Russia at war 1941-1945

children.

[Ibid., p. 87.]

The deportation of villagers and the shooting of villagers by the Germans, ostensibly for

"partisan sympathies" is an ever-recurring theme. In the Kaluga province alone, 20,000

civilians were shot, according to this book. Near Briansk, in the Ludinovo and Dyatkovo districts the Germans (and Hungarians) killed, up to November 1942, 2,000 civilians and burned down 500 houses. 5,000 civilians were deported as slave labour. Owing to this

"scorched earth" policy, the Briansk partisans had a particularly hard winter in 1942-3.

But with supplies coming from the "mainland" in the spring of 1943, things began to look up for them, and, in the following summer, the Briansk partisans were preparing for their all-out Rail War. As the Red Army was approaching Orel, they also issued "last

warnings" to "traitors" (there are facsimiles of the leaflets in Glukhov's book)—the starostas, burgomasters, Russian policemen and "legionaries" (apparently Vlasovites), giving them a last chance to turn their weapons against the Germans by joining the

partisans. Some, but not very many, did. (Many, not unnaturally, suspected a trap.)

More harrowing even than the numerous "Oradours" and "Lidices" in the Kaluga-Orel-Briansk provinces, described in Glukhov's book, are those destroyed in the Osveia and Rossony districts in northern Belorussia in March 1943. This was partisan country; and although the German punitive expedition failed to trap the partisans, they occupied for a time the Osveia district. When, after forty days' fighting, the partisans returned to their base, they found that the Germans had burned down 158 villages. All able-bodied men

had been deported as slaves and all the women, children and old people murdered.

When the partisans returned, there were corpses everywhere. Only those who had

followed the partisans had survived. Many thousands had been murdered.

[ Iz istorii partiz. dvizh. v Belorussii, p. 46.]

The troops of the punitive expeditions were usually composed of German regulars, or SD

and SS troops, sometimes with an admixture of Cossacks, German-appointed policemen,

and even Slovaks. Some of these, as well as some Cossacks, went over to the partisans in a few cases.

The atrocities committed against both captured partisans and allegedly pro-partisan

peasants and their families must rank among the worst atrocities committed by the

Germans and their stooges, and that is saying something.

Few of these Partisan stories are well-written, and the themes are nearly always the same.

And yet the general picture that emerges is harrowing enough. It is not only one of great bravery and enterprise —for it takes a brave man to join the partisans—but also one of a world in which human life is terribly cheap. There are many boasts of "hundreds" of Germans being killed even in some relatively small partisan engagement, and of dozens of trains being wrecked; there are lamentations over the extermination of thousands of women and children in the "partisan areas'" by Einsatzkommandos and other punitive troops; there are fewer references to the losses suffered by the partisans; but these must have been extremely heavy, especially at the beginning, when small improvised groups were either wiped out by the Germans, or died of cold and hunger and illnesses and

wounds in the forest camps. These early units had mostly been improvised by Russian

soldiers left behind the enemy lines, and by local communists.

A glimpse into the German methods of dealing with partisans and "partisan regions" is also provided by a number of German documents. Thus, at the Nuremberg Trial a report was read from the (German) General Commission for Belorussia, dated June 5, 1943, on the results of an anti-partisan operation called "Cottbus". The figures given were: enemy dead, 4,500; dead suspected of belonging to bands, 5,000; German dead, 59.

These figures (the report went on) indicate again a heavy destruction of the

population... If only 492 rifles are taken from 4,500 enemy dead, this shows that among them were numerous peasants from the country. The Dirlewanger Battalion

especially has the reputation for destroying many human lives. Among the 5,000

people suspected of belonging to bands, there are numerous women and children.

By order of the chief of the anti-partisan units, SS Obergruppenführer von dem

Bach-Zelewski, units of the Armed Forces have also participated in the operation.

[TGMWC, vol. 3, p. 174.]

Von dem Bach, a Himmler nominee in charge of the anti-partisan operations in the Soviet Union, who was later to distinguish himself as No. 1 killer in the German repression of the Warsaw rising in 1944, giving evidence at Nuremberg, explained that the anti-partisan operations were mainly carried out by regular Wehrmacht formations, and that the high military leaders had ordered the greatest severity in dealing with partisans.

Col. Telford Taylor {U.S. Prosecution): Did these measures result in the killing of an unnecessarily large number of civilians?

Von dem Bach: Yes...

Taylor. Was an order issued by the highest authorities that the German soldiers who had committed offences against the civilian population were not to be punished in a military court?

Von dem Bach: Yes, there was such an order... The Dirlewanger Brigade consisted for the greater part of previously convicted criminals, among them murderers and

burglars. These were introduced into the anti-partisan units partly as a result of Himmler's directives which said that among the purposes of the Russian campaign

was the reduction of the Slav population by thirty millions.

[TGMWC, vol. 4, pp. 26 ff.]

Hence the destruction of hundreds of villages and the massacre of thousands of civilians, including women and children, in the "partisan regions". Among the "enemy killed", as the above report shows, there were thousands of unarmed peasants in this one operation only. And there were very many more. And most of this "anti-partisan activity", as Bach-Zelewski stressed was "mainly undertaken by Wehrmach formations", the "principal task of the Einsatzgruppen of the SD" being "the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies and political commissars."

[ Ibid., p. 26.]

In a Hitler order, dated December 16, 1942, and signed by Keitel, there is also the

following:

If the repression of bandits in the east, as well as in the Balkans, is not pursued by the most brutal means, the forces at our disposal will, before long, be insufficient to exterminate this plague. The troops, therefore, have the right and the duty to use any means, even against women and children, provided they are conducive to

success. Scruples of any sort are a crime against the German people and against the German soldiers... No German participating in action against bandits and their

associates is to be held responsible for acts of violence either from a disciplinary or a judicial point of view.

[TMGWC, vol. 7, p. 59.]

This directive was issued at the time of the Stalingrad encirclement and as the partisan movement was getting into its stride.

German savagery did not stop the development of the partisan movement which went

from strength to strength in 1943 and 1944. So numerous did the partisans become that the Germans even made some feeble belated attempts at winning them over with "anti-communist" propaganda.

With the Red Army approaching, the partisans sometimes occupied entire towns a day or two in advance, thus preparing the way for the regular Russian forces. When these

arrived the partisans were almost automatically drafted into the Red Army. It was fairly easy in the case of those young people who had joined the partisans at the later and

"safer" stage; the old guerilla fighters, with a mentality of their own, sometimes with an anarchist and even a "bandit" streak, inherited from the old Russian partizanshchina tradition, did not always find themselves at home in the regular army. It was not

altogether unlike the problem de Gaulle had in France in drafting the Home Resistance (the Francs-Tireurs-Partisans and other FFI formations) into the regular army. The big difference was that the FFI had no great respect for the regular French army, largely composed of ex-Vichyites; the Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian partisans—even

though they may have felt some bitterness at having been neglected by Moscow for so

long—were proud, all the same, in 1943 and 1944, to join the Red Army, with its

Stalingrad record behind it. Once in the Red Army, they were frequently used for

reconnaissance and other peculiarly "partisan" jobs.

Before being drafted into the Red Army, the partisans all had to undergo a medical test; not surprisingly, some twenty percent of them—many suffering from tuberculosis—were

unfit for military service after all the physical and mental strain they had gone through in the last one, two, or even three years.

These are just a few of the elements of a human drama forming part of the even vaster drama of the Soviet people between 1941 and 1945. The romantic figure of the partisan, as he had existed and had been built up in popular imagination, during the civil war was something of an anachronism in the context of World War II. "Joining the partisans"

could, in 1941, be a "personal solution" to many people with their backs to the wall; but as an effective fighting force, with a direct bearing on the progress of the war, the partisan movement did not become truly effective until late 1942, or rather, the spring of 1943.

The partisans were active in a great number of places—all the way from the Leningrad province to the Crimea; but the most important partisan activity inevitably took place in the geographically most suitable areas—the Russian forest country (Leningrad, Porkhov, Briansk), Belorussia, and some northern sections of the Ukraine.

[The partisans certainly succeeded in 1942, and especially 1943, in creating among the Germans a feeling of acute insecurity, particularly on roads and railways. Fernand de Brinon, the French quisling who was taken on a visit to Russia in 1943, describes the dread of partisans he observed among the German soldiers and officials who took him on his tour. {Mémoires, Paris, 1948, pp. 141 ff.)]

In addition to these "rural" partisans, with their traditional forest camps, there were the

"urban" partisans who are, however, often hard to distinguish from the Soviet

"underground" proper which, in varying degrees, existed in all towns under the occupation. The risks taken by these people were, in a way, even greater than those taken by the partisans proper.

The most famous case of urban resistance was that of the Young Guard in the mining

town of Krasnodon in the Donbas; but this act of collective patriotism and martyrdom was by no means unique, any more than was that of Zoya who was hanged by the

Germans in a village outside Moscow, in December 1941, and became, like the

Krasnodon Heroes, a national symbol. The build-up of national heroes and martyrs was very much of a lottery; many fought and died, and never became famous.

At the height of the partisan movement, in 1943—4, there were at least half-a-million armed partisans in the Soviet Union. How many partisans and how many persons

"associated" with them lost their lives in combat, or as a result of the German punitive expeditions is very hard to say; but in Belorussia alone about a million persons are estimated to have been killed in the course of the partisan war.

[ For further details see John A. Armstrong (ed.) Soviet Partisans in World War II. (Univ.

of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1964.)]

Chapter XII PARADOXES OF SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY IN

1943—THE FALL OF MUSSOLINI —THE "FREE GERMAN

COMMITTEE"

On October 1943 the foreign ministers of the Big Three—Molotov, Cordell Hull and

Eden—met in Moscow; this meeting was, among other things, intended to prepare the

ground for the "Summit" at Teheran a month later. But during a great part of 1943, before clear decisions had been taken to hold these two conferences, the Soviet attitude to the Western Allies remained puzzling and full of apparent contradictions. This attitude was partly, at any rate, determined by what was happening at the time on the Russian Front.

At the time of Stalingrad, Stalin had been full of praise for the Anglo-American landing in North Africa; in February, with the Germans about to start their Kharkov counter-offensive, he began complaining again of the absence of a Second Front. Then, in March, partly in response to Admiral Standby's complaint about Russian ingratitude, the Soviet press started playing up Western aid, and the breach with the London Poles was followed, as we have seen, by rapturous accounts of the Allied achievements in North Africa. Soon afterwards came the dissolution of the Comintern, a gesture intended to impress Western opinion.

One cannot, however, escape the impression that this great cordiality shown to the Allies had something to do with the situation on the Eastern Front: on the eve of the Nazi

offensive at Kursk, the Soviet public were very anxious, and, for once, it was apparently thought expedient to magnify, rather than minimise, the Western war effort.

But, as we know from the Stalin-Churchill correspondence during that period, relations were in reality far from cordial. Churchill tried to cheer Stalin with stories of 400-bomber raids on Essen (March 13); but, while not denying the value of such raids, Stalin was not satisfied. On March 15 he complained of major operations in North Africa again being postponed, and said that "Husky", the planned landing in Sicily, "can't possibly replace the second front in France."

The Soviet troops [he wrote] fought strenuously all winter. Hitler is taking all

measures to rehabilitate and reinforce his army for the spring and summer. A great blow from the west is essential. There is grave danger in delaying the Second Front in France.

Churchill went on sending him messages about "1,050 tons of bombs we've flung on Berlin" (March 28).

Stalin thanked him for the information and then graciously added (or was he being

heavily ironical?):

Last night with my colleagues I saw Desert Victory. It splendidly shows how Britain is fighting, and skilfully exposes those scoundrels— we have them in our country too

—who allege that Britain is not fighting but merely looks on. Desert Victory will be shown to all our armies at the front.

But a few days later he blew up, after Churchill had told him that there would, for the present, be no more Arctic convoys, with the Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Lützow around. "I consider the step as catastrophic," Stalin wrote on April 2. "The Pacific and the Southern

[Iran] routes can't make up for it."

Again Churchill wrote (April 6) of 348 aircraft over Essen; Stalin welcomed the

intensified bombing of Germany: "It evokes the most lively echo in the hearts of many millions in our country." On April 10, Churchill reported that 502 aircraft had attacked Frankfort, and promised to send films of bombed Germany "which might please your soldiers who had been in many Russian towns in ruins "; he also assured Stalin that the 375 Hurricanes and 285 Airocobras and Kittyhawks which were to have been delivered

by the Arctic route, were being sent as quickly as possible through the Mediterranean.

This strange blend of pleasantness and unpleasantness was followed by the Russian

breach with the London Poles, with Churchill frantically pleading with Stalin not to make the breach final. Sikorski was a good man, he argued, and anyone replacing him would be worse. He also declared that, according to Goebbels, the Russians were now setting up a new Polish Government—a story that Stalin hastened to deny as "a fabrication" (May 4).

On June 10, with the German offensive in the offing, Stalin grew furious with Churchill again. Writing to Roosevelt that day, he declared: "Now in May 1943 you and Churchill have decided to postpone the Anglo-American invasion of Western Europe till the spring of 1944. Now again we've got to go on fighting almost single-handed," and, on the 24th, in his letter to Churchill, he became really violent:

The Soviet Government could not have imagined that the British and US

Governments would revise the decision to invade Western Europe which they had

adopted earlier this year... We were not consulted. The preservation of our

confidence in the Allies is being subjected to a severe stress.

On June 27 Churchill angrily replied that Stalin's reproaches left him "unmoved", recalled that England had to fight Germany single-handed till June 1941, and that,

anyway "you may not even be heavily attacked by the Germans this summer. That would vindicate decisively what you once called the 'military correctness' of our Mediterranean strategy."

Only a week later, the Germans struck out at Kursk.

Stalin's anger and recrimination may partly be due to the nervousness he felt about the outcome of the battle; once this had been won, he no longer worried too much about the Second Front. His line now was that it would come when it came; that Russia, though

losing a terrible number of men, should be thankful for whatever the West contributed—

lend-lease, or the fall of Mussolini—and that she should meantime make preparation for a big Tripartite Conference. In view of the delays in the Second Front, Stalin was more determined than ever not to give way on a question like Poland. At the same time he felt that, on the German question, he might take certain purely unilateral precautions.

It was while the successful Russian offensive, following the rout of the Germans at

Kursk, was in full swing that Mussolini fell from power.

Until then, the Russian press had treated the Italian campaign with a deliberate show of disdain. The invasion of Sicily was being pointedly and invariably referred to as

"operations in the island of Sicily". But the fall of Mussolini, on the other hand, suddenly convinced the Russians that the Italian campaign, "miserable" though it was in purely military terms, could be extremely important politically. The effect on Germany and on her satellites of Mussolini's fall was not something that could be ignored.

On July 27 Red Star commented on Mussolini's fall in the following pungent piece containing some phrases directly borrowed from Churchill (like "the jackal"), handsomely putting the importance of Mussolini's fall side-by-side with the victorious Russian summer campaign:

... this jackal, in June 1940, stabbed bleeding France in the back... Italy was hopeless even in her fight against little Greece. The fighting in Africa did not bring Mussolini any laurels either... The British offensive smashed the Italo-German army... The

military situation of Fascist Italy became altogether hopeless when, like a fool, Mussolini threw himself into the adventure of conquering Russia, by Hitler's side...

The best Italian divisions were sent there: Celere, Sforzesca, Giulia, and others; but they found their graves in the Don and Voronezh steppes. In Russia they lost

100,000 men in killed and prisoners. Then came Tunis...

And now... the British and Americans have, in a short time, overrun the greater

part of Sicily. The jackal had boundless greed, but his teeth were rotten... And now he has been forced to abandon his post of Dictator... These twenty-one years of

Mussolini's dictatorship are the gloomiest period in the whole of Italy's history...

Mussolini sold Italy to Hitler.

And the article already foreshadowed a lenient Russian attitude to the Italian people.

The Germans, these sworn and time-honoured enemies of the Italian people, became

masters of Italy through the services of their flunkey, Mussolini. Mussolini, the traitor to Italy's interests, will as such go down to his grave... The liquidation of the German offensive in the sast in the summer of 1943 was a mighty blow at Hitler.

The collapse of his ally, Mussolini, is another mighty blow.

Not that that was quite enough. The theme of much of the comment about that time was that, splendid though the political achievements of the Allies were in Italy, there was a growing danger of the Germans now trying to drag out the war; therefore it was

necessary to strike at Germany herself; i.e. land in France.

It is doubtful, however, whether the Russians had any serious illusions left on the

possibility of such a landing in 1943.

Two developments of the summer of 1943, after the victory of Kursk, concerned Russian policy vis-à-vis Germany. First, with the liberation of large areas of the Soviet Union, some terrible German atrocities had come to light; and these called for a definite policy of ruthless punishment; on the other hand, pending an agreed Anglo-American-Soviet

policy on Germany, it was felt that certain political precautions were called for, now that Hitler's last hope of defeating the Russians had been smashed at Kursk.

So only a few days after this victory, there were these two seemingly contradictory

manifestations of the Soviet attitude to Germany. One was the Krasnodar trial, where a handful of Russian traitors were sentenced to death for collaborating with the Gestapo in exterminating 7,000 Jewish and other Soviet citizens, chiefly by means of the

dushegubka, the word for "soulkiller", which was applied to the gas wagon which the Gestapo had used to exterminate its victims—men, women and children. It was the first public trial in Russia in which Gestapo horrors were revealed to the world with a mass of details which at that time were still completely new. In the light of later discoveries—

such as Maidanek and Auschwitz—the Krasnodar revelations were small stuff; but they

were almost the first concrete example of their kind, and made a deep impression on

soldiers and civilians alike. The trial was fully reported for days at the beginning of the Russian Orel offensive. As "hate propaganda" it was first-rate, but all these details of how screaming children were pushed into the gas wagon were so horrifying that not only did the press abroad tend to play down the Krasnodar trial, but even in Russia some sceptics wondered whether the whole thing hadn't been somewhat touched up for propaganda

purposes—little knowing that Krasnodar, with "only" 7,000 victims, was merely a minor episode in the Gestapo's and the SD's activities throughout Europe.

And then another startling development took place. On the very day after the Krasnodar verdict the Russian press came out with a spectacular display of the fact that a Free German Committee, composed of anti-Nazi war prisoners and a few German émigrés in

Russia, had been formed. In Russia it at first caused some mental confusion; for it was certainly a curious development coming, as it did, on top of the Krasnodar trial, at that time the high-water mark of anti-German "bestiality" propaganda. Abroad, it aroused acute suspicion in many quarters. It was whispered that the Russians were preparing for a separate peace with Germany, perhaps even with Hitler... Molotov assured the British Ambassador that the whole thing was nothing but propaganda intended to create

confusion in the minds of the German army and people, and so lower their resistance, which "Vansittartite" and "Ehrenburg" propaganda was obviously not doing; but the fact that the decision to form this Free German Committee had been taken unilaterally,

without any consultation with the Allies, left, at least for some time, many doubts in the minds of "ill-disposed" people abroad. There can, indeed, be little doubt that, at least until Teheran at the end of 1943, there was some fear, not least on the British-American side, of a "dirty deal". It is perhaps characteristic that during the fighting in Italy, where, especially during the autumn and winter, there were many hard and heart-breaking

moments, with little prospect of any early progress, the British troops at Monte Cassino and Monte Camino should (as we know) have been repeatedly told: "We've got to stick it, because if we have no foothold in Europe at all (and there won't be anything in France till next year) the Russians, tired of losing so many men, may pack up."

