Russia at war 1941-1945

It is scarcely surprising that, as the Red Army moved farther and farther west, it became increasingly angry at the sight of all this bestiality and destruction.

The Russians scored two other important military successes at the beginning of 1943: they captured the strategically important Demiansk salient north of Smolensk and, more spectacular, after several days' extremely heavy fighting—with the troops of the

Leningrad Front striking east and those of the Volkhov Front striking west across the German Lake Ladoga salient—the Russians cut a seven-mile-wide gap in the Leningrad

land blockade. It was through this gap, which included the town of Schlüsselburg, that a railway line was built within a few weeks, and so linked Leningrad with the "Mainland".

The trains had to travel through a corridor constantly exposed to German shell-fire, and the journey called for the greatest bravery on the part of the railwaymen. But though frequently shelled, this railway through what came to be known as "the corridor of death"

carried on, and the thought of no longer being entirely cut off by land from the

"mainland" had a very heartening effect on the 600,000 people still living in Leningrad.

The city was, nevertheless, to remain under German shell-fire for another year.

[See Part III.]

All this was satisfactory. Nevertheless, the violent German counter-offensive which

started at the end of February and led to the Russian loss of Kharkov, Belgorod and a large part of the northern Donbas was a disappointing conclusion to the glorious "Winter of Stalingrad".

In his Red Army Day order of February 23 Stalin spoke in glowing terms of the winter offensive, saying that "the mass expulsion of the enemy from the Soviet Union had begun." But he warned the army and the country against excessive optimism—no doubt foreseeing some major setbacks.

The figures he gave for total enemy losses were, as usual, improbably high. In three months, he said, the Germans and their allies had lost 7,000 tanks, 4,000 planes and 17,000 guns; 700,000 enemy soldiers had been killed and 300,000 taken prisoner. Since the beginning of the war, the enemy casualties had amounted to nine million men, among them four million killed. In the Soviet Union things were going much better, both in the army and in industry, whose output of armaments had "enormously increased".

If, Stalin said, the German army was more experienced at first than the Red Army, the opposite was now true. The Red Army had now become a cadres army, and the quality and skill of the Soviet soldier had greatly increased. The German losses, on the other hand, were compelling the German High Command to draw low-quality soldiers into the

army. Also, Russian officers and generals were now superior to their German opposite numbers. The Germans' tactics were banal and when the situation no longer corresponded to one outlined in his Field Regulations, the German officer lost his head.

Yet this did not mean that the German Army was finished:

The German Army has suffered a defeat, but it has not yet been smashed. It is now going through a crisis, but it does not follow that it cannot pull itself together... The real struggle is only beginning... It would be stupid to imagine that the Germans will abandon even one kilometre of our country without a fight.

Stalin's statement was remarkable in two respects: it was a warning to the Red Army that very heavy fighting was still in store; and, as events were to prove before long, the Germans were already on the point of launching their counter-offensive. Russian

reconnaissance must have shown by February 23 that it was coming.

Secondly, of all Stalin's war-time statements, this one was by far the least pro-Ally.

Without mentioning North Africa—where the Allies' progress was admittedly slow at the time—Stalin said that the Soviet Union was "bearing the whole brunt of the war." The compliments he had paid the Allies in November 1942 on their North Africa landing

were not followed up. What they were doing was small stuff compared with Stalingrad

and the rest.

What nettled the British and Americans even more was that, after paying a warm tribute to Soviet industry, Stalin should have made no mention at all of Lend-Lease and other Western supplies which were now beginning to arrive in very substantial quantities,

partly along the newly-reorganised Persian route. It was this Stalin Order of February 23

which was really at the root of the "Standley incident" described in the last chapter.

A strange dual phenomenon was to characterise Soviet foreign policy during the rest of 1943: an almost constantly growing cordiality towards the United States and Britain (all, as it were, in preparation for Teheran at the end of the year) but, at the same time, an extremely "anti-Western" stand on the Polish issue. It already looked as though Stalin, while anxious to cultivate the best possible relations with the Western Allies, had made up his mind that Poland was an issue which the Soviet Union was going to settle her own way. It was the biggest test-case of all; and one, as de Gaulle was to observe during his visit to Moscow at the end of 1944, which was "the principal object of his (Stalin's) passion, and the centre of his policy".

[C. de Gaulle, Salvation, 1944-6 (New York, 1956), p. 74.]

From the end of March until early July there was a relative lull on the Soviet-German Front—in fact the longest lull from then until the end of the war. But both sides were preparing feverishly for the summer campaign which was to begin on July 5 with the

stupendous Battle of Kursk, the last major battle that most (though not all) Germans were still confidently expecting to win—thanks largely to their new Panther and Tiger tanks and Ferdinand mobile guns. Yet within five days the Germans had lost the battle, and the Russians then were able to fight their way to the Dnieper and beyond.

But this long three-months' lull was marked by political events of far-reaching

importance, among them a further rapprochement with Britain and the United States, characterised by such "gestures of goodwill" as the dissolution of the Comintern and, on the other hand, the breach with the Polish Government in London and the laying of the foundations for an entirely new Polish régime.

Chapter VI THE TECHNIQUE OF BUILDING A NEW POLAND

The Breach with the London Poles

Poland occupies the central place in the diplomatic battle between Russia and her

Western Allies—a battle which began long before the war was over. Despite all official attempts to play it down or to localise it, it was the problem which had, since the early part of 1943 (and even before) tended to poison East-West relations.

Throughout the Soviet Union's Battle of Survival of 1941-2, from the invasion to the Stalingrad victory, the Soviet Government had been on its best behaviour—at least most of the time—in its relations with the outside world. There had been a strident outcry, largely for home consumption, for a Second Front during the agonising summer of 1942, but apart from that and the snarling about Hess, the Soviet Union was, in the main, being thoroughly conciliatory in her relations with the West.

The only allied and "friendly" country with whose government relations were continuously strained was Poland. This was, indeed, a very special case. The trouble inevitably went back to the fact that Germany and Russia had "partitioned" Poland in 1939, and that several hundred thousand Poles had been taken prisoner or deported by the Russians; there were Poles scattered all over the Soviet Union; and among these Poles there were numerous war prisoners, including some twelve to fifteen thousand officers and N.C.O.'s.

According to the Polish Government, the officers had been in three large camps—at

Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov until the spring of 1940; but by the end of 1941,

despite pressing inquiries, no trace could be found of any of them, except for some 400

who had been transferred from one of these camps in the spring of 1940 to the camp of Griazovetz, near Vologda.

The fate of these missing officers was to become a major bone of contention between the Russians and the "London" Poles. It was also to provide the basis for one of the master-strokes of Goebbels's propaganda machine—the story of the mass-graves in Katyn forest, near Smolensk, which we shall discuss later in this chapter.

Under the terms of the Sikorski-Maisky Agreement of July 30, 1941, concluded in

London, diplomatic relations between the two Governments were restored, and a Polish Army was to be organised in Russia "under the orders of a chief appointed by the Polish Government, but approved by the Soviet Government". It would be under the Supreme Soviet Command, but this would include a Polish representative.

The Agreement further said that, after the restoration of diplomatic relations, the USSR

would "grant an amnesty to all Polish citizens imprisoned in Soviet territory whether as war prisoners or for any other reason." The very word "amnesty" in this context was, of course, more than distasteful to the Polish Government, but conditions were too serious for quibbling.

General Sikorski went to Moscow in December, 1941—with the Germans still only a few

miles from the Soviet capital—and confirmed the Polish promise to set up a Polish Army on Soviet territory, which would fight the Germans beside the Soviet Army. Even with Russia in a highly precarious military position, Stalin would not agree during the meeting with Sikorski to the restoration of Poland within her pre-September 1939 frontiers, and the Polish territorial claims continued to be a chronic subject of dispute between the Russian and Polish "allies". But a more serious and immediate problem was the Polish Army in the Soviet Union.

*

This army began to be formed in 1941 by General Anders, who had himself been a

prisoner of the Russians, and was understandably anti-Russian at heart.

Later, after the breach with the London Poles, Vyshinsky made a savage indictment

against Anders and the Polish government in London. He began by recalling that the

Polish-Soviet agreements of 1941 provided for:

A Polish Army to be formed on Soviet soil, the number being fixed at 30,000 men.

General Anders himself had proposed that "when a division was ready for action, it should be immediately sent to the front."

The supplies given to the Polish Army were the same as those given to Soviet Army units in process of formation. Moreover the Soviet Government had granted the

Polish Government an interest-free loan of sixty-five million roubles, which, on

January 1, 1942, was increased to 300 millions, plus a free gift of equipment to

Polish officers, amounting to fifteen millions.

Vyshinsky said that, by October 25, 1941, the Polish Army already counted 41,561

men, including 2,630 officers. In December Sikorski proposed that this figure be

increased to 96,000 men, representing six divisions.

Despite great difficulties, there were already divisions with 73,415 men in the Polish Army in December 1941.

But at this point, according to Vyshinsky, it began to be increasingly clear that the Poles were double-crossing the Russians; that they had no intention of letting their men. be killed at the Russian front, and were making one excuse after another for not letting them fight.

Some of the troops (Vyshinsky claimed) were to be ready for action by October 1,

1941; but they were not. While the Soviet Government did not wish to hurry the

Poles, it began, after five months had elapsed since the beginning of the Army's

formation, to ask questions, in virtue of the Agreement of August 14, 1941. This had said that the Polish Army units would be sent to the front as soon as they were fully ready for action. As a rule, they would not go into action in less than one division, and would be used in accordance with the Soviet Command's operational plans.

Later, however, Anders declared that he considered the use of single divisions

undesirable, even though (Vyshinsky added) single brigades were used at other

fronts.

Then Anders promised that the whole Polish Army would be ready for action on

June 1, 1942; however, before long, the Polish Government finally refused to send any Polish troops to the Soviet front.

It is perhaps scarcely surprising that the Polish Army under Anders had no desire to fight on the Russian front after all that had happened since 1939. They had some very grim memories of the N.K.V.D. camps and also grave misgivings about the fate of the missing Polish officers, a crucial point Vyshinsky dodged.

In Ehrenburg's Memoirs—though he also dodges this question— there is this striking passage on the early stages of Polish-Russian "friendship":

At the beginning of December (1941) I happened to attend near Saratov a parade of General Anders's army, composed of Polish ex-war-prisoners. General Sikorski

arrived, accompanied by Vyshinsky. I don't know why Vyshinsky, of all people,

should have been chosen for this ceremony. Perhaps because he was of Polish

descent? I could not help remembering him in the rôle of Public Prosecutor in the Purge trials... He clicked glasses with Sikorski and there was a sugary smile on his face. Among the Poles there were many gloomy men, deeply embittered by what

they had lived through; many of them could not restrain themselves and openly

admitted that they hated us. I felt that these men could not let bygones be bygones.

Sikorski and Vyshinsky referred to each other as "allies", but behind these pleasant words one could feel deep animosity.

[ Novyi Mir, 1963, No. 1, p. 73.]

The "Anders' Poles" had certainly had a more than raw deal in Russia since 1939—

though it was perhaps tactless and ungracious of them to complain so frequently after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war of their miserable living and food conditions: after all, the Russian people as a whole were also suffering terrible hardships during that winter.

Nor is it surprising that the Russians were not especially anxious to have on Russian soil a "reactionary" Polish army, commanded by virulently anti-Russian officers—

particularly if it was being of no help in fighting the Germans—and that Stalin agreed to Churchill's proposal that the Anders' Poles should leave Russia via Iran. Many Russians regarded their departure as a good riddance:, but it so happened that the Anders' army left Russia on the eve of the Battle of Stalingrad. To the Russian people this looked like rats leaving a ship they thought was sinking. All this was very unfair; but it was all part of that tragic conflict which went back to 1939.

In any case, the Poles held rather a special place in the Russians' scheme of things; many Russian soldiers had taken part in the Polish campaign of 1939, and they had been struck by the almost general hostility of the Poles; similarly, there were Russian soldiers who, when abandoning cities like Lwow in 1941, claimed to have been fired on by Poles while the Germans were entering the city from the other end.

It is perhaps significant that on General Gundorov's "All Slav Committee" which was particularly active in 1942, and was marked by a special Russian affection for Yugoslavs, Czechs and pro-Soviet Bulgarians, the Poles played very little part. This was a curious movement with sentimental "Pan-Slav" and even Orthodox Church undertones.

In short, the Russians had many mental reservations in respect of the Poles—and no

doubt a very bad conscience as a result of the 1939 deportations. And among the top-

ranking Russians there was great uneasiness about the "missing officers" about whom the London Government never ceased asking questions.

But in any case Stalin had some definite ideas about the future of Poland. He was not going to subscribe to the "Riga frontiers" of 1921. Nor was he going to tolerate a Poland run by anti-Russian elements. Of one thing he was profoundly convinced— and that was the deep-seated hostility existing between Poles and Russians. Even in later years, long after the war, he continued to be highly sceptical about any assurances that the Poles and Russians were "getting on splendidly"—he used to say that it would, perhaps, take two generations or more to overcome the innate prejudices existing on both sides.

Stalin's Polish policy had been planned in advance, though it is doubtful whether he could have anticipated Goebbels's Katyn bombshell. But this bombshell, in fact, only

precipitated the process Stalin had planned. The all-out campaign against the Sikorski Government's territorial claims had started almost immediately after Stalingrad, and before the Katyn blow-up. It was indeed, after Stalingrad (and not before) that the diplomatic activity of the Russians became very intensive, complete with the production of (as yet secret) blue-prints for the future of Eastern Europe.

The trouble over Poland, which had been simmering for a long time, began to boil over in February, 1943.

The Russian post-Stalingrad winter offensive was still at its height and the Red Army was continuing its advance west of Kharkov. The Ukrainian Government arrived in Kharkov

(only to leave again a few days later, it is true), and in the official Ukrainian Government newspaper Radyanska Ukraina (Soviet Ukraine) printed in Kharkov on February 19, there appeared an article by Alexander Korneichuk, the well-known Ukrainian

playwright—who had written The Front in 1942—and in this article, reprinted on the following day in Pravda, the Soviet-Ukrainian point of view was clearly stated. For, apart from being a problem concerning the Soviet Union as a whole, Poland was also treated then, as later, as a problem specifically affecting the Ukrainian S.S.R.

Shortly afterwards, Korneichuk was, somewhat symbolically, appointed Soviet Vice-

Commissar for Foreign Affairs "in charge of Slav countries". He did not hold the job for very long though, partly perhaps because diplomacy was not quite in his line and partly perhaps because the foreign press tended to make the most of the fact that he was married to Wanda Wassilewska, a Polish Communist writer who had been a Soviet citizen since

1939, and was even a member of the Supreme Soviet.

Ever since the renewal of diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 the frontiers had been a bone of contention between the two

Governments. Sikorski himself, though willing, at heart, to take a realistic view of the situation, had never officially abandoned Poland's claims to the 1939 frontiers. He was always considering his own diehards; though the indications are that he was prepared, eventually, to compromise, and his "minimum" was the preservation by Poland of Lwow.

Later it was argued that, if only Sikorski had remained alive, relations between the Soviet Government and the Polish Government in London would not have deteriorated as much

as they did; but this is doubtful. Sikorski was still alive when the Soviet Government

"suspended" diplomatic relations; Sikorski was still alive when the Union of Polish Patriots—that first nucleus of a pro-Soviet Government in Poland—was set up and the

decision was taken to form the new Polish Army in Russia.

There are, however, indications that the Russians did not hold Sikorski personally

responsible for the "Katyn Scandal", but some of the diehards in and around his Government, especially their bête noire General Sosnkowski, the Chief of Staff; and it is also true that at no moment after the suspension of relations with the Polish Government in April 1943 did the Russian press attack Sikorski personally. But, looking back on it now, it is doubtful whether Sikorski would have been able to play a part much greater than that to be played later by Mikolajczyk.

The main lines of Russia's Polish policy may be said to have been laid down in the early part of 1943. The Katyn scandal only precipitated an inevitable breach.

The eastern frontier was to be, roughly, the Curzon line, and Poland was to expand

westwards instead, though no exact borderline was yet mentioned.

The Polish Government was to be a "friendly Government".

A lasting settlement of Poland's frontiers was to be achieved, and although the Russians at first refrained from indicating officially what Poland's frontiers in the west would be, a new Polish paper published in Moscow, Wolna Polska (Free Poland) openly raised the question in March 1943. Somebody called Andrzei Marek wrote that Poland should be

given the essential parts of Silesia and, naturally, the mouth of the Vistula, "with wide access to the sea". The coastline from Danzig to Memel, he said, should be Polish and East Prussia should "cease to be an everlasting springboard for German aggression against the Poles, Russians, and the Baltic peoples. It should be Poland's bridge to the sea, and not the barrier between her and the sea". These still relatively modest claims were to be greatly exceeded later by the Oder-Neisse frontier.

