Russia at war 1941-1945

Nema kurka, nema brot,

Dosvidania Belgorod; or

Nema kurka, nema soup,

Dosvidania Kremenchug,

which, in this mixture of German, pidgin Russian and pidgin Ukrainian, means—"No more chicken, no more eggs, good-bye, landlady; No more beer and no more wine, goodbye, Ukraine; No more chicken, no more bread, good-bye, Belgorod; No more chicken,

no more soup, good-bye Kremcnchug". And many more on the same lines. And, more

generally, the bitter disappointment and disillusionment was expressed in these lines, known to every German soldier:

"Es ist alles vorueber, es ist alles vorbei,

Drei Jahre in Russland und nix ponimai",—

"It is all over, it is all gone; three years in Russia, and can't understand anything".

Chapter III CLOSE-UP II: ODESSA, CAPITAL OF RUMANIAN

TRANSNIESTRIA

April and May 1944 saw the final expulsion of the Germans from the southern parts of the Ukraine. The troops of Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front swept all the way into northern Rumania, and it was not till they had reached a line some twelve miles east of Jassy that the front became temporarily stabilised. On April 2 Molotov, announcing the invasion of Rumania, hastened to declare that the Soviet Union did not aim at altering the "social order" (i.e. capitalism) in that country. The troops of Malinovsky's 3rd Ukrainian Front had meantime advanced along the Black Sea coast, liberating Kherson, Nikolaev and

Odessa, and, on April 11, the beginning of the Russian invasion of the Crimea, Hitler's last stronghold on the Black Sea, was announced. Within a month, the Crimea was

cleared.

The great peculiarity of Odessa, "the Russian Marseilles" was that, except for the last few weeks when the Germans took over, it had not been under German rule. As a reward for Rumania's participation in the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler had given her a large and rich territory in the southern Ukraine stretching all the way from Bessarabia to the Bug; this included the great Black Sea port of Odessa, and the whole area was

incorporated into "greater Rumania" as a new province under the name of Trans-niestria (i.e. the land beyond the Dniester).

Malinovsky liberated Odessa on April 10, and the Germans, fearing encirclement, had

left in a frantic hurry, some by sea, under almost constant Russian bombing and shellfire, others by the last remaining road between Odessa and the Dniester estuary, where a ferry took them across to the parts of Bessarabia and Rumania which the Russians had not yet occupied. By the time Odessa fell, this road was littered with hundreds of

wrecked and abandoned German vehicles. Though in a desperate hurry to get out of

Odessa, the Germans had had time to turn the harbour, most of the factories and many other large buildings, into smouldering heaps of wreckage.

I drove to Odessa on a beautiful spring day in mid-April from a point just north of

Nikolaev, on the east side of the Bug. The Bug had been the frontier between German-

occupied and Rumanian-annexed Ukraine, and civilians were not allowed to travel

between the two except by very special permission. But since February 1944 the

Germans no longer took any notice of the fiction of "Trans-niestria" being part of Rumania.

They had tried to drive away the cattle; but as they could not get the cows across the Bug, they shot them, and the green banks of the river were littered with dozens of brown

carcasses of dead cows which were beginning to stink.

It was typical steppe country between the Bug and Odessa, and sometimes there was no village in sight for miles as one drove between the immense green carpets of winter

wheat which had been duly sown in the autumn, and which the Russians were now going

to harvest.

Here and there, there were fallow patches, but not many. But one of the strangest sights on this road were some completely deserted villages; they did not look like Russian or Ukrainian villages. Their houses were painted in bright colours, and they had spired churches —Lutheran churches, or maybe Catholic churches, for by the roadside there

were also one or two Catholic shrines. These were German villages—villages of German colonists who had lived here for 150 years, and had latterly acted as quislings

everywhere, filling administrative and police jobs placed at their disposal by the Germans on the eastern side of the Bug. Those who had stayed in this "Greater Rumania", had acted as an arrogant German minority, and had no doubt already been preparing

unpleasant surprises for the Rumanian "majority". But the rapid advance of the Red Army had obliged them to abandon their homes. Later, in Odessa, I was to see a paper called Der Deutsche in Transniestrien, in which the province was in fact treated as part of the German heritage, and the Rumanians were not mentioned once! Nevertheless, until

only a few weeks before, Hitler still felt obliged to keep up the myth of Greater Rumania, and the pretence that Transniestria was a Rumanian province and Odessa a Rumanian

city.

We approached Odessa at dusk, and as we drove towards the Black Sea, the country

became hillier, and here and there were signs of fighting. All along the road we had passed many dead horses, and here, on these wind-swept hills above the Black Sea there were many more, and some bomb craters, and, here and there, some dead men. At one

point we passed an enormous war memorial the Rumanians had erected to commemorate

their Odessa victory of 1941. It was here, through these hills, that the Russian ring of defences round Odessa then ran.

And then we came to Odessa, and in the streets there was a sharp smell of burning.

Odessa was completely dark. All the power stations had been blown up by the Germans

who had full control of the city in the last fortnight and, worse still, there was no water—

except for very limited quantities drawn from Artesian wells inside the city. The normal supply of water came from the Dniester, thirty or forty miles away, and the mains had been blown up. Now, as during the two months' siege in the grim autumn of 1941,

Odessa was relying on its own wells. At the Hotel Bristol, where we stayed, the washing ration was one bottle per day.

This Bristol Hotel, a great big absurd-looking building with ornate caryatids going three storeys up, was in Pushkin Street, and all its windows were broken. It had two hall

porters, an old man with a black beard, a former Odessa docker or bendyuzhnik, with a gruff voice and loud ugly laugh, and his assistant, a little old man with a grey barbiche and a leer. The two of them would stand on the pavement outside, and, watching the

Odessa girls in their light dresses walk past in groups of four or five, they would make lewd remarks, and the little man with the grey barbiche and the leer would then tell remarkable anecdotes, for instance about two girls who were living in the same house as himself, and of how the one specialised in Rumanian, and the other in German officers, and how they would compare notes.

No inhibitions here. This was Odessa with its perpetual whiff of the underworld, which recalled the glories of Isaac Babel's Benya Krik, the king of the Odessa gangsters, and which even a hundred years of Soviet rule may never quite eradicate.

It wasn't quite the Odessa one had known in the past. For one thing, it was an Odessa without Jews, and they had been an essential part of the Black Sea port—they and the Armenians and Greeks and other Mediterranean or quasi-Mediterranean fauna.

But there was still the Odessite who, whether he was Ukrainian, or Russian, or

Moldavian, was Odessite first and foremost, speaking a jargon of his own, with his own idiom and his own accent. Obviously, many of them took like a duck to water to the

seemingly easy-going life of Antonescu's Odessa, with its restaurants and black market, its brothels and gambling dens, lotto clubs and cabarets, and its semblance of European culture, complete with opera, ballet and symphony concerts.

There were the Siguranza, the Rumanian secret police, and the Bolshevik underground—

literally underground in the Odessa catacombs—and the Jews, many thousands of whom

had been murdered by the Rumanians; but the occupation (or rather, annexation) régime was different in many other ways from the German occupation régime I had seen in cities like Voronezh, Orel or Kharkov.

While the Axis's prospects of winning the war seemed good, the Rumanians were

planning to turn Odessa into a sort of brighter and better Bucharest. Not only were there the restaurants, and shops and gambling dens, and the solemn appearance of Antonescu in the former Imperial Box at the Opera, but there was a serious attempt to convince the people that they were, and were going to remain, part of Greater Rumania. Unlike the Germans in occupied cities, the Rumanians did not close down either the University or the schools; school-children had to learn Rumanian, and university students were warned that if they did not learn Rumanian within a year, they would be expelled—though after Stalingrad the Rumanians were no longer insistent on this point. They continued to

distribute a Rumanian geography book, translated into Russian, which demonstrated that practically the whole of southern Russia was, "geopolitically", part of Rumania and was largely inhabited by descendants of the ancient Dacians. Those who could prove any

Moldavian blood were promised various privileges: to have a Jewish grandmother was

dangerous, but to have a Moldavian grandparent was like a title of nobility.

There was one aspect of Odessa which was not to be found in any of the German-

occupied cities. Odessa was full of young people. It was a happy fluke: the Rumanians had regarded "Transniestria" as part of their country, and its inhabitants as future Rumanian citizens. No doubt, after Stalingrad, they were no longer so sure about keeping Odessa, but the fiction still had to be kept up. Therefore, the great majority of young people in Odessa were not deported to Germany, or anywhere else. Nor had they been

called up into the Rumanian Army, since they were totally unreliable from the Rumanian point of view. Only during the last few weeks, when the Germans had taken over, were some unlucky Odessites deported to Germany; but most had dodged deportation, thanks, partly, to the Soviet underground.

During those first days of the liberation, there were still plenty of signs of the Rumanian occupation régime that had lasted for two-and-a-half years.

All down Pushkin Street (spelled Pušchin on the white-and-blue Rumanian street plates that were now being taken down) and the other famous acacia-lined Odessa streets,

named after the city's 18th century French founders (Richelieu, De Ribas, Langeron)

there were still advertisements of lotto clubs and cabarets, and shop-signs with Bodega written on them (the Bodegas were now closed) and remnants of a proclamation printed in Rumanian, German and Russian (but not Ukrainian): "We Ion Antonescu, Marshal of Rumania, Professor L. Alexeanu, Civil Governor of Transniestria", etc., etc. A large building had a notice up: "Guvernamantul Trans-nistriei", and the bus signs—not that there were any buses now— said that the first bus from the Aeroport to La Gara (Station) left at 7.15 a.m. The musical programmes referred to the "Teatrul de Opera & Balet, Odesa" —which, incidentally, showed that it was not true that the city had been re-named Antonescu, and had merely lost one s. There had been many other entertainments in Odessa, even the Symphony Orchestra of the Luftwaffe had given a concert— though

this was on March 27, during the German régime—and they played Schubert's

Unfinished, and Beethoven's Violin Concerto, and Tschaikovsky's Fifth. There were also several dressmakers' ateliers, and many other small shops, whose proprietors had now vanished. Free Trade—of sorts—seemed to have been in full swing in Odessa while the

Rumanians were there. The Rumanians were speculators, and half the people of Odessa, and more perhaps, were speculators, too. Was not speculation and trade in the Odessite's blood? Rumanian generals used to bring whole trunkloads of ladies' underwear and

stockings from Bucharest, and get their orderlies to sell them in the market. Even now there were quite a few things to buy in the market—German pencils, Hungarian

cigarettes, German cigarettes (called "Krim", and made in the Crimea), and even bottles of scent—and some stockings, though these were becoming scarce now, and could only

be bought under the counter. Now the militia was keeping an eye on all this trading, and the Odessites in the market looked somewhat subdued. The noisiest person was a blind man, accompanied by an old woman who rattled her moneybox in people's faces; and the blind man was singing in a whining penetrating voice:

Znayut vse moyu kvartiru,

Tam zhivu sredi mogil,

Rvalis tam snaryady zlyie,

Zhizn svoyu tam polozhil.

("Everybody knows my dwelling;

There I live among the graves,

Where the wicked shells were bursting,

There I lost my youthful life.")

They were selling jam at twenty roubles a pot and bread at ten roubles a kilo (which was very cheap); there was plenty of milk, and they were also selling German bottles of

apple-juice. The silk stocking under the counter were now fetching 300 roubles.

[Nominally £6, but the value of Russian currency (except for rationed goods) had

depreciated so much during the war that the figure is meaningless.]

And the saleswomen were still talking of marks when they meant roubles. The wrapping paper used was German newspapers.

Later, all these "New Order" luxuries were to disappear, and prices went up.

Although the port with its docks and grain elevators was a heap of smouldering ruins, the famous marine promenade overlooking the port and the sea was crowded as usual with

young people. Many of them were sitting on benches or on the steps of the Great

Staircase (of Eisenstein's Potemkin tame). I remember, in particular, two youngsters—

one fair, the other with the beginnings of a black moustache, who were commenting, in their Odessa jargon, on the terrible destruction the Germans had caused to the port and other parts of the city—particularly to the factories at Moldovanka and Peresyp. They also recalled how, during the last fortnight of the German occupation, they and their friends had hidden in cellars and in the catacombs—for it was no good going out into the street, not even before the 3 p.m. curfew, because the Germans might nab you, and deport you to Germany, or simply kill you. They used elaborately abusive language about the Germans, and said the Rumanians were exceedingly fed-up when the Germans took

everything over in February. "I wonder," black moustache said, "what the Reds are going to do about sea bathing." (In Odessa, too, many talked about "The Reds"). During the previous summer, he said, the Rumanians had allowed only one beach to be used, and on hot days as many as 20,000 people would queue up. Now that the damned Germans had

mined all the beaches, there mightn't be any bathing at all this year. On the whole, they were pleased that the "Reds" had come, because it was really terrifying under the Germans. The Rumanians at least left "most people" in peace, though others, especially the Jews, had had great trouble with the Siguranza. But, on the whole, the Rumanians didn't interfere too much with people. Mozhno bylo zhit—"one could live", and there was plenty of food in the market, and the Rumanian soldiers always had a variety of things to sell.

"What happened to the Jews?" I asked. "Oh," said the fair-haired boy, "they say they bumped off an awful lot, but I didn't see it. Some were allowed to escape—with a little money you could buy anything from the Rumanians, even a passport in the name of Richelieu. We had a family of Jews living in our cellar; and we took them food once a week. The Rumanian cops knew about them, but didn't bother. They said that if so many Jews were bumped off, it was because the Germans had demanded it. 'No dead Jews, no

Odessa', they said. Anyway, that's what the Rumanians told us."

Professor Alexeanu, the civil governor of the Transniestria, had taken up his residence in the beautiful Vorontzov Palace on the Marine Promenade; in Soviet times it had been

turned into the Pioneers' Palace. Now it was going to be turned into the Pioneers' Palace once again. Alexeanu, people in Odessa said, had been rather easy-going, except that he gave the Siguranza an entirely free hand. When he was removed in February 1944, it was because of the terrible amount of embezzlement of which he was said to be guilty. He did not spend his money on civic welfare, but rather, on a nice pair of legs. True, he

pretended to be interested in the welfare of schools and the university, and it wasn't until the Germans came in February 1944 that the university laboratories and everything else were looted. Alexeanu, as somebody said, "was tall, long-faced, with brown hair, the kind of man women like". His chef de cabinet was one Cherkavsky, a White Russian, but the bulk of Alexeanu's staff came from Bucharest.

Alexeanu was succeeded as civil governor by General Potopianu, who had besieged

Odessa back in 1941. He was a bit less easy-going than Alexeanu, but anyway he hadn't much say any longer. For from February the Germans were, unofficially, in control of everything and, from April 1, officially.

Towards the end of the occupation, the Germans scrapped the very name of Transniestria, and took over the railways and every-thing else (much to Antonescu's indignation). They were greatly worried about two things—that some of the Rumanian generals in Odessa,

or elsewhere, might "do a Badoglio" on them; and about the spread of communism and defeatism among the Rumanian soldiers.

Before the Germans had taken over, Transniestria had thirteen districts, each under its own prefect; in Odessa itself there was a mayor, Herman Pintia, formerly mayor of

Kishenev. The police was Rumanian, on the lines of the Soviet militia; but there was, moreover, the Siguranza.

Pintia was deposed by the Germans who appointed in his place a Russian quisling called Petushkov. He was the last mayor of Odessa. He arrived on March 24 and left again on April 9. He had been Mayor of Stalino under the Germans; he was an engineer, a fat

podgy little man of forty-six; a German major did all his work.

Under the Rumanians, thirty churches were open in Odessa, among them a few Lutheran

and Roman Catholic churches. The Orthodox clergy at Odessa were ordered by the

Rumanians to sever all connection with the Moscow Patriarchy, and to accept the

authority of the Metropolitan Nikodim of Odessa, a man who saw eye to eye with the

new masters. The Rumanians sent a church mission of twelve priests to Odessa, headed by one Scriban, a theology professor from Bucharest. These priests took over some of the best houses in Odessa, including those of the Metropolitan and other Bishops; they also took over all the best parishes. Father Vasili, the Priest of the Uspensky Cathedral, told me that, as a result, the Russian priests were put "in a highly unfavourable position, and many were reduced to finding themselves new parishes in the countryside." Father Vasili declared that the Rumanian priests in Odessa went in for highly riotous living, and the worst offender of all was Scriban himself. Scriban had made a racket of his job: he would authorise Russian priests to take this or that parish, and the better the parish, the higher Ms rake-off.

Finally, he was sent back to Bucharest, because his behaviour was becoming too

scandalously notorious, and instead there came the Metropolitan Vissarion of Bessarabia and Czernowitz. He made a solemn and triumphal entry into Odessa, with Rumanian

cavalry escorting his carriage, but soon afterwards great rows started between him,

representing the Church, and Governor Alexeanu, representing the temporal power. The final result was that the Metropolitan Vissarion, who had entered Odessa like a Tsar, left for the railway station in a droshki, with one suitcase.

There was little or no Herrenvolk stuff about the Rumanians, and for that matter, not much love lost between Rumanians and the Germans, except perhaps at the very top

level. Conquerors and conquered found common ground in business and in the black

market. But neither Ukrainians, Russians nor Rumanians could, after all, take

Transniestria very seriously. For one year (up to Stalingrad) it seemed possible that the Rumanians had come to stay: but not after that. Many "free-enterprise" enthusiasts among the Odessites must then have gone much more cautiously about their co-operation with the new masters. These were, moreover, becoming visibly dejected since the rout of the Rumanian troops on the Don, and were increasingly frightened of the Germans throwing them out of Transniestria altogether. It was known that even Antonescu was now

resenting Hitler's growing demands for more and more Rumanian cannon fodder.

What had the Siguranza done in Odessa? The Russians said that they were as bad as the Gestapo: that they had not only shot 40,000 Jews in a place called Strelbishche Field, but had also, especially during the early part of the occupation, shot about 10,000 others, many of them communists or suspected communists, or hostages taken after the shooting of Rumanian officers in the streets, cases of bomb-throwing, etc.

[There were over 150,000 Jews in Odessa in 1941, but about two-thirds had been

evacuated by sea with most of the army and many of the other civilians. When, in June 1944 I went to Botošani, in the part of Rumania occupied by the Russians, I found there a large Jewish population which had not been exterminated by the Rumanians, despite German demands. There was some disagreement in the Rumanian Government on this

issue (see Reitlinger. The Final Solution. London 1953, p. 404.)]

The only redeeming feature of the Siguranza, according to the Russians, was that they were extremely corrupt, and many Jews who could afford it could buy "Aryan" papers, or, at any rate, be allowed to escape to the countryside. There is evidence to show that the Rumanians, while themselves ready to kill Jews, resisted German "interference" in Odessa.

There is some doubt, too, about the real importance of the Soviet "underground"

operating from the inextricable labyrinth of the Odessa catacombs, with their dozens of miles of subterranean passages, some of them as much as 100 feet underground. Many

romantic stories (notably by V. Katayev) were written towards the end of the war about the "only urban partisans in the world", and about some of their communist chiefs, such as S. F. Lazarev, I. G. Ilyukhin and L. F. Borgel, who functioned throughout the

Rumanian occupation and spread perpetual terror among the invaders.