On the very day of the opening of the Krasnodar trial, the Russian press published with great prominence a written statement by a German officer, Oberleutnant of tanks Frankenfeld who said that, till the end, he had fought with distinction, but that he considered Germany's persistence in continuing the war as senseless and suicidal.

... On July 8 it became clear to us that the offensive had failed and that the whole year's campaign was lost. Now, much as it hurts me, I am absolutely convinced of

the inevitable defeat of Germany: the only questions are: how soon?—in two or six months?—and where?— in the east or in the west?

What was I to do? Die in the next days or months, without doing the German people any good? .. . and knowing that the continuation of the war would lead only to the senseless use of gas and even more fearful casualties? The future of the German

people is wholly in the hands of the victors.

Taking a long view of it, he decided to "hasten Germany's defeat".

But this was only a small prelude to what was to come five days later when, under

enormous headlines, the formation of the Free German Committee was announced. The

announcement took a peculiar form: the reproduction, in the Russian press, of the first number of Freies Deutschland, "Free Germany", organ of the National Committee. This paper explained that on July 12 and 13 (that is at the very time the Russian Orel offensive had begun) a conference had taken place in Moscow among German officers and

soldiers, together with various anti-Nazi Reichstag deputies and writers who had been in Moscow since before the war.

The delegates, the Soviet press said, came from all the German war-prisoners' camps in the Soviet Union, men of different social classes and of different political and religious views. The Committee was elected unanimously. The President was Erich Weinert, well-known German communist writer, and the vice-presidents, Major Carl Hetz, and

Lieutenant Graf von Einsiedel. (The latter explained, at the time of his capture, that he was a grandson of Bismarck's and said he regretted that Hitler had ignored Bismarck's golden rule not to attack Russia and the West at the same time.)

The Committee said that Germany was now in deadly danger, and in fact used many of

the arguments that were to be used a year later by those who attempted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.

Hitler is dragging Germany down the abyss... Look what is happening at the fronts; in the last seven months Germany's defeats are unparalleled in history: Stalingrad, the Don, the Caucasus, Libya, Tunis. Hitler, who is responsible for all this still stands at the head of our State and our Army... British and American troops are on the threshold of Europe.

Look what is happening at home: through the allied bombings, Germany has

already become a theatre of war... Facts are inexorable: the war is lost. But the attempt to drag out the war at a fearful price can only lead to the catastrophe of the nation. But Germany must not die.

If the German people continue inertly to follow Hitler, then he can be overthrown only by the armies of the Coalition. But that would mean the end of our national

independence and the partition of our country.

If the German people have the courage to free Germany of Hitler... then Germany

will have won the right to decide her own fate, and other nations will respect her...

But no one will make peace with Hitler; therefore the formation of a genuine

National Government is an urgent task... Such a government can be formed only by

men who have risen against Hitler and are resolved to render harmless the enemies of the people—Hitler, his patrons and companions.

Such a Government will recall the troops to the German frontier. Only under such a government can Germany, as a sovereign state, discuss the conditions of peace.

The forces in the Army, true to their Fatherland, must play a decisive part in this.

Our aim is a Free Germany, i.e. a strong democratic power totally unlike the

impotent Weimar Republic...

The programme included the abrogation of anti-minority and racial laws, the restoration of trade unions, freedom of trade (i.e. no "bolshevisation"), the liberation of the victims of Nazi terror; the just and merciless trial of war criminals and war culprits.

German soldiers and officers (it concluded), you have the weapons in your hands.

German people! organise resistance units inside the country! For People and

Fatherland! For immediate Peace! For the Salvation of the German People! For a

Free Independent Germany!

The document was signed by Major Karl Hetz, Major Heinrich Homann, Major Stesslein,

several captains and lieutenants, dozens of NCO's and privates; Anton Ackermann, a

Chemnitz trade union official; Martha Arendsee, Reichstag Deputy; Johannes Becher,

writer, Willi Bredel, writer, Wilhelm Florin, Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, all

Reichstag deputies; Gustav Sobottka, trade union leader of Ruhr miners; and two more writers, Erich Weinert and Friedrich Wolf. (Weinert had just written a book of anti-Nazi poems, called Dank für Stalingrad, which was published in Moscow; much cf it was emotional German verse, with the then, in Russian eyes, somewhat unfashionable theme:

"My beloved German people, how law have you fallen! ")

Naturally, all this was not, strictly speaking, committing the Soviet Government in any way. It was the Free German Committee, without any authority, and not the Soviet

Government that was promising the Germans "sovereignty" if an anti-Nazi "National Government" were set up. Obviously, the Soviet Government could make no such

promises to Germany without consultation with the Allies.

Nevertheless it was, both internally and internationally, a curious step to take, and during the period that followed, some odd reactions to it could be observed both in Russia and abroad.

The truth is that the Free German Committee had by this time become an important basis for Russian propaganda in Germany, and especially among the German army. Speakers

from the Free German Committee talked daily and nightly to Germany from Moscow

radio. Hundreds of thousands of copies of Freies Deutschland were printed weekly and showered over the German lines. It was a large, extremely well printed and well produced paper, with a mass of good reading matter: but in this paper the Soviet Union's

benevolence to the German people seemed to be so great that every possible precaution was taken to keep copies of Freies Deutschland out of the hands of foreigners, especially of foreign diplomats and correspondents in Russia. For, without the full acceptance by such readers of the view that this was propaganda, and nothing but propaganda,

calculated to undermine German morale, it might have given rise to all sorts of

undesirable comments, especially in the American press hostile to Russia. Nor were

Russians allowed to read it, except for that first number. The thing was intended for Germany, and for Germany only.

Whether, in setting up this Free German Committee and in printing this "Free German"

paper (whose Wilhelmian black-white-and-red border particularly scandalised so many

"Comintern" Germans in Russia), the Soviet Government was also thinking in terms of

"just in case" will perhaps never be definitely established. But it is certainly quite conceivable that there was an element of "insurance" in all this—for, supposing there was a palace revolution in Germany, and the Generals took over from Hitler, and attempted to negotiate a general peace, or a separate peace with the West, the Free

German Committee and its later by-product, the Bund Deutscher Offiziere, with several of the Stalingrad generals among them, who were now calling for the overthrow of Hitler, might have become a useful diplomatic weapon in the hands of the Russians. All kinds of possibilities can, indeed, be envisaged if the plot against Hitler in July 1944 had

succeeded; and if that had happened, the Free German Committee might have been of

some value to the Soviet government. Also, one never could tell—it might come in useful even after the complete defeat of Germany; for there was not sufficient reason to suppose that complete unanimity would reign forever among the occupying powers. Also, from

the standpoint of German internal propaganda, it was important to be able to impress upon the German people, if necessary, that the Russians were the first to have set up a Free German Committee, and that Stalin's benevolence was of more lasting consequence than all Ehrenburg's bloodcurdling threats. As it happened, the Free German Committee proved to be of only small practical importance; but in July 1943 there were still all kinds of possibilities in the future, and perhaps the Russians thought they had better be

prepared for them. It should also be remembered that this was before Teheran: and suspicions of a possible double-cross by the "other fellow" existed—though only faintly

—on both sides.

Perhaps the Russians also thought that the German defeat at Kursk might have greater immediate repercussions inside Germany than it actually had.

If the Free German Committee was not to play any political part whatsoever, it was

because the Nazis kept control of Germany and the German people till the very end.

Later, after Germany's surrender, some of the old German communists, who had been in Russia since before the war, were sent to Germany to do some "organisational" work; the soldiers on the Free German Committee, and on the Bund Deutscher Offiziere were not going to play any appreciable part in this sequel.

[ It is notable, all the same, that Field-Marshal Paulus, General Korfes (also of

Stalingrad), and some others settled in East Germany and adopted a pro-Russian line.]

It was indeed, obvious from the start that at least a great part of the Free German

Committee—which actually included among its rank-and-file members some SS men!—

was never intended to be anything but a tool of Russian propaganda. Barring, of course, an "accident" to Hitler.

[ In Child of the Revolution, Wolfgang Leonhard, who was one of the contributors to the Free German paper in 1943-4, describes the consternation some aspects of the "Free German" move caused among the German communists then in the Soviet Union,

especially the Wilhelmian black-white-red colours which, more than the "Weimar"

colours, were expected to appeal to German soldiers and officers.]

Chapter XIII STALIN'S LITTLE NATIONALIST ORGY AFTER

KURSK

With the great victory of Kursk in July 1943 and the subsequent rapid advance of the Red Army along a vast front towards the Dnieper and beyond, the conviction grew in the

country that the war had been as good as won, though final victory was still very far ahead, and would still cost another million lives or more.

Leningrad was still under German shellfire, but Moscow, with its frequent victory salvoes and fireworks, was now completely out of danger; symbolically, in August 1943, the

whole diplomatic corps was allowed to return to Moscow from Kuibyshev—Japs,

Bulgarians and all.

On August 22, a programme of urgent reconstruction measures was published. The

purpose of this programme was, as far as possible, to put the liberated areas on their feet again, so that they should not be a lasting burden to the rest of the country. It provided, among other things, for the supply of seeds for autumn sowing, for the return of the cattle and tractors that had been evacuated before the retreat, for the emergency reconstruction of railways, railway buildings and for the building of rudimentary dwellings for railwaymen.

From now on, to the end of the war, there was a curious clash of two conflicting

tendencies, both of them characteristic of the personality of Stalin. The Marshal

combined in a strange way an urge to return to a semblance of "Leninist purity" with a streak of the most jingoist Great-Russian nationalism. In his Memoirs Ilya Ehrenburg says that it was in 1943, after Stalingrad and especially after Kursk, that this Great-Russian jingoism manifested itself with particular vigour, and made a writer like Lydia Seifullina squirm. "I always considered myself a Russian; but since my father was a Tartar, I shall damn well call myself a Tartar from now on. I don't like this Russian ultra-nationalism," she said.

The Russian ultra-nationalism took on peculiar forms in 1943 and made some foreign

observers go so far as to talk about a "return to Tsarism". And not only foreign observers, but some startled Russians too. A typical 1943 film was Eisenstein 's Ivan the Terrible, specially made on Stalin's orders, and depicting the cruel but wise State-Builder of Muscovy as the obvious forerunner of Stalin. The most striking example of the new

measures was the decision to set up nine "Suvorov Schools" in the liberated areas—i.e.

Cadet schools closely modelled on the pre-Revolution Cadet Corps. The "cult of the uniform", which had begun at the time of Stalingrad, was now in full swing. More than that: the Suvorov Schools (nine of 500 pupils each) were clearly intended to create

something of an "officer caste".

There was certainly something "Tsarist" about these Suvorov Schools. In a statement to Red Star on August 25, 1943, Lieut.-Gen. Morozov, head of the Military Education Establishments, said:

The Suvorov Military Schools are established, as is indicated by the instructions of the Council of People's Commissars and of the Central Committee of the Party,

after the manner of the old Cadet Schools. This means that the pupils will receive here not only a complete secondary education but also an elementary knowledge of

military problems. Having completed his education in a Suvorov School, such a boy will become a worthy Soviet officer. The whole system of this education is based on the idea that the military consciousness should penetrate into the pupils' flesh and

blood at an early age. At the end of his studies, the young Soviet officer must be a model of patriotism, culture, and a high standard of military knowledge... The

curriculum will be more extensive than in an ordinary secondary school. Already at eight he will start learning a foreign language. On many routine details we are

consulting old officers who received their education in the old Cadet schools... The boys will be chosen from among the sons of soldiers and partisans, and also from

among children whose parents were killed by the Germans... The uniforms are

modelled on Red Army uniforms, with epaulettes and other markings; so that from

childhood the boys should develop a feeling of love and respect for the uniform... We

have already received many applications, for an officer considers it an honour that his

son should carry on his military traditions. (Emphasis added.)

For some weeks afterwards the press, particularly the military press, went on publishing articles by old generals, notably by Lieut-Gen. Shilovsky, giving an attractive account of their days in the old Cadet School under the old régime.

A year later, when I visited the Suvorov School at Kalinin, I found that, among the

subjects the budding little officers were taught were English, fine manners and old-time ballroom dances (the waltz, the mazurka, the pas-de-quatre, etc.). On the walls, there were large pictures of Suvorov, but also equally large ones of Stalin and of numerous Red Army generals.

All this went together with the revival of the Church in Russia, already described.

September 1943 saw the crowning of the Patriarch of Moscow, and the visit of the

Archbishop of York.

No doubt all this was partly intended for foreign consumption; it was useful to put

Churchill and Roosevelt in a good mood, and to get the New York Times to talk about a

"return to Tsarism" and even perhaps to capitalism. But it was more than that: the dissolution of the Comintern, the establishment of the Suvorov Schools, General

Krivitzky's articles, in October 1943, on "the glorious traditions of General Brusilov"

[The most successful Russian general of World War I], the election of the Patriarch, and the orgy of gold braid and new uniforms—uniforms for diplomats, uniforms for

railwaymen ("and why not," Ehrenburg later said, "for poets, with one, two or three lyres on their epaulettes? ")—all this was strangely significant of the Stalinist Great-Russian ultra-nationalism of 1943— a year that contrasted so strikingly with the année terrible only two years before, or even with one year before.

*

Not that the "Socialist" side of things was being entirely neglected: alongside with the Suvorov Schools for a new officer caste a large network of Trade Schools for metal

workers and others was to be set up in nine of the liberated areas; and there was nothing

"Tsarist" about these; and, in 1944, as we shall see, there was a return, in some respects, to "Leninist Purity" and a drive for greater "Soviet-consciousness"; but this was, somehow, less striking than the manifestations of Great-Russian ultra-nationalism of 1943.

It all had a certain bearing on Stalin's relations with Britain and America. It seems significant, for instance, that in the November 7, 1943, slogans the very mention of capitalism should have been avoided.

The first of the slogans said: "Hail the 26th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution which overthrew the power of the Imperialists in our country, and proclaimed peace among all the nations of the world!"

And the other slogans were "Long live the victory of the Anglo-Soviet-American

Coalition! " "Long live the valiant Anglo-American troops in Italy!" "Greetings to the valiant British and American airmen striking at the vital centres of Germany! ", etc., etc.; and this was when the British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, told me that Stalin had assured him that "in a way, he, too, believed in God."

How deep this regard for the Allies was in Party and Komsomol circles may, however, be questioned. On October 27, at a meeting celebrating the 25th anniversary of the

Komsomol—that was the time of the Foreign Ministers' Conference in Moscow, and the

"November slogans" had already been published—N. A. Mikhailov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, paid tributes to Lenin, Stalin, the Army, and the Party, but did not mention the Allies at all.

There was below the surface something of a conflict at that time between "Holy Russia"

and the "Soviet Union". Sometimes compromises were reached between the two. Thus, on the question of the new State Anthem a curious compromise was reached at the end of 1943. No new Anthem by Shostakovich or Prokofiev was approved; but the new

nationalist and Stalinist words were pinned to the old Party anthem, which became the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, while the Internationale became officially the anthem of the Party! There had been tremendous competition in the writing of the new anthem, and on January 5, 1944, it was announced that over 200 also-rans—172 poets and

seventy-six composers—had been paid "consolation prizes" of between 4,000 and 8,000

roubles each!

Meantime—i.e. between July and November 1943—the Red Army was making a

spectacular advance in the Ukraine and elsewhere.

Kharkov was captured by General Konev (Steppe Front), with the aid of General Vatutin (Voronezh Front) and General Malinovsky (South-West Front) on August 23.

The next great victory was General Tolbukhin's in the far south when, after breaking through from the Voroshilovgrad area to the Sea of Azov, his troops captured Taganrog, which the Germans had held ever since the autumn of 1941. 5,000 German prisoners

were taken.

On August 31, Rokossovsky (Central Front) captured Glukhov and penetrated deep into

the northern Ukraine.

Farther south, the Donbas was being rapidly overrun, the Germans fearing encirclement and pulling out, after wrecking factories and coalmines.

On September 8, a Stalin Order covering the whole front page of every newspaper, and addressed to Tolbukhin and Malinovsky, declared that in six days' skilful and rapid

operations, the whole of the Donbas had now been liberated.

On September 10, with the aid of a naval landing west of the city, Tolbukhin and

Malinovsky captured Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.

In the far south the last two German strongholds in the Caucasus were being mopped up.

After five days' heavy fighting the troops of General Petrov and the naval units under Vice-Admiral Vladimirsky captured Novorossisk on September 16—or rather the ruins of that important naval base. The Taman peninsula was cleared by October 7, most of the Germans escaping to the Crimea across the straits of Kerch.

On the 21st, Rokossovsky took the ancient city of Chernigov, already reduced to ruins by German mass bombings in the summer of '41; and, on the 23rd, Konev took Poltava (also almost completely destroyed by the retreating Germans); on the 29th, breaking through to the Dnieper, Konev took Kremenchug.

On the 25th, Sokolovsky (Western Front) took Smolensk.

By the end of the month, as was officially stated, the Red Army was advancing on Kiev, in the Ukraine, and on Vitebsk, Gomel and Mogilev in Belorussia.

If September was marked by a spectacular amount of territory liberated, October was

marked by something even more important— the forcing of the Dnieper. The German

hope of "holding the Dnieper line" was smashed.

The great optimism after the forcing of the Dnieper may be gauged from a poem by

Surkov printed on October 8:

... Avenging Russia is advancing;

Ukraine and Belorussia, wait and hope;

The Germans have not long left to torment you,

The evil days of your bondage are numbered,

From the high banks of the Dnieper

We see the waters of the Pruth and the Niémen.

Russo-Ukrainian Unity was the subject of many articles, and was symbolised in the

establishment of a new high decoration, the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky.

[ For some reason, the Khmelnitsky order was not widely awarded, and never became

popular in the army; it seemed an unnecessary rival to the Suvorov, Kutuzov and Nevsky orders which had the prestige of Stalingrad attached to them. Moreover, it caused some embarrassment when a number of Russian officers of Jewish race refused the

Khmelnitsky order on the ground that the glorious Hetman had been guilty of a

considerable number of pogroms. (Similarly several Poles refused the Suvorov Order,

Suvorov having been one of the worst oppressors of the Polish people.)]

