Read The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe Online
Authors: William I. Hitchcock
90. The evidence for the link between a war against Russia and a final solution to the Jewish “problem” is overwhelming, and powerfully presented in Ian Ker- shaw, Hitler, vol. 2, Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000), chapter 8.
Earl F. Ziemke and Magna E. Bauer, Moscow to Stal- ingrad: Decision in the East (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1987), 3–15.
Stalin quoted in Werth, Russia at War, 163.
Marius Broekmeyer, Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, trans. by Rosalind Buck (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 54; and Joachim Hoffman, “ The Conduct of the War through Soviet Eyes,” in Boog, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 4, 848.
Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, eds., A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 48.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf, 2004), 399.
Ilya Ehrenburg, “ We’ll Survive,” October 28, 1941, World War II Dispatches, 29–32.
Werth, Russia at War, 246.
Broekmeyer, Stalin, the Russians and Their War, 56, 59.
This point is particularly stressed by Richard Overy,
Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton, 1995), 180–82; and Russia’s War, 118. In the second half of 1941, despite the invasion and its huge disruptions, the USSR pro- duced significantly more armaments than it had done in the first six months of 1941. Soviet factories churned out 4,470 tanks, 8,000 aircraft, 55,500 artillery pieces,
1.5 million rifles, and 40 million shells in the second half of the year, and the numbers soared in 1942, when they produced 24,445 tanks and 21,000 aircraft. Joachim Hoffman, “ The Conduct of the War,” 856.
Yevgeny Petrov, “In Klin,” December 16, 1941, World War II Dispatches, 44–48.
Werth, Russia at War, 194.
Broekmeyer, Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, 94–95; Overy, Russia’s War, 158–60; Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad, 371.
Overy, Russia’s War, 175; Erickson, Road to Stalin- grad, 364.
Werth, Russia at War, 560–62; Grossman, “Military Council,” December 29, 1942, World War II Dispatches, 157–58. For a superbly detailed account of the battle at Stalingrad, see Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (New York: Penguin, 1999).
Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism, 898–99. For Hitler’s musings about the destruction of the Soviet peoples and the creation of a German paradise in the east, see Kershaw, Hitler, 2, 400–4. An excellent overall survey of Hitler’s aims for his conquered territories is Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: The Establishment of the New Order (New York: Norton, 1974).
Christopher Browning, “ The Nazi Decision to Com- mit Mass Murder, Three Interpretations—The Eupho- ria of Victory and the Final Solution, summer-fall 1941,” German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (Oct. 1994), 473–81; and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 309–14; Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1991), 167–97, provides details on Himmler’s ac- tivities in the summer of 1941.
Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 154.
Gilbert, The Holocaust, 175. The numbers of killings are from Gilbert, 154–75.
Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, 315.
Kershaw, Hitler, 2, 464.
Boris Kacel, From Hell to Redemption: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 5–6.
Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 42.
http://www.ns-archiv.de/krieg/
1941/kommissar- befehl.php.
Order of July 2, 1941, from Reinhard Heydrich to Einsatzgruppen leaders, Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1091.
The numbers of POW deaths is debated; for a sur- vey, see Theo J. Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 1989), 180–210; and the work of Christian Streit, Keine Kam- eraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegs- gefangenen 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags- Anstalt, 1978). Werth provides horrific details: Russia at War, 703–9.
Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941– 1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd ed. (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press, 1981), 428–53; Timothy P. Mul- ligan, The Politics of Illusion and Empire: German Oc- cupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1942–1943 (West- port, Conn.: Praeger, 1988), 111–16; Himmler, October 4, 1943, to SS leaders in Posen, in Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 919–20.
Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 131–36, 164–86; Boh- dan Krawchenko, “Soviet Ukraine under Nazi Occupa- tion, 1941–44,” in Yury Boshyk, Ukraine during World War II (Edmonton: Canadian Library of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 15–37.
Ehrenburg, We Will Not Forget (Washington, D.C.: Soviet Embassy, June 1944), articles titled “ Two Years,” June 1943, and “Beginning of the End,” September 1943; Grossman in Beevor and Vinogradova, eds., A Writer at War, 252–60.