[V. Katayev, Katakomby (The Catacombs), (Moscow, 1945).]

It seems that, in reality, the Soviet underground in Odessa used the catacombs (which had many secret entrances inside houses) only in cases of great emergency and that, although some food and arms dumps were hidden there, very few people (if any) actually lived in the catacombs for any length of time. Some Jews were said to have lived there right

through the occupation, but the extreme damp of the catacombs makes this highly

doubtful.

What is certain, however, is that after the end of 1943 (but not before), and particularly during the last (German) month of the occupation the catacombs became much more

important. Thanks to the Soviet underground organisations, they became a refuge for

young people in danger of deportation, and for a number of Alsatian, Polish, and

especially Slovak deserters from the German Army. Some of the partisan chiefs I saw in Odessa soon after the liberation (and pretty thuggish bendyuzhnik types they were), claimed that there was a well-armed army of 10,000 men in the catacombs (who bought

most of their arms in the black market from Rumanian or German soldiers) complete with a "catacomb hospital" with "twelve surgeons and 200 nurses", and not only a "catacomb bakery" but even a "catacomb sausage factory"; but this is not certain by any means, and must be taken with serious reservations. Except during the last weeks of the occupation, when Odessa was under the Germans, the usual incentives (such as the danger of

deportation) for a big partisan movement were simply not there; and even later a great number of people who went into the catacombs were passive rather than active partisans.

All I saw in the catacombs were several machine-gun nests covering the essential

passages; emergency food stores, artesian wells and arms dumps. A few thousand people may well have stayed in the catacombs during the last few critical weeks; but the claims made to me by the partisan chiefs that the Odessa underground had killed "hundreds of Germans", that it had prevented them from destroying the whole of Odessa (it had not stopped them from destroying the harbour and practically all the factories) had a certain histoire marseillaise quality. It is perhaps significant that serious Soviet post-war studies of the war say very little of the "catacomb partisans", and certainly do not describe them as a major underground army which (as the partisan chiefs claimed on April 14, 1944)

"could have occupied Odessa and thrown out the Germans if the Red Army had not

arrived in time". Such boasts were wholly unsubstantiated.

I saw many war prisoners that week at Odessa, among them, the Slovaks and the

Alsatians who had joined the partisans. They were in fine fighting spirit, especially the Slovaks, and also some Poles, and they were typical of the Occupied Europe during those days— typical of its rapidly rising hopes. The Rumanian war prisoners were all down-at-heel, both physically and morally, and one of them, when asked what he had done during the war, jovially declared that he had been a deserter for three years. Another was a cheery Bucharest taxi-driver, who said he hoped King Carol and Madame Lupescu— a very good woman, he said—would come back, because in their days life was gay and there was a lot of business for taxi-drivers. And the question they were all asking—

hopefully—was "Has Bucharest been taken yet? "

The Germans, however, sulked, and few would commit themselves to saying Hitler had

lost the war. They seemed, in fact, rather proud to think that nearly all the Germans had managed to get out of Odessa before it was too late.

The centre of Odessa had in the main survived, though most of the factories in the

suburbs had been destroyed. But life—a new Soviet life—was already beginning to take shape here and there. At the Vorontzov Palace—now again the Pioneers' Palace—whose

glass dome had been shattered by a Russian shell that was aimed at the port—children were invited to register again.

The matron of the Pioneers' Palace was indignant. "Such barbarism," she said. Alexeanu had lived here in grand style with his mistress, and, not unnaturally, he had "restored" the Palace, according to his own taste, and had given the Empire drawing room with the

chandeliers new cream-coloured walls. "And the cream-coloured paint," she said, "is smeared over the mural of the pre-revolutionary squalor in which the children of Russia had then lived; and, similarly, on the opposite wall Alexeanu has destroyed forever the beautiful mural painting of Comrade Stalin clapping his hands as the happy Soviet

children dance round him."

I was to see Odessa again, nearly a year later, in March 1945. By then it had become the port of embarkation for thousands of British, American, French and other prisoners of war, who had been liberated by the Red Army in Poland, Silesia, Pomerania and East

Prussia. They were living in barracks, school buildings, and in villas near the Arcadia Beach. Sailors, British and American mostly, were dancing and drinking hard among the dusty palm trees of the lounge of the Hotel de Londres, now de-mined (it was roped off during my first visit). Food was scarce—even at the Hotel de Londres—and Odessa had a hungry look, much leaner than in 1944. There were still no buses or trams, and the

market looked poverty stricken. Banditry was rife. Shady characters were slinking about the streets at dark, and robberies and murders were a nightly occurrence. Were they using the catacombs now—to dodge the Russian police? The port, it is true, was working, and pale, yellow-skinned German prisoners were clearing away the rubble. Much of the

wreckage had indeed been cleared, though only a small part of the port was usable, with one American and one British transport moored to the quay, and the breakwater was still smashed in two places. Hundreds of British or French or American P.O.Ws. would march joyfully through the wrecked dockland of Odessa to the ship that was awaiting them; they would jeer at the Germans, and the Germans would make philosophical remarks to each

other about the changing fortunes of war, or merely glare disconsolately.

I wondered then why Odessa was scarcely being restored at all, and why food and living conditions generally were harder than they were in so many other liberated cities. Was not Odessa, I wondered, being indirectly punished for that relatively easy time it had had in the Transniestria days, and for the eagerness with which so many of its citizens had entered into the spirit of night-clubs, bodegas and black-marketing? Not out of real disloyalty, but rather out of an innate and frivolous liking for petty business.

For several years after the war there was a feeling that Odessa was in poor odour in Moscow and was low on the list of priorities for reconstruction.

Chapter IV CLOSE-UP III: HITLER'S CRIMEAN

CATASTROPHE

Post-war German historians hold Hitler exclusively responsible for the "senseless disaster" that the German Army suffered in the Crimea in April-May 1944, complete with their abortive "Dunkirk" at Sebastopol, perhaps the most spectacular defeat of all inflicted on the Germans since Stalingrad.

Hitler's determination to cling on to the Crimea, even though the whole Ukrainian

mainland to the north of it was now in Russian hands, had been dictated by his usual political and economic considerations, besides the sentimental rubbish about the Crimea having been "the last stronghold of the Goths" and still being potentially a wonderful playground for Kraft durch Freude. It was even said that Hitler intended to retire to the Tsar's palace of Livadia in his old age.

With Turkey beginning to lean heavily the other way since Teheran, it was essential to impress upon her that Germany was still powerful on the Black Sea; secondly, obsessed by economic considerations, Hitler was determined not to allow the Russians to use the Crimea as a springboard for massive air attacks on the Rumanian oil fields—Germany's most important source of oil. Ironically, it was exactly two days before the Russians undertook their attack on the Crimea that the Americans, operating from southern Italy, dropped their first big bombs on Ploesti—which Hitler thought he could make

invulnerable against air attacks by hanging on to the Crimea!

[Philippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 243.]

Anyway, by May 1944, the Russians were already at Odessa, not much farther away from Ploesti than Sebastopol.

The Russians recaptured the Crimea within a month. The attack began in the north on

April 11. In the course of the previous winter the troops of Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front had established a bridgehead on the south side of the Sivash, the narrow inlet between the Crimea and the mainland. It had been one of the boldest operations of its kind. After a heavy barrage against the relatively slender Rumanian positions on the south side of the Sivash, a considerable number of Russian troops got across by various means and established a bridgehead on the south side. After that hundreds of soldiers spent hours waist-deep or shoulder-deep in the icy and very salt water of the Sivash—the salt eating into every pore and causing almost unbearable pain—laying a pontoon across the inlet. Although the Russians suffered heavy losses in this double operation, the bridgehead was firmly established and fortified.

[Curiously, at the time there was no announcement in the Russian press of this

bridgehead, and later in newspaper articles and films (like The Third Blow) the establishment of the bridgehead was represented as the first part of Tolbukhin's April offensive. Perhaps it was feared that the bridgehead might yet be lost, so it was better to say nothing meantime.]

And so, on April 11, after a heavy artillery barrage, thousands of Russian troops and hundreds of tanks poured from the bridgehead into the interior of the Crimea.

Simultaneously other Russian forces attacked the German defences on the Perekop

Isthmus, but this was more in the nature of a diversion and, with the troops from the Sivash bridgehead threatening to cut off Perekop from the south, the Germans and

Rumanians hastily abandoned the elaborate twenty-mile-deep defences they had been

built on the Isthmus.

[It had been the well-guarded "gate" of the Crimean Tartars up to the 18th century, and the main fortified position of Wrangel's "Whites" in 1920. In 1941 the Isthmus was poorly fortified and manned and the Germans broke through with relative ease.]

Within two days Tolbukhin's troops overran the whole northern part of the Crimea, and captured Simferopol, its capital. Meantime Yeremenko's special Black Sea Army,

advancing from east-Crimean bridgeheads (also established during the winter) struck out west along the southern coast of the Crimea, capturing Kerch, Feodosia, Gurzuf, Yalta and Alupka, and continuing to pursue the Germans retreating to Sebastopol.

Hitler's decision to hold the Crimea was one of his most insane inspirations. According to present-day Russian sources, the Russians succeeded in achieving overwhelming

superiority there. Whereas there were 195,000 German and Rumanian troops in the

Crimea, the Russians had 470,000 and a similar superiority in tanks, guns and aircraft.

[ IVOVSS, vol. 4, p. 89.]

The Russians also had great naval superiority on the Black Sea.

About half of the German 17th Army holding the Crimea consisted of Rumanians; and

Antonescu had argued months before with Hitler in favour of evacuating these Rumanian troops; the attempt to hold the peninsula struck him as totally unrealistic. But Hitler would not hear of it. Many of the Rumanian troops, realising no doubt that Sebastopol—

to which all the German troops were now rapidly converging—would be a death-trap,

and that they would, in any case, be the last to be evacuated, hastened to surrender to the Russians in the northern Crimea, at Simferopol, and along the coast.

By April 18, the bulk of the German forces had rapidly retreated to Sebastopol which Hitler now declared to be "Festung Sewastopol". This would have to be held indefinitely by some 50,000 men; the others could be evacuated; the Russians had held Sebastopol for 250 days in 1941-2, and had created a "Sebastopol Legend"; the Germans must now do at least as well.

[According to German sources Hitler thought it essential to hold Sebastopol at least until he had repelled the expected Normandy landing six or eight weeks later.]

On April 18 the front ran in a semi-circle east of Sebastopol, and was twenty-five miles in length.

In their hurried retreat to Sebastopol, the German troops nevertheless caused considerable destruction. They destroyed the whole sea-front at Yalta, but had no time to destroy the rest of the town (including the Chekhov Museum, where the writer had lived) or the

former palaces at Alupka, one of which had been presented to Manstein "the conqueror of the Crimea" by "the grateful German nation" back in 1942. It was in these palaces that the Yalta Conference was to meet less than a year later.

It was later argued on the Russian side that if only the Red Army had begun to storm Sebastopol immediately after April 18, and had not waited till May 5, very few of the German troops could have got away at all; but the storming of Sebastopol required a high concentration of troops, guns and tanks, a thorough organisation of airfields, etc., and this needed some time. According to Tolbukhin, no successful all-out attack was possible

without about a fortnight's preparation.

It will remain one of the puzzles of the war why, in 1941-2, despite overwhelming

German and Rumanian superiority in tanks and aircraft, and a substantial superiority in men, Sebastopol succeeded in holding out for 250 days and why, in 1944, the Russians captured it within four days. German authors now explain it simply by the great Russian superiority in effectives, aircraft and all other equipment. But did not the Germans and Rumanians enjoy much the same kind of superiority in 1941-2? Was there not something lacking in German morale by April 1944—at least in a remote place like the Crimea? For, as we know, the Germans could still put up suicidal resistance once on German soil.

A moot question is how many Germans were actually evacuated from the Crimea

between April 18 and May 13. According to a Russian general I saw at Sebastopol at the time, only 30,000 got away; according to German war prisoners taken, at least twice as many. Post-war German accounts say that 150,000 got away, but that "at least 60,000

Germans" were "lost" in the Crimea; as well as enormous masses of equipment, while sixty ships were sunk. The Russians put the enemy losses in the Crimea much higher—

50,000 (nearly all Germans) killed and 61,000 taken prisoner (30,000 of them at

Chersonese)—a total loss of 111,000; but these (especially the prisoners) obviously

included a great number of Rumanians. German authors today are surprised that the

Russian Black Sea fleet allowed so many ships to get away; the Russian answer to this is that the sea between Sebastopol and Rumania was heavily mined, but that many German

ships, with 40,000 men on board, were sunk all the same, mostly by aircraft between May 3 and 13.

Anyway, whether the Germans lost (as they now admit) at least 60,000 men or (as the

Russians claim) nearer 100,000 men, the whole Crimean operation, and Hitler's futile attempt to stage a German version of the "Heroic Defence of Sebastopol" is now admitted to have been one of the Führer's prime blunders. German histories today say that the German commander of the 17th Army, Colonel-General Jaenicke, was made a scapegoat

by the Führer. In fact he informed Hitler that he could not hold Sebastopol and was

relieved of his command on May 3, and was replaced by General Allme-dinger. Whether, at heart, the latter had any more hope than Jaenicke is hard to say; but he was apparently a more wholehearted Nazi. The big Russian onslaught began two days after his

appointment.

In his farewell message, which the Russians captured at the time, Jaenicke wrote:

"The Führer has ordered me to take up new functions. This means a bitter good-bye to my Army. With deep emotion I shall remember your exemplary courage. The

Führer has entrusted you with a task of world-historical importance. At Sebastopol stands the 17th Army, and at Sebastopol the Soviets will bleed to death."

There had been some heavy fighting on the outer defences of Sebastopol since April 18, particularly in the valley of Inkerman; but it was not till May 5 that the Russians attacked Sebastopol in strength from the north, in order to draw there as many German troops as possible. Having achieved that, the Russians launched, on May 7, an all-out attack on Sapun Ridge, a hill 150 feet high, with several lines of German trenches, which was "the key to Sebastopol". The artillery and katyusha barrage, supported by aircraft, lasted several hours, and then the ridge was stormed by infantry. There were heavy losses on both sides, but once Sapun Ridge was taken, the road to Sebastopol was clear. Two days later, on May 9, Hitler resigned himself to abandoning the Crimea and ordered

evacuation. But it was already too late and the 50,000 German troops left around

Sebastopol were now doomed.

The successful if costly Russian capture of Sapun Ridge was accompanied by attacks on other parts of the "impregnable" Sebastopol defences, and by the 9th, the Russians began to pour into Sebastopol from all directions. Several thousand Germans were killed or captured in Sebastopol itself, while the rest—about 30,000 —abandoned the city and

retreated across the moors to the Chersonese Peninsula. Here there were three isthmi, one less than two miles wide, and the others less than a mile wide, and across the first isthmus the Germans had laid minefields and had built an "earth wall" with fortifications of sorts consisting of barbed-wire fences and a series of dugouts and machine-gun nests—nothing very solid, but hard to approach because of the minefield.

The distance between the first line of defence and the tip of the Chersonese Promontory, with the ruins of its white lighthouse, was about three miles. The fortifications across the other two isthmi were much more rudimentary. It was in this small area of about three miles by about one and a half that the Germans were going to make their last stand, still in the desperate hope that ships would come to take them away.

And so, on the 9th, after abandoning Sebastopol, 30,000 Germans retreated across the bleak moors outside Sebastopol to the Chersonese Promontory—the very place to which

the last Russian defenders of Sebastopol had retreated in July 1942, only to be

exterminated or taken prisoner.

German prisoners later said that the morale was low among the troops, but that the

officers kept on assuring them that ships would come. The Führer had promised it... For three days and nights the Chersonese was that "unspeakable inferno" to which German authors now refer. True, on the night of May 9-10 and on the following night two small ships did come and perhaps 1,000 men were taken aboard. This greatly encouraged the

remaining troops.

The Germans still had one small fighter airfield on Chersonese; but since it was now under constant Russian shell-fire, it could not serve much purpose.

The Russians were not, however, going to allow any more Germans to be evacuated by

sea; on the night of May 11-12, several more ships approached Chersonese, but two were sunk by Russian shell-fire and the rest turned tail. That was the night on which the Russians decided to finish off the 30,000 Germans. By this time the sight of the ships that had come and gone without landing had seriously demoralised the German troops. They

had already been heavily bombed and shelled for two days and nights; and on the night of May 11-12 the katyusha mortars ("the Black Death" the Germans used to call them) came into action. What followed was a massacre. The Germans fled in panic beyond the second and then the third line of their defences, and when, in the early morning hours, Russian tanks drove in, they began to surrender in large numbers, among them their commander, General Böhme and several other staff officers who had been sheltering in the cellar of the only farm building on the promontory.

Thousands of wounded had been taken to the tip of the promontory, and here were also some 750 SS-men who refused to surrender, and went on firing. A few dozen survivors

tried in the end to get away by sea in small boats or rafts. Some of these got away, but often only to be machine-gunned by Russian aircraft. These desperate men were hoping to get to Rumania, Turkey, or maybe to be picked up by some German or Rumanian

vessel.

My trip to the Crimea on May 14-18 was perhaps the strangest Crimean holiday anyone

had ever had.

On the morning of the 14th I flew from Moscow to Simferopol. The plane circled over

the Sivash, where the Russian offensive had started a month before, and then over the Perekop Isthmus, where the Germans had built their defences in depth. It was just as well the Russians had by-passed Perekop.

With its poplars, the country round Simferopol looked like the Touraine. All the apple, peach, cherry and apricot trees were in blossom. Simferopol, small and nondescript,

except for a few small mosques, had suffered some bomb-damage, but not much. More

characteristic of the Crimea were the Tartar villages, with their mosques and the peculiar Tartar cottages with flat roofs and open verandahs. We drove through several such

villages on our way to the mountains and the south coast, and the Tartars looked on, morose and scared.

Then we came to the south coast of the Crimea. At Alushta many houses had been burned out, and the beach was mined and roped off by barbed-wire fences; yet the scenery was of a picture-postcard beauty—a land of vineyards and cypresses, where the fruit-trees and the lilac were now in bloom and houses were bright with the flaming red of the

bougainvilia, the lavender clusters of glycinium and the gardens golden with the yellow bushes of laburnum. Farther west, on the pale blue sea, lay the giant shape of Ayu Dag, the rock which, according to local legend, was the devil who had been turned into a

granite bear trying in vain to drain the Black Sea by drinking it dry. To the right, there rose into the sky the high lilac outline of Ai-Petri, its peaks wrapped in cloud.

At Yalta, the "Nice" of the Crimea, the whole sea front had been burned down by the Germans, but there was little destruction between Yalta and the spot where the road turns inland. We passed the imperial palaces at Alupka, and several sanatoria, now crowded with Russian wounded, and many of them, though bandaged or on crutches, waved

cheerfully as we drove past. (The Germans had also made great use of the Crimea as a gigantic military hospital ever since they had come here in the autumn of 1941).