No doubt, in earlier Soviet interpretations, the celebrated 17th century Hetman was not quite as great a man as he was now made out to be; in fact, he was described in the 1931

edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia as a double-crosser of the worst sort, and indeed something of an agent of the Polish szlachta; but now a different view was taken: A Knight of the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky—that is a proud title, (wrote Red

Star). The life of Bogdan Khmelnitsky is an example of the decisive struggle for the brotherly union of the Ukrainian people and its elder brother, the Russian people.

Khmelnitsky clearly realised that the free and prosperous development of the

Ukraine was possible only in the closest union with Russia. The Soviet people who finally completed the union of all Ukrainian lands into one mighty state [Meaning the incorporation of parts of the Western Ukraine formerly ruled by Austria-Hungary and, after World War I, by Poland, Rumania and Czechoslovakia.],under the Red Banner of the Soviets, particularly value Bogdan Khmelnitsky's immortal deed.

On October 14, Malinovsky captured Zaporozhie, and, on the 23rd, Tolbukhin captured

Melitopol. The Crimea was now about to be cut off from the mainland. The actual

penetration of the Russians into the Crimea did not, however, succeed, and had to be postponed till the spring of '44. A particularly brilliant stroke was Malinovsky's surprise attack on Dniepropetrovsk, on the lower Dnieper, which was captured on October 25.

The German "Dnieper Line" was cracking from top to bottom.

Chapter XIV THE SPIRIT OF TEHERAN

It is unnecessary to go once again over the ground of the Foreign Ministers' Conference in Moscow in October 1943, or of the Teheran Conference a month later, both of which have been described in some detail by Churchill, in the Hopkins Papers, in General John Deane's Strange Alliance, and elsewhere. What we are chiefly concerned with here are the Soviet reactions to these two momentous events, which are, of course, major

landmarks in Soviet-Western relations during the war.

It may seem surprising that the war in Russia had gone on for over two years, and that it was not till the end of 1943 that these first two full-dress meetings among the Big Three leaders should have taken place. In 1941, it is true, Hopkins, Beaverbrook, Harri-man and Eden had all visited Moscow; in May 1942 Molotov had travelled to Washington and

London, and Churchill had come to Moscow on his dismal visit in August 1942, in the

course of which he had not found Stalin or the other Soviet leaders in a particularly happy or receptive mood. Stalingrad was, just then, on the eve of its grimmest ordeal, and the Germans were well inside the Caucasus.

In October 1943, the Russians were winning one victory after another, day after day. If, before Kursk—which in July 1943 had started an uninterrupted succession of Russian

victories—the Russians were worried and on edge, and were clamouring for vigorous

action in the west, which would draw some forty or fifty German divisions from the

Soviet Front—in October 1943, the Soviet Government, and indeed Soviet opinion, were taking things much more calmly. The Russians were losing thousands of men every day, but the Second Front was no longer, to them, a matter of life or death. It now began to be taken for granted that the war would be won anyway—and that the Western Allies were

quite prepared to fight the war to a victorious finish, but with a maximum loss of life to the Russians, and a minimum loss of life to themselves. This was now accepted with a kind of bitter resignation.

Even so, the Allies had their uses; they were supplying substantial quantities of lend-lease equipment to Russia; and, as Stalin said to Eden in October 1943, he did not ignore the fact that the threat of a Second Front in Northern France had, in the summer of 1943, pinned down some twenty-five German divisions in the west, beside the ten or twelve

German divisions that were tied up in Italy. For the time being Stalin was reasonably satisfied; though he had not stopped worrying about "Overlord"—the cross-Channel landing in Northern France—again perhaps being unduly delayed. It was the common

belief in Moscow (a belief fed by American indiscretions) that Churchill was still anxious to extend operations in the Mediterranean, but was continuing to surround "Overlord"

with all kinds of conditions and reservations.

This was the Number One question which, in the Russian view, needed clearing up at the Foreign Ministers' Conference that met in Moscow on October 19, 1943.

There had, as already said, been very few top-level Government contacts between the

Russians and the Anglo-Americans, and the Moscow Conference was the first Big-Three

meeting of its kind. It came at a good moment, after three months of uninterrupted

Russian victories.

That this Conference took place in Moscow, and not elsewhere, was because Stalin, too busy with his own war, would not go abroad, and would not even let Molotov go—for

instance, to Casablanca. It was not merely a technical matter; Stalin's line was that the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of this war, and that it was for the "others" to travel to Moscow. Even if Cordell Hull was an old man and a sick man, it couldn't be helped.

For the Summit Meeting with Roosevelt and Churchill, Stalin was willing to stretch a point and go to Teheran, close to the Soviet border, but he would not go to Habanniya or Basra, let alone Cairo. It was not only that Stalin as Commander-in-Chief could not

absent himself for more than a few days; nor was it primarily a question of security; it was above all, a question of prestige: "We aren't going hat-in-hand to the West; let the West come to us." It made in the Soviet Union just the kind of impression Stalin meant it to make.

As long as the Western Allies were not doing any very serious fighting anyway, and had made it amply clear that no "real" Second Front was to be expected in the near future, and since the Red Army still seemed to have a very long way ahead of it, there was, to the Russians, no urgent need for a Big-Three Conference.

But by October 1943 the situation had changed. There was room for joint military

planning; within a few months, the Red Army might well be across the Soviet borders, and the defeat of Germany was becoming, more and moire, a tangible reality. The big

question now was how long the war was to last. Since the month before Kursk, when the Russians officially stated that the Soviet Union could not win the war single-handed, there had been a certain departure from this position.

The statement was still true, but no longer in such absolute terms.

Paradoxically, one opinion expressed to me in a moment of indiscretion at the time of the Moscow Conference by Alexander Korneichuk, who was then one of the Foreign Vice-Commissars, was: "Things are going so well on our front that it might even be better not to have the Second Front till next spring. If there were a Second Front right now, the Germans might allow Germany to be occupied by the Anglo-Americans. It would make

us look pretty silly. Better to go on bombing them for another winter; and also let their army freeze another winter in Russia; then get the Red Army right up to Germany, and then start the Second Front." Quite obviously a man like Korneichuk was anxious that the Russians should occupy Poland before the collapse of Germany or a de facto surrender to the West.

The Moscow Conference went on for no less than twelve days, and was marked by an

extraordinary round of sumptuous lunches, ballet shows, embassy receptions and a super-banquet at the Kremlin described in lurid detail by General Deane, the head of the newly-appointed US Military Mission to the Soviet Union. There had never been anything like it in wartime Moscow, now deep in the Russian rear.

Eden had several meetings with Stalin and found him, on the whole, in good humour,

though still ironical about the Western war effort—apart from the bombing of Germany, which pleased him greatly. "Hit the svolochi hard, the harder the better!" he said, thumping the table with his fist. His chief concern was the date of "Overlord"—and in this he was glad to receive full support from the Americans. The Americans, for their part, were anxious to obtain a promise of Russian participation in the war against Japan.

Both questions were discussed at the Moscow Conference, though no clear decisions

were to be taken until Teheran.

Stalin, for his part, was satisfied with the Americans' support of "Overlord". As General Deane wrote a little later, at the time of Teheran: "[Most of] the Americans at the Conference met Stalin for the first time. They were all considerably and favourably

impressed by him, perhaps because he advocated the American point of view in our

difference with the British. Regardless of this, one could not help but recognise qualities of greatness in the man... " To which, on a technical plane, he added:

Stalin is a master of detail... and has an amazing knowledge of such matters as

characteristics of weapons, the structural features of aircraft, and Soviet methods in even minor tactics.

[ John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (London, 1947), pp. 47 and 152.]

In a sense, the Moscow Conference was a rehearsal for Teheran; but it also achieved

some "positive" results of its own—the setting up of a European Advisory Commission, a Commission for Italy (which would include British, American, French, Greek and

Yugoslav representatives, while Vyshinsky was going to represent the Soviet Union);

there had been "sincere and exhaustive discussions" on the measures to be taken to hasten the end of the war against Germany and her satellites, and on the setting up of "close military co-operation between the three Powers in future"; it was also agreed that the

"closest co-operation" must continue between the three Powers after the war. A Four-Power Declaration (the work chiefly of Cordell Hull) was signed on the unconditional capitulation of the Allies' "respective" enemies; in addition to the Big Three, the Chinese Ambassador in Moscow also signed this document on his country's behalf. (The Russians were no longer much scared of provoking the Japanese and were anxious to please Hull who had set great store on this Declaration, which gave China a Great-Power status.) Another of the statements foreshadowed the constitution of a United Nations

Organisation. The Conference also published a statement on Austria, in effect warning the Austrians not to cooperate with Germany to the bitter end, and urging them to

contribute to their own liberation—a principle of which much was later to be made in Rumania, Bulgaria, etc. Finally the Conference published a Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin declaration on war criminals. They established the principle that these criminals would be returned for trial to the country where the alleged crimes had been committed.

Eden and Cordell Hull were optimistic both during and after the Conference. During an interval at the Bolshoi (they were playing the inevitable Swan Lake) I remember Eden telling me: "This is a good conference—better late than never. But the question of travelling to Moscow is infernally complicated. Here we've got to set up the right kind of machinery—we want it, and the Russians want it, too. If the machine is functioning, we'll find it much easier to deal with a problem like Poland. What we are striving for is to get the machinery set up, and to set as many things as possible down on paper."

He got this "machinery" in the form of the European Advisory Commission, but it was quite clear that both at the Moscow Conference and, later, at Teheran, Poland was among the problems that were inevitably shelved. At the Moscow Conference there was much

talk of getting both Turkey and Sweden into the war, but this led to nothing. On direct Soviet-Western military co-operation the Russians were still reserved, and did not

respond very favourably at first to the American proposal for shuttle bombing, with the setting-up of US air bases in Soviet territory. Nothing was going to be decided about this until February 1944.

Cordell Hull, though very tired at the end of the Conference, received the Press at the US

Embassy and sounded very pleased:

When I started out over here, (he said) most people thought that nothing would

come of this meeting, since Russia was liable to go the isolationist way.

[ It is amusing to think that, just as Hull dreaded Russian isolationism so, by 1945, the Russians dreaded American isolationism—one reason, by the way, why they insisted on

UN having its headquarters in the USA.]

Yet we exchanged at length our views, and were tremendously gratified to find that the Soviet statesmen were more and more disposed towards the view that

isolationism was bad... Now the spirit of co-operation has been born, and we can

begin to build. Now, indeed, was the time to get together. The foundations have been laid. Some problems are delicate and complicated, but with the spirit of harmony

existing between us, nothing can bring estrangement."

He then hinted that the three heads of governments would meet shortly, and sounded

particularly pleased with the Four-Power Declaration which included China. There was, however, still a Herculean task ahead of the Allies—problems like the future of Poland and Germany had not yet been settled, but consultation on both questions were in

progress.

He also said that AMGOT (Allied Military Government in Occupied Territories) would

gradually disappear and that the EAC would have an ever-growing number of problems

to deal with. And then:

Stalin is a remarkable person showing at once unusual ability and judgment and a

grasp of practical problems. He is one of the leaders who, together with Roosevelt and Churchill, has a responsibility which no other man may have in the next 500

years... There is no hard feeling among the Russians about the Second Front, as far as I know... I do not know of two nations with fewer antagonistic interests and more common interests than the USA and Russia...

Eden also was very pleased with the Conference:

When we first arrived here, we thought the prospects were very bleak, and that all the Russians would do would be to scream for the Second Front. I should be

surprised if they started screaming now, for they now know it is coming. Instead, this Conference was very big stuff, the beginning of a new form of co-operation

between us. The teamwork was admirable. Today I discussed military problems

with Molotov for two hours. Poland? Yes, it will be discussed through diplomatic

channels...

On October 30, as President of the Anglo-American Press Association I presided at the lunch we gave to Eden and Cordell Hull (represented by Harriman) at the Hotel National.

We did not think Molotov and the other top Russians would come, but much to our

surprise the Protocol Department rang up and hinted that invitations would be welcomed.

Here was real cordiality! True, Molotov did not come, but Vyshinsky and Litvinov did.

In my speech of welcome I referred, among other things, to Eden's and Litvinov's gallant stand at Geneva and at Nyon, and made a crack or two at Chamberlain— without naming

him—which went down very well. Eden sat to my right, and the terrible Vyshinsky (now with a sugary smile) to my left, and the whole atmosphere was very matey indeed.

Quoting Churchill's remark, earlier in the year, about the "autumn leaves", Vyshinsky said: "Well, it is customary for the autumn leaves to fall in autumn, but if they fall in spring—well, I suppose that's okay, as long as they do fall." (He was now clearly resigned to the Second Front in 1944). Litvinov said the League of Nations had

unfortunately turned out to be a Tower of Babel, not a solid Pyramid; the nations of the world must do better next time.

Harriman was in a slightly truculent mood and pointedly talked about the war in the

Pacific, saying that if it hadn't been so successful there wouldn't be much prospect of America helping with the Second Front in Europe.

At the extravagant Kremlin Banquet that crowned the Conference, Stalin seemed in an

exuberant mood. Despite all the earlier unpleasantness over the Northern convoys, he now paid a tribute to the British Navy and the Merchant Fleet: "We don't talk much about them, but we do know what they do." The new head of the British Military Mission, General Giffard Martel rapturously congratulated Stalin on the forcing of the Dnieper only shortly before: "No other Army in the world could have performed such a feat!" The short era of mutual compliments and congratulations had set in.

The two chief American military representatives in the Soviet Union, the anti-Soviet General Michela, and General Faymonville who was notorious for the optimistic analyses of the military situation in Russia he had been sending Roosevelt ever since 1941, often to the disgust of the State Department—were both withdrawn and replaced by a regular Military Mission with General John R. Deane at its head. The Russians were soon to find him a very tough negotiator, who was particularly sticky in organising lend-lease

deliveries, always first asking the Russians for full explanations as to whether they really needed the stuff for military purposes, or merely for postwar reconstruction.

The Soviet press was very pleased with the Foreign Ministers' Conference. The

Revolution-Day Festivities on November 6 and 7, which were marked by tremendous

fireworks in honour of the liberation of Kiev by Vatutin's troops, took place in an

exuberantly cheerful atmosphere.

Stalin's speech reviewing the events of 1943—"the year of the great turning-point"—in which he paid the warmest tributes both to the Red Army and to the Russian war effort, was also particularly cordial in its comments on the Anglo-American Allies.

Taking together the blows struck at the Germans and their allies in North Africa

and Southern Italy, the intensive bombing of Germany ... and the regular supplies of armaments and raw materials that we are receiving from our Allies, we must say

that all this has greatly helped us in our summer campaign... The fighting in

Southern Europe is not the Second Front, but, all the same, it is something like the Second Front... Naturally, only a real Second Front—which is now not so far away

—will greatly speed up victory over Nazi Germany, consolidate still further the

comradeship-in-arms of the Allied States.

He was particularly pleased with Italy dropping out of the war, thought that Germany's other satellites, knowing that "only bumps and bruises were now in store for them," were frantically looking for ways and means of getting out of Hitler's clutches. He suggested that, in 1944, Germany would lose all her allies. She was now clearly "facing

catastrophe".

On the night of the 7th Molotov gave his biggest war-time party. The whole diplomatic corps were now back in Moscow, and it was an extremely sumptuous and exceedingly

drunken affair. Molotov was going round the guests, proposing innumerable toasts, and, towards the end of the evening, had to be supported on both sides in his further progress through the crowded rooms of the Spiridonovka. He was jovial and looked like a man

who was relaxing—certainly for the first time in more than two years. But he carried his liquor much better than others. The first to leave were the Japanese diplomats who had been received with marked coolness; but not very long after, they were followed by a procession of Excellencies who were simply carried out, feet first. The British

Ambassador had fallen flat on his face on to a table covered with bottles and wine-

glasses, and had even slightly cut himself. There was also something of a row between Molotov and the Swedish Minister, whom Molotov upbraided for the peculiar

"neutrality" Sweden had been pursuing. The said Minister was soon afterwards recalled by his Government. The whole party sparkled with jewels, furs, gold braid, and

celebrities. The gold braid on the new Russian pearl-grey diplomatic uniforms rivalled that of the generals and marshals. Shostakovich was there in full evening dress—looking like a college boy who had put it on for the first time—and there were dozens of other stars of the literary, musical, artistic, scientific and theatrical firmaments. The party had something of that wild and irresponsible extravagance which one usually associates with pre-Revolution Moscow. There never was to be another party quite like it in subsequent years. But Molotov must have enjoyed it. There was something splendidly Muscovite in this entertainment of watching Ambassadors in all their regalia falling flat on their faces and being carried out by Russian underlings whose chuckles kept breaking through their expression of deep concern.

We need not recount here the familiar story of the Teheran Conference, except to say that the Russians were satisfied with it—as far as it went. A firm decision had at last been taken to launch "Overlord" in May, an operation that would be supported by a great Russian offensive. Also increased help was to be given to Tito's Partisans.

Some of the remaining "military" decisions—e.g. concerning the eventual entry of Turkey into the war on the side of the Big Three— were to remain a dead letter.

The Partition of Germany was discussed, but no definite decisions were taken; an

agreement of sorts was reached on the approximate future frontiers of Poland, though the question of the Neisse frontier was left unsettled and the question of the Polish

Government was shelved.

Churchill had pleaded in favour of a lenient Russian treatment of Finland, and had

received some half-assurances from Stalin on that score. In the end, Finland was to be let off fairly lightly by the Russians, less because of any half-promises made to Churchill, than in virtue of Russia's own peculiar "Scandinavian" policy, with Swedish neutrality as its centre.

Stalin promised to take part in the war against Japan after the capitulation of Germany, but on terms still to be settled.

None of this was publicly disclosed at the time; what was announced in the final

communiqué was that:

We have concerted our plans for the destruction of German forces. We have

reached complete agreement as to the scope and timing of the operations which will be undertaken from the east, west and south. Our offensive will be merciless and

cumulative.

The Russians were going to get their real Second Front at last. It was on this note—

which caused immense satisfaction in Russia— that the victorious but very hard year of 1943 ended for her. A year that had carried the Red Army all the way from Stalingrad and the Caucasus to Kiev and beyond. Over two-thirds of the German-occupied territory had been liberated. But it was still a long way to Berlin.

Perhaps Stalin was not bluffing when he said at Teheran that the Red Army was growing war-weary, and that it needed something to encourage it. The Teheran communiqué did

it.

It came as a shock to many when, less than two months after Teheran, Pravda published its famous "Cairo Rumour" story about secret separate peace negotiations going on between Britain and Germany "somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula". Was this calculated to discourage that excessive post-Teheran euphoria that had developed in Russia, or was it a reflection of Stalin's irritation with Churchill who had been much more "difficult" at Teheran than Roosevelt had been? Significantly., the Americans did not figure in the

"Cairo Rumour" story; Roosevelt was treated throughout as a very loyal friend and ally of the Soviet Union.

