The Fall of Berlin 1945 (14 page)

Many reports appear to have been dramatized and exaggerated by local commanders wanting to make their work sound more important. A report on captured 'terrorists handed over to SMERSH for interrogation' revealed that all these 'terrorists' were born before 1900. Tsanava, the NKVD chief of the 2nd Belorussian Front, reported the arrest of Ulrich Behr, a German born in 1906. 'He confessed under interrogation that in February 1945 he was engaged as a spy by a resident of German intelligence, Hauptmann Schrap. His mission was to stay in the rear of the Red Army to recruit agents and to carry out sabotage, intelligence and terroristic activities. Fulfilling this task, Behr recruited twelve agents.' On a number of occasions, stragglers or local Volkssturm soldiers were described as 'Left in the rear by German intelligence with the task of committing sabotage'. The most ridiculous incident was the 'sabotage of an electric power line near Hindenburg', in Silesia. After a fearsome search for culprits, this turned out to have been caused by Red Army artillery practice. Pieces of shrapnel had severed the cables.

On the other hand, when the chief of SMERSH with the 2nd Belorussian Front claimed that his men had discovered 'a German sabotage school in the village of Kovalyowo', he may have been right. The names of those trained there were all Russian or Ukrainian. The Germans, in their desperation, had been resorting to the use of Soviet prisoners more and more. Many of these Russians and Ukrainians had probably volunteered in the hope of an easy way home, but even their prompt surrender to Soviet military authorities would not have saved them, to judge by other cases.

NKVD detachments seem to have spent more time searching houses and barns than combing the huge areas of forest. One detachment found a group of eight German women sitting in a hay stack. 'An attentive sergeant' found that they were not women, but 'German soldiers wearing women's dresses'. There were many reports of this nature.

It appears that East Prussian peasant families were often as naive as their Russian counterparts. Patrols on house searches found that the inhabitants could not stop glancing at a particular object or leave it alone. In one house, the woman went to sit on a trunk. The NKVD soldiers pushed her aside and found a man hidden in the trunk. One patrol noted the worried glances of the owner of the house towards the bed. The NKVD soldiers pulled off the mattress and saw that the boards of the bed were very high. They removed the boards and found a man dressed in women's clothes. In another house they found a man hiding under the coats on a coat-stand. The man's feet were off the ground because he had strung himself up with a strap under his armpits. Usually, the most obvious hiding places were used, such as sheds, barns and hay ricks. Sniffer dogs soon found them. Only a few constructed underground refuges. Sometimes the NKVD patrols did not bother to search a house. They set it on fire, and those who were not burned to death were shot as they jumped from the windows.

While many Volkssturm men wanted to stay near their farms, stragglers from the Wehrmacht were trying to slip back through the lines to Germany. In many cases they dressed themselves in Red Army uniforms taken from soldiers they had killed. If caught, they were mostly shot on the spot. Any prisoners taken, whether German, Russian or Polish, were put in a 'preliminary prison'. These buildings were usually just a commandeered house with barbed wire nailed over the windows and the sign 'Jail: NKVD of the USSR' chalked up on a wall outside. They were then interrogated by SMERSH, and, depending on the confession obtained, were sent off to a camp or to forced labour battalions.

NKVD chiefs also kept a sharp eye on their business affairs. Major General Rogatin, the commander of NKVD troops with the 2nd Belo- russian Front and formerly the NKVD commander at Stalingrad, discovered 'that in some [NKVD] units a majority of officers and soldiers are not engaged in their duty, but are active in the collection of looted property ... It was established that looted property was shared out within the regiments without the knowledge of division staff. In the regiments there are cases of selling and bartering looted products, sugar, tobacco, wine and gasoline taken from drivers with the advancing units of the Red Army, and motorcycles. Such a situation in the [NKVD] regiments and absence of discipline has led to a sharp increase in extraordinary events. There are soldiers who do their duty, and then there are the others who are doing nothing but loot. The looters should now be put to work along with those who do their duty.' It appears that there was no question of punishing them, and the phrase 'without the knowledge of division staff' is most revealing. Divisional headquarters was outraged presumably because it had discovered that it was not receiving its share of the proceeds.

There can be little doubt that the Red Army resented the 'rear rats' in the NKVD, but the feeling ran both ways. The NKVD did not appreciate having to deal with ammunition and weapons abandoned by Germans and advancing units of Red Army. 'All this leads to massive stealing by bandits and the local population. It has been noticed that adolescents get hold of these weapons and organize armed groups and terrorize the population. This creates favourable conditions for the growth of banditry.' An order was also issued forbidding the use of grenades for fishing, a popular sport among Red Army men in the many lakes of East Prussia and Poland.