Nothing was more striking than the contrast between this drive along the picture-postcard coast and the country round Sebastopol. There was nothing here but bleak, windswept

moors, and a few houses, now all destroyed. The Valley of Inkerman was like the Valley of Death. It is separated from Sebastopol by Sapun Ridge, and this also looked one of the most melancholy spots on earth, now pockmarked with shell-holes, like all the country around. God knows how many men died here on May 7. In the plains around Sapun

Ridge and along the road that runs to Sebastopol through the Valley of Inkerman, the air was filled with the stench of death. It came from the hundreds of horses still lying there, inflated and decaying by the roadside, and from the thousands of dead, many of whom

had not been buried deep enough, or even not yet buried at all.

Here, more than anywhere else, one felt that one was driving over layers and layers of human bones—of those who died in the Crimean War, and in the righting in 1920, and in 1941-2 during the deadly 250-day siege of Sebastopol, and now again...

From a distance Sebastopol, with the long and narrow bay beyond, looked like a live city, but it also was dead. Even in the suburbs, at the far end of the valley of Inkerman, there was hardly a house standing. The railway station was a mountain of rubble and twisted metal; on the last day the Germans were at Sebastopol they ran an enormous goods train off the line into a ravine, where it lay smashed, its wheels in the air. Destruction, destruction everywhere.

Sebastopol itself, bright and lively before the war, was now melancholy beyond words.

The harbour was littered with the wreckage of ships the Russians had sunk during the last days of the German evacuation.

It was hard to imagine how people could have lived and fought here during that summer of 1942, in the midst of the stench of hundreds of unburied corpses. And then it all Ht up in a flash: on the remnants of the old Navy monument on the sea front, I noticed an

inscription scratched with a knife or a nail, and written no doubt during the last days of the agony of July 1942:

You are not the same as before, when people smiled at your beauty. Now everyone

curses this spot, because it has caused so much sorrow. Among your ruins, in your lanes and streets, thousands and thousands of people lie, and no one is there to cover their rotting bones.

It was strange to wander along the deserted streets of Sebastopol, so full of historic memories of the Crimean War with that Mikhailovsky Fort—still, more or less,

undamaged across the bay—where young Tolstoy had taken part in the siege of 1854-5,

and so full of the more agonising memories of 1942.

In one of the few bigger buildings (patched up by the Germans since 1942) I saw the

Mayor of Sebastopol, Comrade Yefremov; he had been mayor during the siege of 1941-

2. Now, he said, the streets were deserted because the people living in the outskirts had not yet lost the habit of looking upon this as verboten territory. The soldiers also had gone, except for some Black Sea sailors manning the antiaircraft guns. For the last two years, these men had been day-dreaming of the day when they would stand again on

guard at Sebastopol... The famous Naval Museum had, in the main, survived the siege, but all its exhibits had been taken away to Germany by the Organisation Rosenberg "with the Wehrmacht's permission", as a notice inside said. It was written in German, Rumanian, Tartar and Russian, Russian coming last.

30,000 civilians had survived the 1941-2 siege of Sebastopol, but some 20,000 were

deported by the Germans or shot as suspected soldiers in disguise; and 10,000 had been allowed to stay in Sebasto-' pol, or rather in its northern suburbs. Yefremov also alluded to the Crimean Tartars, who had played a particularly cruel game in hunting down

disguised Russian soldiers. Altogether, the Tartars' record was as bad as could be. They had formed a police force under German control and had been highly active in the

Gestapo...

Chersonese was gruesome. All the area in front of the Earth Wall and beyond was

ploughed up by thousands of shells and scorched by the fire of the katyusha mortars.

Hundreds of German vehicles were still there, or were being carted away by Russian

soldiers. The ground was littered with thousands of German helmets, rifles, bayonets, and other arms and ammunition. Some of this stuff was now being piled up by Russian

soldiers assisted by meek German war prisoners who looked almost happy to be alive.

There were also numerous German guns around, and a few heavy tanks—but only few,

for the Germans had either lost or evacuated the rest of them long before.

Over the ground were also scattered thousands of pieces of paper —photographs,

snapshots, passports, maps, private letters—and even a volume of Nietzsche carried to the end by some Nazi superman. Nearly all the dead had been buried, but around the

shattered lighthouse dead Germans and rafts were bobbing in the water, as it beat against the tip of the Chersonese Promontory—bodies of men who had tried to escape on the

rafts. They were some of those 750 SS-men who had made a last stand around the

lighthouse, and would not surrender. And here, among these dead bodies, on the water-edge, was another weird shape: something that looked like a skeleton with only a few rags still clinging to it: and one of the rags still had white-and-blue stripes: the telniashka (singlet) of a Black Sea sailor. Was he one of those who, nearly two years before, had fought here to the last—just like these Germans—on this very Chersonese Promontory,

and had been left here on this desolate spot, to rot away unburied?

Around the lighthouse, the blue sea was calm, and perhaps, not very far away some rafts were still drifting over the sea, with desperate men clinging to them, drifting over waters where only three years before, the pleasure steamers still cruised between Odessa,

Sebastopol and Novorossisk. Of the three, only Odessa still looked like a city.

Novorossisk, like Sebastopol, was also a heap of ruins.

My last night in the Crimea, I spent in the midst of the rich juicy green steppe. It had rained heavily during the previous evening and throughout the night. I was billeted in the clean little Tartar cottage; there was an old man there, and an old woman, and their son, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. They had, behind the house, a large vegetable garden, all their own; the vegetables were coming up luxuriantly, and beyond the vegetable plot were

immense fields of green wheat. But the Tartar family were morose and frightened,

scarcely said a word, and the woman claimed to be very ill. The land had been intensely cultivated. The Germans, still hoping until April to hold the Crimea, had encouraged the Tartars to sow and plant wherever possible, and the Tartars had worked hard.

I remember the look of fear that came over the old man when a Soviet officer knocked on the door in order, as it turned out, merely to billet me on him.

The 500,000 Crimean Tartars were, before long, to be deported en masse—women, children and all—to "the east" for having collaborated with the Germans. The Crimea was eventually turned over to the Ukrainian SSR, and nothing more was said of the

Tartars, even though Mr Khrushchev was to be very indignant about the "racialist" and

"un-Leninist" mass deportation of other entire nationalities. But the Crimean Tartars (or the Volga Germans, for that matter) were not mentioned, and they were never allowed to return.

Chapter V THE LULL BEFORE D-DAY-STALIN'S

FLIRTATION WITH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH—"SLAV

UNITY"

By the middle of May 1944 the Soviet-German Front came to a relative standstill. Except for the enormous "Belorussian Bulge" in the middle, where the Germans were still nearly 250 miles inside Soviet territory, the Soviet-German Front ran in an almost straight line from the Gulf of Finland, near the former Estonian border, down to Northern Rumania

and Bessarabia. To the north, the Baltic Republics were still in German hands; so was most of Belorussia; but most of the Ukraine had been liberated, with the front now

running a short distance to the east of Lwow. It was expected that, within the next few months, not only would the whole of Soviet territory be cleared of Germans, but that the Red Army would penetrate deep into eastern and central Europe—Poland,

Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Hungary, and possibly Germany. Finland was not yet out

of the war, the tentative armistice talks in Moscow with Enckel and Paasikivi having broken down. Vyshinsky announced this breakdown on April 22, indicating that the Red Army would have to make the Finns see reason before long. Since Finland had not

suffered a military defeat, there was still much opposition to accepting the stiff armistice terms, complete with a demand for $600 million in reparations.

Soviet policy in relation to the countries of eastern Europe called for some clarification; and almost the moment Soviet troops had entered Rumanian territory, Molotov convened a press conference on April 2 and officially announced that the Soviet Union did not aim at acquiring any Rumanian territory or at making any changes "in the existing social order in Rumania." The entry of Soviet troops into Rumania was exclusively dictated by military necessity and the continued resistance of enemy troops in that country. So there was to be no forced "bolshevisation" or even "socialisation" of Rumania, no abolition of private enterprise, perhaps even no abolition of the monarchy. All this, in principle, was a matter for the Rumanians themselves to decide. It was no use, at this stage, either

alarming the Rumanians, or upsetting the Western Allies with the prospect of

revolutionary changes in the countries of eastern Europe. Already, various Rumanians were in contact with the British and the Americans, with a view to getting out of the war, and it was no good frightening them off. The question of the Rumanian Government, as distinct from the "social order" could be tackled once the Red Army was well inside Rumania—unless, in the interval, "the people" (as Stalin said) were to change the government themselves; for the present, the Russians occupied only a small area in northeast Rumania. "No claims on Rumanian territory" did not, of course, relate to Bessarabia or Northern Bukovina, both of which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in 1940.

The Second Front decided upon at Teheran was now known to be due in a matter of

weeks. The feeling widely expressed among ordinary Russian soldiers and civilians was that it would be "too easy", now that the Red Army had already pulled most of the chestnuts out of the fire, and that if the British and Americans were going to land in France now, it would be less out of any feeling of comradeship for the Russians than out of pure self-interest and even self-protection, since they feared that the Russians might now well smash Germany "single-handed".

These views were soon discouraged by Stalin, whose May-Day 1944 Order was

particularly cordial to the Western Allies. After recalling that the Red Army had

advanced in a little over a year from the Volga to the Sereth, he said:

We owe this success in a large measure to our great Allies, the United States and Great Britain, who are holding the front in Italy and are diverting from us a large part of the German troops, and who are also supplying us with highly valuable raw materials and armaments, are systematically bombing military objectives in

Germany and are so undermining her military power.

In paying a tribute to the Soviet rear, Stalin said:

In the past year hundreds of new factories and mines have come into operation,

dozens of electric power stations, and many railway lines and bridges. Millions more Soviet people have entered industry.

Then, after a tribute to Russia's women, intelligentsia, and collective farms, Stalin said: The satellites must now see clearly that Germany has lost the war. But their

Governments cannot be relied upon to break with Germany, and the sooner the people

take over and make peace, the better.

The Red Army, he said, had reached the Soviet frontier along 250 miles, and more than three-quarters of occupied Soviet territory had now been liberated. But to drive the Germans out of the Soviet Union was not sufficient. The wounded German beast must be finished off in his lair.

This phrase (though usually amended to "Fascist beast") was to become No. 1 slogan during the next twelve months.

And as if to discourage any ideas that the Red Army had already done the job, and that the Second Front was no longer all that important, he added:

The liberation of Europe, and the smashing of Germany on her own soil can be done only on the basis of joint efforts from the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the

United States as they strike from the east and the west. .. There is no doubt that only such a combined blow can smash Hitler Germany.

This was, politically, an important statement.

*

There was much display of cordiality towards the Allies during May: at a ceremony of the British Embassy on May 10 the G.C.B.E. was conferred on the Soviet Chief of Staff, Marshal Vassilevsky, and hundreds of other decorations were awarded. Molotov and

Clark Kerr exchanged speeches.

On May 26, the second anniversary of the Anglo-Soviet Alliance was marked by warm

editorials in the principal papers.

On May 25 and 27 Churchill's and Eden's speeches were reported at great length, and the Molotov-Eden exchange of anniversary messages was particularly cordial. Eden was

clearly alluding to the coming events when he spoke in his message of the "mighty onslaught" in which "our two peoples, hand-in-hand with our American and other allies", would win the war. Such a victory, he said, would strengthen the bonds of friendship and understanding on which the Anglo-Soviet alliance was based.

The suspension of diplomatic mail from Britain created a very happy impression in

Russia. It was clearly an indication of what was coming—and coming soon. Alexei

Tolstoy jokingly remarked to me one day: "If we Bolsheviks had done anything so outrageous, nobody would have been surprised; but if the correct English do such a thing, then they surely must have good reasons for doing so."

The Second Front—the Normandy Landing—came a few days later.

With the Russians preparing for their summer offensive which was expected to take the Red Army into Poland, this country, more than any other, continued to be in the centre of the Soviet Government's preoccupations. In April and May there were a number of

curious developments: the visits to Moscow of Father Orlemanski, of Dr Oscar Lange,

and of the leaders of the "Democratic Polish Underground."

The visit of Father Orlemanski, a parish priest from Springfield, Mass., was probably the most curious episode in the whole diplomatic history of the Soviet Union. People rubbed their eyes when they looked at the front page of Pravda of April 28 showing Stalin and Molotov smiling benignly in the company of the Rev. Stanislaw Orlemanski "who has come here to study the problems of the Poles and the Polish Army in the Soviet Union".

Stalin and Molotov were obviously anxious, through their contacts with Orlemanski, to kill three birds with one stone: to make a good impression on the Catholics in the United States; to appease and, if possible, win over the powerful Catholic clergy in Poland—

who were, for the most part pro-London—as well as the numerous priests in Lithuania

and Belorussin; and, possibly to lay the foundations for a rapprochement with the Vatican.

After about a week there, Orlemanski came out with a statement on the Moscow radio:

Dear fellow countrymen (he said), I left home on April 17. I came through the

United States, Canada, and Alaska, and across Siberia to Moscow. I travelled very comfortably. I had never flown before, and now I flew all the way from Chicago to Moscow! I am an American of Polish origin, and I am a Roman Catholic priest.

Moreover, we are four brothers, all priests in the United States.

After this pleasant introduction. Father Orlemanski, the parish priest from Springfield, Mass., said that as soon as he had heard of the formation of the Kosciuszko Division on Soviet soil, he decided to help, and in November 1943, formed the Kosciuszko League at Detroit. This, he said, was a great success. He continued: "Having achieved all this, I felt that I must inform myself more completely on the plans and aims of the Polish emigrants in the USSR." He said he had come with Cordell Hull's personal okay.

First of all I went to Zagorsk where there are Polish children. At the school there I attended the lessons in Polish history. May I, as a neutral observer and practical

American, say that the present conditions could not be better. We Poles must be grateful to the Soviet Government for their kindness, and we must try to preserve these

institutions. I was told that there are such institutions in the whole of Russia.

All this sounded somewhat naïve. Then he described his visit to the Polish Army: Here he felt "quite at home". While he was there, 8,000 new soldiers from Ternopol and from other liberated parts had joined. "I told the soldiers that I considered the arms in their hands as the key to a free Poland."

Finally came his statement on his first two-hour meeting with Stalin and Molotov:

I cannot repeat all that was said. But I must say that Stalin is a' friend of the Poles.

He wants to see a strong, powerful, independent and democratic Poland which

would effectively defend her frontiers. Stalin does not intend to interfere in internal Polish affairs. He wants Poland to be friendly and to co-operate harmoniously with the Soviet Republics...

We are Slavs. Allied, Poland and the Soviet Union will be the mightiest power in the east. It will be of the greatest benefit to both. It will guarantee peace for hundreds of years. Long live the United, States of America. Long live the Soviet Union. Long live a free, strong, independent and democratic Poland!

All this was reported verbatim, and in all seriousness, in the Soviet press, as was also his statement on the following day:

I want to make the historic statement {sic) that the future will prove that Stalin is a friend of the Roman Catholic Church. Our religion will be the religion of our

ancestors, and Marshal Stalin will not tolerate any violation of this.

He went on to say that there were five chaplains in the new Polish Army and that the Bishop of newly-liberated Luck (in the Western Ukraine) had promised to send several more priests into the army.

I had another meeting with Stalin and Molotov (he continued), and the result has

exceeded all my expectations. Marshal Stalin and Mr Molotov are two great men: I

am most grateful to both these gentlemen for the democratic reception that was

given me during my stay in Moscow.

Perhaps the Soviet press had its tongue in its cheek when it used the English word

"gentleman" in quoting Orlemanski's broadcast.

But less than a fortnight later Orlemanski was back in the States— and in the soup. For it turned out that Orlemanski represented nobody, and was either a well-meaning simpleton or else a practical joker, in which case his visit to Stalin was the biggest hoax ever played on the Kremlin. In any case, Father Orlemanski's immediate superior, Bishop O'Leary, reprimanded and repudiated the Kremlin visitor on his return to the USA, and Orlemanski had to "repent" before being reinstated. After that Stalin came to the conclusion, either that he had been fooled, or else that Cardinal Spellman and the rest of the hierarchy but not Orlemanski, were the people who really mattered among the Catholics in the USA.

The official repudiation of a Catholic priest who had consorted with the Devil naturally had the very opposite effect on the Polish and Lithuanian clergy to what Stalin and

Molotov had hoped for when they devoted so much of their time to their unusual visitor from the USA. This was no joking matter: for the attitude of the Polish clergy mattered greatly in a question like the recruitment of Poles into the "Moscow-made" Polish Army.

As we shall see, this Army, by the end of 1944, when part of Poland had already been liberated, consisted of about 300,000 men. With the active co-operation of the Church and the Armija Krajowa it might have been much larger.

Father Braun, the unofficial representative of the Vatican in the Soviet Union (and he was not going to do anything to help the Kremlin) thought the Orlemanski visit the biggest joke for years. Father Braun, of Alsatian origin, but American nationality, was the priest of the only Catholic church in Moscow. It happened to be next door to the NKVD

headquarters and was jokingly referred to as Notre-Dame de Lubianka. Father Braun had had a good deal of trouble with the Soviet authorities during the eight or nine years he had been in Russia; in return he was an unfailing source of information to many

foreigners, who had come to Russia with an open mind. During the earlier part of the war he had lived in two rooms at the French Embassy, till he was more or less turned out by the rather pro-Soviet and anti-clerical French Minister, M. Roger Garreau. The US

Embassy took him under its wing after that.

Professor Oscar Lange of Chicago University, who was to become a prominent

personality in post-war Poland, came to Moscow soon after Father Orlemanski, and was also photographed in the company of Stalin and Molotov, and made numerous speeches,

in which, more intelligently than Orlemanski, he advocated close bonds between Russian and the New Poland. The Russians publicised the eminent Professor's preference for the

"Moscow" Poles in order to make the maximum impression in the USA.

*

Throughout May, Poland continued to be front-page news. With obvious relish the Soviet press reported on May 19 that General Zeligowski, a popular Polish veteran then in

London, had more or less rebelled against the London Government by saying that the

alliance of the Slavs was the only salvation for Poland, and that, by refusing to adopt this slogan, the London Government was playing into the hands of the Germans. The

Russians gladly forgave Zeligowski the coup de force with which he had snatched Vilno away from Lithuania in 1920, and even the contemptuous remarks he now made about

the Lithuanians, whom he described as a nondescript alien body in the Slav world. In London many Poles tried to explain Zeligowski's change of heart by simply saying the poor old boy had gone gaga.

But the biggest surprise was still in store.