This is not altered by the fact that Roosevelt failed to give any serious thought to the tentative Russian suggestions—both in 1943 and in 1944—for large-scale economic cooperation between Russia and America after the war, complete with a seven-billion-dollar loan for Russian reconstruction. Such "co-operation" was known to be favoured by certain important American business interests, but frowned upon by others, among

whom, it was believed, was Ambassador Averell Harriman.

PART SEVEN 1944: Russia Enters Eastern

Europe

Chapter I SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF 1944

1943 was, in the Russian phrase, the perelom year—the year of the great turning point.

Since Stalingrad and especially since Kursk the Red Army had been sweeping west

almost without a break. Two-thirds of the vast territory occupied by the Germans in

1941-2 had been liberated by the end of 1943, and although the Germans still held most of the Western Ukraine and of Belorussia and the whole Baltic area, and were still

shelling Leningrad, the Russians were preparing for the final expulsion of the Germans from the Soviet Union in 1944. What is more, the Red Army, on its way to Germany, was going to find itself in non-Russian territory all the way from the Balkans to Poland, and this was going to create a number of new political, diplomatic and psychological

problems. Since Stalingrad and especially since the fall of Mussolini, Germany's satellites (Finland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia) were looking for ways and means of

getting out of "Hitler's war" with the minimum damage to themselves. Already very early in 1944 the first peace-feelers were put out by Finland, Hungary and Rumania. The

Teheran Conference had finally convinced these countries that the fighting alliance of the Russians and Anglo-Americans was a much more solid enterprise than German

propaganda had tried to make out. The more conservative elements in these countries

were hoping to soften the rigours of a Russian occupation by an active participation of Britain and the United States in any kind of peace settlement. Thus, Admiral Horthy, in his first peace-feeler, was ready to break with Hitler provided Hungary was jointly

occupied by Soviet and Anglo-American troops.

Poland continued to be the central problem in East-West relations, and was to lead to many new complications in the course of 1944; not that it was, in essence, a problem very different from say, Rumania, Bulgaria or even Czechoslovakia; but it turned out to be the test-case on which a seemingly uncompromising stand was taken by both the Russians

and the Western Powers. In the case of Czechoslovakia, for instance, there was some

friction and unpleasantness between Benes and the London Government-in-exile on the

one hand, and Gottwald, Kopecky and the other "Moscow Czechs" on the other, but it did not come to an open conflict until long after the war.

[ Gottwald, for example, criticised the Czechoslovak Government in London (in some

articles in Pravda and elsewhere) for not encouraging a more vigorous resistance to the Germans inside Czechoslovakia.]

The Russians maintained reasonably correct relations with the Czechoslovak "London Government", and never attempted to set up a rival pro-Communist Czechoslovak

Government either in Moscow or in the liberated part of Czechoslovakia. Whether the

Russians had any long-term plans for the future or not, they seemed willing to try out the Czechoslovak experiment of an East-West Co-existence Shopwindow.

On the face of it, President Benes's visit to Moscow in December 1943, almost

immediately after Teheran, and the signing of a Soviet-Czechoslovak Pact of Friendship, Mutual Assistance and Post-War Co-operation, were a great success, even though the

atmosphere surrounding the visit was not free from all kinds of mental reservations —not least in the relations between Benes and Zdenek Fierlinger, the Czechoslovak

Ambassador, who was working hand-in-glove with Gottwald and Kopecky, and was to be

one of the villains of the Prague coup of 1948. But much was made of the blessing given by Benes to the Czechoslovak Army units fighting on the Soviet Front, and to their

Commander, Colonel Svoboda. On December 18 Stalin had a meeting with Benes, in the

presence of Molotov and Fierlinger, and some surprise was caused by the absence of any phrase like "cordial atmosphere" in the official statement that such a meeting had taken place. It was known that, with Stalin's blessing, the Czech Communists had been

accusing Benes for some time of not encouraging a more active Resistance movement in Czechoslovakia; I gathered from Benes—whom I saw a few days later—that Stalin had

raised this question, too. Unlike the Poles, the Czechs in London were a "good" London Government, but they were a London Government for all that; and Stalin's tentative suggestion that they move to Moscow met with no response from Benes.

Nevertheless, Benes's farewell speech on December 23 was marked by extreme

cordiality, except that the Russians were not perhaps altogether pleased with his reference to the new Soviet-Czechoslovak Pact as one of the most important pillars on which the future policy of Czechoslovakia would be built.

Looking back on 1943, Russia had every reason to be in an optimistic mood, though, to individual Russians, the war, with its fearful casualties, continued to be a very grim reality. More and more young men were being drafted daily into the Red Army, and it

was only too common to meet elderly men and women who had already lost several or all of their sons in the war. According to official figures published after the war, there were about seven million men in the Army at the beginning of 1944, and since at least five million men had, by then, been lost in two-and-a-half years' fighting, (not to mention the wounded), it is easy to imagine how deeply the war had affected practically every family in the country.

[The exact number of troops in the Red Army, Navy and Air Force are not easy to

ascertain; General Deane, head of the US military mission in Moscow since 1943 thought there were "on the average" twelve million men, but these, of course, also included non-combat troops.]

Work in the war industries, largely run by women, adolescents and elderly men, was

desperately hard, with overtime, compulsory subscriptions to State loans, various

"competitions", practically no holidays and often very little food. Eighty to ninety percent of the mostly meagre rations were handed over to the factory canteens. The podsobnyie khoziaistva (auxiliary farms), usually no more than vegetable plots, attached to each factory, produced some extra vegetables, but food supplies were still far from good. To the ordinary worker, the kolkhoz markets were of little help because of the still exorbitant prices.

Doctors, surgeons and teachers were all hideously overworked. There were not nearly

enough surgeons to deal adequately with all the wounded during major military

operations, and many lives were lost as a result.

The conditions in some—though not all—of the secondary schools of Moscow in 1944

may be illustrated by the comments made to me by an eleven-year-old boy about that

time. There were thirty-five pupils in his form, and one fearfully overworked woman-

teacher for all subjects: history, geography, arithmetic, natural science and Russian. All the food the children got at school was a slice of bread with some "nasty bitter jam—

American stuff made of oranges"; some of the kids threw this drisnya (diarrhoea) out of the window. Among the boys, this youngster told me, there was a good deal of

lawlessness, "hooliganism" and thieving; in a short time three penholders, a cap and a pair of gloves had been stolen from him. Most of their fathers were in the Army (or

dead), and most of their mothers were working endlessly long hours in a factory. Among these youngsters there were clear signs of escapism: they no longer sang the usual

patriotic songs, but an "escapist" song from a recent film about Kostya, a swaggering beau in the docks of Odessa, or, worse still, a "hooligan" (i.e. obscene) version of the same song. The war was, clearly having a bad effect on secondary education, and may

well account for the extensive wave of juvenile crime that was to mark the immediate post-war years in Russia.

There was a serious shortage of teaching staff in 1944, and both the elementary and

secondary schools suffered most from it. Also, in Moscow—now deep in the rear—the

very young were less conscious of the immediate war tension as life was returning to

"normal", except for the shortage of everything. On the other hand, vocational and trade schools, whose purpose was to create large industrial labour reserves, were given priority; similarly, top priority was given to the training of more and more new soldiers.

*

The spirit of the Russian working class was still good, despite unquestionable signs of physical fatigue. It was better still in the Army. Not only was there a feeling of great elation among the soldiers, as every day brought new victories, but there was a great national pride, a sense of achievement, and a well-cultivated desire for more and more distinctions, medals and decorations. These medals and decorations ran into many

millions, and acted as a great incentive to every soldier. There were already "Stalingrad medals" and "Leningrad medals" and "Sebastopol medals" and "Moscow medals" and the end of the war was to see new medals "for the capture of Bucharest", "for the liberation of Warsaw"—as well as Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Prague and Berlin medals, besides a whole range of new decorations.

In the Army both Stalin and the generals were popular. I remember the tragic, but typical case of a nineteen-year-old boy I knew, Mitya Khludov. He belonged to a well-known

Moscow merchant family, whose survivors had inevitably had a difficult time during the early years of the Revolution. He was in an artillery unit during the Battle of Belorussia in the summer of 1944. He wrote me a letter, in which he said: "I am proud to tell you that my battery has done wonders in knocking the hell out of the Fritzes. Also, for our last engagement, I have been proposed for the Patriotic War Order, and, better still, I have been accepted into the Party. Yes, I know, my father and my mother were burzhuis, but what the hell! I am a Russian, a hundred percent Russian, and I am proud of it, and our people have made this victory possible, after all the terror and humiliation of 1941; and I am ready to give my life for my country and for Stalin; I am proud to be in the Party, to be one of Stalin's victorious soldiers. If I'm lucky enough I'll be in Berlin yet.

We'll get there—and we deserve to get there—before our Western Allies do. If you see Ehrenburg, give him my regards. Tell him we all have been reading his stuff... Tell him we really hate the Germans after seeing so many horrors they have committed here in

Belorussia. Not to mention all the destruction they've caused. They've pretty well turned this country into a desert."

Ten days later Mitya's sister had another letter from him, this time from a hospital. He had been wounded, but said he was feeling better and would soon be back with his

battery. He gave no details of his injury. But a few days later he died. We learned later that he had died in one of those terribly overcrowded field hospitals in which it was physically impossible to give the wounded all the individual attention and care that they needed.

Mitya's enthusiastic feeling of being "one of Stalin's soldiers" was not the only reaction.

But this nationalist mood with its eagerness for medals and distinctions, and its hatred of the Nazis who had "humiliated" Russia, was probably the most widespread of all, and was shared by most of the peasant lads in the Army. Such moods were, of course,

encouraged by the politotdels, the Army's propaganda services. Others were conscious of belonging to a lost and condemned generation which was destined to be sacrificed—a

mood reflected in that pathetic little literary masterpiece by Emmanuel Kazakevich, The Star, the story of a reconnaissance raid, written towards the end of the war. The consciousness of living close to death runs through most of the Soviet writing during the war— whether in Surkov's poetry, or Siminov's poetry and plays, or Grossman's and

Kazakevich's stories and novels. In the poems of Simeon Gudzenko, a remarkable poet

(discovered during the war by Ehren-burg) there was a slightly different frontovik mentality; war to such men is a desperate, but still fearfully exciting gamble, and, after the war, such men felt a nostalgia for it. He, like so many others, also hoped it would be a better and freer Russia after the war.

1944 was to be known as the year of the Ten Victories.

1. In January the Leningrad Blockade was finally broken. After a tremendous artillery barrage from the Oranienbaum Bridgehead, the Russians broke through the powerful

German ring of concrete and armoured pillboxes and minefields and joined with other

Russian forces striking from the east; losses were very heavy on both sides, but within a week the Germans were on the run, and did not stop until they reached Pskov and the

borders of Estonia. There was immense rejoicing among the 600,000 people who were

still living in Leningrad after the fearful thirty-months' siege. In retreating, the Germans had destroyed many historic buildings, among them the palaces of Pushkin (Tsarskoie

Selo) and Pavlovsk, south of Leningrad.

2. In February and March the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under Konev (assisted by those of the 1st Ukrainian Front under Vatutin) first encircled several German

divisions in the Korsun Salient on the Dnieper, and then, in their famous "Mud

Offensive", crashed right through into Rumania, after forcing the Bug, the Dniester and the Pruth. They were then held up for a few months outside Jassy in Northern Rumania.

3. In April Odessa was liberated, and in May the Crimea was completely cleared.

4. In June Finland was knocked out by the Russian breakthrough to Viborg (Viipuri)

across the Karelian Isthmus. Then, having reached the 1940 Finnish border, the Red

Army stopped of its own accord, without pursuing its advance on Helsinki.

5. No less spectacular than Konev's offensive across the Ukraine into Rumania in March was the liberation of Belorussia, after the Russians had broken through the powerful German Bobruisk-Mogilev-Vitebsk fine. Nearly thirty German divisions were trapped,

chiefly around Minsk, and the Russians advanced almost as far as Warsaw, where the

Armija Krajowa insurrection had by then begun.

[ The Armija Krajowa (or A.K.) was the Polish underground resistance movement

directed from London.]

In the course of this offensive the Red Army liberated a large part of Eastern Poland (including the new provisional capital of Lublin), nearly the whole of Lithuania, and, after forcing the Niémen, reached the frontiers of East Prussia.

6. In July, in a parallel offensive, the Red Army liberated the Western Ukraine, including Lwow, forced the Vistula and, after an abortive attempt to break through to Cracow,

established the important bridgehead of Sandomierz on the west bank of the Vistula,

south of Warsaw. But after its failure to take Warsaw, the Red Army did not pursue its task of breaking through to Germany at any price. Here, in Poland, the concentration of German forces was, indeed, heavier than anywhere else.

7. Instead, in August, the Red Army struck out in the south—in Moldavia and Rumania

—and, after trapping fifteen or sixteen German divisions as well as several Rumanian divisions in the Jassy-Kishenev "pockets", swept into Rumania, precipitated Rumania's surrender, overran Bulgaria, reached the borders of Hungary, and established contact with the Yugoslavs.

8. In September Estonia and most of Latvia were freed of the Germans. Thirty German divisions remained, however, in Kurland peninsula, and remained there, as a "nuisance"

force, till the capitulation of Germany in May 1945.

9. In October, the Red Army broke into Hungary and Eastern Czechoslovakia, joined up with the Yugoslavs and took part in the liberation of Belgrade. In Hungary the fighting was exceptionally fierce, and the fight for Budapest at the end of the year lasted several months. The city was not captured until the following February.

10. In October also, the Red Army attacked in the extreme north, threw the Germans out of Petsamo, in the Finnish salient running to the Arctic, and broke into Northern Norway.

The victories of 1944 were spectacular, but very few of them were easy victories. The Germans fought with extreme stubbornness in Poland (especially in August, when the

Russians were stopped outside Warsaw), at Ternopol in the Western Ukraine (which,

with its three weeks' intensive street fighting, was reminiscent of Stalingrad); and, later, in Hungary and Slovakia. German resistance was also particularly fierce in all areas on the direct road to Germany, notably in the areas adjoining East Prussia and, later, in East Prussia itself.

The Germans were, at last, obviously outnumbered. The Allies had been advancing in the west since June, and by September Germany had lost all her allies, except for a few

Hungarian divisions.

Yet the German tendency to resist the Russians at any price, and to resist the Western Allies less strongly, became more and more pronounced as the war was moving to its

close. The Vistula line opposite Warsaw; Budapest; East Prussia; and, later, the Oder Line, were defended more desperately by the Germans than any line or position in the west. Apart from the sweep across the southern Ukraine in March, and the sweep across Rumania in August (both following an encirclement of large German forces), and the

minor operation in northern Norway, none of the Russian offensives in 1944 were in the nature of a walkover, and the nearer the Russians got to Germany, the more desperate became German resistance.

If, in 1941 and even in 1942, the German soldier seemed to so many Russians a soulless, but formidably efficient robot, the Russian attitude to the Germans changed very

perceptibly during 1943 and 1944—but in two different directions. There were still some formidable German soldiers, particularly the Waffen-SS, ready to fight to the last round, and even known to commit suicide rather than surrender. But the ordinary German war

prisoner was no longer the arrogant individual he used to be in 1941 and 1942. Now more and more German prisoners tended to whine, and tried to look pathetic, and spoke of

"Hitler kaputt"; the 1941 and 1942 desire to beat up and even kill German prisoners had now largely disappeared; after a short time the Russian soldiers' anger cooled down, and they would even give newly-captured Germans food, saying: "go on, stuff yourselves, you bastards."

But there was another side to the "German problem". Nearly every liberated town and village in Russia, Belorussia or in the Ukraine had something terrible to tell.

In Belorussia, hundreds of villages in alleged "Partisan country" had been burned down, and their inhabitants either murdered or deported. Everywhere large cities had been

systematically destroyed; in the Ukraine, where there was relatively little scope for partisan warfare, the Germans had deported a very high proportion of the young people; everywhere, in the towns, the Gestapo had been active, and people had been shot or

hanged. The Einsatzkommandos and other troops had been busy exterminating partisans or alleged "accomplices" of partisans—often whole villages, including women and children. In hundreds of towns there had been the systematic massacre of Jews. In Kiev, for example, tens of thousands of Jews had been exterminated in a gully outside the city called Babyi Yar. Every Ukrainian and Belorussian city had its own horror story. As the Red Army advanced to the west, it heard these daily stories of terror, and humiliations and deportation; it saw the destroyed cities; it saw the mass-graves of Russian war

prisoners, murdered or starved to death; it saw Babyi Yar with its countless corpses, among them the corpses of small children; and, in the Russian soldiers' mind, the real truth on Nazi Germany, with its Hitler and Himmler and its Untermensch philosophy and its unspeakable sadism became hideously tangible. All that Alexei Tolstoy and

Sholokhov and Ehrenburg had written about the Germans was mild compared with what

the Russian soldier was to hear with his own ears and see with his own eyes and smell with his own nose. For wherever the Germans had passed, there was a stench of decaying corpses. But Babyi Yar was small amateur stuff compared with Majdanek, the

extermination camp near Lublin where one and a half million people had been put to

death in a couple of years, and which the Russians captured almost intact in August 1944.

[See pp. 889 ff]

It was with the whiff of Majdanek in their nostrils that thousands of Russian soldiers were to fight their way into East Prussia... There was the "ordinary Fritz" of 1944, and there were the thousands of Himmler's professional murderers; but was there a clear

dividing line between the two? For had not "ordinary Fritzes", too, taken part in the extermination of "partisan villages"? And did not the "ordinary Fritz", in any case, approve of what his SS and Gestapo colleagues were doing? Or didn't he approve? Here was both a psychological and political problem which was to give the Soviet government and the Red Army command a good deal of trouble, especially in 1944 and 1945.

The Teheran communiqué had created in Russia a feeling of euphoria: but for a number of reasons this did not entirely suit Stalin and the Party. Stalin had apparently been irritated by Churchill's half-hearted attitude to "Overlord", and also by his repeated grumbling about "the Polish Problem", on which Stalin held strong views. So in January 1944 Pravda launched, as already said, its "Cairo Rumour" about separate peace talks

"between two leading British personalities and Ribbentrop in a coastal town of the Iberian Peninsula"—a story which was later implicitly repudiated by Stalin himself in the Red Army Order of February 23. This story was followed by a particularly savage attack by Zaslavsky in Pravda on Wendell Willkie (of all people) who had raised some questions—in a very mild form—about what the Russians were going to do about Poland, the Baltic States, the Balkans and Finland.

Willkie, said Zaslavsky, was using the phraseology of the "enemy camp"; and then he went off the deep end:

It is high time it was understood that the question of the Baltic States is an internal Soviet matter which is none of Mr Willkie's business. Anyone interested in such

questions should take the trouble to become acquainted with the Soviet Constitution and with that democratic plebiscite which took place in these Republics; and let him also remember that we know how to defend our Constitution.