The Poles, in short, were expected to sink their past differences with the Russians and Ukrainians, to become "good Slavs", and stop thinking about cordons sanitaires and other Pilsudskian heresies.

As already said, Korneichuk opened the debate on February 19:

It would seem (he wrote), that in the hard times through which the Polish people are living all layers of Polish society would be united by the same national feeling, and by the same sacred thought; to drive out the Germans... But no, there are large

groups of Poles in London who are doing their best to shatter the united front of Hitler's enemies. A Polish newspaper, printed on good English newsprint, recently dismissed the outcry for the Second Front as "cheap demagogy". And at a recent meeting in Edinburgh Professor W. Wielhorski said: "Every Pole must consider it his duty to fight for the inviolability of our eastern areas."

The Polish szlachta [landed gentry] have learned nothing. They have never recognised the Ukrainian people...

Korneichuk then gave a long list of the benefits that the Western Ukraine had derived during its incorporation in the Soviet Union, between 1939 and 1941—the creation of

schools and hospitals, land reform, struggle against illiteracy, unemployment and

prostitution.

On March 2 a Tass communiqué declared that this Polish attempt to deny the Ukrainians and the Belorussians their rights was "contrary to the Atlantic Charter... Even Lord Curzon, hostile though he was to the Soviet Union, understood that Poland could not

claim Ukrainian and Belorussian territories."

Then it sounded the motif that the Polish Government in London was not representative of the Polish people.

It was all well orchestrated.

Wolna Polska made its first appearance a few days later. It declared itself to be the organ of the Union of Polish Patriots, and aimed at "uniting all Polish patriots living in the USSR, regardless of their past, their views and their convictions, in the joint task of waging an uncomprising struggle against the German invaders... " The aim, the paper said, was to "regain for Poland every inch of Polish ground, but not to claim an inch of other people's land."

Other articles were published by Wands Wasselewska, Wiktor Grosz and others, calling for friendship with the Soviet Union and denouncing both the London Government and

various Polish "quislings".

Many wondered at first who these people of the Union of Polish Patriots were. Only one, its President, Wanda Wassilewska, was well known. But she was in a somewhat

ambiguous position, being, at the time, a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR,

and moreover, the third wife of Korneichuk, the newly appointed Vice-Commissar for

Foreign Affairs. Then there was Colonel Berling, one of the very few officers who had refused to follow Anders's Army to Iran. There were some other Poles—Borejsza, the

editor of Wolna Polska, and Victor Grosz, Jedriehowski, and Modzelewski—mostly young and unknown people whom the collapse of Poland had, in one way or another,

brought to the Soviet Union. Many of them were Jews. Who were the public to whom the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR were appealing?

In March, this still seemed very vague. There were hundreds of thousands of Poles and Polish Jews scattered over large parts of the Soviet Union—mostly people who had been deported by the Russians in 1939-40 from Western Ukraine and Belorussia, including

some ex-war-prisoners who had not had time to be incorporated in the Anders Army.

There were others who had come voluntarily, to escape from the Germans in 1941, but

how many of these could be called real Poles—rather than Ukrainians, Belorussians or Jews— was in some doubt; and, altogether, it seemed doubtful whether many of these

people were "Polish Patriots" in the Moscow sense. Even a well-known Russian said to me, when he heard of the decision to form a Polish division on Russian soil, that he did not quite see how it could be done, for it was not much use putting nothing but

Ukrainians or Jews into the "Polish Division", and as for real Poles, the only ones who would be willing to enter such a division would be Polish Communists; and these were a rara avis.

Yet neither the Union of Polish Patriots, nor, still less, the Polish Division (later followed by three more divisions formed on Soviet soil) turned out to be a joke, as not only the enemies of the whole scheme, but also many friendly sceptics seemed to expect at the time. It was not until the Kosciuszko Division made its appearance in July 1943 that most of the sceptics recognised that the Russians had, somehow, pulled it off. As for the Union of Polish Patriots, nondescript though it may outwardly have been, it had created the ideological basis for that New Poland, of which the Kosciuszko Division was to be the first important manifestation.

It was certainly not accidental that throughout April all the loyal friends of the Soviet Union should have been built up in the Soviet press. It was as if their activities were being compared with the "reprehensible and shortsighted" conduct of the London Poles.

Thus, great publicity was given to the Czechoslovak unit that fought its first great action

—a very costly but successful action—on the Soviet front. Great prominence was also

given to the resistance movements in France, Belgium, and Norway, and more

particularly to the French Normandie Squadron already fighting on the Russian front on de Gaulle's initiative.

The Czechoslovak unit fighting on the Russian front won the greatest fame of all during those days. It was not a large unit— 2,000 or 3,000 men under the command of Colonel Svoboda, who was later to become Minister of War in the Czechoslovak Government in

Prague. In March it went into action and on April 2, the Russian communiqué told the story of its first great engagement. Two things were, politically, of the greatest

importance; first, that, unlike the Anders Army, the Czechoslovak unit was fighting on the Soviet front; secondly, that it was doing so with the blessing of the Czechoslovak Commander-in-Chief, President Benes, and of the Czechoslovak Government in London.

The unit was, of course, under the operational command of the Russians.

On April 8, Alexander Fadeyev wrote a glowing account of the Czechs' heroism and, two days later, warm congratulations were sent to Colonel Svoboda by President Benes, by the Minister of Defence (also in London), and by the Czechoslovak Communist deputies who were then in Moscow, Gottwald, Kopecky and others. Captain Jaros who was in

command of one of the companies during the heavy fighting in the Kharkov area, and had been fatally wounded, was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Svoboda received the Order of Lenin, and eighty-two other men of the Czechoslovak unit were decorated by the Russians.

Such relations with the Czechs contrasted strangely with the first-class row with the London Poles which was on the point of reaching its climax.

From the beginning the Polish Government's principal worry had been the fate of the

Polish officers who had been in the Soviet Union since the debacle in 1939. Where were they? In their many conversations with Stalin, Molotov and Vyshinsky during the winter of 1941-2, General Sikorski, General Anders (who had himself been in Russian prisons for many months), Ambassador Kot, and other Polish representatives kept on raising this question. The Russians (according to the Poles) never gave a definite answer, saying that these prisoners would eventually turn up or that they had perhaps escaped to Poland, or Rumania, or Manchuria or, finally (a very belated afterthought of Stalin's) that some of them might have been trapped by the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

The announcement by Goebbels's propaganda machine in the middle of April, 1943, that the Germans had found several mass graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk

containing the bodies of thousands of Polish officers, was therefore well timed to

exacerbate further the strained relations between Moscow and the London Poles.

The Germans had set up a much publicised Committee of Inquiry which had "proved"

that these Polish officers had been shot by the Russians in 1940.

The news was sprung on a startled Russian public in an official communiqué on April 16:

"Goebbels's gang of liars have, in the last two or three days been spreading revolting and slanderous fabrications about the alleged mass shootings by Soviet

organs of authority in the Smolensk area, in the spring of 1940. The German

statement leaves no doubt about the tragic fate of the former Polish war prisoners who, in 1941, were in areas west of Smolensk, engaged on building, and who,

together with many Soviet people, inhabitants of the Smolensk Province, fell into the hands of the German hangmen, after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from

Smolensk... In this clumsy fabrication about numerous graves which the Germans

are supposed to have discovered near Smolensk, Goebbels's liars mention the village of Gnezdovaya; but they deliberately omit to mention the fact that it was precisely here, near Gnezdovaya, that archaeological excavations were in progress on the so-called Gnezdovsky Tumulus... With this faking of facts, and these stories of Soviet atrocities in the spring of 1940, the Germans ... are trying to shift on to the Russians the blame for their own monstrous crime...

"These professional German murderers, who have butchered hundreds of

thousands of Polish citizens in Poland, will deceive no one with such lies and

slander..."

All this was a little mystifying; for it seemed to suggest that, although the Poles had no doubt been murdered, the Germans had invented the story about the mass graves at

Smolensk. It was not at all clear what the Gnezdovsky Tumulus had to do with it all.

The position became a little clearer a few days later; or, at least, one thing now became perfectly clear—and that was that Goebbels had engineered a first-class diplomatic row.

On the 19th, the Pravda editorial indignantly wrote:

Goebbels's fabrication has been taken up not only by his German scribes, but, to

everybody's amazement, by the ministerial circles of General Sikorski... The Polish Ministry of Information knows perfectly well the purpose of this German

provocation, for it says itself: "We are used to the lies of German propaganda, and can understand the purpose of its latest revelations." Yet, in spite of this, the Ministry of Information can think of nothing better than to appeal to the

International Red Cross with the request to "investigate" something that never existed, or, rather, had been fabricated by the hangmen of Berlin, who are now

trying to attribute their crime to the Soviet organs [i.e., the NKVD]. They have been caught by this German bait. It is not surprising that Hitler should also have

appealed to the International Red Cross. Yet this is not the first case of its kind: already in Lwow in 1941 they staged "The victims of Bolshevik Terror".

Hundreds of witnesses then showed up the German liars. [The article then referred to Sovinformbureau's statement on the subject of August 8, 1941.]

Feeling the indignation of the whole of progressive humanity over their massacres of peaceful citizens, and particularly of Jews, the Germans are now trying to rouse the anger of gullible people against the Jews: for this reason they invented a whole

collection of mythical "Jewish Commissars" who, they say, took part in the murder of the 10,000 Polish officers. For such experienced fakers it was not difficult to invent a few names of people who never existed—Lev Rybak, Avraam Borisovich,

Paul Brodninsky, Chaim Finberg. No such persons ever existed either in the

"Smolensk Section of the OGPU", or in any other department of the NKVD. In the light of these facts, the request made by the Polish Ministry of National Defence to the International Red Cross can be regarded only as a demonstration of their desire to give direct aid to Hitler's forgers and provocateurs.

And then, two days later, a Tass statement said that this Pravda editorial "fully reflects the attitude of Soviet leading circles".

The statement made by the Sikorski Government on April 18 makes matters worse,

since it identifies itself with the provocative statement of the Polish Ministry of Defence... The fact that the anti-Soviet campaign started simultaneously in the

German and the Polish press, and is being conducted on the same plane—this

amazing fact allows one to suppose that this campaign is being conducted as a result of an agreement between the German occupants in Poland and the pro-Hitlerite

elements of the ministerial circles of Mr Sikorski. The Polish Government's

statement shows that the pro-Hitlerite elements have great influence in the Polish Government and that they are taking new steps to worsen relations between Poland

and the USSR.

The Soviet case was not at all well presented. Detailed facts and figures were missing.

Something of the secretiveness that had surrounded the whole affair of the "missing Polish officers" was still maintained. To the Russians, the allegations were "beneath contempt". They would say what there was to say once the Red Army got to Smolensk.

Now there was only one thing to do: draw the political conclusions.

On the evening of April 27 it was announced that the Soviet Government had suspended diplomatic relations with the Polish Government. The announcement was contained in a letter from Molotov to Romer, the Polish Ambassador in the USSR.

The word used was "prervat" (suspend), not "porvat" (break off), and those who believed that the breach was only temporary, at first attached some importance to this fine point of Russian grammar.

The Polish Ambassador himself suggested at first that the quarrel might be patched up, and that he "would soon be back in Moscow". He was clearly upset at what had happened, but made a point of being very "correct" about the Russians at the press conference he gave to the British and American correspondents the night the

"suspension" was announced. He said he had refused to accept the Russian Note, because the motives were "unacceptable". He argued that an article in the official Polish paper in London, the Dziennik Polski had, on April 15, rejected the German proposal to appeal to the International Red Cross; but he did not know when and how exactly this appeal had finally been made, and on whose authority. Instead, speaking studiously more in sorrow than in anger, he made a few general complaints about the Russians. According to the lists of the Polish Embassy, he said, there had been 400,000 Poles in the Soviet Union.

Since then 95,000 soldiers and 40,000 civilians had gone to the Middle East. The Polish soldiers had been demobilised in 1939, but the officers and N.C.O.'s were kept in camps.

The Polish Government had asked the Russians in vain to give them lists of these officers and N.C.O.'s; and, unlike Kozielsk, the camps of Starobelsk and Ustashkovo had not been occupied by the Germans. If the Polish officers and N.C.O.'s had been transferred to Smolensk, the Polish Government had not heard of it until now. It was apparent that if the Russians had left the Poles behind to fall into German hands, the Russians did not wish to admit it, and were, therefore, humming and hawing. It was most unfortunate, and had

played into the hands of German propaganda. "Je ne crois pas au crime russe— I don't believe in a Russian crime", he said, "only why could they not be franker with us? " He said the three camps in question had been closed between April and June 1940, and it had been believed that the officers had been scattered through the Soviet Union in small groups. The news that they had been left behind near Smolensk was something quite new.

In these camps (he said), there had been 12,500 officers and N.CO.'s and when the Polish Army began to be formed, it was found that only a handful of officers were available.

He then talked about the 570 children's homes, schools, canteens, old people's homes, and other Polish institutions which had been set up in the Soviet Union, and had mostly been run on lend-lease stuff by 420 personnes de confiance appointed by the Polish Embassy at Kuibyshev, but had latterly been taken over by the Russians. After that, all these centres had lost contact with the Embassy. He had heard of Madame Wassilewska but did not know what she was doing or was proposing to do.

And then, on January 16, the Soviet Government went back on its former decision

to allow certain categories of people from Eastern Poland to rank as Polish citizens.

I (Romer) had been discussing this question with the Russians for some time, and it is most disappointing to me that these negotiations should now have had to be

suspended.

He ended, however, on a note of confidence, saying he thought the quarrel would yet be patched up.

I have quoted Romer's statement because, a few days later, Vyshinsky was to answer

him, though not on the crucial point of the "missing officers." Romer's suggestion that it would "blow over" was not justified. The Russians, having in effect broken off relations with the London Government, were now going to get tough.

Romer was not to forestall Vyshinsky. From the Russian point of view he was no longer Ambassador, and, therefore, had no business to give interviews. None of his statements was passed by the censorship, not even the statement that he did not believe the Russians had committed the Katyn crime!

[ After recapturing the Katyn area the Russians tried to prove that the Polish officers had been shot by the Germans. See pp. 661 ff.]

On the very next day, while Pravda was fuming against the "Polish Imperialists" and

"German agents", Wanda Wassilewska came out with an article in Izvestia which was a landmark in the history of Polish-Russian relations. After making the usual charges

against the London Government of preventing active resistance to the Germans in

Poland, and of haggling, instead, over Poland's eastern frontiers, she said that this Government had "done everything to silence progressive Poles abroad" and to

"undermine the Poles' confidence in their natural ally, the Soviet Union."

"Yet every honest Pole knows that such an alliance is a matter of life and death to his country, especially now when Europe's and Poland's fate is being settled on this front."

And then she came to her main point: she said that another Polish Army might shortly be constituted on Soviet soil, which would fight side by side with the Red Army, as the Czechoslovak troops and the French airmen were already doing. This Polish Army would not be under the jurisdiction of the Polish Government in London.

What this meant was that a new Polish Army, drawn from Polish citizens in the Soviet Union, and former Polish citizens (though Wassilewska did not mention this point) would shortly be formed on Soviet soil. It now seemed likely that the point about Polish

nationality which the Russians had, for a short time, stretched in favour of the Anders Army, might now be stretched again for the benefit of the new Polish Army, and, indeed, stretched much farther.

The question as to who would replace the London Government from the point of view of authority was left vague; but, for the present, the new Polish Army would, in fact, owe its allegiance to the Soviet Government pending the formation of a real Polish Government.

Many sceptics wrongly thought that what was contemplated was merely a "token force", or even only a "gesture".

From now on, Soviet policy had two objectives—to denounce and debunk the Polish

Government in London as "unrepresentative", and to proclaim its intention of supporting those wishing to build a "free, strong, and democratic Poland". On May 6, Stalin answered the questions of Ralph Parker, the Times correspondent, as follows: Q. Does the Government of the USSR desire to see a strong independent Poland

after the defeat of Nazi Germany?

A. Unquestionably.

Q. What, in your view, should be the basis for relations between Poland and the

USSR after the war?

A. Sound good-neighbourly relations and mutual respect, or, if the Polish people

desire it, a basis of mutual aid against the Germans, the principal enemies of both the Soviet Union and Poland.