On May 24 the Union of Polish Patriots issued a statement saying:

A few days ago delegates of the People's Council of Poland (Krajowa Rada

Narodowa) arrived in Moscow... This Council was established in Warsaw on January 1, 1944, by the democratic parties and groups struggling against the

German occupants. The following are represented in the K.R.N.: The Opposition

groups of the Stronnictwo Ludowo (Peasant Party), the P.P.S. (Socialist Party), P.P.R. (Workers'—in fact, Communist—Party), the Committee of National

Initiative non-party democrats, the underground trade-union movement, the Youth

Struggle Movement (Walki Mlodych), groups of writers and other intellectual workers, artisan and co-operative groups, representatives of the underground

military organisations—the National Guard, the National Militia, the Peasant

Battalions, local military formations of the Armija Krajowa, etc.

These were alleged "dissidents" of that A.K. which was under the orders of the London Government. The statement went on:

It has become necessary to form a centre of struggle and coordination. .. The emigre Government is not fighting the Germans; instead, it is calling for inactivity. Its people sometimes even murder resistance leaders... In 1943 hopes were rising in

Poland, but, at the same time, the German terror was growing in intensity... The

National Council, at its very first meeting, took the highly important decision to unify all the partisan groupings, armed units, etc., struggling with the occupants, and to merge them into a single People's Army (Armija Ludowa)... The National Guard, the National Militia, a large part of the Peasant Battalions, etc., have entered this. The Polish people have responded with enthusiasm. In a few months a network of local—rural, urban, and provincial—organisations was set up by the National

Council. The struggle against the occupants has been greatiy intensified.

The statement concluded by saying that the Delegates of the National Council of Poland came to Moscow, firstly to become acquainted with the work of the Union of Polish

Patriots in the USSR, and with the state of the first Polish Army; and secondly in order to establish contact with the Allied Governments, including the Government of the Soviet Union.

It was also announced that, on May 22, Stalin had received the Polish delegates, with Mr

"Morawski" at their head, that the conversation lasted for over two hours, and that Molotov and Wanda Wassilewska were present.

That was the first news the world was to hear of the "Left Underground" in Poland, and of a National Council of Poland that had allegedly been in existence there for over five months. It was also the first mention of the name of Morawski, later known at Osöbka-Morawski. The London Poles lost no time in debunking the delegates in Moscow as a

bunch of communist stooges or adventurers with no following whatsoever, the National Council as a pretentious fake, etc., etc.

Indeed, Morawski and the other delegates whose names (or even pseudonyms) were not

disclosed at the time (though many knew that they included Bierut, Andrzei Witos, and some others who were to become prominent before long), stayed for some time in the

Soviet Union, and some did not go home until the Red Army had marched into Poland in the following July. On June 8 Morawski gave an interview to Tass in which he said that nearly 100,000 Polish troops were now on Soviet soil; among their leaders were General Berling, Alexander Zawadski (recently promoted to the rank of general by the Russians), and that great Gargantuan character, General Karol Sweszczewski, famous in the Spanish Civil War under the nom de guerre of General Walter.

[In 1947, as Deputy Minister of Defence, he was assassinated by Ukrainian terrorists near the Ukrainian border.]

Already acting like something of a Provisional Government, the delegates of the National Council conferred on General Berling, on the Council's behalf, the Grunwald Cross 1st class.

Among other things the delegates had come to Moscow to ask for arms. They received

some satisfaction from the Russians but none from the British and the Americans who

continued to supply the Armija Krajowa. But the political significance of the arrival in Moscow of this "delegation" was much greater than its military significance. They were, in fact, a nucleus of that "Lublin Committee", which was, before long, going to be the de facto government of Poland. In the course of his interview with Tass, Morawski expressed his gratitude to the Red Army and his affection for Stalin.

Nor were the Yugoslavs being neglected in this bid for Slav Unity. In April a regular military mission from Tito arrived in Moscow, and on May 20 it was announced that

Stalin had had a long meeting the day before with Generals Terzic and Djilas,

"representing the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia". Terzic, it was explained, was

"the head of the Yugoslav Military Mission in the USSR". Whether this was recognised by the Royal Yugoslav Government no longer mattered; the Soviet Union had already

given de facto recognition to Tito. Simic, the Yugoslav Ambassador had declared himself a Titoite some time before, and when two members of the Yugoslav Embassy, returning

to Moscow, were met by the Embassy car flying the Tito flag with the red star, they

ordered the chauffeur to take it down. This he refused to do, and told the two diplomats they could walk into Moscow for all he cared. It is not recorded how they reached town, but they refused to accept the Embassy's fait accompli, and stayed for some days at the Hotel National, whereupon they were recalled by the Royal Government.

On the same day as the announcement of Stalin's meeting with the Yugoslav generals, an interview, given by Tito to the A.P. was prominently published in the Soviet press. Tito explained that 50,000 square miles and five million people were under his jurisdiction; he asked for UNRRA help, and for the recognition of the National Liberation Committee as the Government of Yugoslavia. A few days later Lieut.-Gen. Milovan Djilas published a long article in the Russian press on the four years of the war of liberation in Yugoslavia.

In the course of it he violently denounced Mihailovic. He also commented on Stalin's shrewdness and clarity of vision, and his hatred of empty phrases:

He takes a problem and you can just see him polishing it and sharpening it. He did not ask us a single irrelevant question, and he answered our questions remarkably quickly and to the point. He has an excellent knowledge of Yugoslavia and her

personalities, and he interprets these men with remarkable correctness and

shrewdness.

[ In retrospect Djilas was to paint a very different picture of Stalin in his Conversations with Stalin, published in 1962.]

Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia—the future was taking shape.

Chapter VI THE RUSSIANS AND THE NORMANDY LANDING

Officially, relations continued to be excellent between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies at the time of the Normandy Landing. Only a few days before, the American

shuttle-bombing bases in the Ukraine had come into operation. Flying Fortresses started coming in from Italy after dropping their bombs on Debrecen, Ploesti and other

Hungarian and Rumanian targets; and then flying back to Italy and dropping more bombs on the way.

It was strange to see there, at Poltava and Mirgorod, in the heart of the Gogol country, those hundreds of G.I.'s eating vast quantities of American canned food—spam, and

baked beans and apple-sauce —drinking gallons of good coffee, making passes at the

giggly Ukrainian canteen waitresses, and commenting flatteringly on the Ukrainian

landscape, which was "just like back home in Indiana or Kentucky". Many of them, it is true, had serious doubts about the usefulness of these shuttle-bombing bases, and thought them more in the nature of a political demonstration of "Soviet-American solidarity", or as a precedent which might come in useful in the Far East if and when...

Judging from General John R. Deane's account, [ The Strange Alliance.] the Russians had never been very keen on the whole idea and had been difficult and obstructive for months before the bases actually came into operation in early June 1944.

Soon afterwards, in a surprise night raid on the principal (Poltava) base the Germans destroyed forty-nine out of the seventy Flying Fortresses on the ground.

[Two Americans and thirty Russians were killed in this raid, mostly by anti-personnel mines with which the Germans had peppered the airfield before dropping their heavy

bombs.]

My own impression at the time was that the Russians were extremely embarrassed at

having failed to protect the base effectively with either fighters or anti-aircraft guns but that they were, on the whole, relieved when, before very long, these American bases were scrapped altogether, despite the enormous effort and money that had been sunk into them.

The very idea of American air bases on Soviet soil somewhat went against their grain; nor did they care for the idea of the Ukrainians in a war-devastated part like the Poltava Province (Poltava itself had been completely destroyed) being able to observe at close quarters the "high living" of the American G.I.'s, with their P-X, and their enormous meals.

The shuttle-bombing bases came into operation only a few days before the Normandy

Landing. I happened to be at the Poltava base when the news broke, and immediately

flew back to Moscow, arriving there in the afternoon of June 6.

The first wave of excitement over the Second Front had subsided, but people were happy.

The newly-opened "commercial" restaurants were packed that night with people celebrating—not only British and Americans, but many Russians, too. (A party of Jap

diplomats and journalists also came to one, and behaved and danced provocatively and ostentatiously and were nearly beaten-up by some Americans.)

The news of the Normandy landing had missed the morning papers, but Moscow radio

had been giving news of it in successive bulletins. On the night of the 6t.h General Deane and General Burrows, heads of the American and British military missions, spoke on

Moscow radio, the latter in Russian (of sorts). On the 5th, there had been enthusiastic articles in the Russian press on the capture of Rome, and now, on the 7th, the great news of the Normandy landing was splashed over four columns, with a large picture of

Eisenhower. But there was no comment yet. The Russians wanted to be absolutely sure

that the landing was a success. A curious feature of this Russian reporting on the Second Front was that, although facilities had been given to Russian correspondents to be on the spot, no news from any Russian correspondent was published.

The articles were mostly by military and naval experts, and dealt with the technicalities of the landing operations, the part played by the allied air-forces, etc., and for some days rosy forecasts were avoided. Almost the only non-technical article was written by

Ehrenburg, and, in the circumstances, it was particularly inept. It was a sloppy, emotional piece on France, which would have been all right, if only there had been something on the same lines about Britain and America; but, as it was, it lacked all sense of proportion.

It was all about the French people, the French Resistance, French paratroops that had landed in Normandy, the tradition of Verdun, the Unknown Soldier who had now risen

from his tomb to fight le Boche, etc. Those really responsible for the operation he swept aside in a polite sentence: "We admire the valour of our Allies— the British, Canadians, Americans." And then he immediately proceeded to wallow in his Francophilia.

Was this a purely personal reaction of Ehrenburg's, the old habitué of the Rotonde?

Perhaps, and yet in a film produced some time later on the liberation of France, the British and Americans were also made to play a sort of incidental role—or something that could be taken for granted—while the men who played the most prominent part in saving France were—the French, assisted by the Red Army, the heroes of Stalingrad, etc.

Rather more legitimate were the frequent suggestions in the Soviet press that the

Russians had, in fact, enormously facilitated the task of the Allies, and had already done the greater part of the work in smashing the Germans. Patrick Lacey, of the BBC, was quoted with pleasure as saying that "but for the Russians, D-Day would have been impossible." A Kukryniksy cartoon, on June 11, showed Hitler as a rat, with its head already caught in the Russian trap and the British-American sword then descending upon its hind quarters.

A week passed before Stalin indicated the official line. This was wholly unlike

Ehrenburg's.

In a statement to Pravda, Stalin said:

After seven days' fighting in Northern France one may say without hesitation that the forcing of the Channel along a wide front and the mass-landings of the Allies in Northern France have completely succeeded. This is unquestionably a brilliant

success for our Allies. One must admit that the history of wars does not know of an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and

mastery of execution.

Invincible Napoleon shamefully failed in his plan to force the Channel and to

conquer the British Isles. Hitler the hysteric, who, for two years, boasted that he would force the Channel did not even venture to carry out his threat. Only the

British and American troops succeeded with flying colours in carrying out the

gigantic plan of forcing the Channel and of landing in force on the other side.

History will record this action as an achievement of the highest order.

After this statement the press became very warm to the Allies and, on the initiative of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade, only a few days after the opening of the

Second Front, the Soviet press published for the first time (and not merely in the form of a statement by Roosevelt or Stettinius) a long list of arms and other deliveries received since the beginning of the war from Britain, the United States and Canada.

[This list of deliveries from the three countries up to April 30, 1944, is given on pp. 625-6.]

Not long after D-Day all Russian attention was again focussed on the Soviet-German

Front. In a way, this was natural, for now the Red Army was making an all-out bid to put all Germany's satellites out of action, and to break into Germany itself. Only four days after D-Day the Russians, under Marshal Govorov, struck out at Finland and, after eleven days of heavy fighting on the Karelian Isthmus, Viipuri was captured. On June 23 began the great offensive in Belorussia, that was to carry the Red Army far into Poland. And no sooner had the front become more or less stabilised there in August than the Russians struck out at Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary—and, in Russian eyes, the war in the west again became relatively small stuff.

At first the Allies, held up at Caen and Saint-Lo, had made little progress—which

produced some critical notes in the Russian press; then it became "extraordinarily easy"; and when Paris was liberated, it was the French Resistance who received most of the

credit in the Russian press (even though only a few days before, à propos of Warsaw, an official Soviet statement ridiculed the suggestion that, in conditions of modern warfare, any city could be liberated by forces inside it). Indeed, it was not long after the Russian summer offensive had begun in Belorussia that Pravda wrote on July 16:

The Red Army's offensive has not only made an enormous gap in the eastern wall of Hitler's European fortress, but has also shattered the arguments of Nazi

propaganda. The myth that Germany's main front is now in the west has burst like

a soap bubble... German commentators are now speaking with terror of the battle in the east which, they say, has taken on apocalyptic proportions.

Naturally, the suggestions put forward by some military commentators in Britain that the Germans were deliberately pulling out of Belorussia as a result of the Normandy landing, were strongly resented by the Russians. As the Russian commentator was to say, "this nonsensical talk did not stop until we had paraded 57,000 newly-captured German

prisoners, complete with dozens of generals, through the streets of Moscow." That was on July 17, after the enormous German routs at Vitebsk, Bobruisk, and Minsk.

Even when the campaign in France was developing highly favourably, the Soviet press

still published little more than the official communiqués from the Western Front, and few despatches from the Russian correspondents attached to SHAEF appeared in print. It was not until the end of 1947 that one of them, A. Kraminov, wrote a long retrospective

account of the Second Front, and if the sentiments and ideas he expressed then were the same as they had been in 1944, it would scarcely have been good inter-allied manners to publish his cables while the war was still in full swing. He treated the institution of SHAEF war correspondents as a gigantic publicity machine for armies and even for

individual generals (Montgomery, in his view, was the worst publicity-monger of all); of Montgomery's military gifts he spoke with some disdain, gave the British army no credit for holding the Allies' left flank at Caen, and wrote with typical Russian anger of both the conception of strategic bombing and of the "barbarous and futile" use made of the air force in Normandy where cities like Caen were wrecked and thousands of civilians killed for no valid military reason. It is true that he spoke with admiration of both Patton and Bradley, but treated Eisenhower as a "good chairman", and no more.

In 1944, however, it was not yet the fashion to speak in rude terms of the Second Front.

Though terribly belated, it was still regarded as a real help and as a guarantee that the war would end soon. It made the imminent collapse of Germany more tangible than ever; and the Russians were not altogether surprised at the attempt made on July 20 to assassinate Hitler.

The failure of the attempt was received in Russia with undisguised relief. Although the Russians had, in a way, prepared for such an eventuality with their Free German

Committee, the setting up of a "respectable" (i.e. pro-Western) German Government, with the British and Americans now firmly established on the Continent, might have

created a situation which would almost certainly have turned out detrimental to Russia.

There was nothing the Red Army wanted more at this stage than to "finish off the fascist beast in his lair".

This did not prevent them from letting, or even encouraging, Field-Marshal Paulus (who had kept silent until then) publish a statement calling on the German people to "change the State leadership". The wide use made of this statement in leaflets showered over the enemy lines was intended to demoralise the German soldiers, even though the results of similar attempts in the past had been disappointing, especially if measured by the number of Germans voluntarily surrendering to the Red Army.

Chapter VII GERMAN ROUT IN BELORUSSIA: "WORSE

THAN STALINGRAD"

The great Russian summer offensive started a little over a fortnight after D-Day in the West, and, somewhat symbolically, on June 23, the day after the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The rôles had now been completely reversed. In

the last two years, despite extremely heavy losses in both men and equipment, the

Russians had gone on building up a tremendously effective, competent and powerfully

equipped army, while Germany's reserves in manpower were now in constant decline.

[Some very interesting percentage figures are published in Vol. V of the Soviet History, showing that between Stalingrad and the end of the war the Russians increased only slightly the number of soldiers in their Army, but increased enormously the quantity of equipment. (IVOVSS, Vol. V, p. 467).

The following table illustrates this point admirably:

Guns and

Date

Effectives

Tanks Aircraft

Mortars

Nov. 19,

100

100

100

100

1942

Jan. 1, 1944

111

180

133

200

Jan. 1 .1945

112

217

250

343

The increase in the number of trucks must have been greater still.]

Whereas the Soviet Union now had her British and American allies fighting a major

campaign in France, and tying down (according to Russian estimates) thirty percent of Germany's combat troops, the troops of all Hitler's remaining allies were becoming more and more unreliable and their governments were hoping to get out of the war at the first convenient opportunity. It is ironical that one of the reasons why Hitler was determined to cling on to the Vitebsk-Mogilev-Bobruisk Line at the east end of the great

"Belorussian Bulge" penetrating deep into Russia was that its loss would have a demoralising effect on the Finns who, since the loss of the Karelian Isthmus and Viipuri earlier in the month, were sorely tempted to resume their armistice talks with the

Russians.

Field-Marshal von Busch, the commander of Army-Group Mitte which occupied

Belorussia, had been pleading with Hitler to pull out of Belorussia, or at least to "shorten the line". All that Hitler did, after five days of inevitable German defeats, was to sack von Busch and replace him by Field-Marshal Model, one of the losers of the Battle of Kursk.

The Russian offensive began in the best possible conditions. For one thing, until the very last days of the May-June lull, the Germans had expected the next big Russian blow to fall, not in Belorussia, but in the southern part of the front, between the Pripet Marshes and the Black Sea. The Russian concentration of no fewer than 166 divisions in

Belorussia had been done with the utmost secrecy and discretion, and when the blow fell the Germans were taken almost completely by surprise.

[This is the Russian figure; the Germans speak of " 140 rifle divisions, plus forty-three panzer and mechanised formations {Verbände)" (Philippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 247).]

The campaign, starting along a 450-mile front (which was to extend later to over 600

miles) was conducted by four fronts:

1st Baltic Front under General Bagramian,

3rd Belorussian Front under General Cherniakhovsky,

1st Belorussian Front under General Rokossovsky,

2nd Belorussian Front under General Zakharov.

The first two were under the general command of Marshal Vassilevsky and the last two under that of Marshal Zhukov.

The Russians made no secret of the fact that this was, in a sense, their revenge for 1941

and that it was they who now had enormous superiority over the Germans, with 166

divisions (including reserves) in Belorussia, 31,000 guns and mortars, 5,200 tanks and self-propelled guns, and at least 6,000 planes. Their superiority over the Germans was: 2

to 1 in men; 2.9 to 1 in guns and mortars; 4.3 to 1 in tanks; and 4.5 to 1 in planes.

[IVOVSS, vol. IV, p. 164. German sources put the Russian superiority even higher.]

This looked, indeed, like 1941 the other way round! In the breakthrough areas, the

density of artillery was often as much as 320 guns per mile. For several weeks enormous reserves of ammunition, petrol and food had been accumulated behind the Russian lines; 100 train-loads had been arriving daily for the four Fronts, besides large quantities brought by lorries (chiefly American). A large fleet of motor ambulances was in

readiness, as well as hospital accommodation of 294,000 beds for the wounded.

[Ibid., p. 166.]

A fleet of 12,000 lorries was in readiness to transport 25,000 tons of ammunition, petrol, etc., to the advancing troops in a single journey. It was—with the possible exception of Kursk—the most thoroughly prepared of all the Russian operations, with everything

worked out down to its finest detail, and nothing left to improvisation, as had been the case in the past, even at Stalingrad, chiefly because of serious shortages in equipment and motor transport.