As for Finland and Poland, not to mention the Balkan countries, the Soviet Union

will manage to thrash things out with them, without any assistance from Mr Willkie.

Zaslavsky indeed thought it "most peculiar" and highly suspect that Willkie should dare suggest that a "crisis" among the United Nations might be approaching over this question of Russia's small neighbours.

Appearing in Pravda a month after Teheran, this strident cry of "Hands off Eastern Europe", with its suggestion of a definite Russian "sphere of influence" was much more indicative of coming disagreements than Willkie's article to which Zaslavsky had so

violently objected.

All kinds of little pinpricks continued in the Soviet Press, particularly against the British; thus, in March, Pravda publicised a story of German war prisoners—now re-taken by the Russians—who had allegedly been exchanged for British war prisoners in North Africa

on the understanding that they would not fight the British again, but were, however, free to go and fight the Russians.

Above all, there continued to be a chronic irritation over the Polish Problem. The Russian offer to amend the Curzon Line in Poland's favour by giving her Bialystok and a large area around it failed to meet with any favourable response from the Polish London

Government. This was also held responsible for alleged anti-Russian activities by the Armija Krajowa in Poland who wrote in their clandestine press that there was "nothing to choose between Hitler and Stalin", and who (the Russians alleged) even directly collaborated with the Germans by denouncing to them certain Belorussian underground

leaders as Communists. It was also reported in the Russian press that General Anders had arrested fifty Polish officers in Teheran for wanting to join the Polish Army in the Soviet Union. Then, in January 1944, the Russians were greatly annoyed by the reservations and innuendos in the British and American press concerning the Soviet methods of

conducting the investigation into the whole lurid business of the Katyn murders.

However, with the Second Front in Normandy approaching, the Russian attitude to the

West grew considerably more cordial, though the Polish Problem still continued to

poison East-West relations, which became particularly strained at the time of the Warsaw rising in August. But, by October, the atmosphere again changed for the better, and

Anglo-Soviet relations never seemed as overwhelmingly good as during the Churchill-

Eden visit to Moscow that month. Even the most sceptical became convinced that, by that time, both Stalin and Churchill thought it expedient to remain on the best of terms, at least so long as the war with Germany was still going on. It was, indeed, not till some weeks after Yalta in February 1945 and very near the end of the war in Europe that the Polish Problem became acute again, only to go from bad to worse once the war was over.

In 1944, with the end of the war in sight, a great deal of stock-taking began to be done by Stalin and the Party. The reconstruction and population problems in Russia required some long-term decisions; also, the ideological "deviations" and the Russian-nationalist departures from "Leninist purity" during the war—and, indeed, for some time before the war—required some serious adjustments. Finally, the very fact that millions of Russian soldiers were now fighting in "bourgeois" countries in Eastern and Central Europe raised a number of altogether new psychological problems. One of these was to be created by the Russian soldiers' first contact with the department stores of Bucharest.

Chapter II CLOSE-UP I: UKRAINIAN MICROCOSM

A "Little Stalingrad" on the Dnieper

Nikopol with its manganese, Krivoi Rog with its iron ore, and the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine (i.e. the Ukraine west of the Dnieper) —that great colonial domain of Erich

Koch and that future (if not present) No. 1 granary of the greedy Herrenvolk—it was not easy for Hitler to say goodbye to all these. Without them, Grüne Mappe [Göring's June 1941 "Directives for the Control of Economy in the Occupied Eastern Territories ".] and the rest of his superman blueprints were only fit for the waste-paper basket.

At the end of 1943 the Russians had already eaten some distance into Right-Bank

Ukraine. At the end of September and the beginning of October they had performed one of their most astonishing feats in the war: under cover of night, many thousands of men had forced the mighty barrier of the Dnieper at many points. They had done it s'khodu, that is, "on the march". No sooner had they reached the Dnieper than thousands rowed or paddled across in small craft, on improvised rafts, on a few barrels strung together, or even by clinging on to planks or garden benches. The Germans, who had boasted of their impregnable Ostwall on the right bank of the Dnieper, were taken completely by surprise.

Their allegedly powerful fortifications along the whole length of the Dnieper had, in fact, not been built, and what fortifications there were had certainly not been manned in time.

If any serious resistance came from the Germans anywhere, it was dealt with by the

Russian artillery on the east bank of the river. In one place as many as sixty tanks, with all openings puttied up, actually advanced under water and forded the river. Enough

Russians crossed the river to form a number of bridgeheads on the other side: Vatutin's troops established several in the neighbourhood of Kiev, and, further south, Konev's set up no fewer than eighteen; and though, in the next few days, seven were lost with very heavy casualties, the remaining eleven merged into one. As soon as the big bridgeheads had been firmly established, the Russians laid pontoons across the river, and German air attacks on these were usually successfully repelled thanks to the powerful concentration of Russian fighters. The Russians also used two brigades of paratroopers to set up the bridgeheads. At the Kremlin banquet during the Foreign Ministers' Conference in

Moscow in October 1943, General Giffard Martel, head of the British Military Mission, said that no army in the world could have performed the feat of crossing the Dnieper as the Red Army had done.

On the face of it, it looked like a reckless improvisation, but in reality the whole operation—barrels, garden benches and all—had been carefully planned in advance, and high decorations had been promised to those who particularly distinguished themselves in forcing the Dnieper: over 2,000 were, indeed, decorated afterwards. The Germans'

"Maginot Line" on the Dnieper proved very largely a piece of bluff, and once the pontoons and ferries were completed, vast quantities of heavy Russian equipment were taken across the river, and, on November 6 the Russians liberated Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. Despite various ups and downs (such as Vatutin's temporary loss of Zhitomir, west of Kiev, later in November) the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts had, by January,

captured substantial territories on the right bank of the Dnieper, Vatutin's 1st Ukrainian Front [ The former Voronezh Front.] having advanced along a wide front some 125 miles west of the river, and Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front some ninety miles. Still farther south there were Malinovsky's 3rd Ukrainian Front and Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front. These four Fronts were to liberate nearly the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine between January and the beginning of May 1944.

Obviously over-rating their own strength, and under-rating the drive and skill of the Red Army, the Germans were still determined —or at least Hitler was—as late as January

1944 to clear the Russians out of the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine—to begin with. With that end in view, they clung like grim death to their Korsun-Shevchenkovo salient on the Dnieper, about fifty miles south of Kiev, and stretching some thirty miles along the west bank of the river. North of this relatively narrow salient were Vatutin's troops [On March 1,1944, General Vatutin was fatally wounded by a band of Ukrainian nationalists and

Marshal Zhukov took over the command of the 1st Ukrainian Front on the following

day.];

south of it Konev's troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front (formerly "Steppe Front"). Hitler's plan was to attack the Russians from this salient both north and south of it, and so to recover the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine for Germany—a plan as unrealistic as so many other Hitler plans during the later stages of the war.

The Russian command thought differently. Here, it seemed to them, was a golden

opportunity of inflicting a "second Stalingrad" on the Germans—though admittedly, on a smaller scale.

The similarities between the two operations were, indeed, striking enough. It was a case of encircling the German forces by the Russian northern (Vatutin) and southern (Konev) pincers joining somewhere west of the "bag", and of preventing the Germans outside it from breaking through to their encircled comrades. In this case, the rôle of Manstein was played by the German 8th Army under General Hube; the most important difference

between the Stalingrad and the Korsun situation was that the Germans trapped at Korsun did try to break out, with the result that the Russians had to fight on "two fronts", as it were, on either side of the circle they had made round the "Korsun" Germans.

On February 3rd the great news was announced that, after three days' heavy fighting the troops of the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, one striking south-east from Belaya Tserkov, the other, striking north-west from Kirovograd, had effected their junction near

Zvenigorodka, and had thus cut off the large German "Korsun" salient. The German divisions had been encircled, and the sixteen-day battle to liquidate them began. On February 9, Gorodishche, inside the Korsun "bag", was captured; on the 14th, Korsun itself was taken, and although that day the German forces, trying to break through the ring from outside, made some slight advance, on the 15th their further attempts to break through were already "successfully repelled". On the 18th, the Germans were wiped out in the whole Korsun "ring". The Russians claimed 55,000 German dead and 18,000

prisoners, 500 tanks, over 300 planes and much else.

It was in February and the beginning of March that all the four Ukrainian Fronts came into violent motion. After liquidating the Germans in the Korsun Salient, Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front swept all the way into northern Rumania within a few weeks; north of it, General Zhukov's 1st Ukrainian Front, meeting with much suffer resistance (it was

getting nearer Germany than any other) still advanced along a wide front as far as the Carpathians and almost as far as Lwow, capturing Rovno, Erich Koch's Ukrainian

"capital" in the process. To the south of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, Malinov-sky's 3rd Ukrainian Front pushed on, in a spectacular sweep, to Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa,

which they captured at the beginning of April; and Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front, after finally dislodging the Germans in February from the Nikopol bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper, undertook its spectacular reconquest of the Crimea.

While Zhukov was crashing ahead in the northern Ukraine and Malinovsky along the

Black Sea coast, on March 5 Konev launched his great offensive against the German 8th Army under General Hube—the "Manstein" who had failed to rescue the Germans trapped at Korsun. After a week's heavy fighting in incredibly difficult conditions (an early thaw had set in) Konev captured the town of Uman, Hube's principal base; after which the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front drove on to the Bug and beyond, not to stop until they had invaded Rumania the last week in March. They had covered a distance of over 250 miles in less than a month.

It was soon after the liquidation of the Korsun "bag" and on the day after Konev's capture of Uman that I had the good fortune of being the only Western foreign correspondent

authorised to visit the 2nd Ukrainian Front, where I spent one of the most illuminating weeks of all my war years in the Soviet Union. My principal companion was Major

Kampov, an officer of General Konev's [He was to be promoted to the rank of Marshal

later in 1944.] staff, who was to remain a life-long friend, and who was to become

famous after the war as the novelist "Boris Polevoi".

On March 12 I was flown in an army plane from Moscow across the Dnieper and over

Cherkassy to a place called Rotmistrovka which had been, until February, in the northern part of the Korsun salient. On the following day I was to fly in a tiny U-2 plane to Uman, which had just been recaptured by Konev's troops.

It was at Rotmistrovka that I first met Major Kampov. He looked pale and physically—-

though not mentally—tired; his uniform was grubby, and the mud was splashed right up his army boots. For three years he had been at it; in the grim autumn of 1941 he had broken out of an encirclement in the Kalinin Province after losing most of his men; he had taken part under Konev in the heartbreaking Rzhev offensive in 1942; but now he

had eight months of continuous victories behind him. He was slim, dark, and had grey laughing eyes with a quietly humorous expression. Maxim Gorki, in his youth, must have looked a little like him (except that one of his eyes was half closed as a result of shell-shock).

"You couldn't have come at a better moment," he said, "do you know what happened today? Our troops have already crossed the Bug." This was great news. The Bug, on the way to Odessa and Rumania, was said to be one of the most heavily fortified German

lines. (In practice, as I later learned, it was nothing of the kind, since before reaching the Bug the Germans had lost all their heavy equipment).

The "Mud Offensive" was in full swing. It was one of the most extraordinary things that had happened; it was contrary to all rules of warfare. Barely three weeks after the

liquidation of the German troops trapped at Korsun, Konev had struck out at a time when the Germans had least expected it. So deep and impassable was the Ukrainian mud.

During that week in the Ukraine I was to hear—and, indeed see— a great deal of the

"Little Stalingrad" of Korsun. Since then I have read both Russian and German accounts of the operation, and whereas, by and large, the Russian and German versions of what happened at Stalingrad coincide, there are some major differences in the two versions on Korsun.

According to the official Russian History, the German troops still in the bag after a fortnight's heavy fighting, and after the failure of the Germans to break through from outside, made a final bid to break out of the encirclement on the night of February 16-17.

Despite a violent blizzard, they were heavily attacked, first by artillery and mortar fire and by "light bomber planes", and then by machine-gun fire, and Russian tanks and cavalry.

Only a small group of enemy tanks and armoured cars, carrying the generals and

senior officers, succeeded, thanks to the blizzard, in breaking out of the

encirclement in the Lisyanka area, leaving their troops to their fate. Before that, they had succeeded in evacuating 2,000 to 3,000 officers and soldiers by air. The whole operation ended in the liquidation of ten enemy divisions and one brigade.

55,000 Nazi officers and soldiers were killed or wounded, and 18,000 taken prisoner.

The enemy also lost all his equipment, all of which had a highly demoralising effect on other units of the German Army in the Ukraine.

[IVOVSS, vol. IV, p. 68.]

German writers, on the other hand, have tried to minimise the disaster. According to Manstein [Op. cit., p. 585. There is also a detailed account of this battle in

Mellenthin's Panzer Battles.] only six divisions and one brigade were encircled, totalling 54,000 men—a figure which the Russians challenge on the strength of German army

documents captured at the time. Other German historians, such as Philippi and Heim,

while (as usual) putting the whole blame on Hitler for trying to hang on to the "utterly useless" Korsun salient at all, claim that when the 50,000 encircled troops still left there attempted their desperate breakthrough on February 17, 30,000 got out, and some 20,000

"were lost", besides the entire equipment of all the divisions that had been encircled.

[The big margin between the German admission of a loss of 20,000 men and the Russian claim of 80,000 German dead, wounded or prisoners, is perhaps due to the Germans

referring only to the " final" breakthrough attempt without taking account of the extremely heavy fighting that had gone on for a fortnight for the liquidation of the "bag".

When the casualties the Germans suffered during this period are added to the 20,000 men lost on February 17, the Russian figure of 80,000 becomes much less improbable.]

What is certain is that the breakthrough of February 17—unsuccessful according to the Russians, partly successful according to the Germans—was very costly for the Germans.

In view of the conflicting post-war versions, it may be interesting to quote Major

Kampov's very dramatic eye-witness account given me at the time.

After describing how the Vatutin and Konev troops had formed their ring round the

salient on February 3, Kampov said:

"Having broken through with our tanks and guns and mobile infantry, we now had to face both ways in the 'ring'—and, for a time, this was very hard. We were shelled from both sides, and we had to attack unceasingly to widen our 'ring'—which, at first, was often only some two miles wide. Of course, we suffered very heavy losses. Even so, after six days, we had managed to widen the ring to nearly twenty miles at its narrowest point.

"At the beginning of the encirclement the area of the 'bag' was almost 240 square miles, and for a long time we had to fight not only the troops inside, but also those outside—and these amounted to no fewer than eight Panzer divisions.

[Seven, according to Philippi and Heim.]

They were under the command of General Hube. Inside the ring there were ten divisions, including a tank division, plus the Belgian SS Wallonia Brigade. Degrelle, the Belgian top Nazi, was among them but, along with several German generals, he escaped by plane.

Pity; it would have been interesting to 'interview' him. The Belgian SS were all

underworld thugs and adventurers of the worst kind.

"We had very strong forces in our 'ring' and Hube's troops did not make much progress.

As for the 'bag', our policy was to slice it into bits, and deal with each bit separately. In this way we wiped out village after village in which the Germans had entrenched

themselves —it was bloody murder. I'm afraid some of our own villagers perished, too, in the process: that's one of the cruellest aspects of this kind of war.

"Anyway, four or five days before the end, the Germans had only an area of about six miles by seven and a half, with Korsun and Shanderovka as its main points. By this time the whole German 'bag' was under shell-fire, but they still held out, because they were hoping for the miracle to happen—the miracle of Hube's breakthrough from outside. But all these German high hopes rapidly began to fade out. And then Korsun fell, and a tiny area round Shanderovka was all that was left.

"I remember that last fateful night of the 17th of February. A terrible blizzard was blowing. Konev himself was travelling in a tank through the shell-battered 'corridor'. I rode on horseback from one point in the corridor to another, with a dispatch from the General; it was so dark that I could not see the horse's ears. I mention this darkness and this blizzard because they are an important factor in what happened...

"It was during that night, or the evening before, that the encircled Germans, having abandoned all hope of ever being rescued by Hube, decided to make a last desperate

effort to break out.

"Shanderovka is a large Ukrainian village of about 500 houses, and here Stemmermann's troops—he was the last general left in the 'bag', the others having fled—decided to spend their last night and to have a good night's rest. Konev learned about those plans, and he was determined to prevent them at any price from having a rest, and effecting an

organised escape—or any kind of escape—the next morning. 'I know this is a hell of a night, with this blizzard blowing, but we must get night bombers to deal with the

situation,' he said. He was told that, in weather like this, it was practically impossible to do anything with bombers, especially with so small a target as Shanderovka. But Konev said: 'This is important, and I cannot accept these objections as final. I do not want to give any orders to the airmen, but get hold of a Komsomol air unit, and say I want

volunteers for the job'. We got a unit composed mostly of Komsomols; all without

exception volunteered. And this is how it was done. The U-2 played an immensely

important part in this. Visibility was so bad that nothing but a slow low-flying plane like the U-2 could have achieved anything at first. The U-2s located Shanderovka in spite of the blizzard and the darkness. Not for a moment did the Germans expect them. They flew down the whole length of Shanderovka and dropped incendiaries. Many fires were

started. The target was now clearly visible. Very soon afterwards—it was just after 2 a.m.

—the bombers came over and the place was bombed and blasted for the next hour. Our

artillery, which was only three miles away now, also concentrated its fire on

Shanderovka. What made it particularly pleasant for us was our knowledge that the

Germans had chased every inhabitant out of Shanderovka into the steppe. They had

wanted the place all to themselves for their sound night's rest. All the bombing and shelling compelled the Germans to abandon their warm huts, and to clear out.

"All that evening the Germans had been in a kind of hysterical condition. The few remaining cows in the village were slaughtered and eaten with a sort of cannibal frenzy.

When a barrel of pickled cabbage was discovered in one hut, it led to wild scrambles.

Altogether they had been very short of food ever since the encirclement; with the German army in constant retreat, they didn't have large stores anywhere near the front line. So these troops at Korsun had been living mostly by looting the local population; they had done so even before the encirclement.

"They had also had a lot to drink that night, but the fires started by the U-2s, and then the bombing and the shelling sobered them up. Driven out of their warm huts they had to

abandon Shanderovka. They flocked into the ravines near the village, and then took the desperate decision to break through early in the morning. They had almost no tanks left—

they had all been lost and abandoned during the previous days' fighting, and what few tanks they still had now had no petrol. In the last few days the area where they were concentrated was so small that transport planes could no longer bring them anything.

Even before, few of the transport planes reached them, and sometimes the cargoes of

food and petrol and munitions were dropped on our lines.

"So that morning they formed themselves into two marching columns of about 14,000

each, and they marched in this way to Lysianka where the two ravines met. Lysianka was beyond our front-line, inside the 'corridor'. The German divisions on the other side were trying to batter their way eastward, but now the 'corridor' was so wide that they hadn't much chance.