On the same day, Vyshinsky called a press conference and produced his long indictment against the London Government. He spoke in a particularly harsh and snarling manner, reminiscent of his manner as Public Prosecutor in the notorious purge trials of 1936-8.

He began by giving his account, quoted above, of the formation of the Anders army, and then went on to deal with the charges that it had been undernourished.

He argued that, owing to the Pacific War and other causes, there was a food shortage in Russia in 1942. Non-combat troops could, clearly, not be as well fed as combat troops.

As the Polish Command persisted in not wishing them to fight, they had to be regarded as such. Finally, on April 1, it was decided that the rations would be cut down to 44,000, and that those over and above that figure could leave the Soviet Union.

In March 1942, 31,488 soldiers and 12,455 members of their families were evacuated.

But while refusing to fight, said Vyshinsky, the Polish Government desired to go on mobilising new units; however, in reply to the Polish Note of June 10,1942, on the subject, the Russians refused to allow any further mobilisations. It was then that the question of total evacuation was raised, and in August 1942 a further 44,000 soldiers and 20,000 to 25,000 dependents left the country.

Thus, already in 1942, 75,491 soldiers and 37,756 members of their families left the Soviet Union.

All the assertions, he said, that the Soviet authorities prevented Polish citizens in the Soviet Union (who were "not numerous") or members of Polish soldiers' families, from leaving the country, were a lie.

Here, of course, was a sticky point. There were believed to be some 300,000 or 400,000

Polish citizens, including Jews, still in the Soviet Union. But (a) had they expressed the wish to leave for Iran, rather than wait for Poland to "open" and, (b) even if they did, and there was no means of transport, could it be said that they had been "prevented " from leaving? Further, very many of those whom the Polish Government considered Polish

citizens, were no longer Polish citizens in the eyes of the Russians. At least, not as far as joining the Anders Army was concerned—though points were, in fact going later to be

stretched in the case of the Kosciuszko and other Russian-formed divisions.

Vyshinsky partly explained the problem when he said that, in the early stages of Polish-Soviet relations in 1941, it was agreed by the Russians that Polish nationality could be regained by the Poles of Western Ukraine and Belorussia—this with a view to their joining the Anders Army.

The Polish Government did not, however, consider itself satisfied, and pressed for the cancellation of Soviet nationality for other inhabitants of Western Ukraine and

Belorussia.

Far from satisfying this claim, the Russians decided, once the Anders Army had left, that there was no longer any purpose in making an exception for the Poles, and all former Polish subjects in Western Ukraine and Belorussia, again became Soviet citizens, in terms of the original Soviet ukase of November 29, 1939. This decision was taken on January 16, 1943.

This was the subject that had been Ambassador Romer's chief concern when diplomatic

relations between Poland and the Soviet Union were broken off.

The second part of Vyshinsky's statement dealt with the large network of Polish welfare organisations, to which Romer had referred in the statement quoted above:

After referring to the twenty "agencies" the Polish Embassy had set up in the Soviet Union, ostensibly for the purpose of dealing with these welfare organisations, and

quoting numerous cases of more than "incorrect" Polish behaviour, Vyshinsky said that the Polish Embassy people, including Ambassador Kot, instead of busying themselves

with the welfare of their fellow-citizens were, in reality, engaged in espionage. Many, he said, were arrested, some expelled from the Soviet Union, and others sentenced to a

number of years' imprisonment. (It all savoured a bit of 1937!)

Soon afterwards it was learned that the Union of Polish Patriots had largely been put in charge of these schools, hospitals, et cetera.

Decision to form Polish Army in the Soviet Union

On May 9, it was officially announced that the Council of People's Commissars had

agreed to the request of the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR concerning the

formation on Soviet soil of the Tadeusz Kosciuszko Division which would fight against the German invaders, alongside the Red Army. The statement added: "The formation of this division has already begun."

That same day, there was a great All-Slav meeting in Moscow. Greetings were sent to

Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt and Benes. Representatives from all the Slav countries were there, among them Colonel Svoboda, the Commander of the Czechoslovak unit which

had distinguished itself so well on the Russian front at the end of March; the

Metropolitan Nicholas was there in his robes and tiara; a girl who had escaped from

Dachau also spoke, and the introductory speech was made by Fadeyev, President of the Writers' Union, who said:

The Russian people are totally opposed to the thoroughly reactionary idea of Pan-

Slavism, which Russian Tsarism tried to use in its imperialist ambitions. The

Russian people are united with the other Slav peoples in their struggle against the common foe on a basis of equality and of profound respect for their freedom, and

their national honour and dignity.

But the real clou of the meeting was the presence of Wanda Wassilewska and Colonel Berling. Wassilewska, tall, dark, more highly strung than ever, exclaimed:

From here, from the Eastern Front we shall break through to Poland, a great strong and just Poland. Polish brethren! Listen to the shots fired on the Eastern Front!...

And shame on those who are urging you to follow a policy of disastrous inactivity!

Colonel Berling, an ugly, burly man with cropped hair, and looking older than his age, said:

The road to our homeland lies across the battlefield, and we, Poles in the Soviet Union, are now taking this road.

In the next two months there were to be many more discussions around the Polish

problem; violent editorials about the London Poles, meetings by the Union of Polish

Patriots, etc. Wolna Polska published more revelations about the high officers of the Anders Army and about Anders himself who, according to Zygmunt Berling, now

Commander of the Kosciuszko Division, had said that he was glad the Polish Army was

being trained on the Middle Volga, because, with the collapse of the Red Army, the Poles could get away to Iran along the Caspian, and then "they could do what they liked".

Berling also said: "What an opportunity Anders missed when he could have thrown one Polish Division into the Battle of Moscow, and failed to do so! " He also referred to General Okulicki, Anders's chief of staff (and later, in 1945, the chief defendant in the Moscow trial of the Polish Right-wing Underground) who

was sabotaging the supply base on the Caspian through which British arms and

food were to come to the Anders Army from Iran... The Polish warehouses at

Teheran were bursting with stuff in 1942—stuff that the British had been sending—

and food was going rotten. But the Anders Command would not allow a single

British rifle, tank or case of food to be sent to Russia, and the supply base was to be used for one thing only—the evacuation of the Polish troops from Russia.

But all this recrimination was becoming ancient history (not, however, ancient history of no consequence), and what was of immediate interest now was the development of

Russian Policy towards the "other" Poland, and, in the first place, the progress of the new Polish Division. I was to see the Kosciuszko Division on July 15, and it was something of a revelation.

The camp of the Polish Division was in a beautiful pine forest, on the steep banks of the Oka river, about two-thirds of the way from Moscow to Riazan. In the surrounding

villages, in that heart of hearts of Great-Russia, it was odd to see soldiers in Polish uniform wearing square confederatka caps, talking to the local inhabitants. No Polish soldiers had ever been anywhere near these parts since 1612, in the days of Ivan Susanin!

However, these were in khaki, and not in the dazzling costumes they wore in 1612, if one is to believe the costume designers of the Bolshoi Theatre!

It was a large camp, with well-built wooden barracks and everywhere there were Polish inscriptions, slogans and symbols. The whole forest was teeming with white Polish

eagles. We arrived there on the night of the 14th, and the 15th was Grünwald Day, when the Kosciuszko Division was to take the oath on the large parade ground. Grünwald was a battle in the Middle Ages which the combined forces of Slavdom—Poles, Russians and

also Lithuanians —had fought against the Teutonic Knights, and by which they had

delayed the Germanic expansion to the east. To the Poles it was what the Battle of the Ice, fought on Lake Peipus by Alexander Nevsky in 1242, was to the Russians. It was

also a great symbol of Slav unity.

On that night of the 14th, there were many guests seated round the supper table in a large army hut: some Russian generals, Commandant Mirlès, representing the French airmen in France, Czech officers—in short, representatives of all the nations fighting on the Soviet-German Front. For reasons of etiquette, or rather for fear of being snubbed, the Poles had not invited any official British or American representatives. A Russian general called Zhukov— only a namesake of the Marshal's, and, according to the London Poles, an

NKVD general—was the principal Russian attached to the Polish division, and had

played a leading part in its training, organisation and equipment.

Many Poles who were later to become familiar figures I saw there for the first time.

Major Grosz—later General Grosz who was to become one of the chief political advisers of the Polish General Staff; Captain Modzelewski, a seemingly modest and quiet little man, who was later to become Polish Ambassador to Moscow and then Foreign Minister;

Captain Borojsza, who was later to become "dictator" of the Polish Press.

And there was a priest there, Father Kupsz, who was said to have been a Polish partisan, and who had recently smuggled himself into Russia. Father Kupsz was a young man with mousey hair and very cagey.

The proceedings on the night of the 14th were presided over by Wanda Wassilewska, and by Colonel Beding.

The next day started with an open-air mass. This was totally unlike the Red Army. An open-air Catholic altar had been erected in an open space in the forest, and Father Kupsz officiated. The altar was decorated with three large panels, one with a symbolic picture of the Christian Faith protected by a Polish soldier, the middle panel showed a Polish eagle, and, below it, a crown of thorns surrounding the figures 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942 and

1943, and with enough room left for one, or, at most, two more dates; the third panel represented a scene of the Nazi terror in Poland. The altar was decorated with flowers and fir-branches and an orchestra of two violins and several brass instruments took the place of the organ. Hundreds of soldiers were kneeling down as they prayed, and later many of them, and scores of auxiliary service girls in khaki, received the holy sacrament. All this in the middle of the pine-forest made a memorable picture.

The most important event of the day was the long march-past of the Kosciuszko Division, preceded by their taking the oath, and the presentation to the Division of its banner with the white Polish eagle on a red-and-white background, inscribed "For Country and Honour" on one side, and a portrait of Kosciuszko on the other. Everywhere, there was a great display of Polish national symbols, and no suggestion that this was in any way a Russian show—except that the Polish spokesmen continuously emphasised their

gratitude to the Soviet Union and the Red Army. In the oath, which, phrase after phrase, thousands of Polish soldiers repeated in chorus, standing there on the parade ground, they swore not only that they would fight to the last drop of blood to liberate Poland from the Germans, but they also swore fidelity to their Russian allies "who had put the weapons of war into their hands". And then the march-past began.

It went on for nearly two hours. On the grandstand decorated with Polish, Russian,

British, American, Czech and French flags, stood Wanda Wassilewska, Berling and other Polish and Russian officers, and Allied representatives. The men were mostly between twenty-five and thirty-five and were in good trim; the officers wore spruce khaki

uniforms and square caps with the Polish eagle; the soldiers wore dark khaki summer

tunics as they marched past, the band playing military marches. The formation of the division had started in April, but the intensive training had not begun till early June. They were not a fully trained division yet, but what had been done was described by French and other Allied representatives as very remarkable. No secret was made of the fact that the division had been trained almost exclusively by Russian officers. But the most

notable feature was the equipment. Eighty per cent of the equipment was automatic or semi-automatic; several of the companies also had long "stove-pipe" anti-tank rifles; there were several machine-gun units and artillery units, a number of mortar units, and finally some thirty T 34 tanks. All the equipment, except for a few American trucks and jeeps, was Russian.

This equipment was particularly interesting to see, as it was the equivalent of that of a regular Russian Guards infantry division, and the wealth of anti-tank weapons made one realise why, in the previous ten days' fighting, the Germans had failed so completely in their Kursk offensive. A Polish officer remarked (and this was later confirmed by General Zhukov) that the fire power of this division was seven times greater than that of a regular division of the Polish Army in 1939. It was stated that by October the Kosciuszko

Division would be ready for action. This was to prove correct, and the Division fought with distinction and heavy casualties in its very first engagements.

What of the human material?

No precise figure could be obtained, but the great majority of the nearly 15,000 officers and men appeared to be Poles—but Poles from parts of Poland taken over by the

Russians in 1939. What Russian I did hear spoken in the division—and nearly everybody was speaking Polish—was spoken with a Polish accent. A considerable number of the

officers—in fact nearly all of them—had served in the Red Army; and many of them

were decorated. One had the Stalingrad medal. But he was unmistakably a Pole, a native of Lwow, who had been mobilised into the Red Army at the beginning of the war. The

problem of "nationality" was now solved in a curious and "non-committal" way: the principle on which people were drafted into the Polish division was whether they "felt"

Polish. Anyone from the Western Ukraine or Belorussia who "felt" Polish could enter the division. In fact, I talked to a few soldiers who, while calling themselves Poles, said that

"in a way" they were sorry to have moved from the Red Army into this Polish division.

Very few of the officers and men had served in the Anders Army but there were many

who had been "about to join" it when it left for Iran. The soldiers were told that those whose nationality was in doubt could later opt for Polish or Soviet citizenship. This applied to both Poles and persons holding Soviet passports now. There were said to be six per cent of Jews, two per cent of Ukrainians and three per cent of Belorussians in the division. Many of the men were ex-Polish war-prisoners who had come from strange and remote places in the Soviet Union, to which many had been deported as long ago as 1939.

Others were deported civilians. In the course of the day I saw a crowd of these. They looked ragged, verminous and demoralised; they had lived in shocking conditions for a long time, and had also had a very hard and long journey from Siberia or Central Asia.

One officer remarked, as I was talking to them: "A lot of our soldiers looked just like that when they first arrived—and now look how spick and span they are." It was true enough, and while no one could deny that many of the Poles in the east had had a very raw deal, this division at last provided a solution for them, and most of them apparently welcomed it. It did mean, if nothing else, that unless killed en route, they would be among the first to re-enter Poland; and now, after the tremendous Russian victory at Kursk, the prospect was no longer a remote one.

Among those ragged verminous new arrivals, there was, however, one man in a half-

demented hysterical state. He was a dark little man who shrieked a wild incoherent story in very good French— a story of how he had worked before the war on Le Peuple, the Socialist paper in Brussels, of how he then fled from Vilna to Sweden with a "temporary"

British passport just before the Red Army arrived, of how he then got to Brussels again in 1940. And then the Germans came, and he was put in a concentration camp, but later he was released and went to Lithuania, and here he fell into Russian hands, and then, he cried hysterically, "depuis trois ans je ne suis plus parmi les vivants!" He did not seem to relish his "resurrection" by means of the Kosciuszko Division, nor the clarification of his national status.

More refreshing was a group of Polish youngsters who had been mending roads for the

German Army near Kalinin, but had joined a Russian partisan unit and had finally got across the German lines.

As regards the trained soldiers, the impression one had was that although they were a very mixed lot, the patriotic propaganda was having the desired effect. They were well-disciplined, well-fed, well-clothed and the idea of being "the first Poles to enter Poland"

had its attractions. There was a strong element of flattery in the propaganda and many of these people who had been at a loose end were made to feel important now. Many of

them were, in fact, Poles whom Anders would have mobilised (and taken away to Iran), if he had been given time to do so.

A press conference was given by Berling and Wassilewska. Berling said he was born

near Cracow in 1896 and had served in Pilsudski's Polish Legion in the last war. (Nobody was tactless enough to ask against whom they had fought then.) He was on the general staff of the Anders Army but disagreed with Anders's political line. He said that the principal criterion in selecting and mobilising people into the Kosciuszko Division was the man's own conscience; if he considered himself a Pole, he was accepted. Other points he made were:

It is not certain whether we shall accept Poles who served in the German Army. We may take those who deliberately came over to the Red Army; but shall be much

more careful with those simply taken prisoner.

We have 600 women doing mostly auxiliary work in our division, also nurses...

No political work is done in the division. But care is taken of cultural activities and a big effort is being made to stamp out illiteracy.

Most of the people have been in the Soviet Union since 1941, or earlier (sic); many left their homes as civilian refugees (sic). Some have their families in the Soviet Union, and the Union of Polish Patriots is taking care of them.

Father Kupsz has been here only a short time, but judging from the number who

attended mass this morning, a high proportion of our soldiers feel the need for

religious services.

Wanda Wassilewska, in a somewhat pugnacious mood said that the division clearly

showed that all foreign suggestions that it would be merely a token force were utter nonsense. She said she was born in Cracow in 1905, had graduated at the University of Cracow, was a member of the National Committee of the Polish Socialist Party until the collapse of Poland. She had been a journalist, and, since 1934, an author. She came to the Soviet Union in September, 1939. (She did not mention the fact that she was a member of the Supreme Soviet.)

The Union of Polish Patriots (she said) was established in April, 1943. The Union had directly appealed to Marshal Stalin for assistance; and had offered to provide the people who would do the Union's work. The Union of Polish Patriots had three

objects: (1) stimulate the formation of Polish armed forces in the Soviet Union; (2) satisfy the cultural needs of the Poles in the Soviet Union; and (3) build a network of Polish schools and take care of the children.

There was no full record of all the Poles in the Soviet Union. The areas over which they were scattered were so enormous that it had not been possible to get in touch with everybody.