One characteristic of the Belorussian campaign was the very important part played by the partisan formations behind the German lines. Despite some particularly savage German punitive expeditions against the Belorussian partisans in January-February 1944, and again in April, with massacres of entire villages (for example, the village of Baiki in the Brest province where 130 houses had been burned down and 957 people massacred on

January 22, 1944), the partisans of Belorussia still constituted an appreciable armed force of 143,000 men on the eve of the offensive. There was close coordination between the Red Army Command and the partisans who succeeded between June 20 and 23, in

putting practically all the Belorussian railways out of action—precisely what the Red Army needed to paralyse the movement of German supplies and troops.

From the very start, the Russian offensive was tremendously successful. Between June 23

and 28 the four Russian Fronts broke through the German lines in six places, and

encircled large German forces at Vitebsk and Bobruisk. Tens of thousands of Germans

were killed and some 20,000 taken prisoner in these two encirclements alone. After the Germans' loss of the Vitebsk-Orsha-Mogilev-Bobruisk line, Hitler sent a frantic order to hold the Berezina line. But in this the Germans failed completely. Striking out from north-east and south-east, the Russians entered Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, on July 3, and in the process encircled large German forces in a vast "bag" east of Minsk—a total of about 100,000 men, the majority of whom surrendered. Some 40,000 were killed or

wounded, but 57,000 Germans, with several generals and dozens of officers at their head were marched in July 17 through the streets of Moscow. The purpose of this unusual

procedure was to disprove both the German claims of a "planned withdrawal from

Belorussia", and suggestions in the British and American press that if the Russian campaign in Belorussia was a "walkover", it was because large numbers of German troops had been moved to fight the Western Allies in France.

That parade of 57,000 Germans through Moscow was a memorable sight. Particularly

striking was the attitude of the Russian crowds lining the streets. Youngsters booed and whistled, and even threw things at the Germans, only to be immediately restrained by the adults; men looked on grimly and in silence; but many women, especially elderly women, were full of commiseration (some even had tears in their eyes) as they looked at these bedraggled "Fritzes".

I remember one old woman murmuring, "just like our poor boys ... tozhe pognali na voinu (also driven into the war)".

The Russian soldiers fighting in Belorussia did not, on the whole, feel quite so charitable towards the Germans. Everywhere the retreating Germans had tried to destroy as much as they possibly could. At Zhlobin, the Russians saw a trench with 2,500 corpses of newly-murdered civilians, and it is estimated that well over a million people had been murdered in Belorussia during the German occupation— among them the entire Jewish population

and many hundreds of thousands of partisans and their "accomplices", including women and children.

Most of Belorussia, and the country east of it between Smolensk and Viazma, had been turned into a "desert zone". In the spring of 1944, anticipating a probable withdrawal from Belorussia, the Germans had ordered that the winter crops be ploughed under, and had tried to prevent spring sowing. They even devised special rollers to destroy the crops.

Practically all the cities were in ruins. It is true that with nearly sixty percent of the rural areas more or less under partisan control (and even jurisdiction, complete with Soviet administrative and party organs) these orders could not be put into effect in many places.

General Tippelskirch, Commander of the 4th German Army which took part in the

Belorussia retreat, later referred to "a vast wooded and marshy area from the Dnieper nearly all the way to Minsk which was controlled by large partisan formations, and was never in three years, either cleaned up, still less occupied by German troops."

[K. Tippelskirch. Istoriya vtoroi mirovoi voiny. [Russ. ed.] p. 445.]

Nevertheless, the Germans succeeded in turning most of Belorussia into a "desert zone".

In the villages (according to Russian figures) over a million houses were destroyed; and when I travelled through Belorussia, shortly after the German rout, there was extremely little livestock to be seen.

Here (as distinct from the Ukraine) a large number of young people had evaded

deportation by joining the partisans; but even so, 380,000 had been deported from

Belorussia to Germany. The destruction in the cities was appalling: nearly all factories and public buildings had been destroyed, and at Minsk the majority of all other houses had been burned down, too. If the large Government House and some other public

buildings and nineteen out of 332 industrial enterprises had survived, it was only because they had been rapidly de-mined as soon as the Russian troops had entered the city. In Minsk alone 4,000 delayed-action bombs, mines and boobytraps had to be unprimed. The Red Army was full of admiration for those engineers "who never made more than one mistake."

The "bagging" of 100,000 Germans east of Minsk meant that the Red Army had torn a 250-mile gap in the German front, and that the road was now almost clear into Poland and Lithuania.

On July 4, even before the final liquidation of the Minsk "bag", the Soviet Supreme Command set new targets for the four fronts fighting in Belorussia: they were to advance, within a very short time into eastern Latvia, Lithuania, and on to Vilno, Kaunas, Grodno and Brest-Litovsk, and to force the Niémen in several places, with a subsequent advance to the East Prussian border and (farther south) into Poland.

The Red Army continued to advance at great speed, covering between ten and fifteen

miles a day; on July 8 Baranovichi was taken; on July 13 Vilno fell to the troops of Cherniakhovsky, on July 18, Rokossovsky's troops crossed into Poland, and on July 23, captured Lublin—an event of far-reaching political consequences. On July 28 they

captured Brest-Litovsk, and the whole of Belorussia was cleared of the Germans.

According to the Germans themselves, the Russian offensive in Belorussia was the

gravest defeat ever inflicted on the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Between twenty-

five and twenty-eight German divisions were destroyed, a loss of at least 350,000 men. In the words of the Official Journal of the OKW the rout of Army Group Mitte (in Belorussia) was "a greater catastrophe than Stalingrad."

[ Kriegstagebuch des OKW, IV-I, pp. 13-14.]

This figure of twenty-five divisions or 350,000 men lost occurs in other German post-war accounts. Thus, Guderian speaks of the "destruction of Army Groupe Mitte" and of "the total loss of some twenty-five divisions." The events, he says, were "so shattering" that

"Hitler moved his headquarters in mid-July from Obersalzberg to East Prussia."

[Guderian, op. cit., p. 336. Philippi and Heim speak of twenty-eight divisions and

350,000 men.]

The routing of Army Group Mitte in Belorussia had created highly favourable conditions for other Russian army groups to come into action. On July 13 the 1st Ukrainian Front under Konev started its Lwow-Sandomierz operation; in the north, the 3rd Baltic Front liberated Pskov on July 18 and broke into southern Estonia; the 2nd Baltic Front broke into southern Latvia, while the 1st Baltic Front under Bagramian, after capturing Yelgava (Mitau) broke through on July 31 to the Gulf of Riga at Tukkum, thus cutting off the whole of the German Army Group Nord in Estonia and Latvia from the rest of the German forces. However, three weeks later, the Germans succeeded in hacking out a

twenty-mile corridor south of the Gulf of Riga and thus partly restoring land

communication between Army Group Nord and western Lithuania and East Prussia.

Although, in Belorussia and eastern Lithuania the Russians had scored one of the greatest victories of the war—and one from which the Germans could never recover—their

further progress from about July 25 to the end of August was much slower for a number of obvious reasons: long-drawn-out communications, fatigue among the troops, and the throwing in of heavy German reserves against the Russian attempt to advance both

beyond the Niémen into East Prussia, and along the Narew and upper and middle Vistula into central Poland. By the end of August, when most of the operations between Yelgava in Latvia, and Jozefow, a hundred miles south of Warsaw, came to a standstill by order of the Soviet Supreme Command, the front ran about half-way across Lithuania, then a short distance from the eastern border of East Prussia, and then, roughly, along the Narew and Vistula into central Poland.

*

By this time Poland had become the scene of the most dramatic military and political events. On July 23, the left flank of Rokos-sovsky's 1st Belorussian Front, including the 1st Polish Army, had already liberated the ancient Polish city of Lublin. On July 31, the blunted spearhead of the right flank of the same 1st Belorussian Front reached "the outskirts of Praga" across the Vistula opposite Warsaw; on August 1, the Warsaw Uprising of the Armija Krajowa under General Bor-Komarowski began.

Chapter VIII WHAT HAPPENED AT WARSAW?

It was shortly before the beginning of the Warsaw tragedy that events of far-reaching political importance took place in the Russian-liberated parts of Poland.

As we have seen, Lublin was liberated by the Russians on July 23, and two days later the Soviet Foreign Office published a statement on the attitude of the Soviet Union to

Poland; simultaneously a Manifesto was published, dated July 22 and signed at Chelm (a frontier town inside Poland), announcing the formation of the Polish National Liberation Committee, before long to be known as the "Lublin Committee".

The Russian statement said that the Red Army, together with the Polish Army fighting on the Soviet Front, had begun the liberation of Polish territory. The Soviet troops, it continued, had only one object: to smash the enemy and to help the Polish people reestablish an independent, strong, and democratic Poland. Since Poland was a sovereign state, the Soviet Government had decided not to establish any administration of its own on Polish soil, but had decided to make an agreement with the Polish Committee of

National Liberation concerning the relations between the Soviet High Command and the Polish administration. The statement added that the Soviet Government did not wish to acquire any part of Polish territory or to bring about any changes in the social order of Poland, and that the presence of the Red Army in Poland was simply necessitated by

military requirements.

The Rada Narodowa (the "underground parliament"), in a document dated "Warsaw (sic), July 21", issued a decree, which was published in Chelm on the following day, in the first issue of the "official" paper, Rzeczpospolita, ordering the formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation.

The principal members of the Committee were:

President and Chief of the Foreign Affairs Department: E. B. Osöbka-Morawski.

Deputy-President and Head of the Department for Agriculture and Agrarian

Reform: Andrzei Witos.

Deputy President: Wanda Wassilewska.

Head of National Defence Department: Col.-Gen. M. Rola-Zymierski.

His Deputy: Lt.-Gen. Berling.

There were fifteen other appointments, among them that of S. Radkiewicz, the notorious head of security, and five whose names were not disclosed, since they were still in

German-occupied territory.

The Committee's "Manifesto" stated that it had been nominated by the Krajowa Rada Narodowa, "a body comprising representatives of the Peasant Party and other democratic elements inside Poland", and "recognised by Poles abroad—in the first place by the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR and by the Polish Army formed in the Soviet

Union." It denounced the London emigre government as a "usurper" government that had adopted the "fascist" constitution of 1935. The National Committee, on the other hand, recognised the "democratic" constitution of 1921 until the Constituent Assembly met and decided otherwise.

The Manifesto emphasised the new era of Slav unity; it said that the frontiers between Poland and the Soviet Union would be settled on an "ethnical" basis and by mutual agreement, and that, in the west, Poland would regain her old territories in Silesia, along the Oder, and in Pomerania. East Prussia would also be included in Poland. The 400

years of fruitless enmity between the Slav peoples were now at an end, and the Polish and Soviet flags would wave in the wind side by side as the victorious troops marched into Berlin...

The Manifesto then enumerated the various items of the reconstruction programme, and stressed the need for a general land reform. On nationalisation it was cautious; it said that the Polish State would take over large enterprises now run by the German State and

German capitalists, and, "as economic relations were being regulated, property would be returned to its owners." All this was still exceedingly vague.

The Manifesto said that comradeship-in-arms would strengthen Poland's friendship with Great Britain and the USA, and that Poland would strive to maintain her traditional bonds of friendship and alliance with France.

The personnel of the National Committee was a rather mixed bunch; Dr Drobner—head

of the Department for Labour and Health—for instance, was a right-wing Socialist; Witos was (like Mikolajczyk) a veteran leader of the Popular Peasant Party (he was soon to be eliminated); but the key positions were obviously held by men of the PPR (the

Communist Party)—to which Bierut, the President of the Krajowa Rada Narodowa, at that time also belonged. Osöbka-Morawski was made President of the Committee—not

perhaps because he was an outstanding personality, but because he was one of the few Socialists available. This was freely admitted (much later, it is true) by many of the PPR

men.

On July 23 a number of decrees were issued by the Rada Narodowa—one establishing a High Command of the Polish Army, another placing the Union of Polish Patriots under

the authority of the National Committee, and so on.

We now come to one of the most controversial episodes of the war in the East—the

tragedy of the Warsaw Rising of August-September 1944. The "London-Polish" version of what happened is too familiar to need recalling in detail. Bôr-Komarowski, the leader of the uprising, has told his story of "Russian treachery"; so has Stanislas Mikolajczyk in his Rape of Poland [ See his Chapter VI called "Betrayal".] Mikolajczyk's book in particular, keeps on referring to General Rokossovsky's headquarters as "only a few miles" outside Warsaw, and to the Red Army as being "in the suburbs of Warsaw from which it wouldn't budge." The fact that Warsaw and the Red Army were separated by a wide river, the Vistula, is only very incidentally referred to. His implication is that the Vistula was no serious obstacle and that, if they had wanted to, the Russians could easily have captured Warsaw, and so saved the city from destruction, and also saved many of the 300,000 Poles who were to perish in the two-months' fighting-cum-massacre inside the city. If the Russians did not capture Warsaw, it was not, according to Mikolajczyk, because they could not do it, but for purely political reasons: it did not suit them to have the Polish capital "liberated" by a popular rising, directed by Bör-Komarowski and other

"agents" of the London Government. Both Bor-Komarowski and Mikolajczyk make the most of the following facts: (1) a Moscow broadcast at the end of July specifically calling on the people of Warsaw to rise against the Germans; (2) the Russian refusal to allow planes from the west that had dropped supplies on Warsaw to land on Russian airfields, and (3) the lack of proper Russian support for the gallant attempt of the Polish troops under General Berling to force the Vistula in the immediate neighbourhood of Warsaw, and the disciplinary action taken against Berling for failing to hold the bridgehead, or rather, for making the attempt at all.

The Churchill-Stalin correspondence during the period of the Warsaw rising is marked by a tone of increasing exasperation on the part of Churchill about the Russians' unco-operative attitude, and by growing anger on the part of Stalin against the Warsaw

"adventurers" who had dragged the people of Warsaw into a senseless rebellion without co-ordinating their actions with the Red Army Command.

On August 4 (i.e. three days after the beginning of the rebellion) Churchill wired to Stalin:

At the urgent request of the Polish underground we are dropping, subject to the

weather, about sixty tons (on Warsaw)... They also say they appeal for Russian aid which seems very near. They are being attacked by one and a half German

divisions.

On August 5 Stalin replied:

I think the information given you by the Poles is greatly exaggerated and

unreliable... The Polish émigrés claim that they have all but captured Vilno with Home Army units... This has nothing to do with the facts. The Home Army consists

of a few detachments misnamed divisions. They have neither guns, aircraft nor

tanks. I cannot imagine detachments like these taking Warsaw, which the Germans

are defending with four armoured divisions, including the Hermann Goering

Division.

On August 8 Stalin reported to Churchill on the meetings that had taken place in Moscow between Mikolajczyk and the "Lublin Poles", but suggested that the meeting had, so far, been fruitless. Nevertheless, on August 10, Churchill thanked Stalin for bringing the two sides together, and also said that Polish airmen from the west had dropped more supplies on Warsaw. "I am so glad to learn you are sending supplies yourself. Anything you feel able to do will be warmly appreciated by your British friends and allies."

But it was not long before Churchill began to suspect foul play on the part of the

Russians. He telegraphed to Eden (then in Italy) on the 14th:

"It certainly is very curious that at the moment the Underground Army has

revolted the Russian Armies should have halted their offensive against Warsaw and withdrawn some distance. For them to send machine-guns and ammunition [to

Warsaw] would involve only a flight of 100 miles."

[Churchill, op. cit., vol. VI, p. 117.]

Two days later, according to Churchill, Vyshinsky informed the American Ambassador

that the Soviet Government could not object to English and American aircraft dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, but they did object to their landing on Soviet territory,

"since the Soviet Government do not wish to associate themselves either directly or indirectly with the adventure of Warsaw."

On August 16, Stalin sent—though in a milder form—a message to the same effect to

Churchill.

There was great agitation in London and Washington, and on August 20 Churchill and

Roosevelt sent a joint message to Stalin beginning: "We are thinking of world opinion if anti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effect abandoned", and pleading for Big-Three co-operation in the matter. Stalin replied on August 22:

Sooner or later the truth about the handful of power-seeking criminals who

launched the Warsaw adventure will be out. They... have exposed practically

unarmed people to German guns, armour and aircraft... Every day is used, not by

the Poles for freeing Warsaw, but by the Hitlerites who are cruelly exterminating the civil population.

From the military point of view the situation which keeps German attention riveted to Warsaw, is highly unfavourable both to the Red Army and to the Poles.

Nevertheless, the Soviet troops, who of late have had to face renewed German

counter-attacks, are doing all they can to repulse the Hitlerite sallies and to go over to a new large-scale offensive near Warsaw. I can assure you that the Red Army will spare no effort to crush the Germans at Warsaw and liberate it for the Poles. This will be the best, really effective, help to the anti-Nazi Poles."

Churchill went on speaking in terms of the Russians' "strange and sinister behaviour". He attributed the Russians' unwillingness to let Western planes land behind the Russian lines to the blackest villainy. "They did not mean to let the spirit of Poland arise again in Warsaw. Their plans were based on the Lublin Committee."

[ Ibid., p. 24.]

But then, he says, "On September 10, after six weeks of Polish torment, the Kremlin appeared to change their tactics."

That afternoon shells from the Soviet artillery began to fall upon the eastern

suburbs of Warsaw, and Soviet planes appeared again over the city. Polish

communist forces, under Soviet orders, fought their way into the fringe of the

capital. From September 14 onward the Soviet air force dropped supplies, but few

of the parachutes opened and many of the containers were smashed and useless.

And then:

The following day the Russians occupied the Praga suburb, but went no further.

They wished to have the non-Communist Poles destroyed to the full, but also to keep alive the idea that they were going to their rescue.

[ Ibid., p. 127 (emphasis added).]

On October 2, a little over a fortnight later, Bör-Komarowski capitulated to the Germans.

According to the Russian official History, in order to understand the situation one has to go back to the directives given by the Soviet Supreme Command to the various fronts on July 28. These directives included the following:

The 3rd Belorussian Front was ordered to capture Kaunas by August 1 or 2, and

then push on to the East Prussian border;

The 2nd Belorussian Front was also ordered to advance, farther south, via Lomza,

towards the East Prussian border;

The 1st Belorussian Front was ordered, after capturing Brest and Siedlce, to occupy Praga (opposite Warsaw) between August 5 and 8, and to establish a number of

bridgeheads south of Warsaw on the western bank of the Vistula.

The right flank of the 1st Belorussian Front indeed clashed with the Germans on July 31

"on the close approaches to Praga, the suburb of Warsaw on the right bank of the Vistula". Meantime, the left flank of the 1st Belorussian Front forced the Vistula south of Warsaw and captured the small bridgeheads of Magnuszew and Pulawa. The capture of

these bridgeheads was followed by frantic German attacks on them; though the Russians were not to be dislodged, they were not strong enough to enlarge them.