"They were a strange sight, these two German columns that tried to break out of the encirclement. Each of them was like an enormous mob. The spearhead and the flanks

were formed by the SS men of the Wallonia Brigade and the Viking Division in their

pearl-grey uniforms. They were in a relatively good state of physique. Then, inside the triangle marched the rabble of the ordinary German infantry, very much more down-at-heel. Right in the middle of this, a small select nucleus was formed by the officers. These also looked relatively well fed. So they moved westward along two parallel ravines. They had started out soon after 4 a.m., while it was still completely dark. We knew the

direction from which they were coming. We had prepared five lines—two lines of

infantry, then a line of artillery, and then two more lines where the tanks and cavalry lay in wait... We let them pass through the first three lines without firing a shot. The Germans, believing that they had dodged us and had now broken through all our

defences, burst into frantic jubilant screaming, firing their pistols and tommy-guns into the air as they marched on. They had now emerged from the ravines and reached open

country.

"Then it happened. It was about six o'clock in the morning. Our tanks and our cavalry suddenly appeared and rushed straight into the thick of the two columns. What happened then is hard to describe. The Germans ran in all directions. And for the next four hours our tanks raced up and down the plain crushing them by the hundred. Our cavalry,

competing with the tanks, chased them through the ravines where it was hard for tanks to pursue them.

[This appears to be one of the few operations so late in the war in which cavalry played any substantial role. Certain cavalry units, such as the famous Cossack Corps under

General Dovator (who was killed on December 19, 1941) had played a part in the Battle of Moscow and in the subsequent Russian counter-offensive, but their losses had been extremely heavy at the time. While propaganda greatly exaggerated the military

importance of the Dovator Corps, General Malinovsky, whom I saw on the Don at the

time of Stalingrad, referred to cavalry as "very beautiful and picturesque, but pretty ineffective in this kind of war—what can a horse do against a German tommy-gun?"]

Most of the time the tanks were not using their guns lest they hit their own cavalry.

Hundreds and hundreds of cavalry were hacking at them with their sabres, and massacred the Fritzes as no one had ever been massacred by cavalry before. There was no time to take prisoners. It was a kind of carnage that nothing could stop till it was all over. In a small area over 20,000 Germans were killed. I had been in Stalingrad; but never had I seen such concentrated slaughter as in the fields and ravines of that small bit of country.

By 9 a.m. it was all over. 8,000 prisoners surrendered that day and during the next few days. Nearly all of them had run a long distance away from the main scene of the

slaughter; they had been hiding in woods and ravines. "Three days later at Djurzhantsy we found the body of General Stemmermann. Soon afterwards General Konev had a

good laugh when the German radio announced, with all sorts of details, how Hitler had personally handed him a high decoration. For General Stemmermann was dead, right

enough. I saw his body as it lay there. Our people had laid him out on a rough wooden table in a barn. There he lay, complete with his orders and medals. He was a little old man, with grey hair; he must have been a Corpsstudent [Member of a German students'

duelling association.] in his young days, judging from the big sabre scar on one cheek.

For a moment we wondered whether it wasn't all a. fake; perhaps an ordinary soldier had been dressed up in a general's uniform. But all Stemmermann's papers were found on the body. They might have faked all the obvious papers, but they could scarcely have had the idea of forging a Black Forest gun licence, complete with the man's picture, and issued in 1939... We buried him decently. We can afford to bury a general decently. The rest were dumped in holes in the ground; if we started making individual graves—we don't do that even for our own people—we would have needed an army of grave-diggers at Korsun...

And there was no time to waste. The general is very particular about corpses—they must be cleared away in two days in summer, in three days in winter... But dead generals aren't all that frequent, so we could give him a proper burial. Anyway, he was the only general there with any guts. All the rest of them had beat it by plane.

"Had he committed suicide?" I asked.

"No, a shell splinter got him in the back—but many of the SS-men did commit suicide, though hardly any of the others.

"Altogether, the Germans lost over 70,000 of their best troops in their attempt to hold the Korsun salient, 55,000 dead and 18,000 prisoners."

"What had they done with their wounded? Is it true that they killed them off?"

"Yes. And that no doubt contributed to the hysteria that marked their last night at Shanderovka. The order to kill the wounded was strictly carried out. They not only shot hundreds of them—shot them as they usually shoot Russians and Jews, through the back of the head, but in many cases they set fire to the ambulance vans, with the dead inside.

One of the oddest sights were the charred skeletons in those burned-out vans with wide bracelets of plaster-of-Paris round their arms or legs. For plaster-of-Paris doesn't burn...

"The Korsun debacle prepared the ground for our present spring offensive. It was psychologically immensely important. To some extent the Germans had forgotten

Stalingrad; at any rate, the effect of Stalingrad had partly worn off. It was important to remind them. It's going to heighten enormously their fear of encirclement in future."

I find it hard to say whether Kampov's figures are any more correct than post-war

Russian or German figures; and whether it is true, as appears from his account, that no Germans broke out at all; probably some did—particularly the generals. Or perhaps they left by air a few days before. But, unlike the dull "technical" tone of most of the post-war military literature, Kampov's account—even allowing for a little romancing, especially about the cavalry—seems to give a striking and truthful picture of both the hysterical and desperate mood of the hardened Nazi troops as they found themselves trapped, and of a real ruthlessness—"no time to take prisoners"—among the Russian troops at the end of a fortnight's extremely costly fighting against both sides of the "ring".

Konev's Blitzkrieg through the Mud

The Ukrainian mud in spring has to be seen to be believed. The whole country is

swamped, and the roads are like rivers of mud, often two feet deep, with deep holes to add to the difficulty of driving any kind of vehicle, except a Russian T-34 tank. Most of the German tanks could not cope with it.

General Hube's 8th Army, having failed to break through to the Korsun bag, and having suffered very heavy losses in the process, decided, in spite of it all, to hold its part of the line running from Kirovograd in the south to Vinnitsa in the north, namely the line south of the Korsun "bag", now in Russian hands, and some forty miles north of the town of Uman. The Germans assumed that while the Schlammperiode—-the deep-mud period—

continued, there was nothing to fear, and, mobilising thousands of Ukrainian civilians, they were busy fortifying their new line north of Uman.

It was on March 5, with the mud and "roadlessness" at their worst, that Konev started his fantastic "Blitzkrieg through the Mud". It started with a gigantic artillery barrage against the German lines; within six days, the Germans were driven forty miles back, and chased out of Uman. The mud was such that they abandoned hundreds of tanks and trucks and

guns, and fled—mostly on foot— to Uman and beyond. At one railway station the

Russians captured a newly-arrived train with 240 brand-new tanks. Usually, however, the Germans burned or blew up both lorries and tanks.

Although Russian tanks were able to advance through the mud, the artillery lagged

behind; and it was very often a case of Russian infantry, sometimes supported by tanks, but sometimes not, pursuing German infantry. Konev's Mud Offensive was "against all the rules", and the Germans had certainly not expected it. The Russian infantry and tanks rapidly advancing to the Bug and beyond—and, before long, towards Rumania—were

being supplied with food, munitions and petrol by a large number of Russian planes.

These also did some strafing of German troops, and would have done more but for the

weather. The only vehicles, apart from T-34 tanks, that advanced fairly successfully through the mud were the Studebaker trucks, for which the Russian soldiers were full of praise.

Very striking, as I was to discover in the next few days, was the high morale of the Russians and the poor morale of the Germans, who had been unnerved by the Korsun

disaster, by the suddenness of Konev's March 5 offensive and by the loss of practically all then-heavy equipment.

With the permission of General Konev, the Major and I flew in two tiny U-2 planes from Rotmistrovka to Uman the next day. Flying in a U-2 is what, in childhood, one imagined flying to be like. Stuffy, closed passenger planes are nothing like it. Sitting in the open seat behind the pilot I somehow felt that I was really flying for the first time. At no more than sixty miles an hour we flew over the housetops of Rotmistrovka; children in gardens and people on the roads waved, and we waved back. We flew mostly at twenty or thirty yards above the ground. At first the cold wind hurt my eyes, but when the pilot passed me a pair of goggles it was perfect. Like a bird, the plane dived down valleys and ravines, then darted up over hills and woods, and circled over towns and villages which were of special interest. The snow had disappeared, and there was spring in the air. The earth was dark-brown and almost black, and the trees were still bare, but one already imagined the harvest rising from the rich wet earth. We circled all over the "Korsun salient". Some villages were intact, but very few people were to be seen, and hardly any cattle. But other villages, especially Shanderovka, where the Germans had spent their last night, were nothing but a heap of rubble, though many cherry and apple trees were still standing among the ruins. From Shander-ovka, through the hilly country to the west, there ran two roads, like two glossy brown ribbons, along which, on that February 17, the Germans had gone to their death.

Then we circled over a plain: hundreds of German helmets still lay about, but all bodies had been buried; and soon the grass would grow over the many thousand Germans who

had been slaughtered here.

Next came several lines of trenches—these had been German trenches till March 5.

Having crossed these shattered German lines, we flew for many miles over roads that

presented the strangest spectacle. They were cluttered up with thousands of burned-out lorries, and hundreds of tanks and guns which the Germans had abandoned in their

panicky retreat through the mud. And this strange, static procession of burned-out

vehicles stretched all the way to Uman.

After about two hours in the U-2 we landed on Uman airfield. Here were several wrecked German planes, and, at the far end of the field, the enormous steel skeleton of a burned-out German transport plane, a Junkers 323.

The Major talked about his boss, General Konev. "Konev", he said, "is an old soldier. He fought in Siberia during the Civil War. There he organised partisan bands, then brigades, finally divisions; he was political commissar of one of the partisan divisions and

commanded an armoured train which fought against the Japs. Later, armed with a rifle, he took part in the storming of Kronstadt during the Rebellion there in '21. Both in Siberia, and in Kronstadt, he had Fadeyev, the writer, with him; they have remained old friends ever since.

"They call him 'the general who never retreated'. That is, of course, untrue; we all retreated in '41, but Konev less than most, and he was one of the first to counter-attack—

at Yelnia in August '41, and it was also he who advanced further than anyone else in the winter counter-offensive of '41-42.

"You've never met him? He is 48, almost bald and grey-haired. He is broad-shouldered, and can be very stern. But usually there is a gay twinkle in his eyes. Usually he wears glasses and is a great reader. He carries a library with him; he likes to read Livy, and also our classics, whom he loves to quote in conversation—something from Gogol, or

Pushkin, or War and Peace. He lives in a simple peasant hut, and when he travels along the front he wears a cloak so as not to embarrass the soldiers by his presence. He is very austere in his habits; doesn't drink, and objects to others getting drunk. He is very exacting both to himself and others. Of his peace-time hobbies the one he misses most is partridge shooting; he is a great shot. What else can I say about him? He has a smattering of English and can read it fairly easily. He admires Stalin both as a leader and as a writer, and is a strong Party man. I have seen him reading a Stalin Order, and have heard him say: 'That's really first-class. That's the way to write. Everything fits. There is thought behind every word.'" A typical 1944 comment on Konev—and Stalin!

In the next few days I was told by the military authorities at Uman that the total losses the Germans had suffered in the week since Konev's March 5 offensive were: over 600 tanks (250 of them in good condition), 12,000 lorries (most of them destroyed), 650 guns and fifty ammunition and supply stores. In a week the Germans had lost about 20,000 dead, but only 25,000 prisoners; they were still desperately avoiding being taken prisoner. The Russian losses also had been heavy during the breakthrough attempt, but very light since then, with the Germans on the run.

I also remember a very revealing talk I had with an air force colonel during that week at Uman—revealing, because his attitude to the Western Allies—now in March 1944—was

so much warmer than what one had found in the Red Army before. He talked of the way

the air force was supplying the army, as it was advancing "towards Rumania" (the words

"Rumania" and "Mamalyga" were on every soldier's tongue in that part of the world)

[Mamalyga is maize porridge, the staple diet among poorer Rumanians; these were

condescendingly referred to as mamalyzh-niki. i.e. mamalyga-eaters.] ,with food, ammunition and petrol; and then he said:

"The German air force is much weaker now than it used to be. Very occasionally they send fifty bombers over, but usually they don't use more than twenty. There's no doubt that all this bombing of Germany has made a lot of difference to the German equipment, both in the air and on land. Our soldiers realise the importance of the Allied bombings; the British and Americans, they call them 'nashi' —that is 'our' people... A lot of the German fighters now have to operate in the west and we can do a lot of strafing of

German troops, sometimes even without much air opposition." And he added: "Those Kittyhawks and Airocobras are damned good—not like last year's Tomahawks and

Hurricanes—which were pretty useless. But here we mostly use Soviet planes, especially low-flying stormoviks which scare the pants off the Germans..."

The Turbulent Town of Uman— Dostoevskian Bishop and other odd characters

In a way, the small town of Uman was a microcosm of the whole Ukraine. Its population had dropped from 43,000 to 17,000. To live here for a week was to see something of

nearly every aspect of Ukrainian life under the German occupation—except heavy

industry of which there was none for many miles around. Uman was the centre of a large rural area, one of the richest in the Ukraine, noted for its wheat, sugar-beet, maize, fruit and vegetables. Like many other towns in the Ukraine, its population before the war had been about one-quarter Jewish; now you did not see a single Jewish face in the streets.

Half the Jews had escaped to the east in 1941, but the 5,000 who had stayed—children and all—were herded one night into a big warehouse: all the windows and doors were

boarded up and hermetically sealed, and all of them died of suffocation within a couple of days. The Ukrainians in the town did not talk much about it: they seemed to look upon it as rather a routine matter under the Germans. There were now partisans in the town, and there had been a Soviet underground during the occupation. There had also been various kinds of collaborators, and Ukrainian nationalists, and, strangely, the Red Army was still often referred to as "the Bolsheviks" or "the Reds", as though they were something extraneous to this turbulent part of the Ukraine, with its old Petlura and Makhno

traditions.

[Petlura, head of an ephemeral Ukrainian nationalist "Government" in 1918, and Makhno, head of a peasant anarchist movement during the Civil War, were both

notorious for their banditry and anti-Semitic pogroms. Petlura was assassinated by a Jew in Paris in 1928.]

But the biggest obsession was deportation. Nearly 10,000 young people from Uman had

been deported as slave labour. Only few had escaped by joining the partisans, not strong in this part of the Ukraine.

The day we arrived Uman presented a fantastic sight. One large building in the centre of the town was still smouldering. The streets were crammed with burned-out German

vehicles, and were littered with thousands of papers, trodden into the mud: office records, private documents and letters, photographs, and also whole bundles of well-printed

coloured leaflets in Ukrainian exalting the "German-Ukrainian Alliance". One said

"Down with Bolshevism" and showed a manly hand in a green sleeve tearing down a red flag with the hammer-and-sickle; another showed a German soldier shaking hands with

another person in an unrecognisable pearl-grey uniform. "Our alliance will give happiness to all the nations of Europe"; still another called "Oath to the Fatherland"

showed a crowd of gallant horsemen raising their arms to heaven and swearing: "None will lay down his arms while our Ukraine is enslaved by the Bolsheviks "

[ These leaflets were apparently part of one of the half-baked attempts to set up an anti-Russian and pro-Nazi "Ukrainian Army" along Vlasov lines. These attempts came to little, and it was not till the end of 1944, when Bandera, Melnik and other Ukrainian

"nation-

alists" were liberated by the Germans, that they encouraged something of an anti-Soviet guerrilla war in the Western Ukraine, which was to last till 1947. There had, of course, been isolated anti-Soviet guerrilla bands before that, some independent of the Germans. It was one such band that assassinated General Vatutin near Kiev in March 1944. At the

end of the war, a number of SS officers took part in this Ukrainian guerrilla war against the Soviets. Bandera was released by the Germans in September 1944 and Melnik a

month later. (See Dahin, op. cit., p. 624.)]

Among all this rubble, in a vacant space between two houses, lay a dead German soldier

—a young lad, of not more than eighteen, with the face of a sleeping child. But his belly had been crushed— probably by some vehicle in the mad stampede which had

accompanied the Germans' panicky flight from Uman.

A standing joke was one of a German general driving out of Uman on a rickety old farm tractor with a camel-like movement, one of the few vehicles able to cope with the deep mud.

There were very few people in the streets of Uman that day; they still seemed frightened to come out after all the firing during the previous days, and there were no militia in the streets, but, instead, weird figures on foot or on horseback—men with high fur caps, with red ribbons attached. Many were wearing German army overcoats. These were partisans

from the neighbourhood. I talked to some of them. One, a young fellow in a blood-

stained German overcoat, told a long story of how he had been arrested and tortured by the SD; how he had then escaped to the partisans, how the Germans had then murdered

his wife, who had stayed at Uman. He said this with an uncanny calm. "There were lots of traitors in this town," he said; "and the worst was the chief hangman of the SD, a bastard called Voropayev; but now the NKVD have got him under lock and key. We'll

see that he gets hanged all right."

Another of the partisans was a fat man, clean-shaven with a greasy cap on the back of his head: he might well have come straight out of a pub in Leeds or Manchester. He had

worked at the railway depot at Uman as the chief liaison man with the partisans—"We are helping the Soviet authorities," he said, "to catch all the spies and traitors".

*

Major Kampov and I stayed at an improvised Russian officers' hostel, and saw a

wonderful variety of people at Uman during that week. The house had been inhabited by German officers until a few days before, and a good search had been made for mines and booby-traps; one had been found inside the tinny old piano; if anyone had struck one of the keys, it would have popped off.

The next day there were not only many soldiers, but also rather more civilians than before in the streets of Uman, with its small, nondescript, mostly ex-Jewish houses in the centre, and its more pleasant Ukrainian thatched cottages with gardens on the outskirts. I mixed with a large crowd of civilians who had come to the main square for the military funeral of a Russian tank-crew. Almost the sole subject of conversation was deportation to

Germany. Practically all the young people in the town had been deported. The technique of deportation varied from time to time; in some places, the Germans had started by

offering tempting labour contracts; once a few dozen people had fallen for the offer, the rest were mobilised compulsorily. But there were ways of dodging deportation—if one

was lucky and wealthy enough to be able to bribe a German doctor or a German official.

There was much corruption among the Germans. Self-mutilation was also fairly

commonly practised to avoid deportation.

I also heard stories of Russian Cossacks serving under the Germans. They were a bad lot.

A few days before the Germans evacuated Uman, some of these Cossacks—so the story

went—were let loose, and looted part of the town, and raped several girls; they were said to have been wearing Red Army uniforms and the Germans said they were a Russian

advance unit. One theory was that the Germans wanted the population to be terrorised at the thought of the Russians' coming, and to flee to the west.

The Gestapo and SD had been very active in Uman. The Jews had all been murdered; but the Gestapo had also been active among non-Jewish civilians; later, I went to see the field outside the prison, and here were the fresh bodies of some seventy or eighty civilians whom the Germans had shot before leaving Uman. Among them were a lot of ordinary

peasants and peasant women, suspected of, and imprisoned for, "partisan" activity; among the dead bodies I also saw a little girl of six, still with a cheap little ring on her finger. She must have been shot so that she wouldn't tell. I also saw the Gestapo H.Q.

with hideous instruments—such as a hard-wood truncheon with which prisoners' hands

were smashed during interrogation.