The Polish organisations—schools, hospitals, et cetera, run by the Polish Embassy at Kuibyshev were quite unsatisfactory; the Union of Polish Patriots had taken the

whole thing over. By September 1, there would be enough schools for all Polish

children in the Soviet Union.

It was difficult to say whether any rapprochement with the Polish Government in London was possible.

The Union of Polish Patriots merely dealt with Poles in the USSR; it had no

pretension of being an ersatz Polish Government.

But it strongly felt that the future Government of Poland must come from the

people, not from the émigrés. Poland must be democratic, not feudal.

Sikorski [who shortly before had been killed in a plane crash] was a good, honest man, but he was too weak, and he was unable to resist the pressure of the

reactionaries.

The Union of Polish Patriots was not conducting any propaganda inside Poland,

but, the very existence of a Kosciuszko Division here would certainly make the

strongest impression on the Polish people— especially once it started, together with the Red Army, driving the Germans out of Poland.

Clearly, the whole thing was of far-reaching political importance, and this is not altered by the fact that both Wassilewska and Berling were—for different reasons—to disappear as leaders of the movement before very long. Other, and stronger, people were to take their places.

Katyn

In September, 1943, the Russian Army recaptured Smolensk from the Germans, and soon

people in Moscow were asking when light would at last begin to be thrown on the Katyn murders. But for a long time nothing happened, and it was not till January, 1944, that the Russians published their findings, and also invited the Western press in Moscow to visit the mass graves.

On January 15 a large group of Western correspondents, accompanied by Kathie

Harriman, the daughter of Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador, went on

their gruesome journey to look at the hundreds of bodies in Polish uniforms which had been dug up at Katyn Forest by the Russian authorities. It was said that some 10,000 had been buried there, but actually only a few hundred "samples" had been unearthed and were filling even the cold winter air with an unforgettable stench.

[The London Poles alleged that only 4,000 were buried at Katyn and that there were two other "Katyns" inside Russia which had not been discovered.]

The Russian Committee of Inquiry, which had been set up, and was presiding over the

proceedings, consisted of forensic medicine men, such as Academician Burdenko, and a number of "personalities" whose very presence was to give the whole inquiry an air of great respectability and authority; among them were the Metropolitan Nicholas of

Moscow, the famous writer Alexei Tolstoy, Mr Potemkin, the Minister of Education, and others. What qualifications these "personalities" had for judging the "freshness" or

"antiquity" of unearthed corpses was not quite clear. Yet the whole argument turned precisely on this very point: had the Poles been buried by the Russians in the spring of 1940, or by the Germans in the late summer or autumn of 1941? Professor Burdenko,

wearing a green frontier guard cap, was busy dissecting corpses, and, waving a bit of greenish stinking liver at the tip of his scalpel would say "Look how lovely and fresh it looks."

Hundreds of pages have been written about the findings of the Committee of Inquiry set up in April, 1943, by the Germans and of the Russian Committee of Inquiry of January, 1944. Both cases have been very fully summarised in a number of books, particularly in General Anders's Katyn. Anders's conclusion, of course, is that, however many millions of people the Germans had murdered elsewhere, there was not the slightest doubt that in this case the Russians were guilty.

While this is more than probable, if not absolutely certain, it must be said that the Russians conducted their publicity round the case (including the visit of the Western press to Katyn) with the utmost clumsiness and crudeness. The press was allowed to

attend only one of the meetings of the Russian Committee of Inquiry, which questioned several witnesses. Among them were a Professor Bazilevsky, an astronomer, a doddery

little man whom the Germans were said to have persuaded or compelled to become the

assistant burgomaster of Smolensk; he declared that his chief, a quisling who had since fled with the Germans, had told him that the Polish officers were to be liquidated; a notebook said to belong to this ex-burgomaster was produced with this significant, if somewhat cryptic, entry: "Are people in Smolensk talking about the shooting of the Poles? "

Among other witnesses was a girl who had been a servant at the former NKVD villa

taken over by the Gestapo, where the German killers lived.

[Why was there such a villa near Katyn Forest? One might well have wondered.]

She related how lorries used to drive into the forest and how, soon afterwards, with her employers absent from the villa, she could hear shots being fired some distance away.

There was also a railwayman who explained how it was impossible to evacuate the Poles from the camps near Smolensk in July 1941 during the German advance. The railways

were in a state of grave disorganisation, with the Red Army in full retreat.

Another witness declared that on the roads leading to Katyn Forest he had met large

lorries covered with tarpaulins from which came a terrible stench of corpses—the

inference being that not all the killing had been done at Katyn, and that many bodies had been brought by the Germans from elsewhere—indeed old, 1940 corpses, which would

help to confirm their story about these Poles having been killed in 1940. One very scared peasant admitted that he had been bullied by the Germans into testifying as they wanted him to, during their inquiry into the Katyn murders. All this was very thin.

One strange peculiarity of the one and only session of the Committee of Inquiry which the foreign press was allowed to attend was that it was not permitted to put any questions to the witnesses. The whole precedure had a distinctly prefabricated appearance.

Altogether, the Russian starting-point in this whole inquiry was that the very suggestion that the Russians might have murdered the Poles had to be ruled out right away; the

whole idea was insulting and outrageous, and there was, therefore, no need to dwell on any facts which might have led to the Russians' "acquittal". It was essential to accuse the Germans; to acquit the Russians was wholly irrelevant.

The circumstances of the captivity and the exact number and whereabouts of the Polish officers and N.C.O.'s, in fact, continued to be treated as a "State secret" which concerned the Russian authorities only. No outsider was ever shown the three camps "near

Smolensk" at which the Poles were supposed to have been trapped by the Germans.

It must be said that the Russians did not do much to destroy the "London-Polish"

arguments for disbelieving the Russian version. For one thing, they did not even trouble to deal with the circumstantial evidence which, on the face of it, was favourable to them.

First, whatever the Germans said to the contrary, the technique of these mass murders was German, rather than Russian; in countless other places exactly the same technique had been used by the Gestapo in their mass murders. The record of the NKVD, on the

other hand, rather suggested that people in their care did frequently die in large numbers

—but through neglect, overwork, bad food and exposure to cold, rather than in any kind of mass murders. Secondly, why kill them in 1940 when Russia was at peace, and there could be no urgency for exterminating even these "class enemies"?

Then there was the question of the bullets; the Poles had been murdered with German bullets, a fact which—judging from his Diary—had greatly perturbed Goebbels. Anders quotes a witness as suggesting that these "Geco" bullets had been sold in large numbers by Germany to the Baltic States, and that the Russians had helped themselves to them there. But this argument is not perfect: the Russians were supposed to have murdered the Poles in March, 1940, and they did not fully occupy the Baltic States until three months later.

We now know the London-Polish story about the proposed Russo-German exchange of

these officers for 30,000 Ukrainians held by the Germans, the subsequent refusal of the Germans to "accept" them, and the "mistake" made by the NKVD in misinterpreting Stalin's alleged order to "liquidate" the camps. But this story still needs a lot of clarification.

A not wholly convincing pro-Russian argument was that Katyn Forest used to be the

favourite excursion place for the people of Smolensk, which had not been surrounded by barbed wire until after the Germans had come in July 1941. It was very hard to say

whether this was true or not. The Russian argument was that there had been no barbed wire round Katyn Forest before the German invasion, and that, in the circumstances, it was ridiculous to suggest that people would have been allowed to picnic on fresh mass-graves!

Finally, the Germans had been in Smolensk since July 1941; was it conceivable that they would not have heard about the shooting of the Poles until two years later? But all this, too, was very thin.

On the other hand, was it not possible that the Germans had murdered the Poles in 1941

—with a view to "planting" them on the Russians two years later? Since there might well have been serious doubts about the exact "age" of the corpses, this was just conceivable, except for the extreme obscurity surrounding the three camps "near Smolensk" at which the Poles were supposed to have been kept after being transferred there from the three original camps.

Then, there was another version which was put forward by some members of the British Embassy in Moscow at the time—and that is that the Russians did not murder the Poles in 1940, "which made no sense", but in 1941, during their stampede, when they lost their heads and decided that it was impossible to evacuate the Poles, but also most undesirable to leave this "bunch of Fascists" in German hands.

- If this had happened, that would explain why the Russians were so infernally cagey whenever Sikorski or Anders kept asking about the missing officers. But it would still not explain why not a single message had been received in Poland from any of them—except the lucky 400 near Vologda—after the three original camps had been disbanded.

The material evidence produced by the Russians that the Poles had been murdered in 1941 and not in 1940 was very slender, one must say. Correspondents who looked at it were not impressed: newspapers and letters dated both 1940 and 1941 (all of them in very small numbers) were, together with other undated objects, such as tobacco pouches,

medals and a fifty-dollar bill, displayed in show cases.

Sceptics inevitably wondered whether those few 1941 newspapers or one or two

unmailed postcards could not have been slipped into the dead men's pockets at some time between September 1943 and January 1944. In 1943 the Germans had certainly put on

show many thousands of " 1940" objects supposedly found on dead Poles.

The Russians, in presenting their case to the outside world, had certainly taken no notice at all of what would, in Western terms, be regarded as evidence. The idea that foreign experts should have been invited to take part in the inquiry was dismissed by the

Russians as "insulting". The answer to such a suggestion would have been: "Are you suggesting that Professor Burdenko or Alexei Tolstoy, or the Metropolitan Nicholas

could tell a lie?" True, even a benevolent foreigner might say: "Well, if he thinks it in the interests of his country that he should tell a lie, wouldn't Tolstoy or the Metropolitan do it?" But then such an argument would also have been dismissed by the Russians as

"hostile". Also, there was the perennial element of distrust: even if the Russians were one hundred per cent sure of their case, what certainty was there that a foreign expert might not prove either ignorant or malevolent, in expressing the view that the corpses, for all their "freshness" were three-and-a-half and not two-and-a-half years old.

[The "freshness" of the corpses is attributed by Anders to the fact that the Russians made a bad mistake in burying them in sandy soil, in which they tended to become

"mummified". In damp soil nothing but unidentifiable skeletons would have been found by the Germans.]

There was always a risk of "Western bad faith".

The Western correspondents who had been allowed to visit Katyn in such peculiar

circumstances were put in an extremely difficult— indeed impossible—position; they

could do little more than say what they had been shown; and even any implied criticism of the Russian handling of the whole case, however mild, was deleted by the Soviet

censorship. Also, to suggest that the Russian case was as bad as Goebbels's case, or even worse, was something one couldn't do in wartime; it was imperative not to play into the German's hands. Might it not also have been this consideration which prompted Miss Harriman to state in January 1944 that she was "satisfied" that the Russian version was correct?

Looking back on it now, with all the evidence accumulated by the "London Poles", which broadly tallies with the German version, one can only wish the Russians would open up their secret archives on the whole Katyn case. They must know far more than could be revealed in the days when Beria was head of the NKVD. It was surely also Beria who

was Culprit No. 1 in either case—whether the Poles were murdered in 1940 or whether

they were left behind in 1941, for the Germans to murder. But it would, even now, no doubt be too much to expect Moscow to make a clean breast of it merely for the sake of historical truth. Katyn, to the Russians, as well as to the Poles, is still so explosive a word that there is a kind of tacit agreement to say nothing about it. To the Russians it has, one feels, remained an embarrassing subject, whatever their true beliefs as to what really happened.

All the same, the Russians might help to clear up the mystery in their own favour if only they would produce documentary evidence to show that the murdered Poles had really

been in "Camps No. 1 ON, No. 2 ON, and No. 3 ON, 25 to 45 km. west of Smolensk" in the summer of 1941. There must be something about it in the archives of the NKVD—if the Poles really were in these camps at that time. But were they? In Poland, to this day, very, very few—if any—believe in the NKVD's innocence.

And it is, of course, well known that at the Nuremberg Trial, where the same old

Bazilevsky repeated the same old story, the Tribunal found the evidence on Katyn much too thin to take account of it in the final indictment of the Germans.

[TMGWC, vol. 17, pp. 355-62.]

For years Katyn Forest was going to cast a shadow on Russo-Polish relations. It almost seemed as if there was a kind of curse on the relations between the two Slav peoples. For even if, despite Katyn, the Red Army, entering Poland, together with the Moscow-made Polish Army, was at first welcomed by the Polish population, more bitter feeling was, before long, to be created by what came to be known in London as "the monstrous crime against Warsaw". But in reality, as we shall see, the two cases are not identical, or even comparable.

Chapter VII THE DISSOLUTION OF THE COMINTERN AND

OTHER CURIOUS EVENTS IN THE SPRING OF 1943

Living and working conditions were still very hard for most of the civilian population in 1943. In essential industries people worked overtime—eleven, twelve hours. The labour shortage was such that, for simpler operations, children were employed in some plants for periods ranging from four to six hours a day.

[Ehrenburg, Ludi, Gody, Zhizn (People, Years, a Lifetime), Novyi Mir, No. 3, 1963.]

Rations, especially for dependents and non-working children, were miserably poor;

everything in the kolkhoz markets was scarce and very expensive. In the cities, there was a black market of sorts, with sugar, for instance, fetching as much as 3,000 roubles a kilo.

(About £30 per lb.)

In 1943, a "deep war", in Ehrenburg's phrase, had set in; peace had become a distant memory and victory was still a long way ahead, in a dim future. There was still no "real"

second front, and though between March and June there was an extraordinary display of official cordiality towards the Western allies, this contrasted strangely with the much more morose attitude towards them on the part of the general public. The feeling that the Allies were not pulling their weight, despite North Africa and the bombing of Germany, was very widespread. It is usually assumed that "the good Russian people" are much more pro-Western than their government; at this time the opposite was the case. The

official cordiality was no doubt tactical, rather than genuine.

First of all, soon after the uncomplimentary Stalin Order of February 23, the Soviet authorities, swallowing their pride, hastened to react to the Standley incident in a manner most agreeable to Roosevelt. Then there was the breach with the London Poles— which

was likely to generate strong anti-Soviet sentiment in Britain and the United States, and it was essential, therefore, for the Russians to try to "localise" the Polish problem, and not allow it to affect Soviet-Anglo-American relations unduly. Hence perhaps the record

warmth vis-a-vis Britain and America in May and June 1943.

Although the loss of Kharkov was keenly felt, the winter campaign had still, on balance, been a magnificent success. Whether, as the Russians said, the Germans and their allies had lost 800,000 men, or only the 470,000 which the Germans admitted, the replacement of even this lower figure in time for the summer offensive was well-nigh impossible, all the more so since the Satellites had not the capacity, and still less the desire, to waste more of their men on "Hitler's war" which was now more than unlikely to be won. In spite of this, the Russians awaited the summer campaign with a touch of nervousness, for the memories of the terrible last two summers—1941 and 1942—were still fresh.

On the eve of this decisive military showdown of July 1943 rumours became more

frequent than at any other time in the war of separate peace offers by the Germans to both Russia and the West. In his May Day Order Stalin actually referred to these peace-feelers; and it is reasonable to suppose that the great display of official Russian cordiality towards the West was at least partly determined by nervousness at the possibility of a deal between Germany and the Western Powers. Similar suspicions existed on the other side too; for we know that Allied soldiers in the Mediterranean area were told that the war there would have to be pursued with the greatest possible vigour "in case the Russians packed up". Some suspicion was also aroused in the West by the curious and unexpected Russian move of setting up a "Free German Committee", with the Wilhelmian black-white-red as its colours, which were still believed to be cherished by a great part of the officer corps.

[See pp. 733 ff.]

Unlike his Red Army Day Order of February 23, Stalin's May Day Order of 1943 was

full of friendly words for the Western Allies. After describing the great winter campaign in Russia, and after referring to the German counter-offensive at Kharkov which had been carried out thanks to the thirty divisions brought from the west (the only barbed "second front" reference in the whole statement) but which had, nevertheless, failed to become a

"German Stalingrad", Stalin then spoke in glowing terms of "our victorious Allies in Tripolitania, Libya and Tunisia", and of "the valiant Anglo-American airmen" who were

"delivering smashing blows on both Germany and Italy, thus foreshadowing the

establishment of a second front in Europe". The Germans and their allies, he said, were in an increasingly bad mess, and there was more and more talk in the foreign press of

German peace-feelers aimed at splitting the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. The

German imperialists, Stalin said, were treacherous people, and liked to judge others by their own standards. Nobody would fall for that kind of bait, and peace would be attained only through the complete rout of Hitler's armies, and the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.

But though catastrophe was staring Germany and Italy in the face, this still did not mean that the war was as good as won. Some very hard battles were still facing the Soviet Union and the Western allies, but the time was approaching when, together

with the armies of its allies, the Red Army would break the back of the Fascist Beast.

