg, trying to make himself agreeable to Doenitz and to assert
his importance; suffering humiliations that were a constant source of
embarrassment to his staff; and deserted by many of his closest
companions who had already set off on their private journeys to ranch
cattle in the Argentine or collect butterflies in Switzerland,
Himmler slunk away. Clean-shaven, in private's uniform, with a black
patch over his eye, he was caught by the British, announced his
identity, then lost his nerve and crunched the
Zynkali
capsule
of potassium cyanide that was wedged between his gums.

Of the Russians poor Vlasov, who ended his military ca-reer as he
had begun it, fighting Germans with the Slovakian Partisans,
surrendered to Patton. He was returned to Moscow and hanged a year
later. Most of his colleagues, the young men who had emerged with
distinction from the crucible of 1941, held senior commands in the
most powerful army the world had seen. Zhukov, Koniev, Rokossovski,
Tolbukhin, Malinovsky, all had "fronts." Others, like
Ryabyshev and Katukov had tank armies. Some, like Chernyakovski, had
been killed in action. Most were destined for obscurity with the
reassertion of Stalin and Party hegemony that was to follow the
peace.

The elder marshals, Budënny and Voroshilov, long since
shunted into the background, were to be paraded from time to time,
bemedalled effigies of some slight ceremonial value.

Soldiers entered politics at their peril. Zhukov and Voroshilov
both tried to cross Khrushchev's path—albeit from opposite
directions—and both suffered ignominy as a result. Malinovsky,
venturing later, was more successful and is currently (1964) the
Minister of Defence.

For Chuikov, the hero of Stalingrad, fate had a special reward.
Not so much the appointment as Commander in Chief, though that fell
to him in due course, but the performance of a special role on 1st
May, 1945. For it was Chuikov, the expert in house-to-house fighting,
and his 8th Guards Army (the old 62nd Army of the Volga battles) who
were spearheading the drive into Berlin. And on that day he was
visited by General Krebs, who with three other officers had emerged
from the bunker under a white flag to parley a surrender.

Krebs, who knew some Russian and at one stage in his career had
been embraced by Stalin, was "a smooth, surviving type."
And so, with almost incredible effrontery, he tried to talk to
Chuikov as an equal, opening the conversation with the general
comment:

"Today is the first of May, a great holiday for our two
nations . . ."

With seven million Russian dead, half his country devastated,
and fresh evidence mounting daily of the unspeakable barbarity with
which the Germans had treated Soviet captives and civilians,
Chuikov's answer was a model of restraint, a standing testimony to
the cool head and dry wit of that remarkable man. He said:

"
We
have a great holiday today. How things are with
you over there it is less easy to say."

For over a year the embers of the
Ostfront
smouldered in
Berlin and in Germany. A hot summer followed the surrender, and
plagues of flies multiplied in the stricken cities of the Oder,
breeding in the corpses of man and beast. Rats and lice spread
disease; food no longer came in from the countryside; the casual
brutality of the occupying army showed no abatement. Then autumn
came, and those same portents of lengthening darkness and falling
temperature which had, for four years, chilled the hearts of the
Wehrmacht closed in upon the whole civilian population. How many died
in the first winter of the peace will never be known. Children ate
cats, raw, for sustenance, and burrowing in mountains of rubble at
whose centre there glowed, like that of the earth itself, the warmth
of interminable fires, were suffocated there.

Chiefly it was the innocent who suffered. Most of the villains had
slunk off the stage or else, with a change of costume, had taken
employment with their conquerors—readily accepting posts with
the Communist administration of the Eastern or the intelligence
organisations of the Western zones. While the Nuremberg trials were
in process, a genuine effort was made by both East and West to
arraign the guilty. But with the widening of political differences
between the victors, enthusiasm for the pursuit of their former enemy
declined. So many escaped or disappeared: Bormann, "Gestapo"
Müller, "Dr." Mengele. When the twenty-year limitation
period expires in 1965, they may or may, not reappear.

This paradox epitomises the real tragedy of the war in the East.
It achieved nothing constructive—not even the orderly
application of retributive justice. The very totality of the German
defeat made it inevitable that each side would try to resuscitate in
its own image the territory it was occupying, and so even the war's
most notable result, the elimination of German military power, was of
short duration.

For the West the German revival has seemed a matter for
self-congratulation, but for the Russians it has provoked an agony of
conscience and politics which is at the root of the world's
insecurity today. The Communist "government" of East
Germany is a cruel and dishonest fabrication. But what are the
Russians to do? The further they build up the economy of their zone
the more ridiculous and inappropriate will its Communist
administration become; but if they allow no amelioration of its
repressive character they risk a revolt whose consequences are
dangerous and unpredictable. Yet if they withdrew altogether,
immediate reunification with West Germany would follow, and that
country, already the strongest in Western Europe, would become the
third power in the world.

To prevent this most Russians would willingly risk their lives.
Their pathological fear and distrust of Germany is all the more
dangerous because they will not admit—are indeed prohibited
from admitting—what a close-run thing their victory was. At
this time (1964) virtually every important military office post is
occupied by soldiers who served with or under Khrushchev during the
critical three months at Stalingrad: the Minister of Defence (Marshal
Malinovsky, who commanded the 2nd Guards Army), the Chief of the
General Staff (Marshal Biryuzov, who was Chief of Staff at the 2nd
Guards Army), the Commander in Chief of ground forces (Marshal
Chuikov), the Commander in Chief of the Air Defence Forces (Marshal
of Aviation Sudets, who was commander of the 17th Air Army at
Stalingrad), Commander in Chief of the Navy (Admiral of the Fleet
Gorshkov, commander of the Azov flotilla, but operating ships on the
Volga during the Stalingrad battle), Commander in Chief of Strategic
Missile Forces (Marshal Krylov, formerly Chief of Staff to Chuikov in
the 62nd Army). The Commander in Chief of the Air Forces (Marshal of
Aviation Vershinin) commanded the air forces of the north Caucasus
front in the spring of 1943; Krylov's predecessor with Strategic
Missiles, Marshal Moskalenko, commanded the 38th Army and is now
chief of the general inspectorate; while the head of rear services
(Marshal Bagramyan) knew Khrushchev in the bad days of 1941, when he
was chief of the operations directorate of Kirponos' staff. Of the
Russian nuclear battery over four fifths is deployed against Western
Europe, some are trained on China, and only the remaining fraction
have United States targets according to present estimates of the
Institute for Strategic Studies.

As we formulate our policies to ensure that these missiles are
never fired we should always bear in mind the Russian experience in
World War II, the extent to which it colours the hidden mainstream of
Soviet strategy, and the memories of it which are borne by every
senior Soviet administrator, both military and civilian, at the
present time.

Appendices

FACTS ABOUT THE RUSSIAN AND GERMAN LEADERS