We spent one evening at the Town Soviet. What a strange assembly of people were round the supper table! Mayor—i.e. Chairman of the City Soviet—Zakharov, a small palefaced man, with dark hair brushed back, had been one of the chief partisan leaders of the

Ukraine. He had been wounded three times; here also was the former Bishop of

Taganrog; and a doctor, a typical old-time intellectual, with a little beard and glasses, looking rather like Chekhov; and an elderly woman teacher, and a stout clean-shaven

man in a semi-military tunic, who looked a typical Party man, but who declared himself to be a banker. "A banker!" I said, "how do you mean?" Yes, he was a banker all right; he was the head of the Moldavian branch of the Soviet State Bank; and now that the Red

Army was beyond the Bug and would soon be in Bessarabia, he was expecting soon to

take up his former duties again.

The Mayor was not an Ukrainian, but a Russian. He had been appointed Mayor by the

military—"subject to the population's subsequent approval." It made me wonder whether the Army did not prefer to see real Russians in responsible administrative jobs in large Ukrainian towns, immediately they recaptured them, rather than Ukrainians—who might

be more tolerant of the frailties of Ukrainian human nature. Was it a coincidence that in Uman, and before that in Kharkov, and after that, in Odessa., the Mayor should have been a Russian? Yet, in the purely Russian town of Voronezh, the Mayor was an Ukrainian.

In the Ukraine, with only small forests, the Mayor said, the partisans could operate only in small groups; the largest of the five groups he had organised were two of 200 to 300

men each, operating in the Vinnitsa forests. They had their wireless receiving sets, and they multigraphed leaflets with Soviet war news for distribution in the towns and

villages. They were short of arms, and as a general rule they accepted no one without arms; volunteers were told to join the Ukrainian police force, obtain as many arms and as much ammunition as possible, and then come back. The Vinnitsa partisans had had many bloody battles with both German punitive expeditions and Cossacks, and, compared with Belorussia and other more wooded parts of the country, their casualties were very heavy.

Working round Uman was particularly difficult, because there were hardly any forests around here. Nevertheless, the five units had succeeded in derailing forty-three trains with military equipment in 1943 alone, and had other daring exploits to their credit.

Being wounded in July 1941, Zakharov said, he had been unable to follow the Red Army, and had been taken prisoner by the Germans. But he escaped and came to Uman, which

was already under German occupation; he had arrived in October 1941, and, since then, he had been "working for the good of his country." In 1942 he was arrested by the Gestapo and savagely beaten and injured in the spine; "so I know how the Gestapo question people". He was later released, and disappeared for a while, appearing afterwards at Vinnitsa, complete with a beard and priestly robes. For long intervals he would vanish to the woods where the partisans knew him as "Uncle Mitya".

"It was a hard and grim life", he said, "they were merciless and so were we. And we shall be merciless with the traitors now." He spoke in a soft, rather tired voice. "It's no use crying in wartime," he remarked. "Though there were not many of us, we still managed to worry the Germans a lot; in the smaller towns and the villages round Vinnitsa, we would put up notices at night saying: 'You are the bosses from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.; we are the bosses from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and you are forbidden to come out of your houses.' And, by heaven, they usually obeyed the order; and when they didn't they were often sorry..."

As for life in the town of Uman during the occupation it was, on a small scale, much what I had already seen in Kharkov—the virtual abolition of schools, and a great deterioration in the health services; the number of clinics was cut down by three-quarters. Most of the small workshops had disappeared with the killing of the Jews. The one important industry of the town, the large sugar refinery, had been destroyed by the Germans. It was urgent to restore it. In one respect though, it was very different from Kharkov; in this rich

agricultural area, there was always sufficient food to keep people more or less alive.

I asked Zakharov about the agricultural policy and administration.

[ The best and most detailed account we have on the German agricultural policy in the Ukraine will be found in Alexander Dallin's German Rule in Russia. This shows that the underlying policy was exploitation pure and simple, and that the attempt to depart from the kolkhoz system and make other concessions to the peasants so that they should produce more were either very half-hearted or were sabotaged by Untermensch maniacs like Erich Koch, the German overlord of the Ukraine. What with future plans for

colonising the Ukraine with Germans, the Ukrainian peasants' distrust of the Germans was complete.]

On the whole, the Germans considered this part of the Ukraine very much their granary, and they had done all they could to keep agriculture going. They had not split up the farms; or rather, for propaganda purposes, they had, in some parts, distributed the land among the peasants on one collective farm in a hundred, with the implication that this would also be done on the other farms sooner or later. They had made various other

promises, but no one trusted them, and meantime they stuck to the kolkhoz organisation as being the easiest to handle. The cultivation in the main had not been as thorough as before the war, because there weren't enough tractors, even with those the Germans had imported; the peasants often had to plough the fields with horses and even cows; but two things had assured a good sowing of winter wheat: the rubber truncheon of the German officials, and much more so, the solid belief that the Russians, and not the Germans, would reap the harvest in 1944... Revolting conditions existed in many villages. The starosta was appointed by the Germans—he might have been a good man, or a bad man, or simply a weak man; but above him there was always an SS chief. "There's one village I know," said Zakharov, "and it's not the only one of its kind—where the SS man would order the starosta to supply him with girls every night, including young girls of thirteen or fourteen."

"Here at Uman we had three Gebietskommissars in succession: the Gebietskommissar was the Chief for the civilian population. He was assisted by a number of SS officers.

Then there was the Military Kommandatur; then there was the agricultural chief for the area, the Landwirtschaftsführer, a brute called Botke, who on his day off would go to the prison to watch, and take part in, the examination and torture of prisoners; he was a real sadist. The Burgomaster of Uman was a Volksdeutscher [ German-speaking and of German descent, though not of German nationality.] called Gensch, and he had an

Ukrainian assistant called Kwiatkiwski. The police were composed of the Gestapo, the S.D., and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force. Into this they simply mobilised people; some of the Ukrainian police immediately escaped and joined the partisans, with the

firearms they had received, or had managed to take. The Ukrainian policemen who have stayed behind—though the Germans tried to get most of them away, whether they wanted to or not—will be individually examined. Some of them undoubtedly worked for their

country, though in German service; but those who were traitors shall be treated

accordingly".

"There seems to have been a lot of contradictory orders as regards Right Bank Ukraine,"

the Mayor said. "I know of three orders: the first was 'don't destroy'—it came from Hitler himself at a time when the Germans were still confident they would recover all the

ground lost on the Right Bank; then there was a second order, from one of the generals of the 8th Army, which said 'destroy'; and since then, there has been a third one, again saying 'Don't'. I don't know who is responsible for this one. So they may still have a few illusions left; but they can't last long now! In the towns, however, they have always tried to destroy at least the main buildings; you'll have seen something of that here in Uman; they were in a devil of a hurry here, so most of the damage is limited to the big buildings on the outskirts, especially near the airfield. And, of course, there's also the power-station which nearly everywhere is among the first things to go... "

By far the most colourful of the Mayor's guests that night was the priest, the Archierei, i.e. the Bishop of Taganrog, a bishop of the "black" or monastic clergy. He was a handsome man, with a whimsical look in his eyes, rosy cheeks and a blond, silky beard.

He was certainly a bit of a rogue.

He drank vodka like a Hero of the Soviet Union on leave, but carried it remarkably well, except that his humour grew more whimsical and crazy as the evening went on. Heaven

knows what he really thought at the back of his mind as he sat there, the guest of honour at the Bolshevik Mayor's supper table. He must have chuckled to himself at the thought of it; in fact, his whole conversation was like one unceasing chuckle. "Ah," he said, "the morning the Red Army walked into Uman, and some of the dear boys came into my

house, and embraced me and asked me for a drink, I brought out a bottle of vodka, and, believe it or not, I drank to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin! Drank to him for the first time in my wicked life! That's what the Germans did to me!" he chuckled gaily. "They made me face death three times; I spent sixty-six days in jail because I wouldn't knuckle under them; not I! But they're terrible people, and if you don't wish to perish, you have to keep your wits about you. Now look at this," he said, pointing at his enormous diamond cross,

"do you think they would have let me keep this if they had seen it? Not they—not the thieves and robbers that they are. Why, it's worth, I am told, well over a hundred

thousand roubles. I received it five years ago from the Patriarch Sergei himself. I hid it in a nice cosy safe place as soon as the Germans came; I wasn't going to take any chances with this precious cross Sergei had given me as a token of his esteem."

"I had a lot of trouble with the Germans, I can tell you," he said, "I really suffered for my country. How I adore the Red Army!" he cried, and, bending over the shoulder of the major sitting beside him, he kissed the epaulette with a loud voluptuous smack. "You don't mind, Comrade Major, do you? Let me kiss it again!" (Gosh, I thought to myself, the old buffoon, Father Karamazov come to life again!) I also thought for a moment the Major would resent this piece of buffoonery, but he took it like a man, and merely

laughed. "Oh, I know", the High Priest went on, "the Germans pretended they were great Christians; they opened five churches in this town of Uman—but what for? For German

propaganda, for un-Christian, heathen propaganda. And when they saw that it had no

effect, they turned against the church. The men of the Kommandatur would break into the church during Divine Service, and they carried rubber truncheons. They were afraid of our Russian nationalism. What quarrels, what arguments we had with them! They

expected us to recognise the Metropolitan Serafim of Berlin—a Nazi, I tell you. But they said he was the real head of the Russian Church and declared that that holy man the

Patriarch Sergei was—I hardly can repeat it—an impostor, who had been appointed by

Stalin. 'No', I said, 'he has not been appointed by Stalin, but by the Metropolitans. ..' 'Oh', they said, 'they're just a small group of impostors, a bunch of Kremlin stooges... ' I said,

'No, the Patriarch of Moscow is the only Head I can recognise'. But these arguments

really started later. At first, I must say that, to my eternal shame, I thought I could take advantage of the Germans' arrival, and open a few churches at Taganrog—for at that time I was still at Taganrog. They sounded encouraging at first—no use denying it. Only, my troubles soon started. I was told that I was expected to make a speech to the faithful, denouncing the Moscow Patriarch and accepting the authority of their Berlin

Metropolitan. They even said I should say prayers for a German victory. I failed to do either, and was, of course, duly reported, and ordered to go to Rostov, where I was hauled over the coals by a big German chief, who said: 'Look here, Your Eminence, if you think the German Army needs your prayers, you are quite wrong. But don't make any mistake

about it; we give good marks to those who do pray for us, and bad marks to those who do not. And, he added, 'the bad marks can be very bad indeed'. What a nasty, horrid man he was! "

For a long time there was no serious trouble, but then, suddenly, he was ordered to leave Taganrog for Kakhovka, in the Ukraine, where the Germans again brought pressure to

bear on him, this time in real earnest. They wanted him as "an Ukrainian Bishop" to make a public denunciation of the Patriarch Sergei, and to write a long article which the papers throughout the Ukraine would publish. Again he chuckled into his blond silky beard. "I wrote them an article—it made their hair stand on end! So they simply locked me up—

they locked me up in a dark cell without a window; and they starved me, and often left me for a whole day without water. I stayed in that cell for sixty-six days and nights... And as I sat there in the dark, hungry and thirsty, I kept saying to myself: 'I am doing the right thing. How can I not recognise the Patriarch who gave me my diamond cross? How can I not recognise Stalin? He gave me my passport.' And I said to myself: 'No, I shall not work for the enemies of my people, even if it costs me my life'."

It was not quite clear how and why he was let out in the end; but it seems that he was deprived of his large church, and given only a small church at Uman. He had one more argument with the Germans, though, and quite recently. "One day the Gebietskommissar called for me, and said: 'Now what do you make of this? The Archbishop of York has

visited Moscow.' (The German papers were, indeed, full of it.) 'What do you make of the Anglo-Saxons and the Bolsheviks conquering Europe? ' I said I did not make anything of it. I tried to sound as simple as I could, and I said: 'Whatever happens, it will be the will of God'. The Gebietskommissar got very angry and said: 'I am not asking for any emotional utterances from you... I want you to think in a rational spirit.' I said he could not expect me to be too rational; I was a Priest, and therefore whatever God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, decided, was good enough for me.' And I quoted to him the Lord's Prayer—'Thy will be done.' He didn't like it, and told me to go to hell." And, with a chuckle, he added: "Fancy telling a Bishop to go to Hell!"

I asked what he was going to do now. "Now", he cried, "now I shall be happy... Happy and frightened..." "Why frightened?" "Ooh! I am frightened, frightened of the Patriarch", he squealed, becoming more and more Dostoyevskian in his buffoonery. "Ooh! He is such a great man. Such a powerful mind. Do you know that his skull is sixty-three

centimetres in circumference? A great brain. After all", he explained in a dramatic whisper, "I did work with the Germans; oh, only a teeny-weeny bit, but I worked with them all the same... It's true, I refused to pray for a Hitler victory; nor did I write the article that they demanded from me denouncing the Moscow Patriarch... But still I am frightened. Sergei—he is such a disciplinarian! But I am not frightened of Joseph Vissarionovich, who knows I am loyal. He, in Ms infinite wisdom knows that I am not

like the Bishop of Vinnitsa. He escaped to Germany by plane; they even took some cattle away by plane. They took sheep and bishops away by air!" He giggled, and repeated

"Sheep and Bishops!" And, turning to the Mayor, he said: "I know you'll agree with me that Joseph Vissarionovich will not be angry with me... But Sergei, oh I am frightened of that great, grand old man! But perhaps his great heart will soften when he learns that I had to live in hiding the last three weeks the Germans were here. And I also want to write a little book which will be a devastating answer to the foul and libellous book that was written by a Volksdeutscher called Albrecht, about our Orthodox Church, and I want to print on the cover a large black serpent with a swastika on its tail... But I shall atone for my sins. I shall serve my country, great Mother Russia, and her great Soviet Government, and pray for them as long as I live... And so, for the second time in my sinful life, let me drink with you all to our great leader Stalin! "

We drank to Stalin. Our host and the others listened to all this with tolerant amusement.

The Archierei was a typical case, an average case. He was no hero, but he had not

"collaborated" wholeheartedly; that, at least, was fairly clear. Everybody understood that, in the past, he could have had but little love for the Soviet regime, and one had to make allowances for this. He had, for a short time, taken advantage of the Germans' apparent desire to encourage the revival of the Orthodox Church, but had soon realised that they were only out for their own ends.

The roads continued to be rivers of mud, but one morning the Major wangled a

Studebaker in which we drove to the Bug, west of Uman. Though the Red Army was well

beyond the Bug, on its way to Rumania, there were many people on the road: soldiers

who were wading through the mud towards the Bug, and they were jovial and in high

spirits; and new labour battalions of peasants who were being sent to repair the railway, and who were not looking too pleased to be dragged away from their farms; and, lastly, new army recruits, who were going to Uman to report for service in the Red Army—now

that, with the liberation of this part of the Ukraine, they had become available. Some of these looked singularly unenthusiastic; "however," said the Major, "they'll soon get used to the idea when they see so many of their fellow-Ukrainians, with high decorations, in the Red Army." There was no doubt, he said, that the German occupation had

demoralised many people in this part of the country, and while they hated the Germans, they had also lost much of their "soviet-consciousness" and had become parochial in their outlook.

We stopped in one or two villages; they had not suffered much from the war; nor had

more than two Germans ever been stationed there; nevertheless the German officials

regularly came on a weekly inspection, and slackness and absenteeism were severely

dealt with; a German surveyor with a whip travelled around the fields in a brichka and threw his weight about. In case of any trouble the police were called for. Suspected slackers were beaten up. Proportionately, there were much fewer deportations to

Germany from these villages than from the towns; the food deliveries were rigorously exacted, and the peasants said that in fact the whole output of the kolkhoz was taken by the Germans, and they themselves had to live on whatever their "individual" plots yielded; however, in summer, most of the perishable fruit and vegetables were left to them, too, as the Germans did not have enough transport to take them away. The

Germans had made vague promises of splitting up the land among the peasants after the war, but there were few illusions on that score.

This part of the Ukraine had been treated as an important source of food for Germany.

Even so, the area under cultivation was only eighty percent of pre-war; but even this was better than the country round Kharkov, where I had been in the previous summer, and

where only forty percent of the land had been cultivated. About two months before the Germans left, they started taking much of the livestock to Germany. This, of course, created much anti-German feeling. Even so, and even despite the deportations, many

peasants were aloof and seemed indifferent to what was happening; it was clear that the Soviets—or "the Reds", as the peasants here called them—would have a job to develop a proper "soviet-consciousness" among these people. As Kampov said: "They lived reasonably well under the occupation; for the sly Ukrainian peasant is the greatest

virtuoso in the world at hiding food. He always hid it from us; you can imagine how

much better still he hid it from the Germans! And now that the Germans have

disappointed them, they hope that maybe we shall scrap the kolkhozes. But we won't... "

Ukrainian Deportees

Nearly four million Ostarbeiter from the Soviet Union—most of them from the Ukraine

—were deported as slave labour to Germany; and, in the Ukraine, this was No. 1

grievance against the Germans. Not only the deportations themselves but, even more so perhaps, the way in which they were carried out.

In Uman, I had long talks with two local girls, Valya and Galina, who had managed to return from deportation. Valya, a dark little girl of twenty, must have been pretty only two years before, but now was broken, and looked like a frightened little animal. To get away from Germany she had put her hand under a flax-cutting machine and had all four fingers cut off.

"On February 12, 1942, at two in the morning, the Ukrainian police came, followed by some German gendarmes in green uniform, and I was taken away under escort to School

No. 4. From there, together with a lot of other girls, we were taken at 5 a.m. to the railway station, and packed into goods wagons—seventy of us...

"After a very long journey we got to some town, where we were put in a camp, all the women were made to strip and were sent to be deloused. Then, before reaching Munich, we were taken to a village called Logow. There we lived in a camp, until a manufacturer arrived, and he took us all to a flax-combing factory. We lived there in a barracks

attached to the factory—it was really a sort of camp too. A little farther away, lived some French and Belgian war prisoners; and in another part of the camp were some Polish and Jewish girls. I stayed in this place seven and a half months. We got up at five in the morning, and, without food, we went on working till two in the afternoon. Then we

would get two spoonfuls of boiled turnip and a slice of bread, which included sawdust and other substitutes. After that another shift came on, and it worked until eleven or twelve o'clock. For an evening meal we received three or four small baked potatoes and a cup of ersatz coffee; that was all the food we ever got.

"The Germans in the factory were very brutal. I was once beaten by a German woman. It was when I told her that the machine was out of order. She slapped my face and punched me, as if it was my fault. Another time when the machine went wrong, the foreman also hit me, saying I was a 'verdammte Bolshevik'. He hit and hit me again, and I cried.

