The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (22 page)

terized by suspicion, antagonism, and spite toward the brutal Germans. The country would be broken up, dismantled, shorn of its industries, its people made to suffer the hunger, privation, and want that they had so readily inflicted on others. Hitler, Americans believed, had made this the inevitable price Germany would have to pay.

In the waning months of the war, the concept of a “lib- erated” Germany might have provoked wry mirth from Allied soldiers and war planners, whose single aim had been to reduce Germany to a lifeless wreck. Time mag- azine correspondent William Walton reported in Feb- ruary 1945 that among front-line soldiers penetrating into the Reich, he discerned “a sharp increase in hatred of Germans.” Soldiers spoke with “amazing unanimity,” and in particular expressed admiration for the Russian approach to the Germans: “’I hope the Russians get to Berlin first,’” many soldiers said. “’ They’ll know what to do with those Krauts!’” Of the Germans, Captain John Lane of Cascade, Iowa, said “’I know these bas- tards. They’re no good. They’re treacherous, no mor- als, no scruples, no religion, no nothing…I don’t know what in hell you’re going to do about educating their officers. Most of them are just hopeless. My private suggestion is that you just kill them all.’”
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As for the Russians, their attitude toward the Germans in these final months of the war had been shaped by four bitter years of unimaginable atrocity and ideologi- cally driven conflict in the east. Citizens of the Soviet Union had endured the enslavement and murder of millions of their countrymen by the German occupa- tion. Once the tide of war had turned against the Ger- mans, and the Red Army began to push them out of the Soviet Union, soldiers encountered every day new evi- dence of the brutality of the German occupiers. As the Red Army reached East Prussia—that easternmost bas- tion of German power, cradle of the Teutonic Knights and the setting of Hitler’s eastern command head- quarters, the Wolfsschanze—Red Army propagandists sharpened their pencils and went to work:

East Prussia—the nest of Prussian Junkers and land- owners, the hideout of high-ranking fascist gangsters— hears the rumble of our cannon, the engines of our tanks and self-propelled weapons. It sees the endless flow of our troops. It is the Red Army, the army of jus- tice and revenge marching along its roads, destroying the nests of fascism, the Hitlerite armed machine of ex- termination, destroying it forever. And toward the glo- rious regiments comes a flow of people, day and night come the liberated, the people our victorious weapons snatched from the hands of death…. These are not

simply tired, tormented people. They have been saved for life. They were saved by the Red Army.
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This kind of writing, common enough in the pages of the Red Army newspaper Red Star, bore little relation to reality. What the Soviets brought to East Prussia, and to the eastern German lands of Pomerania, Branden- burg, and Silesia, was not liberation but a carefully cal- ibrated catastrophe: extreme violence, looting, rape, death, and destruction on a scale as vast as the climac- tic battles of the war themselves. And before the ad- vance of these vengeful Soviet soldiers flowed a stream of millions of panic-stricken German refugees, bearing not only their children and a few belongings in creaky wooden carts, but also the weight of their consciences, which perhaps whispered to them that they had richly earned this awful fate.

We know that the story did not end there. The Soviet assault into Germany from the east, and the Anglo- American conquest from the west, converged in central Germany at the end of April 1945. Hitler’s suicide on April 30 was followed by the surrender of German forc- es in Berlin to General Vasily Chuikov of the Soviet Red Army on May 2. The German forces in Holland, Den- mark, and northwest Germany followed suit on May 4, surrendering to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery

in a somber ceremony on the flat, windy expanse of Lüneburg Heath. On May 7, at SHAEF headquarters in Reims, France, General Eisenhower accepted the un- conditional surrender of all German forces; the sur- render was signed by General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the German army, and was effective an hour before midnight on May 8. Stalin, however, demanded that the Germans surrender to Red Army forces in Berlin, and so late at night on May 8, in an old engineering school on the outskirts of Berlin, Field Marshal Wilhelm Kei- tel, the chief of the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces, signed the surrender documents before Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov.