For an excellent exploration of Stalin’s thinking, see Constantine Pleshakov and Vlad Zubok, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), espe- cially 1–77. For the size of the Red Army at this point, see John Erickson, The Road to Berlin (London: Weiden- feld & Nicolson, 1983), 146.
There are a number of detailed studies of the con- ference, but the most lucid and well written comes from the pen, not surprisingly, of Churchill himself: The Second World War, vol. 5, Closing the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 342–407. The official record, comprised mostly of notes taken by Charles Bohlen of the State Department, who served as the American translator, is published in Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943 (Washington, D.C.: Department of State, 1961). See also Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 134–54. For a full-blown study, see Keith Eubank, Summit at Tehran (New York: William Morrow, 1985).
Churchill, Second World War, vol. 5, 374; FRUS, Te- heran, 553–54.
Jan T. Gross, “Sovietization of Poland’s Eastern Territories,” in Bernd Wegner, ed., From Peace to War, 63–78. Gross considers Soviet actions in Poland in the two years before Barbarossa to have been “far more in- jurious than those of the Nazis,” 78.
Churchill made his views plain to the London Poles as early as July 1943, when he told President Wladislaw Raczkiewicz that despite Britain’s strong support for
Poland, he “had never wanted, and was still unwilling, to assume any obligation in the matter of Polish fron- tiers. Frontiers were not a ‘taboo’ and could be changed, perhaps by exchange of populations.” “Note on a Con- versation between President Raczkiewicz and Mr. Churchill,” July 26, 1943, in Documents on Polish- So- viet Relations, 1939–1945, vol. 2 (London: Heinemann, 1967), 25–28. For further details on the British-Polish relations in this period, see Jan M. Ciechanowski, The Warsaw Rising of 1944 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), especially chapter 1.
FRUS, Teheran, 509–12.
A copy of the map with Stalin’s red pencil marks is in FRUS, Teheran, 601.
For Soviet military figures, John Erickson, The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany, vol. 2 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), 146, 214, 228; narrative in Overy, Russia’s War, 241–50.
Ehrenburg, “ The Roads to Berlin,” in We Will Not Forget, 56. The Red Army did not bring freedom to the Crimea and Caucasus. There, where some of the inde- pendent, non-Russian peoples had initially welcomed the Nazi invasion as putting an end to the extreme
cruelty of Soviet rule, and where some had agreed to fight alongside the Germans against the Red Army, Stalin swiftly settled scores. In 1943 and 1944, the Chechens, Ingush, Karachay, Meskhets from Georgia, Balkars, Kalmyks from the lower Volga, and Kurds—a hodgepodge of ancient ethnicities that had never felt beholden to Russia’s centralizing autocrats, whether Tsarist or Communist—were rounded up and deported to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Siberia. Their crime was simply that they had survived the German occupation, and therefore might be suspected of collaboration or sympathy toward the foreign occupation. Using tactics similar to those of the German invaders, Soviet secu- rity police (NKVD) entered towns across the Caucasus, used force and threats of death to compel local inhabit- ants to appear in town squares or at railheads, pushed people by the hundreds onto U.S. supplied lendlease trucks or boxcars, nailed the doors shut, and sent them east. The Tatars of the Crimea, accused of collaboration with the German occupiers, were similarly treated: in May 1944, almost 200,000 were deported to Central Asia. A total of 1.5 million people were deported in this manner in 1943–44; a large percentage died during the deportation. At a time when the Soviet Union was still fighting a war of survival against a powerful foreign en- emy, Stalin devoted time and scarce resources to wage war on his own countrymen. One and a half million
people met this fate in late 1943 and early 1944. P. M. Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (New York: Central European University Press, 2004), 140–57; and tables, 330–32.
“Note on the conversation between Mr. Mikolajczyk and Mr. Churchill,” February 16, 1944, in Documents on Polish- Soviet Relations, 180–87.