"There was so much flax-dust in the place, they had to keep the electric light on all day. It was a terribly depressing place. We received no money at all. I was so sick of all this, of the dust, and the bad food, and the beatings, and my clothes that were all going to pieces, because they would not give us any work clothes, and all the insults, and all the

'verdammte Bolshevik' and that cold, contemptuous air with which the Germans talked to us and looked at us, as though we weren't real people, that my nerves began to go to pieces. There was some wild garlic growing outside, and we used to pick it, and rub our gums with it, because we were all developing scurvy, and our teeth were beginning to fall out; but the Director once arrived and said it was verboten to chew garlic because he could not stand the stink. At the railway station one day—we were made to unload coal once a week—there was another row over the garlic; one of the foremen, seeing me

chewing garlic, kicked me in the shins, and hit me over the face; but the other girls began to scream at him; so he stopped. I was so sick at heart, I wanted to throw myself under the train that day; but I remembered my parents, and I felt sorry for them. I sometimes thought I might get one of the Belgians or Frenchmen to make me pregnant, because

sometimes they sent pregnant girls home. But the very thought of it revolted me; was I an animal to have a child from a stranger? I was a virgin, and what would my parents say if I came home to them in that condition?

"I did not throw myself under a train; and yet, as the days went on, I grew more and more desperate. I knew that if I did not do something, I should die a slow death. And then, one morning, without premeditation, I did it. It just occurred to me in a flash. I was working on a machine, with a great knife going up and down and cutting the flax threads. And, almost without thinking, I suddenly put my hand under the knife. I did not lose

consciousness; I was still quite tough then; I only shut my eyes, and then, when it

happened, I was frightened to look. Then I called for the German woman working next to me; and she screamed and ran for the foreman; he was a fat fair-haired man, about thirty-eight and very deaf, and she took some time to explain what had happened. He came

rushing along, and I was taken off to the infirmary, where they made me a tourniquet and bandaged me up. The foreman was very worried; some kind of commission was expected

that day to come and inspect the place, and he thought he might get into trouble. Some Frenchmen and Belgians then led me to our barracks; I was nearly unconscious by the

time we got there. The Director had still not been informed. The foreman went to him to report; and the Director ordered that an ambulance be sent for which would take me to the hospital in Munich, about ten miles away. It was almost a pleasure to be in the

hospital. My hand hurt me; but I was put in a clean bed, with white bed-linen. They did not give me much food, but what I got was nice and tasty. I stayed there about a month; then the Director asked that I be sent back to the factory. He urged me to stay on; said that he would appoint me one of the managers of the camp; I don't know exactly what he was up to, I think he wanted to avoid paying my fare to the Ukraine. For four months he kept me there.

Finally, I was sent home by the Munich Arbeitsamt (Labour Office). It was by pure accident that this happened. One day when I was going to Munich for a dressing, I talked to a German woman who advised me to go to the Arbeitsamt. She was a kind woman, and even paid my fare, and told me exactly where to go. There, at the Arbeitsamt, they gave me a paper, and the police took me off to the station the next day and put me in a goods carriage along with several other Ukrainians. At the factory, the night before I left, the Director seemed much annoyed, but said nothing. I was given a pailful of boiled turnips, and a loaf of bread, and the people in the camp gave me their day's ration, and a few odds and ends they had saved up. But during many days, on that long journey, I had nothing to eat.

Now that I think of it, I realise that for two months they had not paid me anything; and later they paid me seventy pfennigs a week. And when we said to the foreman who was

paying out the money: 'Why so little?' he would shout ' Ruhig'. ('Be quiet!')... God, how they tormented us", Valya said, almost with a shudder. "It was so bitterly insulting, the way these people behaved to us. They looked at us with such contempt. Why? I ask you, Why? Was that the kind of life I was preparing for? I was growng up happily, in our

Ukraine. Why should my life have been broken like this?" And then, as an afterthought:

"There was another girl in the factory, and she decided to follow my example. But the Germans guessed this time that it had been done deliberately; and she was not allowed to go home. So she lost her hand for nothing."

Galina Ivanovna's experience was very similar to Valya's—yet she was, temperamentally, an entirely different woman, and, in a way, more typically Ukrainian with her sarcastic humour, and her singular contempt for the Germans "who did not know what good food was until they got to the Ukraine."

She was small and perky and fair, with the perfect comedian's face, with lively blue eyes and a little turned-up nose. She laughed a great deal, but it was not a kindly laugh; she was a mimic and satirist. She wore a pale-blue dress and a cocky little hat with a feather.

She was about thirty, and physically slightly faded, which was not surprising after all she had gone through. She had been an actress before the war in the First Kolkhoz Theatre in Kiev, where she played small parts in Ukrainian peasant comedies. She quoted a few bits from her parts, but never got very far with them... "Oh dear, I've just forgotten everything", she said, "It seems such ages ago since I was an actress in Kiev... An actress", she repeated with a bitter little laugh. "Being a putzfrau (charwoman) is now more in my line of business. My husband used to be one of the stage managers at the

theatre. Now he's somewhere in the Red Army. I haven't heard from him for years... He's from Uman."

Galina Ivanovna had been in Germany, and her story is the story of millions of Europeans

—with variations. "The real trouble", she began, "started here in Uman when a German called Graf Spretti arrived here in February '42 to recruit labour.

[He is mentioned in the Nuremberg Trial as one of Sauckel's recruiting officers.]

The Germans announced a big meeting at the Cinema. A lot of us went there, just to see what it was all about. So Spretti said: 'I want you people of Uman to go voluntarily to Germany to help the German army.' And he promised us the moon. But we had a fair idea of how much such promises were worth, so we said: 'But what if we don't want to go? '

Then Graf Spretti gave us a dirty look and said: Tn that case you will be politely

requested to go all the same.' That was on February 10 and two days later they started rounding up people in a house-to-house search—the police, armed with rifles, would go from one house to the other and collect the younger people. We were taken to a big

school, and at five o'clock in the morning we were taken to the railway station; we were put in railway carriages, and these were locked up. Some of the people had some food with them, and it was shared. We were told that we'd be fed at Lwow, but when we got there, we were given nothing at all, not even water.

"We stopped there at the railway station for a whole night, and then we went on to Przemysl. At Przemysl the Germans unlocked the carriages, and started examining our

luggage."

"What kind of carriages were they?" I asked.

"What kind?" she said, almost surprised at my question. "Just ordinary goods carriages; we all sat or lay on the floor; there were no benches. There were about sixty or seventy people to a carriage. Anyway, as I was saying, they came to examine our luggage at

Przemysl. 'What do you want all this luggage for?' the Germans said. 'There's any amount of stuff you can buy in Germany—fancy taking all these filthy clothes to Germany.' So they took away nearly all the clothes we had, and all the heavier luggage, and left us with just small bundles... "

The whole journey, which lasted a month, was a nightmare. In a camp near Przemysl,

where they were kept for a fortnight, they were given hardly any food. Several of the girls fell ill, and a few died. Then, in Western Germany, they were taken to another camp; here at least there were some Britis;h and French prisoners who would throw them some food over the fence.

"The friendliness of the English and French", Galina said, "cheered us up a little bit. They would throw us bits of chocolate and some kind of wafers—very nice they were, with

sweet little seeds inside them. We always thought the English, French and Russians were all very different people, but it turned out that we are all much the same. Only the Germans are different.

"And then, women and factory managers, and all sorts of people arrived one day at the camp. We were lined up in the snow—four rows of us—and these people kept walking

up and down and inspecting us. So two hundred of us were picked by one of the factory managers, and we were taken by train to a barracks, with barred windows—the place was inside the factory grounds in a small town near Ulm. We were received there by a bunch of gendarmes, who said: 'Aha, Kommunisten' '. This place was much worse than the other camp. Before going to work we stayed in the barracks for three days, with only raw

turnips and raw potatoes to eat, and one only nibbled at it, it was no use trying to eat a lot of the stuff... But at least there were bunks of sort to sleep on—hard and filthy, but still bunks...

"Later, they began to heat the stove, so we were at least able to cook what little food there was. On the fourth day we were taken to work. It used to be a hat factory; now they made helmet linings, or rather the sort of caps worn under the helmet. They made them of

rabbit skins. We were given no gloves and our shoes also were falling to pieces. Our hands got into a terrible condition with handling those rabbit skins and treating them in some kind of acid." Galina Ivanovna showed her hands; they were small and well-shaped, but they looked scarred and the flesh round the nails seemed to have been eaten away.

"Yes," she went on, "I lived in that factory barracks for eight months and twenty days; and to give you an idea of the condition in which we girls were, I'll say something which may seem indelicate—but I hope you'll understand. 180 girls were working there, and

most of them didn't have what girls have every month; the barracks were thirty yards away from the factory, and we never got outside the factory grounds, except on our 'day off'. We were under constant guard.

"We worked ten or twelve hours a day, and on our 'day off' we were always taken to the goods station to unload railway trucks. We were made to wear an 'Ost' badge—a blue

badge with white lettering—but were never allowed to go into town. They actually

charged us fifty pfennigs for the badge. For seven days' work we received one mark

twenty pfennigs, and for fifty pfennigs we bought Sprudel—soda water—there was

nothing else we could buy. I remembered now how Graf Spretti had told us that we'd

wear silk stockings, and have 100 marks a week. At first when we arrived, we were

promised new clothes and blankets; all we got was one blanket each, and once a fortnight they'd give us a tiny bit of soap with which to wash ourselves and wash our clothes. In our part of the barracks there were 180 girls, but in the other parts of the building there were 200 more women, all Ukrainians, or from Kursk, and 200 lads, from fifteen to

twenty-three. What they gave us to eat was blue cabbage, turnips and sometimes some

spinach, and 100 grammes per day of margarine to cook the stuff in—100 grammes for

100 people, that is, one gramme per day. Really nourishing, what! In other buildings there were Czechs and Poles and Greeks, and Belgians, and Frenchmen. We weren't

allowed to speak to them— but we did all the same.

"The Poles and the French were better off than we were. They received twenty-five to thirty-five marks a week. The Poles had to wear a badge with a yellow 'P', the Belgians and the French were not expected to wear any badge. No difference was made between

Ukrainians and Russians—both were treated the same. The Belgians and the Czechs, the Frenchmen and the Italians were all very decent to us, and gave us things. The Poles were more aloof. The Italians spoke longingly of macaroni.

"We used to meet the other girls in the lavatory, and there we'd talk—talk in bad German.

One day one of the Italian girls said to me: 'You are even unluckier than we are. They say you are being treated like this because you are Communists. But, believe me, we are far more Communist than you are. Come on, let's sing the International. And there, in the ladies' lavatory, the two of us softly sang the International, each to her own words.

"We once even threatened a hunger strike when the food had become altogether

impossible, and we were developing scurvy so that our hands and arms swelled and our eyebrows started falling out, and the hair on our heads got all brittle...

"During air raids we were all driven into a big basement covered over with cement, and the door was locked from outside. The Germans went to their own shelter. When the airraid warning started, the chefs, as they were called, came rushing in, brandishing whips, and drove us into the cellar. I lived through seven or eight big raids. One big bomb fell near the cathedral of Ulm, and wrecked the Rathaus, and demolished a small factory

where they made some kind of metal tubing; 120 of our Ukrainians who were working

there, were killed..."

"But what were the Germans like with whom you had to work?" I asked.

Galina Ivanovna merely screwed up her face. "There was one fat German in our factory.

He once came into our barracks, and said: 'Ah, Ukrainian girls,' and said he liked

Ukrainian songs, and would we sing to him. So we said: 'Alright, only we don't get much to eat, and will you give us something if we sing.' So he said yes. So we sang, in the dark miserable barracks, and as we sang the tears trickled down our faces. When we had

finished, he said: 'That was very nice.' And he pulled out a five mark note and asked for three marks change." Galina laughed angrily. "As if he didn't know we had nothing. Still, he insisted, so we scraped together what pfennigs we had, and it came to two marks

thirty. He seemed annoyed it wasn't more, but took the change and went away. "And then," she went on, "there was a foreman who worked in our workshop. He had a tiny bit of ground near our barracks, where he grew vegetables. He was a fat man with a shaved head and a concertina neck. What a fuss he made of his plot! He managed to grow a

sunflower, and in case the sparrows picked at it, he put a pair of old pants over it; honest to God, he did. So I said to him one day: 'In our country we grow sunflowers by the mile, how many pairs of old pants do you think we'd need if we used your agricultural

methods? There wouldn't be enough pants in the whole of Germany... ' He looked kind of sheepish."

"Bah", said Galina, "these Germans—they're really unlike all other people. Now the French—they're quite different. We used to see them on Sundays at the goods station. We used to talk to them. And some of our girls went further than talking. The point is that if a Ukrainian girl gets pregnant, she is sent home. There was a dark shed behind one of the large piles of coal, and there some of our girls would go in the evening and make love with the French. God knows, they were so hungry and worn-out, they didn't really want to make love, but they hoped they might get pregnant. And the French were friendly—

real comrades. There was one Frenchman I knew, who managed to escape from the

factory. The night before he escaped, he said to me: 'There's a little corner near the stove in the workshop, and I'll leave you a note—try to pick it up tomorrow morning.' I went and looked for the note, and I found it, and with it were three bars of chocolate. The note said: 'This is all I've got. Good luck to you. I have run away. I hope they don't catch me.'

They didn't catch him, though they sent the police all over the place. None of us said we knew anything. There was this strange solidarity among all of us non-Germans; a real fellow-feeling, a common hatred of the Fritz... And that feeling that we were not alone kept us going for a time, in spite of everything... But my health was becoming so bad that I felt that if I stayed on much longer, I should fall ill and die. And I did not want to die.

There was an Austrian there called Hans, who worked in our workshop. He showed me a

pamphlet about Thael-mann and said: 'Although Thaelmann is a German, he is a good

man.' I said I doubted whether any German could be a good man. He gave me a queer

look and for a moment I wondered if he wasn't a provocateur. Then I said: 'Oh God, what do I care, anyway? I want to go away, back home, and if I don't, I'll just vergift myself, poison myself...' Then Hans said: 'You won't betray me, will you? Here are six

cigarettes'—and he slipped them into my hand—'Boil them, and let the infusion wait for an hour, and then drink it. It will give you a bad heart, and they may send you home. But don't give me away.' I did as he told me, but I was in such poor health that my stomach couldn't take it, and I was sick. I told him what had happened and he gave me six more cigarettes, telling me to try again. This time it was successful. It gave me terrible palpitations, and I was in a state of complete physical collapse. There were moments when I thought I'd die. I was taken to hospital. They x-rayed me three times, and decided my heart was so bad I would either soon die or be a cripple for life, so they gave me a certificate allowing me to go back to the Ukraine. But before that happened, I stayed in hospital for two months and five days. They patched up my hands, which were in a

terrible state, and I had many visitors—there was a Greek girl who came to see me, and two Serbian girls; these were among the best. Altogether the Serbians and the Czechs were the best people of all; the French also were good, for instance Henri, who escaped and left me those three bars of chocolate; he was a real Communist. On the whole, all the foreigners in Germany were terribly decent people, and we had with them a common

language as we never had with any Germans... Well, that's not perhaps quite true; there were two decent Germans I knew during all those months. One was a girl called Frieda.

She knew much more about what was happening in the world than I did. I knew nothing

—except from her. It was she who would tell me about the war in Russia—where the Red Army was. She got very excited at the time the Germans were stopped at Stalingrad. My feeling was that she was a double agent. She pretended to work for the Nazis, but she was also an agent of the Popular Front. She often talked to me, and warned me, and told me to warn the other girls that any Ukrainian girl who was intimate with a Frenchman or any other foreigner was liable to be shot. Frieda was a damn good girl. There was also

another girl called Amalia—I didn't know her so well. But I later learned that both Frieda and Amalia had been shot by the Gestapo. But, in general the Germans are a wicked and crazy people."

Finally Galina returned to Uman, after another harrowing two months' journey. She was a physical wreck by then, and spent three months in bed at the house of some people who had befriended her. After that she took a job as a putzfrau—a cleaner—at a hotel occupied by German officers. But her troubles were not yet over.

She was now faced with a complicated family situation—strangely reminiscent of the

turbulent years of the civil war in the Ukraine, when so many families were divided

against themselves. Her brother Kiril had been a machine-gunner in the Red Army; he

was taken prisoner by the Germans but escaped, and later turned up as a civilian in his native village where he set up shop again as a watchmaker. He had a wife who, before the war, was an active member of the Komsomol. "Three months ago she was arrested and taken away, and rumour had it she was shot", Galina said. "The strange thing was that the starosta had denounced her to the Germans, and when they came, they knew exactly where to find her; for she had been hiding in a cellar for the last month. And from what I have heard from my brother Kiril and also from my mother, there's little doubt that the starosta had learned from my other brother, Fedor, where Kiril's wife was in hiding. For Fedor, though my brother, is a thoroughly bad lot. He was a member of the Ukrainian

polizai, and he must have told the starosta. This bad brother is probably still in hiding in our village; and, if it hasn't been done already, I shall denounce him myself to the Red Commandant... "

(6) The Wail of the German stomach

The German prisoners I saw near Uman were a very mixed bunch. All of them were

bitterly disappointed at having been caught, when most of the Germans had got away

beyond the Bug. The Austrians were already claiming to be "quite different from the Germans", though one I saw had obviously been brought up in the best Nazi tradition.

Then there was one German optimist, a deserter, who had a Ukrainian girl friend who had hidden him during the German withdrawal from Uman. He was now hopefully

wondering whether the Russians wouldn't allow him to settle here in the Ukraine, which he thought a lovely country, and he was also most devoted to his Freundin. Such things do happen even in the best of regiments. But depressed and bewildered though they were by their defeats in the Ukraine, and, of course, personally upset at being taken prisoner by the Russians, with only the remotest prospect of seeing Germany again soon, there was still much fighting spirit left in many of the German soldiers I saw. They were hoping for something—they did not quite know what. Those from the Rhineland were more precise

than the others. The allied bombing had made them angry, rather than downhearted. I

remember a sergeant, Willi Jerschagen, from Remscheid on the Rhine. The town had

been bombed to blazes, and yet his wife and parents were still living there among the ruins. His wife had a job in a steel mill, and had no intention of going away to any other part of Germany. "It'll be the same everywhere, so I might as well stay here," she had written recently.

And the great hope of this woman, and of Willi himself, and of other people of Western Germany was— Vergeltung. The Führer had promised this revenge on England; but they were growing impatient, and the people in Western Germany were now saying: "What about these weapons?" The V-1's over London were, indeed, not to start until a little later.

As the Germans were being pushed out of the Ukraine the songs the Wehrmacht sang

began to have a mournful note. These ditties were very similar, though every regiment seemed to have its own variant. They went like this:—

Nema kurka, nema yaika,

Dosvidania khozyaika; or

Nema pivo, nema vino,

Dosvidania Ukraina; or