Germany lay prostrate and inert, and it soon fell to these great powers to resurrect their zones of Germany in their own image: in the west, as a democratic, de- nazified Germany that could serve as a bulwark against the Soviets; in the east, as a Communist state closely linked to the interests of Moscow. This all lay in the fu- ture. Looking back to the records of the Allied powers from 1944 and early 1945, it is hard to find evidence that the Big Three of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill saw their mission as the “liberation” of Germany. In some future time, perhaps, the German people as a whole might be redeemed, and offered an opportunity to live among civilized nations. But in late 1944 and early

1945, Allied leaders framed their war strategy around a simple principle that released them from any respon- sibility for human suffering: in starting the war and killing millions of innocent people, they believed, the Germans had turned their backs on civilization. Now civilization was going to turn its back on them.

4: Red Storm in the East: Survival and Revenge

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ARLY ON MAY 9, 1945, just hours after the Ger- man High Command capitulated to a delegation of Soviet generals in Berlin, Russia’s war with

Germany came to an end. Ilya Ehrenburg, the fiery wartime propagandist for the Red Army newspaper Red Star, described in his memoirs the joyous celebra- tions in Moscow. The city was filled with delirious sing- ing and dancing, fireworks pierced the sky, and spon- taneous street demonstrations erupted throughout the night. But Ehrenburg sensed beneath the surface of these celebrations an undercurrent of pain. “ There was a great deal of sorrow. Everybody was remember- ing the dead…That evening there could not have been a single table in our country where the people gathered round it were not conscious of an empty place.”
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This was no exaggeration. One of the incomprehensible facts about the Second World War is the sheer scale of the human losses in the Soviet Union during four years of war with Germany. The latest scholarship reports that somewhere between 23 million and 26 million So- viet citizens died in the war. Of these, 8.66 million were soldiers; the rest, civilians: women, old men, children. A million of these were Jews. The Soviet Union was a

large country, with a population of 190 million people. About 14 percent of them died in the war—one person in eight. Millions more endured wounds, hardships, losses of homes, land, dignity.
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The scale of Soviet losses, and of the great battles in the east that churned up thousands of square miles of Po- land, the Baltic states, Belorussia, Ukraine, the Cauca- sus, and the Russian heartland, makes the battles of the western front, in Normandy, the Ardennes, and along the Siegfried Line, seem small in comparison. Total U.S. service deaths in World War II, including Army, Navy, and Marines, came to 405,399, including the Pacific Theater, and including nonbattle deaths. This is a huge and frightful number, and for every death there was a family in America that also faced an empty place at the dining table, a closet filled with clothes that would nev- er be worn again. But it bears insisting that total Soviet losses were 65 times greater than American; and that by the time America entered the war in December 1941, two and a half million Soviet soldiers had already been killed. The point here is not to detract in any way from the American sacrifice, but to explain why the Soviet soldiers that pushed into Germany in the spring of 1945 acted with such ferocity and violence toward the Ger- man people. Unlike American, British, or Canadian sol- diers, the men and women of the Red Army had tasted

German occupation on their own homeland. They had fled, with millions of others, from the advancing Ger- mans in the summer of 1941; they had seen the German armored divisions rip into the Russian heartland and flay it open; they had watched in horror as city after city was occupied, looted, savaged by the German invaders; they had seen millions of people enrolled into forced labor for the German war machine; and as the Red Army began to push the Germans back, slowly but re- morselessly, across that charred land, they uncovered all the death and destruction that the Germans left be- hind. For Soviet citizens, the war against Germany was something that it could never be for their western com- rades in arms: a war of survival and, in its final months, revenge.
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“Our holy war, a war foisted upon us by the aggres- sor, will become the war of liberation for an enslaved Europe.”
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That is how Ehrenburg, whose patriotic and sulfurous anti- German articles in the Soviet press were read carefully by millions of soldiers and civil- ians, framed the German- Soviet war on the very day of the German attack of June 22, 1941. But it was not immediately obvious to many citizens of the Soviet Union that the German invasion would bring a worse fate than that already imposed on the country by Josef Stalin. The Soviet Union was barely two decades old; its

birth was attended by bloody revolution and civil war; and for most of the time since its founding in 1922, Sta- lin had waged war on his own people. He imprisoned, starved, shot, or transported to Siberia countless mil- lions of people in an effort to consolidate his power and impose Communist rule. In the Ukraine, Stalin had forced the collectivization of agriculture upon the peas- ants, and treated resistance to this policy by cutting off grain supplies and waging war on the so-called “ku- laks,” or “rich” peasants. In 1932–33, 3 million people died of starvation in the Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.
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In 1939, through the nefarious terms of the Hitler- Stalin pact, the Soviet Union grabbed the independent states in the Baltic—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—as well as a large slice of eastern Poland; these lands were immediately subjected to a ruthless Sovietization. It was an open question, therefore, just what Ehrenburg meant when he spoke of liberation: for whom, and from what?