During the days that followed, the Soviet press was more pro-Ally than ever before. On May 9, Stalin warmly congratulated Roosevelt and Churchill on "the great victory in North Africa", and all over the country coloured posters were displayed of three equal-sized bolts of lightning, bearing the British, American and Russian colours, breaking the Beast's back. It was a mangy, hyenalike beast with a Hitler head.

The end of the Tunisian campaign had raised high hopes— perhaps excessively high

hopes—in Russia.

In any case, the space allotted in Pravda to the Allies was unusually large. The following long articles (podvals, the equivalent of the Times "turnover") appeared in Pravda in May and June:

May June

Germany

1

2

Germany's Satellites

1

2

Britain and USA

4

6

Occupied Slav

7

2

Countries

France and Belgium

1

2

Neutrals

1

-

The articles on the Allies concerned the blows against Italy, the submarine war, the British Navy, the RAF and American war industries. Moreover, the principal Western

statesmen were generously reported—

May 21, Churchill 5 Columns

May 22, Eden 1 Columns

May 26, Stettinius 2 Columns

May 28, Roosevelt 3 Columns

June 2, Sumner Welles 1.5 Columns

June 8, Churchill 4 Columns

June 8, Eden 1 Columns

June 22, Cripps 1 Columns

What impressed Soviet military commentators most was that, in Tunisia, the English and Americans had won their first major land battle. This was represented as the prelude to much bigger land operations in Europe. The air forces were preparing the way for them.

On May 22—largely as a gesture to impress Britain and America— the dissolution of the Comintern was announced. This took the form of a Resolution by the Presidium of the

Executive Committee of the Communist International. It declared the whole organisation to be "out of date", and that it was even "becoming an obstacle in the way of the further strengthening of the national working parties." It then explained that the war had demonstrated a very important fact:

Whereas in the Axis countries it is important for the working class to strive to

overthrow the government, in the United Nations countries it is, on the contrary, the duty of the working class to support the governments' war effort.

This strange document concluded: "The Executive Committee calls upon its supporters to concentrate on the smashing of German fascism and its vassals."

It was signed by the following members of the Presidium: Gott-wald, Dimitrov, Zhdanov, Kolarov, Koplenig, Kuusinen, Manuilsky, Marty, Pieck, Thorez, Florin, Ercoli (i.e.

Togliatti), and also the following representatives of the Sections: Biano (Italy), D.

Ibarruri (Spain), Lechtinen (Finland), Anna Pauker (Rumania), M. Rakosi (Hungary).

A few days later, in a statement to Harold King of Reuters, Stalin declared the dissolution to be "right and timely".

It showed up the Nazi lie that "Moscow" intended to interfere with the lives of other states, or to "bolshevise" them... It also facilitated the work of all patriots for uniting all the progressive forces, regardless of party allegiance and political

beliefs... It was particularly timely just when the Fascist beast was exerting his last reserves of strength that the freedom-loving nations should organise a common

onslaught on him, and so save all nations from the Fascist yoke...

It was well-known that both Churchill and Roosevelt had pressed for this step. Stalin had always replied that the Comintern was moribund, and did not matter. What he did not

say, however, was that this "moribund"—and now dead—body comprised many future leaders of the "new democracy" in Europe—Thorez, Togliatti, Gottwald, Kopecky, Dimitrov, Pauker, Rakosi, et cetera. They led at the time a very retiring existence either at Ufa or in Moscow, where most of them lived in the grubby Hotel Lux in Gorki Street,

only very occasionally wrote in the Soviet press, and were seldom seen in public, except at the very end of the war. But they were kept in reserve. Even so, many wondered

whether Stalin had not a genuine grudge against the Comintern leaders. Had not Dimitrov overdone his "imperialist war" stuff in 1939-40. And who had thought up the "Kuusinen government"?

In my Diary notes during the few weeks before the Battle of Kursk I find a record of a number of conversations with Russians on the dissolution of the Comintern. One said that

"it must have been a very hard decision for Stalin to take; after all, he had sworn on Lenin's tomb never to abandon the cause of the world revolution. But just like his

'socialism in one country' this decision was another sign of Stalin's greatness that he could adapt himself to changed conditions". Another Russian described it jokingly as

"our NEP in foreign policy"; and still another said that "Stalin had been a bit fed-up with the Comintern for some time, especially for their screaming about the 'imperialist war' in 1939-40". This had caused no end of damage in a country like France, and had also grossly misled the Soviet Government on a number of occasions.

Then there was the rather spectacular visit on May 30 of ex-Ambassador Joseph Davies, of Mission to Moscow fame, who had done his utmost to explain the Purge Trials in a manner most favourable to the Soviet Government. On arriving in Moscow, he got the

Russians to paint "Mission to Moscow" in white paint on the fuselage of his plane. He went to see, as he called them, "his old friends" Mikoyan, Vyshinsky and Judge Ulrich.

The film of his Mission to Moscow was full of absurdities—Vyshinsky with a great black beard, Mrs Molotov speaking pidgin Russian, and so on. They showed it at the Kremlin the night he was there, and the big Russian bosses laughed themselves nearly sick, but agreed that the film was friendly, and useful in debunking the Red bogey idea, still, according to Davies, very strong in the USA. The British Embassy were pretty mad with Davies about the monocled silly-ass who was supposed to represent Lord Chilston, the British Ambassador, scared to death of OGPU microphones, and so on. The US Embassy

and the American press were uniformly hostile to Davies, partly because of his peculiar showmanship, and partly because of his excessive display of pro-Soviet sentiment, not to say sentimentality. Davies, for his part, was very pleased with the dissolution of the Comintern and remarked that when he was Ambassador in Moscow, he used to say to

Litvinov that the Comintern—the stick with which everybody beat the Soviet Union—

was the real source of all the trouble.

*

Sandwiched between the Dissolution of the Comintern and Stalin's statement on it were the celebrations of the first anniversary of the Anglo-Soviet Alliance which took the form of enthusiastic articles in the press, messages from Kalinin to George VI, and so on. On June 9, the anniversary of the Soviet-American Agreement, the papers were full of

compliments to the USA, complete with expressions of gratitude for lend-lease

shipments. Said Pravda: "The Soviet people not only know about them, but they highly value the support coming from the great Republic beyond the ocean." The most important thing now, Pravda said, was not to give Hitler any respite.

This constant boost of the Allies in May and June, and the great ideological concessions the Russians were making to the West were not, of course, without reference to the

military situation. A period of extremely hard fighting was imminent, and the Russians were hoping that a tremendous new effort (now that North Africa was a closed chapter) would be made by the Allies in the near future.

In its "Second Anniversary of the War" statement on June 22, 1943, Sovinformbureau went so far as to say that "without a second front victory over Germany is impossible."

The main theme of the statement was that thanks to the Red Army, which was tying up

200 German and thirty satellite divisions, the Western Allies had been given enough time to prepare themselves for an all-out attack on the Axis on the continent of Europe.

[This statement said that, in two years, Germany and her allies had lost 6.4 m. men in killed and prisoners, 56,000 guns, 42,000 tanks, 43,000 planes. The Soviet Union had lost 4.2 million men in killed and missing (i.e. including prisoners), 30,000 guns, 30,000

tanks, 23,000 planes. It then dealt with the Partisan movement which it credited with having killed 300,000 Germans, wrecked 3,000 trains and over 3,000 bridges, destroyed

"hundreds of tanks", et cetera, all of which is highly improbable, since the Partisan movement did not assume major proportions until the second half of 1943.]

Was the Sovinformbureau statement merely another tactical move to butter up the allies, or was it a sign of genuine nervousness on the eve of the great summer battles?

For June 1943 was certainly an anxious month. Everybody felt that the storm might break at any moment. Many were surprised that the Germans had not attacked yet. There was

intense air activity on both sides. On several nights the Germans raided Gorki, causing much damage to its industrial areas, especially to a large tank-assembly plant. There were also raids on Kursk, Saratov, Yaroslavl, Astrakhan, et cetera, and the Germans also

dropped mines on the Lower Volga. The Russians raided Orel and other places.

Altogether, it was clear that the Kursk-Orel area would be the main battleground; and when the German offensive began, it completely lacked all elements of surprise. Even their famous new weapons, the Tiger and Panther tanks were no secret. A number of

them had been captured near Leningrad, and two were even included in the Trophies

Exhibition in Moscow during June. They had undergone all the necessary Russian

experiments for knocking them out.

On June 11 I recorded a conversation with a Russian correspondent who had just been to Kursk. He said the Russian equipment there was truly stupendous; he had never seen

anything like it. What was also going to make a big difference this summer was the

enormous number of American trucks; these were going to increase Russian mobility to a fantastic degree. The Russian soldiers were finding them excellent.

On the same day I also wrote:

Molotov today gave a lunch to celebrate the anniversary of the Soviet-American

agreement. He was extremely friendly, and kept talking about not only wartime, but also post-war co-operation between the Big Three. All the toasts dealt indeed with this tripartite association continuing after the war. Clark Kerr said he was glad the Anglo-Soviet alliance had turned out such a sturdy child; it had looked a bit bandy-legged at first. Admiral Standley dwelt on Lend-Lease deliveries, which had been a bit slow at first, but were very satisfactory now, with a lot of stuff all over the place, with Oerlikons on Russian ice-breakers and British guns on the Red October

battleship. .. The Russians are thinking (or talking) more and more in terms of a Big-Three peace after the war...

During the second half of June there had been two air-raid warnings in Moscow. In fact, on June 9, some stuff had been dropped on the outskirts, though not on Moscow itself.

The planes were on their way to Gorki. Even so, instructions were given to the civil defence people in Moscow to be on the alert.

On June 19 Ehrenburg published a rather alarmist article about future air-raids on

Moscow: "Don't forget that they are still at Orel; forget that they are no longer at Viazma.

They will not take Moscow, but they hate Moscow, the symbol of their failures; and they will try to cripple and disfigure it."

In June I saw a great deal of the airmen of the French Normandie Squadron, a mixed

bunch ranging from Paris communist workers talking with a delightful faubourg accent to the ginger-haired Vicomte de La Poype. The Russians were astonished that a vicomte should want to fight on the side of the Bolsheviks. But the most impressive amongst this marvellous group of fellows was the commander of the Squadron, Commandant Tulasne,

small, handsome, with something of the finesse of Alfred de Vigny's officers.

The squadron was formed in Syria in 1942. For political reasons, de Gaulle had decided to send this small French force to Russia. They had been here since the end of 1942, had already been in action, and, by June, the squadron had shot down fifteen German planes, for the loss of three. Now, in June 1943, they were preparing for those big battles in which so many of them were going to lose their lives. They got on well with the Russian mechanics at the air-base, and also had plenty of fun with the girls in the near-by village.

They flew Yak-1's, which they said they liked.

Tulasne, whom I met at lunch on June 17 at General Petit's (the French Military Attaché), said that things were still very quiet in the Briansk sector (where the French had their base), but that "it" might start at any moment. The Russians were busy raiding German communications with 200 bombers and 200 fighters at a time; they were using Russian

bombers during the day, and American bombers at night; the Germans had hardly any

night fighters here, so busy were they over Germany.

The French, he said, were eating the same food as the Russians, and had got to like kasha and cabbage soup; but they seldom got fresh meat, and usually American spam or

galantine, which was a bore. The more recent French arrivals were finding living

conditions rather primitive, but were quite happy otherwise. The village girls were "very friendly".

The story of the Normandie Squadron was to become one of the proudest French exploits during World War II, and one of the most tragic. In the battles of the Kursk-Orel area in the summer of 1943 about two-thirds of the first batch of the Normandie Squadron were killed, among them Lefevre and Tulasne. Later, others came to take their place, and their last battles were to be fought in East Prussia where, supplied with the best Russian fighters, the Yak-3, they wrought terrible havoc on the now tottering Luftwaffe, once bringing down nearly 100 in three days. The vicomte was born under a lucky star, and, together with three others, was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and

ultimately safely returned to France. But Tulasne was the man whom the veterans of the Normandie Squadron remembered best.

The fearful losses in the Normandie Squadron give one some idea of the losses suffered by the Russian air force generally.

Partly because of the growing Great-Russian nationalism, and partly perhaps to impress the Western Allies (who had been so pleased with the dissolution of the Comintern)

Stalin decided in June 1943 in favour of a new National Anthem to replace the

International. At the end of the month, members of the Central Committee listened to some of the first attempts, but were not satisfied; it was not till the beginning of 1944 that the Party anthem (with new "nationalist" words) was adopted as the national anthem, and the International became the party anthem!

These manifestations of friendliness to the Allies—all with an eye on a Big-Three peace

—were partly offset by an innovation of a different order. To show, as it were, that Marxist consciousness was still alive, and that there was no "ideological NEP", there appeared in June, ostensibly under the auspices of Trud and the Soviet trade unions, a new journal called War and the Working Class. This declared in its very first issue that its main object was to show up crypto-Fascist elements abroad, who were unfavourable to

the Soviet concept of a Big-Three Peace. "It would be ridiculous to deny," it said, "that certain difficulties exist in the relations between the different members of the anti-Hitler coalition," and it went hammer-and-tongs for the American isolationists, for the English

"Cliveden Set" and other "Munichites". These "semi-allies of Hitler" tended nowadays to do their dirty work through the medium of "certain Polish circles who had learned nothing". It then spoke favourably of a "Directorate of the principal powers" which would

"render account" to the wider international organisation of all the nations. The Russian conception of a United Nations Organisation "directed" by the Great Powers— or rather, by the Big Three—was beginning to take shape.

What with air-raids on Gorki and air-raid warnings in Moscow, there was a distinct

feeling of nervousness in Moscow during June and the beginning of July. The feeling that more loss of life was in store was nicely reflected in this genuine story a Russian told me about the charwoman in his office. On hearing somebody say that the Second Front was absolutely necessary, she exclaimed: "God forbid! As if one Front wasn't enough! " She had two sons in the Army.

On July 6 it was officially announced that the German offensive had started in a very big way just where it had been expected—in the Kursk salient, between Belgorod and the

Orel Bulge.

Chapter VIII KURSK: HITLER LOSES HIS LAST CHANCE OF

TURNING THE TIDE

Already in February, after Stalingrad, Hitler had declared that it was essential for the German Army "to make up in summer what had been lost in winter." This was not easy since the Germans and their allies had lost well over half a million men, perhaps as many as 700,000. Despite the "total mobilisation" introduced in Germany, only about half the losses could be replaced by the beginning of the summer fighting, according to German sources. Hitler's prestige had suffered severely from Stalingrad, and the recapture of Kharkov had not made up for it. The rout of the Germans in North Africa and the

prospect of an early invasion of Italy, with unpredictable (or perhaps all-too-predictable) political consequences, had added to Hitler's discomfiture. The war in Russia could

scarcely be won any longer, but what Hitler badly needed was a spectacular victory—

something similar to the Russian victory at Stalingrad. The "Kursk salient" between Orel in the north and Belgorod in the south (a salient which the Russians had captured in the previous winter) seemed the most obvious place for inflicting a sensational defeat on the Russians.

The Russians looked upon the Kursk salient as their springboard for the reconquest of the Orel and Briansk country to the north-west, and of the Ukraine to the south-west, and there were enormous Russian troop concentrations in it. Ever since March the Russians had been fortifying the salient with thousands of miles of trenches, thousands of gun emplacements, et cetera, and the defence in depth along the north, west and south sides of the salient extended as much as sixty-five miles.

In the spring of 1943, according to German sources, Hitler was determined for both

political and economic reasons to hold a front running from the Gulf of Finland down to the Sea of Azov, and to inflict a resounding defeat on the Russians with his "Operation Citadel" in the Kursk salient. To trap vast numbers of Russians there would greatly change the whole strategic position in the Germans' favour, and might even make a new offensive against Moscow possible.

As the Germans now tell the story:

The Kursk salient seemed particularly favourable for such an attack. A

simultaneous German offensive from north and south would trap powerful Russian

forces. It was also to be hoped that the operational reserves the enemy would throw into the fray could be smashed. Moreover, the liquidation of this salient would

greatly shorten the front... True, there were some who argued even then that the

enemy would expect the German attack precisely in this area and... that there was therefore the danger of losing more German forces than destroying Russian forces...

But Hitler would not be convinced, and thought Operation Citadel would succeed,

provided it was undertaken soon.

[Philippi and Heim, op. cit., pp. 209-10.]