Something obviously went seriously wrong with the Russian military plans at the end of July and beginning of August. Under the dateline "Outside Warsaw, August 1" (the day the Warsaw Rising began), Makarenko wrote in Pravda of August 2:

On to Warsaw! In an offensive there is a moment when the military operation

reaches its culminating point and, having acquired its necessary pressure and

impetus, goes ahead without any doubt as to what will happen next. At such a time when the full strength of the offensive comes into motion, it starts advancing in great strides, and then no power can stop its victorious forward march.

Whatever exactly this verbiage was supposed to mean, every reader must have

interpreted it as signifying that the Red Army would be inside Warsaw within a. few

days. On August 3, the Soviet papers published a map showing the front running a few miles from the Vistula, just east of Praga, though on a very narrow salient. The talk in Moscow was that Rokossovsky was going to capture Warsaw on August 9 or 10. And

then something went wrong: apparently that coup de main, of which Guderian was to speak, had not come off.

The news from Warsaw grew more tragic every day. Then, for nearly a fortnight there

was a news blackout in Russia as far as the Warsaw sector was concerned, and it was not till August 16 that an ominous communiqué was published saying that "east of Praga our troops have been repelling the enemy's large-scale attacks, and have abandoned Ossow."

Ossow was only a short distance from Praga, and there was no real indication how far the Russians had been pushed back.

After denouncing the decision taken by the AK command, with the blessing of the Polish Government in London, to start the Warsaw uprising on August 1 as an anti-Soviet

"political operation", and after describing the wholly inadequate quantities of arms available inside Warsaw, the Soviet History goes on to say:

The very first day proved highly unfavourable to the insurgents... They failed to capture the strategic points in the city, the railway stations or the Vistula bridges...

As a result, the Germans were able to bring up heavy reinforcements. The

commanders of some of the AK detachments, discouraged by all this, dissolved them or took them out of Warsaw. Yet, despite these unfavourable conditions, the

struggle continued, and greatly grew in vigour when the population of Warsaw

joined in... Rank and file members of the AK, unaware of the political schemes of their leaders, fought bravely against the Nazis... However, the forces were too

unequal... In the second half of August the situation became truly tragic, with the Germans carrying out Hitler's orders to wipe Warsaw off the face of the earth.

[ IVOVSS, vol. IV, p. 243.]

The explanation now given is that although "in principle" (as could be seen from Stalin's letter to Churchill of August 16), the Soviet Government did not wish to be associated with the Warsaw Rising (on which it had not even been consulted), it nevertheless "did all it could" because many thousands of Warsaw patriots had joined in the struggle.

In reply to the Western charge that the "Soviet Command had deliberately stopped its troops at the gates of Warsaw and so condemned the insurgents to death", the History says:

[IVOVSS, vol. IV, pp. 244 ff (emphasis added).]

People who say this have never taken the trouble to study the possibilities of the Red Army at the time of the Warsaw Rising. Here are the real facts:

In the second half of July the troops of the 1st Belorussian [Rokos-sovsky] and of the 2nd Ukrainian [Konev] Front entered Polish territory and began to advance

towards the Vistula... At the end of July, even before the beginning of the Warsaw Rising, the tempo of the offensive had greatly slowed down. The German High

Command had by this time thrown very strong reserves against the main sectors of

our advance. German resistance was strong and stubborn. It should also be

considered that our rifle divisions and tank corps had suffered heavy losses in

previous battles; that the artillery and the supply bases were lagging behind, and that the troops were short of both petrol and munitions.

Infantry and tanks were not receiving nearly enough artillery support. During the delays in re-basing our air force on new airfields, this was much less active than before. At the beginning of the Belorussian Campaign, we had complete control of

the air. At the beginning of August our superiority was temporarily lost. In the 1st Belorussian sector between August 1 and 13 our planes carried out 3,170 sorties and the enemy planes 3,316.

Consequently, after a long forty-day offensive, with enemy resistance much stronger than it was, our troops could not maintain the high tempo of our advance, and give immediate help to the Warsaw rising. This was quite obvious to the German

command. Thus General Tippelskirch writes: "The Warsaw Rising started on

August 1, at a time when the strength of the Russian blow had exhausted itself." The task was rendered all the more difficult as we were faced with the problem of

forcing the Vistula.

And then:

On August 1, troops of the left flank of the 1st Belorussian Front approached

Warsaw from the south-east. In approaching Praga, the 2nd Tank Army met with

fierce enemy resistance; the approaches to Praga had been heavily fortified... It was also here that the Germans concentrated a heavy striking force of one infantry and

four Panzer divisions, which struck out at the beginning of August and drove the 2nd

Tank Army away from Praga, before the bulk of our troops had had time to approach

this Warsaw suburb.

The very difficult position in which the 2nd Tank Army found itself at Praga may be measured by its losses.

In its battles fought on Polish territory—at Lublin, Deblin, Pulawa and the

approaches of Warsaw—it had lost about 500 tanks and mobile guns. Under the

weight of the German offensive it had to retreat from Praga, take up the defensive and repel the German attacks...

There followed weeks of confused fighting both north and south of Warsaw on the

eastern bank of the Vistula and also on the three bridgeheads the Russians had captured on the western bank—at Magnuszew, Pulawa and Sandomierz—all a considerable

distance from Warsaw. Everywhere the Germans were now throwing in heavy forces.

It is not clear from this how far away from Praga the Russians were thrown back, but they were certainly a considerable distance to the east of Praga by the middle of August, when Churchill was desperate to get Western planes to land behind the Russian lines.

Here I can supplement the History with what General Rokos-sovsky, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, told me at Lublin on August 26, 1944.

My informal and off-the-record conversation with Rokossovsky (after a great ceremony in the main square for the unveiling of a cenotaph to those who had fallen in the Battle of Lublin) was a brief but significant one. Here is what he said:

"I can't go into any details. But I'll tell you just this. After several weeks' heavy fighting in Belorussia and eastern Poland we finally reached the outskirts of Praga about the 1st of August. The Germans, at this point, threw in four armoured divisions, and we were

driven back."

"How far back?"

"I can't tell you exactly, but let's say nearly 100 kilometres (sixty-five miles)."

"Are you still retreating? "

"No—we are now advancing—but slowly."

"Did you think on August 1 (as was suggested by the Pravda correspondent that day) that you could take Warsaw within a very few days? "

"If the Germans had not thrown in all that armour, we could have taken Warsaw, though not in a frontal attack; but it was never more than a 50-50 chance. A German counterattack at Praga was not to be excluded, though we now know that before these armoured divisions arrived, the Germans inside Warsaw were in a panic, and were packing up in a great hurry."

"Wasn't the Warsaw Rising justified in the circumstances?"

"No, it was a bad mistake. The insurgents started it off their own bat, without consulting us."

"There was that broadcast from Moscow calling on them to rise."

"That was routine stuff, [sic] There were similar calls to rise from Swit radio [the AK

radio], and also from the Polish service of the BBC—so I'm told, though I didn't hear it myself. Let's be serious. An armed insurrection in a place like Warsaw could only have succeeded if it had been carefully co-ordinated with the Red Army. The question of

timing was of the utmost importance. The Warsaw insurgents are badly armed, and the

rising would have made sense only if we were already on the point of entering Warsaw.

That point had not been reached at any stage, and I'll admit that some Soviet correspondents were much too optimistic on the 1st of August. We were pushed back.

We couldn't have got Warsaw before the middle of August, even in the best of

circumstances. But circumstances were not good, but bad. Such things do happen in war.

It happened at Kharkov in March 1943 and at Zhitomir last winter."

"What prospect is there of your getting back to Praga within the next few weeks?"

"I can't go into that. All I can say is that we shall try to capture both Praga and Warsaw, but it won't be easy."

"But you have bridgeheads south of Warsaw."

"Yes, but the Germans are doing their damnedest to reduce them. We're having much difficulty in holding them, and we are losing a lot of men. Mind you, we have fought non-stop for over two months now. We've liberated the whole of Belorussia and nearly one fourth of Poland; but, even the Red Army gets tired after a while. Our casualties have been very heavy."

"Can't you help the Warsaw insurgents from the air?"

"We are trying; though, to tell you the truth, it isn't much good. They are holding only isolated spots in Warsaw, and most of the stuff will fall into German hands."

"Why can't you let British and American planes land behind the Russian lines, after dropping their supplies on Warsaw? There's been an awful stink in England and America about your refusal... "

"The military situation east of the Vistula is much more complicated than you realise.

And we just don't want any British and American planes mucking around here just at the moment.

[This may or may not be the true explanation, but it tallies with the usual Russian

cageyness at times of reverses.]

I think in a couple of weeks, we'll be able to supply Warsaw ourselves from low-flying planes if the insurgents hold any recognisable area in the city. But this high altitude dropping of supplies on Warsaw by Western planes serves practically no purpose at all."

"Isn't all this massacre and destruction in Warsaw having a terribly depressing effect on the Polish people here? "

"Of course, it has. But a fearful mistake was made by the AK leadership. We (the Red Army) are responsible for the conduct of the war in Poland, we are the force that will liberate the whole of Poland within the next few months, and Bor-Komarowski and the

people around him have butted in kak ryzhy v tsirke—like the clown in the circus who pops up at the wrong moment and only gets rolled up in the carpet... If it were only a piece of clowning it wouldn't matter, but the political stunt is going to cost Poland hundreds of thousands of lives. It is an appalling tragedy, and they are now trying to put the blame on us. It makes me pretty sick when I think of the many thousands of men we have already lost in our fight for the liberation of Poland. And do you think," he concluded, "that we would not have taken Warsaw if we had been able to do it? The whole idea that we are in any sense afraid of the AK is too idiotically absurd."

*

There were two strange and, in some ways, pathetic figures at a press conference given by General Rola-Zymierski, the "Minister" of Defence of the Lublin Committee, later that day: two AK officers, Colonel Rawicz and Colonel Tarnawa, who said they had left Warsaw on July 29 on the initiative of "a strong minority" of AK officers inside Warsaw to establish contact with Mikolajczyk (who was then in Moscow), in a last-minute

endeavour to persuade the London Government to use all its influence to call off the rising that was being prepared for August 1—for, on July 25, they had already received orders from General Bor-Komarowski to prepare and stand by. They claimed that it was clear that the insurgents could not possibly hold Warsaw unless they struck out at the very last moment, with the Russians practically inside the city. Unfortunately, it had taken the two colonels nearly a fortnight to reach Lublin, and it was then too late.

Colonel Rawicz, a smart, dapper little man in a new uniform, but with a look of grief and bewilderment in his eyes, said that headquarters had given the order for a rising as soon as the Russians were twenty miles away from Warsaw; he and many other officers felt it would be folly to do it until the Russians had reached the Vistula bridges.

"We did not think," he said, "that the Russians could enter Warsaw before August 15. But the man-in-the-street (and you know how brave and romantic our Warsaw people are)

was convinced the Russians would be there by August 2; and with tremendous

enthusiasm they joined in..."

Rawicz was in a state of great emotion as he spoke about Warsaw and its destruction and there were tears in his eyes as he mentioned his wife and daughter, who were "still there", in that burning inferno. He reckoned that 200,000 people had already been slaughtered.

It was all tragic, and a little mystifying. Had these two men really acted in good faith (I felt that they had) in their attempt to avert the disaster? Were they, as London was later to call them, deserters from the AK cause?

*

According to the History:

At the beginning of September, with the Germans having now turned their main attention to our bridgeheads on the west side of the Vistula, we were able to concentrate

sufficiently large forces which ... finally captured Praga on September 14. Thus, there was a considerable improvement in the Warsaw sector of the front, and there was now a good prospect of giving direct support to the Warsaw Rising. This was the task with

which the 1st Polish Army [under General Beding] was entrusted. On September 15 it

entered Praga, and began to prepare the forcing of the Vistula and the establishment of bridgeheads in Warsaw itself.

After describing this operation, carried out with the help of amphibious vehicles, and supported by Russian artillery and aircraft, the History then goes on to say that between September 16 and 19, six battalions crossed the Vistula, that the Polish soldiers and officers fought heroically, but that they were helpless against the very heavy fortifications from which the Germans were able to prevent any extension of the bridgehead.

Moreover, the insurgents failed to co-ordinate their actions with the Polish forces on the bridgehead. On September 21 German tanks and infantry attacked in strength, splitting up the bridgehead and inflicting very heavy casualties on the Poles. On September 23 the Poles had to evacuate the bridgeheads and return to the east bank of the Vistula, suffering very heavy losses.

Such is the present Russian version of the abortive "Berling operation" undertaken (according to the "London" Poles) on Berling's own initiative and without Russian support. After its failure, Berling was recalled to Moscow "for further training".

Quoting Soviet Ministry of Defence archives, the History then gives a long and impressive list of arms, food and other material dropped on Warsaw by the Soviet air force between September 14 and October 1, the eve of Bör-Komarowski's capitulation.

There were altogether over 2,000 Soviet sorties over Warsaw.

The History also dwells on the very heavy Russian casualties in the fighting in Poland during that period. Thus, between August 1 and September 15 the 1st Belorussian Front lost 166,000 men (killed and wounded) and the 2nd Ukrainian Front (in August only)

122,000 men.

Finally, when the position in Warsaw had become completely hopeless, says the History, the Red Army command proposed to the Warsaw insurgents, to fight their way across the Vistula under Russian artillery and aircraft protection; but only a small number of

Warsaw fighters took advantage of this offer.

In conclusion, the History quotes Gomulka's merciless indictment of the AK leadership in Warsaw who "committed a fearful crime against the Polish people by launching the insurrection without previous co-ordination with the Red Army command."

Such is the present-day Russian—and Gomulka—version of the Warsaw tragedy. It

evades the awkward questions of the Moscow radio appeals at the end of July to the

people of Warsaw to "rise" (though it criticises the Swit broadcasts) and the Russians'

refusal to let supply planes from the West land on Soviet airfields.

[The Swit broadcasts were those of the "pro-London" Poles.]

But the really crucial question is whether the Russians could have forced the Vistula at Warsaw in either August or September; and on this the Russian evidence to the contrary seems impressive, reinforced as it is by the opinion of General Guderian who wrote:

It may be assumed that the Soviet Union had no interest in seeing these (pro-

London) elements strengthened by a successful uprising and by the capture of their capital... But be that as it may, an attempt by the Russians... to cross the Vistula at Deblin on July 25 failed, with the loss of thirty tanks... We Germans had the

impression that it was our defence which halted the enemy rather than a Russian

desire to sabotage the Warsaw uprising.

And then:

On August 2 the 1st Polish Army... attacked across the Vistula with three divisions in the Pulawa-Deblin sector. It suffered heavy casualties, but secured a bridgehead...

At Magnuszew a second bridgehead was established. The forces that crossed here

were ordered to advance along the road running parallel to the Vistula to Warsaw, but

they were stopped at the Pilica.

Guderian clearly believes that there was a serious Russian attempt to capture Warsaw in the first week of August. He then goes on:

The German 9th Army had the impression, on August 8, that the Russian attempt to

seize Warsaw by a coup de main had been defeated by our defence, despite the Polish

uprising, and that the latter had, from the enemy's point of view, been begun too soon

[ Guderian, op. cit., pp. 358-9. (emphasis added.)]

This is an important piece of evidence, which tallies, to an extraordinary degree, both with what was said in Moscow at the very beginning of August when the capture of

Warsaw by the Red Army was expected "at any moment", and with what was being said in Lublin at the end of August, at the height of the Warsaw tragedy.

The only conclusion this author, at any rate, has been able to reach is that in August and September 1944 the available Red Army forces in Poland were genuinely not able to

capture Warsaw which Hitler was determined to hold. For Warsaw was on the Russians'

shortest road to the heart of Germany.

It might, of course, be argued that if the Russians had wanted to capture Warsaw at any price, that is, by transferring whole armies to the Vistula from other fronts at short notice (not an easy task), they might conceivably have captured it. But this would have upset their other military plans like steadily advancing on East Prussia, routing the Germans in Rumania, joining with the Yugoslavs and breaking into Bulgaria and Hungary.

There is no question but that the Warsaw rising was a last desperate attempt to free Poland's capital from the retreating Nazis and at the same time to prevent the Lublin administration from gaining a foothold and establishing itself in Warsaw once the

victorious Soviet army had entered the city.

Once more in Poland's history this valiant struggle for independence was defeated by the overriding, although conflicting, great-Power interests of other states. Still, with Moscow determined, ever since the beginning of the war and especially since April 1943, to

control the future destinies of Poland, Bor-Komarowski would have been eliminated one way or another by the Russians, as they managed a few years later to rid themselves of Mikolajczyk.

The story of the end of the Warsaw tragedy, and of German bestiality under the

leadership of the notorious SS Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewsky, assisted by

equally notorious murder gangs like the Kaminsky Brigade, is well known, as is also

Hitler's maniacal order of October 11 to "raze Warsaw to the ground".

300,000 Poles lost their lives in Warsaw. When the Russians finally entered Warsaw in January 1945, more than nine-tenths of the city had been almost as completely destroyed as had been the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.

Chapter IX CLOSE-UP: LUBLIN—THE MAIDANEK MURDER

CAMP

It was a beautiful sunny day as we flew at the end of August 1944 from Moscow to

Lublin over those hundreds of miles of Belorussian fields, marshes and forests that had been recaptured by the Red Army in the great battles of June and July. Belorussia looked more wretched and ruined than any part of the Soviet Union, apart from that terrible

"desert" that stretched all the way from Viazma and Gzhatsk to Smolensk. There were scarcely any cattle to be seen outside the villages, most of which had suffered partial or complete destruction. This was mostly partisan country and, flying over Belorussia one realised once more how dangerous and precarious their life had been. Contrary to what is often believed, there are no immense forests in Belorussia stretching over hundreds of miles; there are mostly only patches of forest seldom more than five or ten miles wide.

Even many of these patches were yellow—set on fire by the Germans, to smoke the

Partisans out. A ferocious life-and-death struggle had gone on here for two years or more; one could tell that even from the air.

Then we flew over Minsk, and it all seemed a shambles, except for the enormous grey

Government Building. Minsk had also had its torture-chambers at the Gestapo

headquarters, and its mass graves of slaughtered Jews. It was hard to grasp that, only three years before, it had been a prosperous industrial city.

We flew on to Lublin, into Poland. The rural scene here looked very different. Outwardly at least, the country looked almost un-scathed by war. The Polish villages looked intact, with their white-washed houses and their well-kept and prosperous-looking Catholic

churches. The front was not very far away from here, and we were flying low; children waved as we roared past; and in the fields there were many more cattle than in any part of the Soviet Union where the Germans had been; and most of the land was cultivated. We landed a good distance outside Lublin, and the villages through which we then drove

along a terribly dusty road looked much the same as from the air—all fairly normal-

looking, with a large number of cattle about, and the landscape dotted with haystacks...

I was to stay several days in Lublin. The streets were crowded, which they seldom were in any newly-liberated Russian town; there was also great activity in the market place.

Everywhere there were many Russian and Polish soldiers. Before leaving, the Germans

had shot 100 Polish prisoners in the old Castle; but apart from a few burned-out

buildings, the city was more or less intact, complete with the Castle, the Radziwill Palace and the numerous churches.