In a country made up of such diverse nationalities, and held together by a tyrannical dictatorship, it might have been easy for the Germans to stir up local griev- ances and win anti- Stalin allies along the way. There were initial signs in the Ukraine that many welcomed the chance to get rid of Soviet rule there, and looked to the German soldiers as liberators. Yet, if Stalin had

been brutal and dictatorial, the Germans were to prove even worse: they aimed at nothing less than the whole- sale enslavement or eradication of the Slavs of the east, and the incorporation of their lands into a German New Order that would serve only the interests of the master race. Whatever ill will many Soviet citizens felt toward Stalin, most of them quickly set their feelings aside in face of the far greater and immediate danger posed by the marauding German invaders. With re- markable speed, the many peoples that made up the Soviet Union converged on a single goal: to push back and defeat the Germans.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, after all, for ideological reasons. The prospect of a long-term accommodation with Stalin—and with communism—was impossible to accept. Hitler had long dreamed of the destruction of the Soviet Union and its peoples. He spelled out his goals repeatedly. In Mein Kampf, his bloated, rambling 1925 political testament, he wrote that National Social- ists desired “to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled on this earth.” This land of course lay in the east, across Germany’s bor- ders, in the USSR. No matter: as he put it, “state bound- aries are made by man and changed by man.” The So- viet Union’s fertile lands, once conquered and settled by Germans, would provide the Reich with a new field

of colonization. The issue was urgent, not only because Germany needed lebensraum, living space, in which to expand, but because Russian Bolshevism represented nothing less than “the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twentieth century to achieve world domina- tion…. Germany is today the next great war aim of Bol- shevism.” The war in the east, Hitler believed, would settle the question of the domination of Europe and also provide the opportunity for the final destruction of the Jewish-Bolshevik threat. The war against Russia was conceived explicitly as a war of extermination.
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The scale and ambition of the German invasion, code- named Barbarossa, are almost impossible to compre- hend. Three million German soldiers (joined by half a million troops from Axis-allied Finland and Romania) crashed across a front line that ran nearly a thousand miles, from the Baltic shores in East Prussia down through Poland and along the Romanian border to the Black Sea. This force of 153 divisions, 3,600 tanks, and 7,000 artillery pieces faced off against an equally large (but far less well-prepared) Soviet force of 2.9 million men drawn up in 140 divisions. Hitler sent one giant army group to the north from East Prussia through the Baltic states toward Leningrad; another army group moved from Warsaw into Belorussia, toward Minsk, Smolensk, and Moscow; and a third massive army

group drove southeast, across the Ukraine and into the Caucasus. These swift moving, heavily armored thrusts, carefully coordinated with 2,770 aircraft, aimed to pen- etrate deeply into Soviet territory, surround and crush the Red Army, and then reach out for the hinterland, occupying finally all of European Russia along a north- south line from Archangel in the Arctic Circle down to the Volga river and the Caspian Sea. This was a conti- nental-sized war of conquest.
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The initial weeks of the invasion were a disaster for the Soviet defenders. The Germans had the element of surprise: despite early warnings and a variety of intelligence, the Soviet leadership did not believe— refused to believe—that a German attack was immi- nent. Worse, the Red Army, despite the large numbers of soldiers in it, was badly equipped, with many sol- diers having no weapons and little ammunition. De- fensive positions were thin and quickly overrun by the swift-moving panzers; the Soviet air force had nothing but obsolete aircraft with poor radar and radio equip- ment. Despite a certain fatalistic spirit—soldiers lined up for frontal attacks on the invaders, sometimes on horseback with sabers drawn, only to be mown down by the thousands—the Red Army simply disintegrated amid chaos and panic. Even Stalin, the iron dictator, took to his dacha outside of Moscow, seized by fear and