But the operation was delayed owing to unfavourable terrain conditions and also to the slowness with which the German divisions were being replenished. In the circumstances General Model, commanding the German troops north of the salient declared that the

operation could not succeed without strong reinforcements by heavy modern tanks,

superior to anything the Russians had. The attack was therefore postponed once again till the middle of June, and meantime numerous new Tiger and Panther tanks and Ferdinand

mobile guns were rushed from armaments works in Germany straight to the front. But

there were further hesitations and delays caused, among other things, by Hitler's fear that Italy was on the point of dropping out of the war. When he had satisfied himself that Mussolini was not giving up, Hitler decided to stick to his original plan.

The Kursk victory, he declared, would fire the imagination of the world.

Meanwhile the Russians under Zhukov and Vasilevsky had not wasted their time, and

nothing suited them better than that the Germans should attack them where they were

strongest of all. The extent of the Russian concentration of armaments in the main battle area may be judged from the fact that, in less than three months, some 500,000 railway wagons loaded with every kind of equipment had been brought from inside Russia to the Kursk salient.

The Germans had accumulated 2,000 tanks round the salient (according to the Russians, over 3,000), more than half of them in the southern sector commanded by General Hoth, and nearly 2,000 planes.

To quote Philippi and Heim:

With such heavy German concentrations, Hitler looked forward to the battle with

great confidence. He was sure that the northern and southern striking force would break through and close the ring east of Kursk. But, contrary to expectations, it took only a very short time to realise that the offensive was a failure, even though our troops exerted themselves to the utmost. Our attacking forces, though

penetrating into the deep Russian defences, were suffering very severe losses, and on July 7 the Russians threw in increasingly heavy tank forces. The German 4th

Panzer Army had to fight particularly heavy tank battles, in which the most it could hope to do was not to be driven back. Serious doubts grew as to the success of

Operation Citadel. Hitler nevertheless ordered on July 10 the offensive to continue.

That was the day on which the Western Allies landed in Sicily, and he needed his

"Kursk victory" more than ever.

In reality, after the initial tactical successes, the Battle of Kursk had long before come to a standstill, and on July 12 the Russian command suddenly struck out

towards Orel, in the rear of the German 9th Army [at the north side of the Kursk

salient]... On July 13 Hitler reluctantly ordered Operation Citadel to be

discontinued. This decision was further prompted by the Italians' failure to defend Sicily, and the possibility of having to send German reinforcements to Italy.

[Ibid., p. 212.]

In four days the Germans succeeded in no more than denting the Kursk salient—by some ten miles along a front of about twelve miles in the north, and by some thirty miles along a thirty mile front in the south. About 100 miles still separated the two German forces when the battle came to a standstill.

Nearly the entire German panzer force had been used up to an irreplaceable extent, and the initiative was finally lost by the Germans and taken over by the Red Army. Despite very heavy losses they had also suffered in the Battle of Kursk, the Russian command was now still able to launch its summer offensive along a very broad front, with superior forces.

There was tremendous tension in Moscow when it was first learned that the German

offensive had begun. The news was contained in an article, redolent of nationalism, in Red Star.

Our fathers and our forebears made every sacrifice to save their Russia, their

homeland. Our people will never forget Minin and Pozharsky, Suvorov and

Kutuzov, and the Russian Partisans of 1812. We are proud to think that the blood of our glorious ancestors is flowing in our veins, and we shall be worthy of them...

What was being fought in the very heart of Russia, in Turgeniev country, was a modern kind of Battle of Kulikovo on the outcome of which so much depended.

[ In which Prince Dimitri Donskoi routed the Tartars in 1380.]

On the very first day of the battle two things were clear: that Germany had thrown

tremendous forces into the battle and that they were suffering losses on an unprecedented scale, and were not getting much in return. The communiqué of the first day's fighting read:

Since this morning our troops have been fighting stubborn battles against the large advancing forces of enemy infantry and tanks in the Orel, Kursk and Belgorod

sectors. The enemy forces are supported by large numbers of aircraft. All the

attacks were repelled with heavy losses to the enemy, and only in some places did small German units succeed in penetrating slightly into our defence lines.

Preliminary reports show that our troops ... have crippled or destroyed 586 enemy tanks... 203 enemy planes have been shot down. The fighting is continuing.

It was the 586 tanks which captured the country's imagination; there had never been

anything like it in one day. The feeling it produced was like that in London at the height of the Battle of Britain when it was announced that 280 German planes had been shot

down in one day.

On July 6 the communiqué again spoke of a slight Russian withdrawal, and the number

of tanks was now 433, and of planes, 111. On the 7th, it was 520 tanks and again 111

planes. On the 8th, the Russians were already counter-attacking, and the German losses for the day were put at 304 tanks and 161 planes.

By the 9th, the four days of anxiety came to an end; not that the anxiety was ever acute after those first 586 tanks. "The Tigers are Burning" was the title of a report from the front, and there appeared statements by bewildered German prisoners on "the carnage among the German troops, the like of which they had never seen".

"Our medical staff were unable to cope with all the wounded. One medical orderly told me that the dressing station was like a slaughterhouse to look at", a German corporal in the Belgorod area was quoted as saying.

On July 15 the Russian communiqué announced that the Russian counter-offensive

against Orel had begun, and that, in three days since the break-through in several parts of the Orel salient, the Soviet troops had advanced between fifteen and thirty miles.

On the 24th there was a Stalin Order to Generals Rokossovsky, Vatutin and Popov

announcing the "final liquidation of the German summer offensive" and the recapture of all the territory the Germans had gained since July 5. It recalled that in the Orel-Kursk and the Belgorod areas the Germans had concentrated a total of thirty-seven divisions—

seventeen tank, two motorised and eighteen infantry— but they had not taken the

Russians by surprise and had failed completely in their design to cut through to Kursk.

The legend that in summer the Germans always advanced had been dispelled once and

for all. The German losses were put at 70,000 killed, 2,900 tanks, 195 mobile guns, 844

field guns, 1,392 planes and over 5,000 motor vehicles.

What was being emphasised in all front reports was the extraordinary sureness of touch the Russians had shown in this battle. No doubt some of these figures were exaggerated, but even if the Germans lost 2,000 and not 3,000 tanks (and after the war they admitted that their tank forces at Kursk had been virtually frittered away), it was good enough. But it was easy to imagine that if 70,000 Germans were killed in the Kursk fighting, the Russian losses must have been very high, too. Examples of extraordinary courage and

endurance by the Russians were reported—for instance of soldiers staying put in their trenches while the heavy German tanks were sweeping across them, and then firing at

them from behind.

Altogether, it was reckoned that some 6,000 tanks and 4,000 planes were involved in the Battle of Kursk on the two sides. It was a concentrated carnage within a small area more terrible than had yet been seen. When, a few weeks later, I travelled through the fair Ukrainian countryside from Volchansk to Valuiki and then to Belgorod and Kharkov, I

could see how the area to the north of Belgorod (where the Germans had penetrated some thirty miles into the Kursk salient) had been turned into a hideous desert, in which even every tree and bush had been smashed by shell-fire. Hundreds of burned-out tanks and wrecked planes were still littering the battlefield, and even several miles away from it the air was filled with the stench of thousands of only half-buried Russian and German

corpses.

But for those who survived these were great days in Russia. What might be called the era of the Victory Salutes opened on August 5, 1943, following the special Stalin

announcement that Orel and Belgorod had been liberated.

The deep voice of Levitan, Moscow Radio's star announcer, now uttered for the first time phrases which were to become like sweet and familiar music during the next two years: Order by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief to Col.-Gen. Popov, Col.-Gen.

Sokolovsky, Army General Rokossovsky, Army General Vatutin, Col.-Gen. Konev...

Today, August 5, the troops of the Briansk Front, in co-operation with the troops of the Western and Central Fronts captured, as a result of bitter fighting, the city of Orel.

Today also the troops of the Steppe and Voronezh Fronts broke the enemy's

resistance and captured the town of Belgorod.

After naming the units which were the first to break into these two cities, and saying that they would now be named "Orel regiments" and "Belgorod regiments", there came, for the first time, an announcement like this:

Tonight at twenty-four o'clock, on August 5, the capital of our country, Moscow,

will salute the valiant troops that liberated Orel and Belgorod with twelve artillery salvoes from 120 guns. I express my thanks to all the troops that took part in the offensive... Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in the struggle for the freedom of our country.

Death to the German invaders.

The Supreme Commander-in-Chief,

Marshal of the Soviet Union,

STALIN.

With only some slight variations in the wording this was to become the consecrated text which Russia was to hear over the radio more than three hundred times before the final victory over Germany and Japan.

Yes, the era of the Victory Salutes had begun.

On the next day, August 6, the communiqué said that the troops that had captured Orel were pursuing the enemy to the west and had captured Kromy and seventy other

localities, while, in the south, a large-scale offensive was successfully developing towards Kharkov.

There was nothing fortuitous or arbitrary in the Russian decision to celebrate the victory of Kursk with those first victory salvoes and fireworks. The Russian command knew that by winning the Battle of Kursk Russia had, in effect won the war.

This is also the view taken by post-war German historians. Thus, in the opinion of Walter Goerlitz, Stalingrad was the politico-psychological turning-point of the whole war in the east, but the German defeat at Kursk and Belgorod was its military turning-point.

[Walter Goerlitz. Paulus and Stalingrad, p. 288. (London, p. 288).]

Chapter IX OREL: CLOSE-UP OF A PURELY RUSSIAN CITY

UNDER THE GERMANS

The recapture of the ancient Russian city of Orel and the complete liquidation of the Orel Salient which, for two years, had constituted a threat to Moscow, were a direct sequel of the German rout at Kursk.

Orel was, in 1943, among the first of the larger purely Russian cities to be liberated; it was, moreover, one where (as distinct from the Don country and the Kuban) the Germans had been for nearly two years—since October 1941.

In the second week of August I was able to travel by car from Moscow to Tula, and then to Orel. The following account, based on notes written at the time, describes what the edge of the Orel Salient looked like, and what I found inside the Salient, particularly at Orel itself.

The thistles were as tall as a man; the thistles and the weeds formed a thick jungle, making a belt some two miles wide, and stretching west and east, and then south, nearly all the way round the Orel Salient. In this jungle, through which the dusty road from Tula now ran, there was death at every footstep. "Minen" in German, "Miny" in Russian, old and new notice-boards were saying; and, in the distance, up on the hill, under the hard blue summer sky, were distorted shapes of ruined churches and fragments of houses, and chimney-stacks. These miles of weeds and thistles had been a no-man's-land for nearly two years. Those ruins on the hill were the ruins of Mtsensk; two old women and four cats were the only living creatures the Russians had found there when the Germans pulled out on July 20. Before departing they had blown up or set fire to everything—churches and houses and peasant cottages and all. In the middle of last century Leskov's—and

Shostakovich's—"Lady Macbeth" had lived in this town; it was strange to think that this drama of blood and passion should have taken place in a town now smelling of blood

shed for such different reasons.

We drove through the jungle up to Mtsensk. No, one small brick house had somehow survived. "Feeding Point", a notice outside said. "Here you can receive your dry ration, breakfast, lunch and dinner." And, beside it, was another notice: "The enemy has destroyed and looted this town, and driven away its inhabitants; they are crying for revenge."

Achtung, Minen. Achtung, Minen... "They're the devil," said the colonel who met us at Mtsensk. "Along only 100 yards just off this road we dug up 650. There was very tough fighting round here. German Jaeger—tough troops, very good troops, can't deny them that. But the mines are bad, very bad. Every damned day something happens. Yesterday a colonel came down this road on horseback; the horse kicked an anti-personnel mine—and there you are: horse and colonel both phut." He talked of new delayed-action mines found in German dugouts. Contraptions in which the acid eats through the metal; some take two months to blow up. And there were also booby-traps, plenty of them. These mines and

booby-traps had become one of the Germans' most important weapons in 1943. and were

the Russian soldiers' greatest worry and chief topic of conversation.

[Many mines—both Russian and German—made in 1943, were cased in wood and so

were particularly hard to detect.]

Mines had caused terrible casualties to the Russians in the Orel fighting, and were going to cause many more at Kharkov and elsewhere. As we talked to the colonel, a horse-cart drove past and in it were two moaning soldiers, with blood streaming from their heads; they had just been blown up on a mine...

In the last few days, only about 200 people had come back to Mtsensk, out of its original population of 20,000. These two hundred had been hiding somewhere in the countryside.

Along the road to Orel, with fields and beautiful woods on either side, there were no villages anywhere, and only notice-boards among the rubble giving the name the village had had. The German "desert zone" had now spread all the way from Rzhev and Viazma to Orel.

Orel, not so long ago a pleasant provincial backwater, still full of Turgeniev memories and associations, was badly shattered. More than half the town was destroyed, and some of the ruins were still smoking. The bridges over the Oka had been blown up, but a

temporary wooden bridge had already been built, and army lorries were driving west, and ambulances were coming in from Karachev— thirty miles further west—where there was

heavy fighting.

How had Orel lived through nearly two years of German occupation? Of 114,000 people

now only 30,000 were there. Many had been murdered; many had been hanged in the

public square—that very square where there were now new graves of the first Russian

tank crew that had broken into Orel, and also of General Gurtiev, of Stalingrad fame, who was killed here the morning the Russians fought their way into the city. Altogether, 12,000 people were said to have been murdered, and about twice as many deported to

Germany. But there were also many thousands who had joined the partisans in the forests round Orel and Briansk—for this (especially the Briansk area) was active partisan

country.

The Germans had appointed a Russian burgomaster, who had now fled with them; and

they had brought to the Orel countryside some former Russian landowners or landowners'

sons—White Guardists they called them. But whether they got their former estates back was not quite clear. In most places, the kolkhozes had not been dissolved. A little private enterprise was encouraged—but goods were so short that it never came to anything. True, I found in a pile of junk in a street a broken bottle, and on it a label saying first in Russian and then in German: "Fruchtwasser-Fabrik, NOS-DRUNOW UND Co., Orel, Moskauer

Str. 6." It would have been interesting to talk to Nosdrunow, the Mr Schweppes of German Orel; but he was not to be found.

The winter of 1941-2 had been the hardest of all. People had died by the hundred of

starvation. Later, they began to receive 7 ounces of bread a day if they worked for the Germans in one way or another. And then there was all the horror of the Russian war

prisoners' camp; and here I first learned at first hand of the German policy towards Russian war prisoners, as it changed after Stalingrad. Until then, they were allowed to die like flies; after that they were being blackmailed or flattered into joining the Vlasov Army.

Stiff, pop-eyed, blue-eyed General Sobennikov, now chief of the Garrison of Orel, had taken part in the great July offensive and now talked about it. By July 15, after three days'

heavy fighting, the Russians had broken through the main lines of the German defences round the Orel salient. There had never been, he said, such a heavy concentration of Russian guns as against these defences; in many places the fire-power was ten times

heavier than at Verdun. The German minefields were so thick and widespread that as

many mines as possible had to be blown up by the super-barrage, in order to reduce

Russian casualties in the subsequent break-through. By July 20, the Germans tried to stop the Russian advance by throwing in hundreds of planes; and it was a job for the Russian anti-aircraft guns and fighters to deal with them. In the countless air-battles there were very heavy casualties on both sides. Many French airmen were killed, too, during those days.

How important it was for the Germans to hold Orel, he said, could be seen from the order of General von Schmidt (since replaced by General Model) saying that Orel must be held to the bitter end.

"And it certainly was," said the General. "The German troops were tough; nearly all held out and only very few surrendered. None of the prisoners we took were older than thirty

—picked troops, healthy, good troops; when Comrade Ehrenburg now talks about the

German army being composed of gouty old men suffering from piles, he is talking

through his hat. Yes, good troops, though morally damaged, all the same. Kursk and the rest has had a demoralising effect on them. Prisoners also told us that the fall of

Mussolini had made a deep impression on the German soldiers—though some continued

to believe their officers' stories that Mussolini was a very sick man."

Then he told the complicated story of how Orel has been almost completely surrounded by August 3, and how, finally, in the early hours of August 5, the Russians broke into Orel.

Our broadcasting armoured car, playing the International and The Holy War and

The Little Blue Scarf, was among the first to break into the city; it had a tremendous effect on the population, who poured into the streets, even though the fighting was still going on. The Germans were still using mobile guns and tanks against us, and their tommy-gunners in the attics also bothered us a great deal. General Gurtiev

was killed by one of them. Delayed action mines were still exploding, and in the

midst of all this din, the loud-speaker was bellowing its patriotic songs. It was not till the next day that the tommygunners were all wiped out, though a few may still be in hiding. And there may still be hundreds of delayed-action mines at Orel, though

we've already picked up 80,000 in the area. That's why no troops are stationed in Orel yet...