Yet this first impression of normality was a little deceptive. The German occupation—

which had now lasted five years—had left a deep mark on the people of Lublin, and the arrival of the Russians here had not set their minds at rest; far from it. And, for over two years now, Lublin had, as it were, lived in the shadow of Maidanek, the great

extermination camp only two miles away. When the wind blew from the east it brought

with it the stench of burning human flesh from the crematoria chimneys.

At dinner on the night of our arrival with some of the local worthies and some of the

"Lublin Poles"—among them Colonel Wiktor Grosz [A few months before, Grosz, as one of the leading lights of the Union of Polish Patriots, had tried to go to London to present to the British Government the "Moscow Poles'" point of view, but had been refused a visa. Grosz was a brilliant writer, and spoke excellent English. He was to become one of the chief foreign policy advisers of the "Lublin Committee" and was later to play a leading rôle at the Polish foreign ministry in Warsaw until his premature death only a few years later.] whom I had already met in Moscow—I sat next to Professor Bielkowski,

who had, before the war, been Assistant Rector of Lublin University; he was one of the few Polish intellectuals who had survived the German occupation. Lublin University, he said, was closed by the Germans, and the Library looted; but he was given a wretched job in the Archives where he was expected to dig up books and documents to show that this part of Poland was urdeutscher Boden (ancestral German territory). "The whole thing was a mockery," he said, but would not go into any details on how the "research work"

was conducted, or on what results it had produced. He had obviously collaborated in a small way to save his life. And he was ready to admit that he was one of the few Polish intellectuals to have escaped.

"The Germans' policy," he said, "was to exterminate the Polish intelligentsia; and now that they are going to be thrown out of Poland before long, they want to make sure that our power of national recuperation is reduced to zero, if possible. In the last few days I have learned that the Germans have murdered dozens more of our professors—in

addition to the thousands and thousands of our intellectuals who have already perished in their concentration camps." He gave a long list of names. "They wanted Poland to be an inert mass of peasants and labourers, without leadership and without any kind of national prestige."

"And the clergy?" I asked.

"Yes, I'll grant you, the Church has done its best to maintain a sense of national cohesion and consciousness in Poland; but there are going to be complications now: most of the priests are pro-AK and anti-Russian."

"How are things here in Lublin?"

"You'll no doubt see Maidanek tomorrow; that's one aspect of Lublin. For the rest—well, things are taking shape, but slowly. There is a lot of worry and uncertainty. People are obsessed with the idea of Warsaw burning and its people being butchered by the

Germans."

"What's the feeling among the Polish people about the Russians? "

"Quite good," he said, "yes, quite good. Of course, I may be more pro-Russian than most Poles. I studied in St Petersburg; I like Russian people, and admire their great civilisation.

But it's no use denying it: there's a terribly old tradition of mutual distrust between Poles and Russians. Now, for the first time, I think, a real attempt is being made by the

Russians to come to a lasting understanding with the Poles. But we Poles have been

kicked around so much that the idea of a Russo-Polish bloc takes time to sink in. And now there are plenty of poisonous stories going around about Warsaw. Quite unjustified, I think. I have talked to many Russian officers; they are very fed-up at having so far failed to take Warsaw... And there are other things, too. Our people want Vilno and

Lwow to be included in Poland. I know we can't have Vilno, which has been promised to the Lithuanians, but the Russians are being sticky even about Lwow..."

[Incorporated into the Soviet Union at the partition in 1940 and kept by her after the war.]

He then talked about Maidanek, where over one-and-a-half million people had been

murdered in the last two years—many Poles amongst them, and people of all kinds of

nationalities, but, above all, Jews.

"What," I asked, "has been the attitude of the Polish people to the massacre of the millions of Jews?"

"This is a very tricky subject; let's face it," said the Professor. "Owing to a number of historical processes, such as the Tsarist government's Jewish policy of confining most of the Jews in the Russian Empire to Poland, we have had far too many Jews here. Our retail trade was entirely in Jewish hands. They also played an unduly large part in other walks of life. There's no doubt that the Polish people wanted the number of Jews in Poland reduced. They wanted part of them to emigrate to America, to Palestine, or perhaps to Madagascar; there was such a scheme before the war. But that was one thing," he added a little glibly. "What the Germans did is quite another thing; and this, I can tell you, genuinely revolted every one of our people... "

During the next few days I spent several hours in the streets of Lublin talking to all kinds of people. Despite some bomb damage here and there, the city had preserved some of its old-time charm. On Sunday, all the churches—and there were said to be more churches

per square mile in Lublin than in any other Polish city— were crowded. Among the

faithful, kneeling and praying, there were many Polish soldiers. People were rather better dressed than in Russia, though many looked distinctly worn out and undernourished, and under great nervous strain. The shops were almost empty, though there was a good deal of food in the market place. But the food was dear, and there was much animosity against the peasants who were described as "a lot of bloodsuckers"; there were also many stories of how the peasants "crawled" to the Germans; a German soldier only had to appear in a Polish village, and the peasants were so scared they'd bring out roast chickens, and butter and eggs and sour cream... On the other hand, the Russian soldiers had been given strict orders to pay for everything and the peasants were not keen at all to give anything away for roubles.

[ This polite Russian behaviour was to change in time; but at first the Russians behaved in a very disciplined and "correct" way to the Polish peasants.]

People—many of them very humble-looking working people, talked freely about the

German occupation; many had lost friends and relatives at Maidanek; many more had

had members of their families deported as slave labour to Germany; they also talked

about that terrible first winter of 1939-40, when there was a regular trade in children: whole trainloads of children—whose parents had been killed or arrested— children from Poznan and other places taken over by the Germans would arrive in Lublin, and a child—

often starved and half-dead— could be bought for thirty zloty from German soldiers.

They talked of people who were publicly hanged in the main square of Lublin and of the torture chambers of the Lublin Gestapo. "Anyone," said an elderly woman looking like a schoolmistress, "could be taken there: if a German thought, as he passed you in the street, that you had given him a dirty look, that was enough. To kill a human being —it was as easy as stepping on a worm and squashing it." During the German occupation, most people in Lublin had gone hungry, and the peasants had not been helpful; and now there was no certainty that things were going to be much better. Still, to many it had been a pleasant surprise to see real Polish soldiers in Polish uniforms arrive here from Russia; the Germans had always denied that there was a Polish Army in Russia. On the other

hand, there were— especially among the better-dressed people—grave misgivings about

the Russians, and strong AK sympathies; and there was also much talk of 2,000 AK men having been arrested by the Russians in the Lublin area alone. Many questions were, of course, also asked about the Polish troops in Italy and France, and, on many Poles, the arrival of British and American correspondents in Lublin made a particularly strong

impression: dozens of people, with a suggestive look in their eyes, would give us flowers.

One young man, I remember, took me aside and drew my attention to a large inscription painted on a wall; it said "MONTE CASSINO". "Monte Cassino," he said, "that's a Polish victory won on the other side, and we are particularly proud of it... It was our people who painted the inscription." "Your people?" I said, "You mean the Armija Krajowa?" He nodded. "The war seems to be going well," he said, "but you realise there are many buts, many, many buts. .. There's Warsaw, and we don't trust these Lublin Committee people... Well, you know what I mean... And 2,000 arrests." He was a pink-cheeked young man of about twenty-three with carefully-plastered hair which, however, strangely contrasted with his shabby clothes; he had worked as an accountant under the Germans, but was also active in the Polish "London" underground. Now, he said, he was going to be mobilised into the Polish Army. "Seems reasonable enough, I suppose," he said, "to be mobilised to fight the Germans, though I can't say I am particularly delighted to fight under Russian orders... "

Since the end of the war, there have been numerous accounts of various German

Extermination Camps—Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Belsen and others—but the story of

Maidanek has not perhaps been fully told to Western readers; moreover, Maidanek holds a very special place in the Soviet-German war.

As they advanced, the Russians had been learning more and more of German atrocities

and the enormous number of killings. But, somehow, all this killing was spread over

relatively wide areas, and though it added up to far, far more than Maidanek, it did not have the vast monumental, "industrial" quality of that unbelievable Death Factory two miles from Lublin.

"Unbelievable" it was: when I sent the BBC a detailed report on Maidanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not till the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were

convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine...

The Russians discovered Maidanek on July 23, the very day they entered Lublin. About a week later Simonov described it all in Pravda; but most of the Western press ignored his account. But in Russia the effect was devastating. Everybody had heard of Babyi Yar and thousands of other German atrocities; but this was something even more staggering. It brought into sharper focus than anything else had done the real nature, scope and

consequences of the Nazi régime in action. For here was a vast industrial undertaking in which thousands of "ordinary" Germans had made it a full-time job to murder millions of other people in a sort of mass orgy of professional sadism, or, worse still, with the business-like conviction that this was a job like any other. The effect of Maidanek was to be enormous, not least in the Red Army. Thousands of Russian soldiers were made to

visit it.

My first reaction to Maidanek was a feeling of surprise. I had imagined something

horrible and sinister beyond words. It was nothing like that. It looked singularly harmless from outside. "Is that it? " was my first reaction when we stopped at what looked like a large workers' settlement. Behind us was the many towered skyline of Lublin. There was much dust on the road, and the grass was a dull, greenish-grey colour. The camp was

separated from the road by a couple of barbed-wire fences, but these did not look

particularly sinister, and might have been put up outside any military or semi-military establishment. The place was large; like a whole town of barracks painted a pleasant soft green. There were many people around—soldiers and civilians. A Polish sentry opened

the barbed-wire gate to let our cars enter the central avenue, with large green barracks on either side. And then we stopped outside a large barrack marked Bad und Desinfektion II.

"This," somebody said, "is where large numbers of those arriving at the camp were brought in."

The inside of this barrack was made of concrete, and water taps came out of the wall, and around the room there were benches where the clothes were put down and afterwards collected. So this was the place into which they were driven. Or perhaps they were

politely invited to "Step this way, please?" Did any of them suspect, while washing themselves after a long journey, what would happen a few minutes later? Anyway, after the washing was over, they were asked to go into the next room; at this point even the most unsuspecting must have begun to wonder. For the "next room" was a series of large square concrete structures, each about one-quarter of the size of the bath-house, and, unlike it, had no windows. The naked people (men one time, women another time,

children the next) were driven or forced from the bath-house into these dark concrete boxes—about five yards square—and then, with 200 or 250 people packed into each box

—and it was completely dark there, except for a small skylight in the ceiling and the spyhole in the door—the process of gassing began. First some hot air was pumped in

from the ceiling and then the pretty pale-blue crystals of Cyclon were showered down on the people, and in the hot wet air they rapidly evaporated. In anything from two to ten minutes everybody was dead... There were six concrete boxes—gas-chambers—side by

side. "Nearly two thousand people could be disposed of here simultaneously," one of the guides said.

But what thoughts passed through these people's minds during those first few minutes while the crystals were falling; could anyone still believe that this humiliating process of being packed into a box and standing there naked, rubbing backs with other naked

people, had anything to do with disinfection?

At first it was all very hard to take in, without an effort of the imagination. There were a number of very dull-looking concrete structures which, if their doors had been wider, might anywhere else have been mistaken for a row of nice little garages. But the doors—

the doors! They were heavy steel doors, and each had a heavy steel bolt. And in the

middle of the door was a spyhole, a circle, three inches in diameter composed of about a hundred small holes. Could the people in their death agony see the SS-man's eye as he watched them? Anyway, the SS-man had nothing to fear: his eye was well-protected by

the steel netting over the spyhole. And, like the proud maker of reliable safes, the maker of the door had put his name round the spyhole: "Auert, Berlin". Then a touch of blue on the floor caught my eye. It was very faint, but still legible. In blue chalk someone had scribbled the word "vergast" and had drawn crudely above it a skull and crossbones. I had never seen this word before, but it obviously meant "gassed"—and not merely

"gassed" but, with that eloquent little prefix ver, "gassed out". That's this job finished, and now for the next lot. The blue chalk came into motion when there was nothing but a heap of naked corpses inside. But what cries, what curses, what prayers perhaps, had been uttered inside that gas chamber only a few minutes before? Yet the concrete walls were thick, and Herr Auert had done a wonderful job, so probably no one could hear

anything from outside. And even if they did, the people in the camp knew what it was all about.

It was here, outside Bad und Desinfektion II, in the side-lane leading into the central avenue, that the corpses were loaded into lorries, covered with tarpaulins, and carted to the crematorium at the other end of the camp, about half-a-mile away. Between the two there were dozens of barracks, painted the same soft green. Some had notice-boards

outside, others had not. Thus, there was an Effekten Kammer and a Frauen-Bekleidungskammer; here the victims' luggage and the women's clothes were sorted out, before they were sent to the central Lublin warehouse, and then on to Germany.

At the other end of the camp, there were enormous mounds of white ashes; but as you

looked closer, you found that they were not perfect ashes: for they had among them

masses of small human bones: collar bones, finger bones, and bits of skull, and even a small femur, which can only have been that of a child. And, beyond these mounds there was a sloping plain, on which there grew acres and acres of cabbages. They were large luxuriant cabbages, covered with a layer of white dust. As I heard somebody explaining:

"Layer of manure, then layer of ashes, that's the way it was done... These cabbages are all grown on human ashes... The SS-men used to cart most of the ashes to their model farm, some distance away. A well-run farm; the SS-men liked to eat these overgrown cabbages, and the prisoners ate these cabbages, too, although they knew that they would almost certainly be turned into cabbages themselves before long..."

Next we came to the crematorium. It was a great big structure of six enormous furnaces and above them rose a large factory chimney. The wooden structure that used to cover the crematorium, as well as the adjoining wooden house, where Obersturmbannführer

Mussfeld, the "Director of the Crematorium" used to live, had been burned down.

Mussfeld had lived there among the stench of burned and burning bodies, and took a

personal interest in the proceedings. But the furnaces stood there, large, enormous. There were still piles of coke on the one side; on the other side were the furnace doors where the corpses went in... The place stank, not violently, but it stank of decomposition. I looked down. My shoes were white with human dust, and the concrete floor around the

ovens was strewn with parts of charred human skeletons. Here was a whole chest with its ribs, here a piece of skull, here a lower jaw with a molar on either side, and nothing but sockets in between. Where had the false teeth gone? To the side of the furnaces was a large high concrete slab, shaped like an operating table. Here a specialist—a medical man perhaps?—examined every corpse before it went into the oven, and extracted any gold

fillings, which were then sent to Dr Walter Funk at the Reichsbank...

Somebody was explaining the details of the whole mechanism; the furnaces were made

of fibreproof brick, and the temperature had always to be maintained at 1,700°

centigrade; and there was an engineer called Tellener who was an expert in charge of maintaining the right temperature. But the corroded condition of some of the doors

showed that the temperature had been increased above normal to make the corpses burn more quickly. The normal capacity of the whole installation was 2,000 corpses a day, but sometimes there were more corpses than that to deal with, and there were some special days, like the great Jew-extermination day of November 3, 1943, when 20,000 people—

men, women and children—were killed; it was impossible to gas them all that day; so

most of them had been shot and buried in a wood some distance away. On other

occasions many corpses were burned outside the crematorium on enormous funeral pyres soaked in petrol; these pyres would smoulder for weeks and fill the air with a stench...

Standing in front of the great crematorium, with human remains scattered on the ground, one began to listen to all these details with a kind of dull indifference. The "industrial report" was becoming unreal in its enormity...

Besides the charred remains of Mussfeld's house, there lay piles of large black cans, like enormous cocktail shakers, marked "Buchenwald". They were urns and had been brought from that other concentration camp. People from Lublin who had lost a relative at

Maidanek, somebody said, would pay substantial sums to the SS-men for the victim's

remains. It was another loathsome SS racket. Needless to say, the ashes with which the cocktail shakers were filled were nobody's ashes in particular.

Some distance away from the crematorium, a trench twenty or thirty yards long had been re-opened and, looking down through the fearful stench, I could see hundreds of naked corpses, many with bullet-holes at the back of their skulls. Most of them were men with shaved heads; it was said that these had been Russian war prisoners.

I had seen enough, and hastened to join Colonel Grosz, who was waiting beside the car on the road. The stench was still pursuing me; it now seemed to permeate everything—

the dusty grass beside the barbed wire fence, and the red poppies that were naively

growing in the midst of all this.

Grosz and I waited there for the rest of the party to join us. A Polish youngster with tattered clothes and a torn cap, and barefooted, came up and talked to us. He was about eleven, but talked of the camp with a curious nonchalance, with that nil admirari that had become his outlook on fife after living for two or three years in the immediate proximity of the Death Camp... This boy had seen everything, at the ages of nine, and ten and

eleven.

"A lot of people in Lublin," he said, "lost somebody here. In our village people were very worried, because we knew what was going on in the camp, and the Germans threatened

to destroy the village and kill everybody in case we talked too much. Don't know why they should have bothered," the boy said with a shrug, "everybody in Lublin knew anyway." And he recounted a few things he had seen; he had seen ten prisoners being beaten to death; he had seen files of prisoners carrying stones, and had seen those who collapsed being killed with pickaxes by the SS-men. He had heard an old man screaming while he was being chewed up by police dogs... And, looking across the fields of

cabbages growing on human ashes, he said, almost with a touch of admiration:

"Everything is growing well here—cabbages, and turnips and cauliflowers... It's all land belonging to our village, and now that the SS are gone, we'll get the land back."

There was much coming and going on the road—hundreds of men and women were

going into and out of the camp; Russian soldiers were being taken in large parties to be shown the pits and the gas chambers and the crematoria; and Polish soldiers of the 4th Division and new Polish recruits. It was policy to make them see it all, and to impress upon them—in case they were not yet sufficiently impressed—what kind of enemy they

were fighting. A few days before a crowd of German prisoners had been taken through

the camp. Around stood crowds of Polish women and children, and they screamed at the Germans, and there was a half-insane old Jew who bellowed frantically in a husky voice:

"Kindermörder, Kindermörder!" [ Child-murderers.] and the Germans went through the camp, at first at an ordinary pace, and then faster and faster, till they ran in a frantic panicky stampede, and they were green with terror, and their hands shook and their teeth chattered...

I shall describe only briefly some of the other aspects of that vast industrial enterprise that the Murder Camp represented. There were those trenches in Krempecki Forest, a few miles away, where they murdered 10,000 Jews on that 3rd of November. Here speed was

even more important than business. They shot them, without taking off their clothes, even without taking the women's handbags and the children's toys away. Amongst the stinking corpses, I saw a small child with a teddy-bear... But this was unusual; the great principle of the Murder Camp was that nothing should be wasted. There was, for instance, that

enormous barn-like structure which had contained 850,000 pairs of boots and shoes—

among them tiny baby shoes; now, by the end of August, half the shoes had gone:

hundreds of people from Lublin had come and taken whole bagfuls of shoes.

"How disgusting," somebody remarked.

Colonel Grosz shrugged his shoulders. "What do you expect? After having had the Germans here for years, people stopped being squeamish. They had lived for years

buying and selling and speculating; they are short of shoes, so they say to themselves:

'These are perfectly good shoes; someone will get them eventually; why not grab them while the going's good?'"