“Order of the Commander of the Home Army to the Districts of the latter relating to the attitude of the USSR towards the struggle of underground Poland against Germany,” July 12, 1944, in Documents on Pol- ish- Soviet Relations, 284–85.
Norman Davies, Rising ‘44: The Battle for Warsaw (New York: Viking, 2003), 232.
Wlodzimierz Borodziej, The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, trans. by Barbara Harshav (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 70–71.
Ciechanowski, The Warsaw Rising of 1944, 212–42.
The astonishing brutality of these hoodlums is de- tailed in Joanna K. M. Hanson, The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 87–92.
Borodziej, The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, 74–99.
Erickson, The Road to Berlin, 247–90.
Ciechanowski, The Warsaw Rising of 1944, 312–15.
Edward J. Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pat- tern in Poland (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1958), 248; Stalin to Mikolajczyk, August 16, 1944, Documents on Polish- Soviet Relations, 346–47.
Stalin to Churchill and Roosevelt, August 22, 1944, Documents on Polish- Soviet Relations, 356.
Borodziej, The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, 130.
Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6, 226–28, 231.
Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6, 237; Pro- ceedings of the Moscow Conference, October 13, dis- cussion between Churchill, Stalin, and Mikolajczyk; minutes of two conversations between Mikolajczyk and Churchill, October 14, Documents on Polish- Soviet Relations, 405–24.
Ehrenburg, “ The Grief of a Girl,” April 1944, We Will
Not Forget.
Cited in Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Re- venge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East Germans, 1944–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 45.
Theodor Schieder et al., eds., The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories East of the Od- er-Neisse Line (Bonn: Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims, 1959), 129–33. The docu- ments in this translated collection were drawn from a much larger collection of German documents gathered by the West German authorities in the 1950s. The effort to demonstrate the degree to which Germans had suf- fered Soviet (and Polish) abuse during the expulsions from Eastern Europe clearly served the purpose of equating German suffering with the suffering of other Europeans. As such, these documents were part of a broader project to relativize German atrocities com- mitted during the war and so must be used with some care. Whatever the motives of the editors, however, the veracity of the eyewitness testimony they gathered has never been called into question. For an illuminating discussion of this documentary material, see Robert
G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 2001), 51–87. A pioneering study
that brought the extent of Soviet rapes to light is Nor- man Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–140. For a thoughtful discussion about the problems of writing the history of this sexual violence in occupied Ger- many, see Atina Grossman, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,” Oc- tober 72 (Spring 1995), 42–63.
The Expulsion of the German Population, Testimony of A.B. of Eichmedien, Sensburg, East Prussia, 207–18.
The Expulsion of the German Population, Testimo- ny of Gerlinde Winkler of Dörbeck, Prussia, 162–65.
Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought, trans. by Anthony Austin (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 60–61, 63, 71, 81, 30.
For figures, see The Expulsion of the German Popu- lation, 27–33. The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in- spired a controversial novel about German war mem- ory by former Danzig resident and Waffen- SS member Günter Grass called Crabwalk (New York: Harcourt, 2002). For an arresting depiction of the flight across the Haff and the Nehrung, see testimony of Lore Eh-
rich, of Sensburg, East Prussia, and testimony of M.M. of Lyck, The Expulsion of the German Population, 133– 43; on the fall of Danzig, The Expulsion of the German Population, Testimony of Anna Schwartz of Schönberg, West Prussia, 178–89.
Hans Graf von Lehndorff, Token of a Covenant: Di- ary of an East Prussian Surgeon, trans. by Elizabeth Mayer (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 68–83. For von Lehn- dorff, who came from an aristocratic East Prussian family that was loosely affiliated with the July 1944 plot against Hitler, these awful days were just the beginning of a long period of arrest, imprisonment, forced march- es, flight, and hiding across a broken, burnt landscape. He eventually made his way to the west, and to a life in Bonn. He died in 1987. His diary was a bestseller in West Germany in 1961 and 1962. Moeller, War Stories, 64, 84.