Yes, I drove into Orel on the morning of the 5th. You can imagine the dawn, and the houses around still blazing, and our guns and tanks driving into town, covered with flowers, and the loud-speaker bellowing The Holy War, and old women and children running among the soldiers, and pressing flowers into their hands and kissing them.

There was still some firing going on. But I remember how an old woman stood at

the corner of Pushkin Street, and she was making the sign of the Cross, and tears were rolling down her wrinkled face. And another elderly woman, well-educated

judging by her speech, ran towards me and gave me flowers, and threw her arms

round my neck, and talked, and talked and talked; through the din I couldn't hear what she was saying, except that it was about her son who was in the Red Army.

Now there's heavy fighting going on at Karachev. We have some British and

American tanks there, but not many. The German air force is again very active,

making a thousand sorties a day. What they are fighting is much more than a

rearguard action, now that we are pushing on to the Dnieper.

*

Orel had been liberated only five days before, but already the Soviet authorities were fully established here. Most public buildings had been destroyed, but in a small house in a side street, Comrade M. P. Romashov, Partisan chief of the area, and Hero of the Soviet Union, was installed as president of the Provincial Executive Committee. He had many stories to tell of partisan warfare, of battles with punitive expeditions, and of partisan raids on columns of civilians who were being driven west. The partisans would kill the German escort, and the civilians would then scatter through the forests.

A check-up was going on among civilians at Orel, and party members especially had to account for their behaviour during the twenty months of occupation. Orel had been

captured on October 2, 1941 by Guderian's tanks with such suddenness that many people had been trapped. On Romashov's desk I saw a note, written in an illiterate hand by a woman who said that she—a member of the Communist Party—and her two children had

been trapped here on October 2, and that, to keep herself and her children alive, she had had to take a job as a cleaner at a German office.

They looked, from a distance, like soft greenish-brown rag dolls lying over the parapet of a trench from which they had been exhumed. Two Russian officials were sorting out

skulls, some with bullet-holes at the back, others without. From the trench came a

pungent mouldy stench. The rag dolls were bodies dug from trenches outside the large brick building of Orel Prison. Two hundred had been exhumed, but, judging from the

length and depth of the trenches, there were at least 5,000 more. Some of these "samples"

were women, but most were men; half of them were Russian war prisoners who had died

of starvation or various diseases; the rest were soldiers and civilians who had been shot through the back of the skull. Many of them had been killed at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays or at 10 a.m. on Fridays; methodically, the Gestapo firing squads would visit the prison twice a week. Besides these, many others had been murdered at Orel; some had been publicly

hanged as "partisans" in the main square.

*

One day at Orel I went to a charming old-time house, with classical pillars and an

overgrown garden, which had once belonged to a relative of Turgeniev's. Turgeniev

himself had often lived here, and this was obviously, in his mind, the scene of The Nest of Gentlefolk. The place could have scarcely changed since the 1840's, when the good and saintly Liza decided, in this very house, to retire to a convent since happiness in this world had been denied her.

The house had been the Turgeniev Museum, and I talked to the old man who was still in charge. He had been in the Gestapo prison for three months, and had heard the volleys on those Tuesday and Friday mornings. Both his assistants at the Museum had been shot as

"communist suspects".

The old man—whose name was Fomin—spoke of the fearful famine in Orel. For a long

time no food at all, not even the tiny ration of bread, had been given to the people. As you went along the streets in the winter of 1941-2, you would stumble over people who had collapsed and died. That winter, with great difficulty, he and his wife had bartered what possessions they had for some potatoes and beetroot. What later helped people to survive was their vegetable gardens.

Ten thousand books of the Turgeniev Library, he said, had been taken away by the

Germans and many other exhibits—Turgeniev's own shotgun, for instance—had simply

been looted. However, he said, thank God, the house had survived. Turgeniev's country house, at Spas Lutovino, between Orel and Mtsensk, had been burned down.

One night at the gorsoviet (town soviet), with a starry sky outside and a red glow of burning villages in the west, Karachev way, I met a strangely assorted pair—a local

doctor and a local priest.

Dr Protopopov who, with his little beard and pince-nez, looked like something out of Chekhov, told how in spite of everything, the Germans allowed him to attend to the sick and wounded Russian war prisoners. It was a nightmarish story of starvation and neglect, which only he and a few devoted assistants had tried to remedy in a small way, by

collecting food from the local population—even though they had less than nothing to

spare—and by smuggling it into the hospital. Some of the severely ill prisoners, were moved by the Germans in horse-sleighs, at the height of winter, to another hospital, many miles away. The Russian staff had protested in vain, and had wrapped as many of the

men as possible in blankets. But nearly half of them died during the journey. That other

"hospital", from what he had heard, was little better than a death-camp, anyway.

The priest was a grubby old man of seventy-two, very deaf, with a white beard and a

silver chain and cross, who said that if many Russians worked for the Germans, it was only because they would have died of hunger otherwise. He was allowed to visit the

Russian war prisoners; they were being starved; on some days, twenty or thirty or forty would die. But after Stalingrad the Germans had begun to feed them a little better; and then started urging them to join the Russian Liberation Army.

He said that, up to a point, the Germans had encouraged the churches: it was part of their anti-communist policy. But in reality it was the churches which had unofficially

organised Russian "mutual aid circles" to help the poorest people and also to do what they could for the war prisoners. Father Ivan said that "in view of the circumstances", he had ceased to be a village priest in 1929, and when the Germans came he thought he

could help the Russian cause by serving in a church again. "Around me," he said, "there gathered a nucleus of believers, and we were given a church. I must say that, under the Germans, the churches flourished in Orel; and they became—that's what the Germans

didn't expect—active centres of Russian national consciousness." But the man who supervised the churches for the German command was not, as one would have expected,

a bishop, but a civilian functionary called Konstantinov, a "white" Russian; the churches were thus deprived of all autonomy, and even the rubber stamp of each church was

locked up in Konstantinov's desk—a fact Father Ivan thought particularly outrageous. His immediate senior was Father Kutepov, who had a much larger church; and Father

Kutepov told him never to mention the Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow, and to pray for Metropolitan Serafim, who was in Berlin and was approved by the Germans.

"I didn't like that," said Father Ivan, "and I avoided mentioning either. Yes, the churches were crowded—and there were five of them at Orel. Sometimes German soldiers—five

or ten at a time—would come to our service, and they behaved very well, I must say."

Then the old man told the strange story of how on Easter Night in 1942 and again in 1943

a few hundred war prisoners were allowed to come to church.

"When our people were told that the war prisoners would attend service, there was great rejoicing, and they swarmed to the church bringing the prisoners gifts... It was so

wonderful to see our poor war prisoners come to church on Holy Easter Night. They were very sad, but there was great happiness shining in their eyes as they saw all the love and affection the people of Orel were showing them."

The doctor, who had been listening to the old priest, was becoming more and more

irritated. "If they were all that happy," he said, "how was it that thousands of them died of starvation? Wasn't it a case of allowing a few prisoners, specially picked ones, to go to your Easter service? Just for effect. And your dates are all wrong. I can swear to it that no prisoners were allowed to go to church in 1942. It was only afterwards, after Stalingrad that the Germans started on all those tricks to get the surviving war prisoners to join the Vlasov Army."

The priest had, of course, been taken in by the Germans, especially by the fact that they were opening churches that had been closed for fifteen years or more. But what was the purpose of this German church policy amongst people whom they were determined to

starve out anyway? Was it not a case of trying to create as much mental confusion as possible among the Russians? The curious thing was that the churches did become

centres of "Russianism", despite the clear anti-Soviet stand taken—at least at first—by some of the priests, and despite the Germans' expectation that the churches would be centres of anti-Soviet propaganda.

[Some Nazi officials had serious suspicions from the start about the churches exercising an undesirable "nationalist" influence on the Untermenschen. On the other hand, certain German generals, e.g. Guderian, later spoke selfrighteously of the satisfaction they had in allowing the Russians in occupied towns to open their churches. Guderian is, however, careful not to say a word about the death from starvation that thousands of war prisoners and also thousands of civilians suffered in towns like Orel which, in 1941-2, were under the direct jurisdiction of his (Guderian's) own troops.]

Some other strange characters had been active in Orel during the two years of the

German occupation. The schools (except a small number of elementary schools and a

school for juvenile spies—like the one I had already heard of in Kharkov) were closed.

The bitterness among adolescents, who had been pampered under the Soviets, was

particularly acute. The teachers—even of the schools that had been closed—were ordered to attend the lectures of an individual who spoke Russian with a queer accent, and called himself Oktan. His lectures were called a "course in pedagogical re-education". Oktan also edited a Russian-language paper in Orel called Rech, in which the gist of his

"lectures" was published. Its subjects were "The Russian is uncreative by nature and is destined to obey orders"; "The revision of the Russian historical past"; "What an Aryan must be like". In the paper he preached a "total revaluation of cultural values"; Tolstoy was declared to be a worthless writer; Russian music was deprecated, and Wagner

declared the greatest musical genius of all time. Needless to say, not all teachers were

"invited" to Oktan's lectures; many had been arrested, while others had fled.

The general impression was that in the victorious days of 1941-2, the Germans had a

number of nondescript Russian adventurers and hangers-on who were preparing to play

some still undefined part in the Germanisation of a purely-Russian area like Orel.

There were also other lunatic happenings. There were some people of German descent

who had lived at Orel for generations. They were sent to Lodz to have blood-tests taken to see if they were real Aryans.

Another memorable impression of Orel was the condition of the railways. I had never

seen such thorough destruction before. In the Stalingrad area, only six months before, the destruction was still primitive, and could be easily repaired. But here, in the Orel area, the Germans had used a special engine which, as it went along, destroyed both rails and

sleepers. To use any railways in these newly-liberated territories, the Russians had to rebuild them practically from scratch.

On September 1 I also went to Kharkov, which the Russians had recaptured in their

sweep towards the Dnieper. This was a hideous experience; for, as we travelled at night in a number of jeeps from Valuiki to Kharkov, one of them struck a mine and three of our travelling-companions were killed—Kozhemiako and Vasev of the Foreign Office press

department, and a young captain, Volkov, whom I had already met at Stalingrad. Only

the army driver, though slightly injured and almost insane with shock, survived.

Kozhemiako had had both legs blown off and died within an hour without regaining

consciousness.

[Vasev was a well-meaning but dull little man, but Kozhemiako, an exceptionally

handsome young Leningrad man, had, despite a basic hardness of the "Stalinite" official, a charming manner and a great sense of humour. He spoke perfect English, though he had never been abroad. Had he lived he would almost certainly have rapidly climbed to the top of the diplomatic ladder.]

At dawn, after the other two bodies had been found—one of them had been hurled fifteen yards off the road—we continued our grim journey. It was then that we crossed the

fearfully devastated country north of Belgorod where some of the fiercest fighting in the Battle of Kursk had taken place in July. "Not a live spot", as the Russians say, was to be seen for miles around, and the air was filled with the stench of half-buried corpses.

Belgorod had suffered less from shelling than one would have expected, and there were many people around. The rich farm country between Belgorod and Kharkov was,

however, cultivated only to the extent of about forty per cent—which was different from the Western Ukraine. But in 1943 this area was already very near the front line, and the Germans didn't bother.

Kharkov had suffered some additional damage since I was last there in February, but, apart from the massacre of 200 or 300 Russian wounded in a hospital by SS-men when

they recaptured Kharkov in March, the Germans had behaved with greater restraint than during the first occupation. They were nervous, and what shootings were done were done in secret—no more public executions. But people were still rounded up in the street and sent to Germany. From May onwards, the German manner had softened considerably,

and the Ukrainian papers published on May 2 an official Order on the better treatment of Russian war prisoners; here too, it was part of the policy of getting them to join the Vlasov Army.

[There is an account of Vlasov himself in the Memoirs of Ilya Ehrenburg (Novyi Mir, January 1963) who met him in the spring of 1942, shortly before he was taken prisoner by the Germans. Vlasov was a man of boundless personal ambition and one of Stalin's

favourite generals. He was rapidly rising to the top of the Red Army hierarchy, when the Germans captured him. His dazzling military career in Russia was at an end and

Ehrenburg believes that Vlasov was sufficiently ambitious and cynical to see a great future for himself only in the event of a German victory. The Germans formed an Army, which he commanded, of "volunteers" from among the Soviet soldiers they had captured.

It is certain that a high proportion of these were virtually conscripted by the "join or starve technique". After the war, Vlasov was captured by the Americans, handed over to the Russians and hanged. Many Vlasovites remained in Western Europe, but those who

were handed over to the Russians or caught by them were in most cases sent to camps

and not amnestied until after Stalin's death. A number of special studies of the

"Vlasovites" have been written in the USA, notably Soviet Opposition to Stalin by George Fischer (Harvard U.P., 1952) and several chapters in German Rule in Russia by Alexander Dallin (London, 1957).]

During the April-to-June lull the Ukrainian papers under German control spoke high-

mindedly of "Two Great Nations Preparing". Some German soldiers were beginning to speak with regret of Germans and Russians bleeding each other white for the ultimate benefit of the British and Americans. However, during the first three days of the Battle of Kursk, the German-run papers sounded triumphant; but their tone soon changed.

Chapter X A SHORT CHAPTER ON A VAST SUBJECT:

GERMAN CRIMES IN THE SOVIET UNION

Orel was the scene of numerous German crimes, and the wooded Orel and Briansk areas

were notorious for their Partisan activity. It therefore seems timely and appropriate at this point to deal briefly with these two aspects of the war in Russia: (a) German crimes and (b) the Partisans.

In a book on the Soviet-German war of 1941-5 the crimes and atrocities that the Germans committed in the vast areas they occupied between 1941 and 1944 should, on the face of it, hold a very important place. But if one dealt with them in great detail the book would be in danger of assuming altogether impossible proportions. The subject is, indeed, vast.

At the Nuremberg Trial, in particular, selected crimes and atrocities were discussed rather repetitively, but by no means exhaustively; and even these "selected" crimes committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union occupy a large proportion of the twenty-two volumes of the trial record. There can be no question of trying to summarise here the findings of the Nuremberg Trial even briefly—let alone all the other trials of war criminals. If the main aspects of German misdeeds are enumerated here, it is, above all, as background to the numerous examples cited in the course of the narrative of German behaviour in

Russia—and in Poland, for that matter. Insofar as these crimes can be classified at all, we find that, at Nuremberg, they fell roughly into the following categories:

(1) There was the general Untermensch "philosophy" which underlay the German attitude to the Russians, a "philosophy" illustrated by Field-Marshal von Reichenau's instructions for the Army's conduct in 1941 on Russian territory, or by Himmler 's

famous Poznan speech in which he said, "I am not interested in the slightest if 10,000

Russian females die of exhaustion digging an anti-tank ditch for us, provided the ditch is dug". Or else, there are the "realistic" utterances by Hitler, Goering and others to the effect that for all Germany cares, thirty million Russians may die of starvation in a very short time, and that it is not the business of the Germans to feed either the civilian population or the war prisoners. Millions of war prisoners and probably millions of

civilians died as a result of this policy, especially in the first two years of the war.

Although some Nazis like Rosenberg drew a distinction between the Russians—who

were the arch-enemy—and the Ukrainians and other nationalities—who were to become

some sort of protégés of the Reich—men like Erich Koch, the Reich Commissioner for

the Ukraine, had no use whatsoever for any such fine distinctions, and his administration of the Ukraine was dictated by the usual Nazi Untermensch approach.

(2) There were special orders, such as the "Commissar Order" under which commissars (or, in practice, any recognisable communist, Jew or other suspect, for that matter) were not to be treated as war prisoners, but simply shot. Several generals tried after the war to explain that this order was largely "theoretical", since it was not applied by the German Army. This is a gross overstatement, or a quibble, since the "commissars" were, as a rule, taken over by Himmler's SD before the other prisoners were sent to camps under Army

jurisdiction. Another order, called "Kugel" (i.e. Bullet), which was rigorously applied to the Russians, provided for the shooting of any war prisoners who had attempted to

escape, or were suspected of any kind of clandestine activity in camps.

(3) There was the deportation to Germany of nearly three million Russians, Belorussians and especially Ukrainians as slave labour. The treatment of these was much worse than that of the forced labour from most other countries.

(4) There were the indiscriminate shooting of hostages and "suspects" in occupied territories, people who might in any way be connected with the partisan movement or the Soviet underground; particularly in Russia and Belorussia numerous villages were not only burned down, but their inhabitants, including women and children, simply

exterminated. As has often been observed, there was, in the Soviet Union, not one Oradour, or one Lidice, but hundreds. In every Soviet town and city there were Gestapo headquarters, where various atrocities and tortures took place, and everywhere there were crowded prisons; before the Germans left the prisoners were usually indiscriminately murdered.