And then—perhaps the most horrifying thing of all—there was the enormous building

called the "Chopin Lager", the Chopin Warehouse, because, by a curious irony, it happened to be in a street called after the composer. Outside, there was still a notice, with the swastika on top, announcing a German public meeting:

Kundgebung.

Donnerstag, 20, Juli 1944.

Reichsredner P.G. Geyer.

Im Hause der Nationalsozialisten, Lublin

[Meeting, Thursday, July 20, 1944. Speaker from the Reich, Party Comrade Geyer, in the House of National Socialism, Lublin.]

One wondered what kind of cheerful news the Partei-Genosse had to tell the Maidanek murderers a couple of days before the Russians entered Lublin, and while most of the Germans must have been busy packing up. It was also the day of the bomb that had failed to kill Hitler...

The Chopin Warehouse was like a vast, five-storey department store, part of the

grandiose Maidanek Murder Factory. Here the possessions of hundreds of thousands of

murdered people were sorted and classified and packed for export to Germany. In one big room there were thousands of trunks and suitcases, some still with carefully written-out labels; there was a room marked Herrenschuhe and another marked Damenschuhe; here were thousands of pairs of shoes, all of much better quality than those seen in the big dump near the camp. Then there was a long corridor with thousands of women's dresses, and another with thousands of overcoats. Another room had large wooden shelves all

along it, through the centre and along the walls; it was like being in a Woolworth store: here were piled up hundreds of safety razors, and shaving brushes, and thousands of pen-knives and pencils. In the next room were piled up children's toys: teddy-bears, and celluloid dolls and tin automobiles by the hundred, and simple jigsaw puzzles, and an American-made Mickey Mouse... And so on, and so on. In a junk-heap I even found the

manuscript of a Violin Sonata, Op. 15 by somebody called Ernst J. Weil of Prague. What hideous story was behind this?

On the ground floor there had been the Accounts Department. Letters were strewn all

over the place; mostly letters from various SS and Nazi organisations to the "Chopin Lager, Lublin", asking to be sent this and that. Many of the letters were orders from the Lublin SS and Police Chief: on November 3, 1942 a carefully-typed letter instructed the Chopin Lager to supply the Hitler Youth Camp, Company 934, with a long list of articles including blankets, table linen, crockery, bed-linen, towels, kitchen utensils, etc. The letter specified that all this was wanted for 4,000 children evacuated from the Reich.

There was another list of articles for 2,000 German children who required "sports shirts, training suits, coats, aprons, gym shoes, skiing boots, plus-fours, warm underwear, warm gloves, woollen scarves". The department store was euphemistically called

"Altsachenverwertungsstelle, Lublin" (Lublin Disposal Centre for Second-hand Goods).

There was also a letter from a German woman living in Lublin asking for a pram and a complete layette for her newborn child. Another document showed that in the first few months of 1944 alone eighteen railway wagons of goods from the Lublin warehouse had

been sent to Germany.

The joint Russo-Polish Tribunal investigating the Maidanek crimes sat in the building of the Court of Appeal at Lublin. It included many leading Polish personalities—the

President of the District Court, Czepanski; Professor Bielkowski (whom I had already met); a round stout prelate, Father Kruszinski, Dr Emil Sommerstein, the leading Jewish member of the Lublin Committee, and a former Sejm deputy, and Mr Witos, the

Commissioner for Agriculture. That these people were not Russian stooges could be seen from the eagerness with which one of the members insisted on telling the foreign press that the Russians had arrested 2,000 AK men in the Lublin District. In an introductory speech, the Polish president of the tribunal gave the history of Maidanek camp, a lurid catalogue of all the various ways in which people were tortured and killed. There were SS-men who specialised in the "stomach-kick" or the "testicle-kick" as a form of murder; other prisoners were drowned in pools, or tied to posts and allowed to die of exhaustion; there had been eighteen cases of cannibalism in the camp even before it had officially become, on November 3, 1943, an extermination camp. He spoke of the chief of

Maidanek. Obersturmbannführer Weiss, and his assistant, a notorious sadist, Anton Thumann, and Mussfeld, the chief of the crematorium, and many others.

Himmler himself had twice visited Maidanek and had been pleased with it. It was

estimated that 1,500,000 people had been put to death here. The big fry had, of course, fled, but six of the small fry—two Poles and four Germans—had been caught, and, after a trial, they were all hanged a few weeks later.

The four Germans—three of them SS-men—were professional killers; but it seemed a

little hard on the two young Poles, both of whom had originally been arrested by the Germans and had then "sold themselves" to them, in the hope of surviving.

[The interrogation of these men is described in my article, "First Contact with Poland", published in the Russian Review, No. 1. (Penguin Books. 1945).]

The press and radio in the West were still sceptical. Typical was the BBC's refusal to use my story, as was also this comment of the New York Herald Tribune at the time: Maybe we should wait for further corroboration of the horror story that comes

from Lublin. Even on top of all we have been taught of the maniacal Nazi

ruthlessness, this example sounds inconceivable...

The picture presented by American correspondents requires no comment except

that, if authentic [sic] the régime capable of such crimes deserves annihilation.

I saw a great deal during those days of the members of the "Lublin Committee"—

Obsöbka-Morawski, its chairman, General Rola-Zymierski, and several others. The New

Poland was still in its infancy, and less than one-quarter of Poland's territory had yet been liberated. No industrial centres, except Bialystok, mostly in ruins, had yet been

recaptured, and it was still too early to do any large-scale planning. For the present, the Committee was obsessed with some immediate problems, such as rationing in the towns, the creation of regular government jobs in Poland, so as to get people away from the hand-to-mouth existence they had led under the Germans, and the mobilisation of

conscripts into the Polish Army, despite the resistance coming from the AK men.

Osöbka-Morawski had seen Mikolajczyk in Moscow earlier in the month, and what

seemed to worry him most at the time was the support the London Polish government

was still getting from Britain and the USA.

There could be no question of an amalgamation between the London Government and the

Lublin Committee. "We are willing to accept Mikolajczyk, and Grabski, and Popiel and one more, and that is all" Osöbka-Morawski said. He added that the Lublin Committee could accept only the 1921 constitution, but London stuck to the "fascist" constitution of 1935. Unlike the Americans, Clark Kerr, the British Ambassador in Moscow, had told

him that he fully approved of the 1921 constitution—but it was just a bit awkward what to do with President Raczkiewicz.

"I was going to tell him where he could put him," Osöbka-Morawski said, and suddenly grinned like a schoolboy. "Anyway," he concluded, "the sooner we resume conversations with Mikolajczyk, the better for him; for time is working for us. We are anxious to come to a settlement, and that's why we offered him the premiership. But he had better accept soon, or the offer may not be repeated." (Which is precisely what happened.)

Chapter X RUMANIA, FINLAND AND BULGARIA PACK UP

Apart from Poland, the Red Army had a lot of other fish to fry. In that summer and

autumn of 1944 Hitler's satellites were collapsing one after the other, and it was

important to speed up the process. Below the surface, there was rivalry between the

Soviet Union and the British and Americans in the Balkans, and Moscow thought it

essential to occupy Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary as quickly as possible.

[ Some (perhaps over-suspicious) Russians attributed Churchill's wish to get the Red Army to capture Warsaw at any price to a desire to slow down its progress in south-east Europe.]

Events in Rumania followed upon one another with fantastic speed during that month of August 1944. Since the late spring the Russians had held a line running (west to east) from the Carpathian foothills across Moldavia and Bessarabia just north of Jassy and Kishenev, and then along the Dniester to the Black Sea some thirty miles south of

Odessa. The Moldavian sector was held by the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under Malinovsky, the Bessarabian sector by those of the 3rd Ukrainian Front under Tolbukhin, which also held an important bridgehead on the right bank of the Dniester just south of Tiraspol. Facing them, east to west, were the Rumanian 4th Army, the German 8th Army, the German 6th Army and the Rumanian 3rd Army, the whole, under the command of

General Friessner, forming Army Group Süd-Ukraine consisting of some fifty divisions, half of them Rumanian.

On August 20 both the Ukrainian fronts struck out with forces estimated by the Germans at "ninety infantry divisions and forty-one tank and three cavalry formations".

[ Philippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 259.]

As the same writers say:

The avalanche had now been set in motion and nothing could stop it on its way to

the Rumanian interior. It was all the easier for the enemy since half the divisions of Army Group Süd-Ukraine were Rumanian, and the Russians deliberately struck their first blows at them. But it was not till August 22 that the full extent of the catastrophe could be measured... With its sixteen divisions the German 6th Army

was trapped in the Kishinev area and the Rumanian 3rd Army along the Black Sea

coast. In the general confusion no one did anything to blow up the bridges across the Pruth and the Danube and, for the Russians the road was now clear to Bucharest

and the Dobrudja.

This roughly corresponds to Russian accounts of the same operation which, within a few days, was to knock Rumania straight out of "Hitler's war". As General Talensky told me in 1945:

"The Germans holding the line north of Jassy were worried, for this was our road to the Rumanian oil and to the Balkans. They concentrated here practically all that was left of the Rumanian Army, which now formed part of the German Army Group Süd-Ukraine.

The Germans had strongly fortified their lines though, in fact, they were pretty sure that the Central Front was engaging all our attention, and that there was little to fear for the present.

[ This is corroborated by German evidence showing that, in July, a number of strong

German formations were moved from Rumania to other parts of the front. See Philippi

and Heim, op. cit., p. 260.]

"So our attack of August 20 came like a bolt from the blue... By August 23 fifteen German divisions were trapped. Unlike the Rumanians, who either offered no resistance or even (in a number of cases) turned against their 'allies', the Germans resisted fiercely at first; some 60,000 were killed, but, in the end, we bagged 106,000 prisoners, among them two corps commanders, twelve divisional commanders and thirteen other generals. Two

corps commanders and five divisional commanders were found dead. We also captured

or destroyed 338 planes, 830 tanks and mobile guns, 5,500 guns and 33,000 trucks... It was a classically-done job."

Nearly the whole of the German 6th Army was destroyed; but most of the German 8th

Army hastily retreated west to the Carpathians.

Jassy had been captured on the 22nd and Kishenev on the 24th; during the following

week the Russians overran the whole of eastern Rumania, and on the 30th Malinovsky's troops triumphantly entered Bucharest and the oil capital of Ploesti. Little more than a week later Tolbukhin was overrunning Bulgaria.

Meantime the political unrest that had been growing in Rumania for months past came to a head. Antonescu, whose last hope rested in the German and Rumanian forces holding

the Jassy-Dniester Line, had had an inconclusive last meeting with Hitler on August 5, and although he urged Hitler to send several panzer formations to Rumania, the Führer still did not think the situation in Rumania desperate, and still imagined that Antonescu had the Rumanian Army behind him. The total lack of enthusiasm for fighting the

Russians shown on August 20 by the Rumanian troops came as a shock to Hitler, and this was to be followed by an even greater shock three days later when King Michael

appointed General Sanatescu head of the Government and had both Ion Antonescu and

Michael Antonescu interned at the Palace.

On August 25, the Soviet Foreign Office published a statement recalling its earlier

statement of April 2 that the Soviet Union did not intend to change "the social order in Rumania" and saying that the Rumanian Army could keep its arms if it were ready to fight the Germans and Hungarians. The Rumanian troops must help to liquidate the

Germans; this was the only way in which military operations in Rumania could rapidly end and the essential conditions be created for an armistice between Rumania and the Allies.

Two days later it published another Note saying that the Armistice terms which had been rejected by Antonescu, had now been accepted by King Michael and General Sanatescu.

It further said that Bucharest was now being firmly defended by the Sanatescu

Government against the Germans, and that the German Military Mission, with General

Hansen at its head, had been interned. The King's Declaration announcing a change of government and a change of policy had caused great rejoicing in Bucharest. The

Germans, however, were wreaking vengeance on the city by bombing and shelling it. In the Carpathians and in Transylvania Rumanian troops were now known to be fighting the Germans. In Transylvania the Germans were planning to set up a puppet government

under Horea Sima.

The Note then said that Mr S. Vinogradov, the Soviet Ambassador in Ankara [Later for many years Ambassador in Paris], had been informed by the Rumanian Minister there

that the new Rumanian Coalition Government was composed of the four principal parties led by Maniu, Bratianu, Petrescu and Patrasceanu, the last-named a Communist.

The Rumanian communication to Vinogradov also said that the government was willing

to accept the armistice terms, which provided, among other things, for a complete breach with Germany, for the Rumanian army now fighting against Germany, for the restoration of the Soviet-Rumanian border of 1940, and for compensation to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Government, on its side, subscribed to the cancellation of Hitler's "Vienna Award"

handing over to Hungary a large part of Transylvania.

For a week after the change of government in Rumania, the Rumanian troops held

Bucharest as best they could, though it does not seem that there were any large German forces around after the Jassy-Kishenev debacle. But there was much nuisance shelling and nuisance bombing of the Rumanian capital, and the people feared a German counter-offensive and an attempt to recapture Bucharest. It was therefore with some relief that most of Bucharest welcomed the Red Army on August 30. The Soviet press reported that the Red Army aroused feelings of "wonder and surprise" in Bucharest: the Rumanians were amazed at the quantity of heavy Russian equipment and could hardly believe at first that most of it was Soviet-made. "The courtesy is overwhelming," one Soviet reporter wrote. "No sooner does one of our comrades produce a cigarette than dozens of hands holding burning lighters are stretched out to light it for him". The communists were displaying posters everywhere welcoming "Maresalul Stalin, genialul comandat al armatei rosii". "And everybody is down on Antonescu", the Soviet press also reported.

The Dictator was still locked up in the Royal Palace.

In all these Soviet reports there was a note of condescension, sometimes a note of

contempt for all this "hearty cringing"; they made a distinction, however, between the

"sincere joy of the ordinary Rumanian people" and the half-hearted relief felt by the

"bourgeois loafers" in whom Bucharest abounded (and who would no doubt have preferred to see American and British troops).

For the first time the Russian troops were seeing a "real" Western capital, with shops, theatres, cafés and all the paraphernalia of the bourgeois way of life. This in itself, as we shall see, was going to raise something of a psychological and almost ideological

problem inside Russia.

At that stage the Soviet Government raised no objections to the composition of the new Rumanian Government and was in a hurry to conclude an armistice with Rumania;

however, before long, it began to bring strong pressure to bear on the "double-crossing elements" in the Rumanian "democratic bloc". Under Russian pressure Sanatescu was later replaced by General Radescu and, finally, by the much more pliable Petru Groza.

The very cordial Russian attitude to the young King, who at first was given a high Soviet decoration, also changed before very long, and later the terrible Mr Vyshinsky was sent down to Bucharest to bully the life out of him.

But that came later. Early in September the Rumanian Armistice Delegation arrived in Moscow. It was received in style—almost like representatives of a new Allied Power—

and lived in luxury at the Government Guest House in Ostrovsky Lane.

Although the delegation was headed by Prince Stirbea who, earlier in the year, had

established contact with the British in Cairo, most of the talking was done by the

communist leader, the new Minister of Justice, Mr Patrasceanu, a man of drive and

ability and great personal charm.

[He was later to be shot as a "Titoite".]

With him was his pretty young wife. Mme Patrasceanu was a product of French culture in Rumania; elegant, petite, vivacious, she evoked visions of the rue de la Paix. She would come to tea and cocktail parties given by British and American correspondents and would bring a whiff of Guerlain into the dingy rooms of the Hotel Metropole. With a playful grimace she would chatter about the "frightful" week in Bucharest before the Russians came, and when the Germans were dropping bombs on the city all the time. She said that King Michael was un très joli garçon and most intelligent; and she related how difficult life had been for her under the Fascist régime. "Of course, even our Rumanian Fascists aren't quite like the Germans; my husband was in a concentration camp, but I can't really say he was ill-treated; I could visit him and take him food parcels."

At his press conferences, Mr Patrasceanu graphically described the coup d'état of August 23, and the way in which Antonescu was trapped by "our King"; he also stressed the heroic deeds of the Rumanian troops during the days when Bucharest was being bombed

and shelled by the Germans, and concluded that the Rumanians were a peace-loving and democratically-minded people who at heart had always hated the Germans.

Of the difficulties that were likely to arise inside the new coalition he said nothing. In the background, at one of his press conferences, sat a Mr Popp, the Minister of Agriculture, but he had little to say about land reform, and preferred to let Patrasceanu do the talking.

[Privately, Mr Popp remarked to me that the Germans would have found it difficult to drag the Rumanians into the war against Russia, if the Russians hadn't recklessly grabbed Bessarabia and Bukovina from them in 1940.]

That month Armistice Delegations were simply queueing up in Moscow. No sooner had

the Rumanians gone than the Finns were ready to be received. The Rumanian Armistice

was signed on the 12th, and the Finnish on the 19th; and then came the Bulgarians.

In June, after their capture of Viipuri (Viborg), the Russians had stopped at the 1940

Finnish frontier, and did not go beyond it. They were giving the Finns time to reflect. But the Finns refused to be rushed.

It was not till the beginning of the Russian invasion of Estonia, that they became

thoroughly alarmed. For what if the Russians were to land troops from Estonia in the most vital parts of Finland, just across the Gulf of Finland? In the first week of August President Ryti, the person most responsible for the recent last-ditch agreement with Germany—an agreement under which the Finns would not conduct separate peace

negotiations without Germany's approval— very suddenly resigned, and the Finnish

Parliament, ignoring the usual procedure in these matters, passed a law handing over the President's powers to Field-Marshal Mannerheim. Keitel, who rushed to Helsinki on

August 17, was informed by Mannerheim that the Ryti-Ribbentrop agreement was "off".

On August 25 the Finnish Minister in Stockholm handed a Note to the Soviet

Ambassador, Mme Kollontai, asking that an Armistice Delegation be received in

Moscow. The Soviet Government agreed, provided Finland publicly announced its

breach with Germany and demanded that all German troops be withdrawn from Finland

by September 15. If the Germans refused, the Finns would disarm them and hand them

over to the Allies as war prisoners. The Soviet Note added that it was sent in agreement with Britain, and with no objections from the United States.

Despite some hedging by the Finns on the question of "disarming" the Germans, a cease-fire was agreed to, to take place on September 4 along the Finnish frontier of 1940.

The Finnish Armistice Delegation, headed by K. Enckel, arrived in Moscow on

September 14 and the Armistice was signed on the 19th. The chief Soviet negotiator was Zhdanov, who soon afterwards became head of the Allied Control Commission in

Helsinki. The 300 million dollars-worth of reparations in kind—the hardest of the

armistice terms—were spread out over six years., later to be extended to eight years; the 1940 frontier was restored; the Russians renounced their claim on Hangö but, instead, leased the territory of Porkkala Udd, only a few miles from Helsinki, as a military base

[The Russians renounced this some years after the war], and the Petsamo area, with its nickel mines and its outlet to the Arctic, "voluntarily" surrendered to Finland in 1920, was now returned to the Soviet Union. The loss of Karelia and Petsamo implied the