NKVD rifle regiments had to deal not only with German stragglers and Volkssturm living like outlaws in the forests, but also with groups of Red Army deserters. On 7 March, a group of 'fifteen armed deserters' ambushed an NKVD patrol of the 2nd Belorussian Front near the village of Dertz. Another group of eight was also living in the forest nearby. All had deserted at the end of December 1944. Two days later, the NKVD reported 'finding more deserters travelling away from the front in the rear areas'. Another 'bandit group' of deserters from the 3rd Army, led by a Ukrainian captain and Party member with the order of the Red Banner, who had deserted from hospital on 6 March, lived off the land round Ortelsburg. Their group, armed with sub-machine guns and pistols, was extremely mixed. It included men from Tula, Sverdlovsk, Voronezh and the Ukraine, as well as a Pole, three German women and another German man from the Ortelsburg district.

Most deserters, however, especially Belorussians and Ukrainians, many of whom were coopted Poles, tried to sneak home in ones and twos. Some dressed up as women. Others bandaged themselves up, then went to railheads and stole the documents of wounded men. A new special pass for wounded men had to be brought in to stop this. Sometimes men simply disappeared, and nobody knew whether they had deserted or been killed in battle. On 27 January, two T-34 tanks from the 6th Guards Tank Corps in East Prussia left on an operation and neither the tanks nor the sixteen tankists and infantrymen with them were ever seen again, dead or alive.

In spite of the large numbers of NKVD troops in the rear areas, there was astonishingly little control over Red Army personnel. 'The Soviet military leadership,' stated a German intelligence report of 9 February, 'is concerned about the growing lack of discipline as a result of their advance into what for Russians is a prosperous region.' Property was being looted and destroyed and civilians needed for forced labour were killed for little reason. Chaos was also caused by the number of civilian 'citizens of the USSR who come to East Prussia to collect captured property'. The senseless death of a Hero of the Soviet Union, Colonel Gorelov, commander of a guards tank brigade, horrified many officers in the 1st Belorussian Front. At the beginning of February he was sorting out a traffic jam on the road a few kilometres from the German border and was shot by drunken soldiers. 'Such cases of bloody drunken violence are not isolated,' Grossman noted. A single NKVD regiment lost five dead and thirty-four men injured from being run down by drivers during the first ten weeks of the year.

The young women traffic controllers did not blow whistles when attempting to restore order in traffic jams, they fired their sub-machine guns in the air. On one occasion behind the 2nd Belorussian Front, a young woman traffic controller called Lydia ran up to the driver's window of a vehicle which had blocked the road. She began to yell obscenities at him. This had little effect. Obscenities were yelled back at her. But then she received unexpected reinforcements in the tall and impressive form of Marshal Rokossovsky, who had leaped from his staff car, drawing his pistol in anger. When the driver saw the marshal he was literally paralysed with fear. His officer lost his head completely. He jumped out of the cab and ran into the bushes to hide.

The entry of Soviet forces into German territory meant that Stalin's plans to force Germans to work for the Soviet Union could be put into action. On 6 February an order was issued to 'mobilize all Germans fit for work from seventeen to fifty years of age and to form labour battalions of 1,000 to 1,200 men each and send them to Belorussia and the Ukraine to repair war damage'. The Germans mobilized were told to report to assembly points wearing warm clothes and good boots. They were also to bring bedding, reserves of underwear and two weeks' food supply.

With Volkssturm members sent to prisoner-of-war camps, the NKVD managed to conscript only 68,680 German forced labourers by 9 March, the vast majority in the rear of Zhukov and Konev's armies. A large proportion were women. At first, many of the so-called labour battalions were used locally for rubble clearance and assisting the Red Army. The attitude of Soviet soldiers towards the conscripted civilians was one of intense
schadenfreude
. Agranenko watched a Red Army corporal form up a working party of German men and women in four lines. He barked out the word of command in pidgin-German, 'To Siberia, fuck you!'

By 10 April, the proportion sent back to the Soviet Union for forced labour increased rapidly, with 59,536 sent to western parts, mostly the Ukraine. Although still fewer than Stalin had planned, they suffered at least as much as their Soviet counterparts rounded up earlier by the Wehrmacht. It was naturally worst for the women. Many were forced to leave children behind with relatives or friends. In some cases they had even been forced to abandon them altogether. Their life ahead was not simply one of subjection to hard labour, but also to casual rape by guards, with venereal infections as a by-product. Another 20,000 men were put to 'demontage work', stripping the factories of Silesia.

Stalin may have described the NKVD rifle regiments to General Bull as 'a gendarmerie', but it is still striking how little they intervened to stop looting, rape and the random murder of civilians. There appears to be only one example of intervention in their reports. In April, a group from the NKVD 2i7th Frontier Guards Regiment arrested five soldiers who broke into a 'hostel of repatriated Polish women'.

Quite how little the NKVD troops were doing to protect civilians from violence of every sort is indirectly revealed in their own chiefs' reports to Beria. On 8 March, Serov, the NKVD representative with the 1st Belorussian Front, reported on the continuing wave of suicides. On 12 March, two months after Chernyakhovsky's offensive began, the NKVD chief in northern East Prussia reported to Beria that 'suicides of Germans, particularly women, are becoming more and more wide- spread'. For those who did not have a pistol or poison, most of the suicides consisted of people hanging themselves in attics with the rope tied to the rafters. A number of women, unable to bring themselves to hang a child, cut their children's wrists first and then their own.

NKVD rifle regiments did not punish their own soldiers for rape, they punished them only if they caught venereal disease from victims, who had usually caught it from a previous rapist. Rape itself, in a typically Stalinist euphemism, was referred to as an 'immoral event'. It is interesting that Russian historians today still produce evasive circumlocutions. 'Negative phenomena in the army of liberation,' writes one on the subject of mass rape, 'caused significant damage to the prestige of the Soviet Union and the armed forces and could have a negative influence in the future relations with the countries through which our troops were passing.'

This sentence also indirectly acknowledges that there were many cases of rape in Poland. But far more shocking from a Russian point of view is the fact that Red Army officers and soldiers also raped Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian women and girls released from slave labour in Germany. Many of the girls were as young as sixteen when taken to the Reich; some were just fourteen. The widespread raping of women taken forcibly from the Soviet Union completely undermines any attempts at justifying Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. The evidence for this is certainly not restricted just to the unpublished notebooks of Vasily Grossman. A very detailed report goes much further.

On 29 March, the Central Committee of the Komsomol (Communist Youth) informed Stalin's associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. 'This memorandum is about young people taken to Germany and liberated by the troops of the Red Army. Tsygankov [the deputy chief of the political department of the ist Ukrainian Front] relates numerous extraordinary facts which affect the great happiness of Soviet citizens released from German slavery. Young people express their gratitude to Comrade Stalin and the Red Army for their salvation.' 'On the night of 24 February,' Tsygankov reported in the first of many examples, 'a group of thirty-five provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women's dormitory in the village of Grutenberg, ten kilometres east of Els, and raped them.' Three days later, 'an unknown senior lieutenant of tank troops went by horse to where girls were gathering grain. He left his horse and spoke to a girl from the Dnepropetrovsk region called Gritsenko, Anna.

"Where are you from?" he asked. She answered this senior lieutenant. He ordered her to come closer. She refused. So he took his gun and shot her, but she did not die. Many similar incidents took place.' 'In the town of Bunslau, there are over 100 women and girls in the headquarters. They live in a separate building not far from the kommandantur, but there is no security there and because of this, there are many offences and even rape of women who live in this dormitory by different soldiers who enter the dormitory at night and terrorize the women. On 5 March late at night, sixty officers and soldiers entered, mainly from the 3rd Guards Tank Army. Most of them were drunk, and they attacked and offended against women and girls. Even though they were ordered by the commandant to leave the dormitory, the group of tankists threatened him with their guns and caused a scuffle . . . This is not the only incident. It happens every night and because of this, those who stay in Bunslau are frightened and demoralized and there is much dissatisfaction among them. One of them, Maria Shapoval, said, "I waited for the Red Army for days and nights. I waited for my liberation, and now our soldiers treat us worse than the Germans did. I am not happy to be alive." ' 'It was very hard to stay with Germans,' Klavdia Malaschenko said, 'but now it is very unhappy. This is not liberation. They treat us terribly. They do terrible things to us.' 'There are many cases of offences against them,' Tsygankov continued. 'On the night of 14—15 February in one of the villages where the cattle are herded a
shtraf
company under the command of a senior lieutenant surrounded the village and shot the Red Army soldiers who were on guard there. They went to the women's dormitory and started their organized mass rape of the women, who had just been liberated by the Red Army.' 'There are also many offences by officers against women. Three officers on 26 February entered the dormitory in the bread depot, and when Major Soloviev (the commandant) tried to stop them, one of them, a major, said, "I've just come from the front and I need a woman." After that he debauched himself in the dormitory.'