(5) There was the specific German practice of exterminating the entire Jewish

population; these massacres were chiefly the work of special Einsatzkommandos under Himmler's authority, and practically all the generals claimed after the war "never to have heard" of these massacres, though they often took place under their very noses. The massacres of Jews were carried out on a vast scale; thus, at Babyi Yar, near Kiev, about 100,000 Jews—men, women and children—were massacred, not to mention countless

other cities, all the way from Krasnodar in the south, with its gas wagon which killed 7,000 people, or Kerch in the Crimea (where the Russians first discovered hundreds of bodies of both Jews and war prisoners) to Tallinn, in Estonia, in the north. To take the example of Tallinn, which I saw myself: there, in a place nearby called Klooga, I saw the charred remains of some 2,000 Jews, brought from Vilno and other places, who had been shot and then burned on great bonfires they themselves had been ordered to build and light. With the Red Army approaching, a small number of Jews had escaped this SD

massacre, and were there to tell the full story. I particularly remember the story told by one of the survivors: a "kindly" SD man, trying to comfort a weeping child, said to it:

"Aber Kleiner, weine doch nicht; bald kommt der Tod."

["My little one, don't cry like this; death will soon come". A very full and poignant account of this harrowing Klooga affair was given by John Hersey in Life Magazine in October 1944.]

And this is without mentioning the vast extermination camps like Auschwitz, Maidanek and many other where Jews (including many Russian Jews) were gassed, shot and

otherwise killed by the million.

[According to the unspeakable Ohlendorf, one of the Einsatzkommando leaders in Russia, giving evidence at Nuremberg, gas wagons had largely to be discontinued, since they

caused "spiritual shock" to the killers—not because they were full of corpses, but because the corpses were mixed up with a lot of excrement, produced by the victims in their death agony. This particular commando had murdered 90,000 people in a little over a year.]

(6) Next to the Jews in Europe, six millions of whom perished at the hands of the

Germans (and it took rather more than a handful of "bad" Germans to carry out all this

"work"), the biggest single German crime was undoubtedly the extermination by hunger, exposure and in other ways of perhaps as many as three million Russian war prisoners.

Many were shot, many died in concentration camps during the later stages of the war

(especially at Mauthausen), some were even used for vivisectionist and other "scientific"

experiments. The evidence is so vast and overwhelming that one can only pick at some of it at random.

Thus, at the beginning of 1942, Rosenberg, writing to Keitel, thought it scandalous that out of the 3,600,000 Russian prisoners, only a few hundred thousand were still fit for work, so appalling were the conditions in which they had been kept. Goering about the same time complained to Ciano of the cannibalism among Russian war prisoners, adding, as a great joke, that it was now going a bit far: they had even eaten a German sentry!

Hitler's policy during the pre-Stalingrad period was, clearly, to demonstrate the

Untermensch nature of the Russians, precisely by reducing them to cannibalism.

We have echoes of this contempt for the "subhuman" Russian war prisoners even in recent German writing, e.g. in that odious little novel, The Road to Stalingrad by Benno Zieser:

[Ballantine Books, New York, 1957, pp. 29-32.]

The Ruskies were completely debilitated. They could hardly keep on their feet, let alone perform the physical effort required of them... Among them were mere kids,

as well as bearded old men who could have been their grandfathers. Without

exception, they all begged for a scrap of food or a cigarette. They whined and

grovelled before us... These were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human...

And then—

When we [threw them a dead dog] there followed a spectacle that could make a man

puke. Yelling like mad, the Russians would fall on the animal and tear it to pieces with their bare hands... The intestines they'd stuff in their pockets—a sort of iron ration.

And so on. Almost too nauseating to quote. And we know from countless other pieces of evidence that this is precisely the kind of thing that happened to hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of Russian war prisoners, especially before Stalingrad.

Thus, a Hungarian tank officer wrote soon after the war:

We were stationed at Rovno. I woke up one morning and heard thousands of dogs

howling in the distance... I called my orderly and said: "Sandor, what is all this moaning and howling?" "Not far from here," he said, "there's a huge mass of Russian prisoners in the open air. There must be 80,000 of them. They're moaning

because they are starving."

I went to have a look. Behind wire there were tens of thousands of Russian

prisoners. Many were on the point of expiring. Few could stand on their feet. Their faces were dried up and their eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Hundreds were dying every day, and those who had any strength left dumped them in a vast pit.

[Dr Sulyok. Deux nuits sans jour (Two Nights Without Day), p. 88 (Zurich, 1948).]

Apart from the deliberate starving of Russian war prisoners, there were also the

massacres. Some significant evidence on this score was produced at Nuremberg, for

instance by Erich Lahousen, of Admiral Canaris's Abwehr. He spoke, in particular, of two specially charming characters with whom he had conferred at the beginning of the war in Russia. One was General Reinecke, known as "der kleine Keitel"; he was Chief of the General Army Office belonging to the OKW; the other was Obergruppenführer

"Gestapo" Müller, a division chief of the Central Board of Reich Security (RSHA). The latter was "responsible for the measures regarding the treatment of Russian war prisoners," i.e. executions.

[GMWC, vol. I, pp. 278 ff]

Lahousen: The purpose of the conference was to examine the orders received on the treatment of these prisoners... The substance of these orders dealt with two groups of measures. First was the killing of Russian commissars. Second was the killing of those elements who, according to the special segregation by the SD, could be

identified as Bolshevists or as active representatives of the Bolshevist attitude to life... General Reinecke explained that the war between Germany and Russia was

unlike any other war. The Red Army soldier... was not a soldier in the ordinary

sense, but an ideological enemy. An enemy to the death of National-Socialism, and he had to be treated accordingly.

Lahousen then said that Reinecke, a good Nazi, was not satisfied with the "ice age"

mentality of some of the officer corps. On behalf of Canaris he (Lahousen) protested against these executions, and particularly against their taking place publicly. They had a terrible and devastating effect on the morale and discipline of the German troops.

Moreover, this kind of thing could only increase the Russians' resistance to the utmost.

Müller rejected my arguments. The sole concession he made was that the

executions ... should not take place in the sight of the troops, but in a secret place...

The SD Einsatzkommandos were in charge of singling out persons in camps and in p.o.w. assembly centres, and of carrying out the executions... The sorting out was done in the most arbitrary way: Jewish or Jewish-looking or other racially-inferior types were picked for execution, or else they were picked according to their

"intelligence".

Reinecke held that the Russians were different from others, and should be treated differently from Western p.o.w.'s. The camp guards should have whips, and should

have the right to resort to firearms if necessary.

Lahousen then said:

The greater number of prisoners remained in the theatre of operations, without

proper care... Many of them died on the bare ground. Epidemics broke out and

cannibalism manifested itself.

In the circumstances, he said, Hitler ordered that no Russian war prisoners were to be brought to Germany.

Asked to what extent the Wehrmacht was responsible for the ill-treatment of Russian war prisoners, Lahousen said:

The Wehrmacht was involved in all matters which referred to the war prisoners,

except the executions, which were carried out by the commandos of the SD and the

RSHA. The victims were selected before the rest were taken to Army camps.

Except that some generals at Nuremberg tried to argue that it was difficult unexpectedly to have to feed so many p.o.w.'s, there is nothing to show that the Army did anything to oppose the policy of extermination of the Russian war prisoners, at least during the first twelve or eighteen months of the war.

More than that: some of these "gentlemanly" German generals were consciously starving the Russian war prisoners. At the Nuremberg Trial, apart from the famous Reichenau

order issued at the beginning of the Russian campaign, there was also an order from

Field-Marshal von Manstein, containing the following:

The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated... The German soldier comes as

the bearer of a racial concept. [He] must appreciate the necessity for the harsh

punishment of Jewry... The food situation at home makes it essential that the troops should be fed off the land, and that the largest possible stocks should be placed at the disposal of the homeland. In enemy cities, a large part of the population will have

to go hungry. Nothing, out of a misguided sense of humanity, may be given to

prisoners-of-war or to the population, unless they are in the service of the German Wehrmacht.

[ TGMWC, vol. 21, p. 72. Emphasis added]

It is these kind of gentlemanly orders, not from Himmler, or Hitler, but also from the generals which are responsible for the starving to death of probably over two million war prisoners during the first year of the war.

Although, in the end, Manstein had to admit at Nuremberg that he had signed the order, he began by saying that it had "escaped his memory entirely ".

[Ibid., p. 73.]

No doubt much else had escaped his—and his fellow-generals'—memory "entirely", including the Army's frequent and very close co-operation with the Einsatzkommandos and other professional killers.

It was not till well into 1942 that the surviving Russian war prisoners began to be looked upon as a source of slave labour. Thus, Field-Marshal Milch thought it "very amusing"

that 30,000 Russians should have to man the German anti-aircraft guns against British and American planes.

It was towards the end of 1942, also, that the Germans started a form of blackmail against the surviving Russian war-prisoners: either go into the Vlasov Army or starve.

But there were many who would not serve Vlasov; and many of these, including high-

ranking Soviet officers, were to be found towards the end of the war at Dachau and

Mauthausen, alive or dead—mostly dead. It was also Russian prisoners who, more than

any other nationality, were given the privilege of Aktion Kugel.

This was one of the numerous methods of dealing with "undesirables". A "K" (i.e.

Kugel) prisoner was taken at Mauthausen to the "bathroom". This bathroom in the cellars of the prison building near the crematorium was specially designed for both shooting and gassing. The shooting took place by means of a measuring apparatus,

the prisoners being backed towards a metrical measure with an automatic

contraption releasing a bullet in the neck as soon as the moving plank determining his height touched the top of his head. If the transport consisted of too many Kugel

prisoners, no time was wasted on measurements and they were exterminated by gas

laid on in the "bathroom" instead of water.

[TGMWC, vol. 3, p. 207.]

Russian prisoners were also used for freezing experiments and a variety of other

entertainments devised by Himmler and some of the "scientists" of the Third Reich.

The whole story of the Russian war-prisoners—second only, in the number of people

involved, to that of the Jews—is so horrible that it is almost difficult to believe. The Russians themselves have never quoted any clear figures on the number of Soviet

soldiers captured by the Germans; but when one considers that the total loss in human life has been put at twenty millions, the loss of some three or four million men who died in German captivity does not sound improbable. The following table compiled by

Alexander Dallin on the strength of an OKW document for May 1944 is probably quite

correct:

In OKH custody in occupied Soviet

In OKW custody in Germany and

territory

Total number of captured

Of these, transferred from OKH to OKW area

3,110,000

Remaining under OKH control

2,050,000

Recorded deaths in p.o.w. camps and

845,000

1,136,000

compounds

Released to worker's or military status

535,000

Escapes

Exterminations

495,000

Not accounted for

Death and disappearance in transit

Surviving as p.o.w.'s

175,000

This would mean that, except for the 800,000 "released" and the one million still alive, practically all the rest must be dead, i.e. over three millions.

On the strength of other German sources, Dallin puts the figure by the end of the war even higher. The total of Soviet war prisoners is put at 5,754,000, of whom 3,335,000

were captured in 1941, 1,653,000 in 1942, 565,000 in 1943, 147,000 in 1944 and 34,000

in 1945. These last four, and especially last three figures seem rather less probable.

Where, in 1943, would the Germans have captured over half-a-million prisoners, not to mention the figures for 1944, let alone 1945?

*

What added to the tragedy of the Russian war prisoners was also that those who had

joined the Vlasov army—mostly simply to save themselves from a slow death by

starvation—were to be broken in mind and spirit even while the war was still in progress.

Many became merely cynics and bandits, and when they returned to Russia, they were

treated as criminals or near-criminals. But even the homecoming of those who had never joined Vlasov was far from always being an occasion for rejoicing. As Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in his Memoirs—

In March 1945 my daughter Irina went to Odessa on behalf of the Red Star. British, French, Belgian war prisoners liberated by the Red Army were being repatriated from

there. There she also saw a troop transport arriving from Marseilles with our own war prisoners on board, among them some who had escaped from German camps and some

who had fought together with the French maquis. Irina told me that they were met like criminals, that they were isolated, that there was much talk of their being sent to

camps.. ."

[ Novyi Mir, 1963, No. 3, p. 138.]

But that is a different story. Here we are concerned with German crimes in the Soviet Union. In addition to the innumerable German crimes against persons, there were also the German crimes against Soviet private and public property: the Germans had laid waste vast areas; in three years they had destroyed hundreds of towns and thousands of villages.

If some villages and some cities like Kharkov, Odessa or Kiev were only partially, but not completely destroyed, it was only because their retreating armies had not had enough time to complete the work of destruction. In other cities, like Rostov, Voronezh or

Sebastopol (as well as Warsaw)—to mention only a few of those I have seen myself—the destruction was very nearly 100 per cent.

Chapter XI THE PARTISANS IN THE SOVIET-GERMAN WAR

In the summer of 1942 they used to sell in Moscow a pocket-size book of 430 pages

called The Partisan's Guide. 50,000 copies, it said, had been printed. It purported to deal with all the problems besetting a Partisan's life. Here were precise instructions, often with explanatory drawings, on the chief "tactical rules of partisan warfare"; on the use of firearms captured from the enemy; on the destruction of enemy tanks and planes; on the best ways of wrecking enemy troop-trains and motor transport, of killing enemy

motorcyclists by stretching a wire across a road; on reconnaissance work; on camping and camouflage. An interesting, and, in a way, highly pathetic chapter was on

"emergencies"—for instance on the kind of moss and bark that can be eaten when there is nothing else to eat. There was also advice on first-aid, hand-to-hand fighting, and on

"how to live in the snow".

The appendix consisted of a Russian-German phrase book: "Halt! Waffen hinlegen!"

"Ergieb dich!" "Raus aus dem Wagen!" "Bei Fluchtversuch wird geschossen!"

And then: "Sie lügen!" "Wo befinden sich deutsche Truppen?" "Wo noch?" "Wo sind Minen gelegt?"

["Halt! Lay down your arms!" "Surrender!" "Get out of the car!" "Anyone who tries to escape will be shot." "You are lying." " Where are the German troops?" "Where else?"

"Where are the mines laid? "]

The superficial impression the book made on the uninitiated reader was that the Russian Partisan was a sort of glorified boy-scout, and that although it must be difficult to "live in the snow" and not very satisfactory to eat moss and bark in emergencies, the Partisan's life was a wonderful life all the same.

Partisan (i.e. guerrilla) warfare in German-occupied territory held an important place in both government propaganda and actual military planning almost from the beginning of the war in 1941. Stalin, in his famous broadcast of July 3, 1941, called for a vast partisan movement in the enemy rear, and on July 18 the Central Committee of the CPSU issued a decree (postanovleniye) on "The Organisation of the Struggle in the Enemy Rear" which explained that it was essential "to create intolerable conditions for the invaders, to disorganise their communications, transport", etc., and calling on "Soviet clandestine organisations" in occupied territories to exert their utmost energies to that end. In popular propaganda much was made of historic precedents—the peasant bands in 1812 who

harassed Napoleon's Grande Armée, and the numerous Soviet guerrilla bands who played so important a role in the Civil War-in Siberia, the Ukraine, and so on. A certain romantic halo was made to surround the partisan leader and his men, and in the grim summer and autumn of 1941 press, radio, theatre and cinema tried (rather feebly) to cheer up Soviet citizens with stories of more or less unbelievable partisan exploits in Belorussia and other occupied territories. In December 1941, at the height of the Battle of Moscow, Zoya

Kosmodemianskaya, who became a partizanka behind the enemy lines and was publicly hanged by the Germans in the village of Petrishchevo near Moscow, was built up into a national heroine and a symbol. But Zoya, like many others, had been sent behind the

enemy lines for some immediate "diversionist" purpose, and so was not typical of the proverbial partisan who, under German occupation, spontaneously rose on the spot against the oppressors of his country.

Historically, the Russian partisan movement of 1941-4 is one of the most complicated and least thoroughly explored aspects of the Soviet-German war. To a large extent it is not only unexplored, but will remain, like the resistance movements in Yugoslavia,

France and other countries, also largely unexplorable for the simple reason that all the participants of many partisan operations died, and there is nobody left to tell the story.

Much misinterpretation also arose from the over-glamourisation and over-magnification of the partisan movement by Soviet propaganda during the early stages of the war. This exaggerated interpretation has its German counterpart: according to the current German version, partly supported by certain Americans, there was no partisan movement in the Soviet Union at first, since both in Belorussia and the Ukraine the population was

thoroughly well-disposed towards the Germans, and it was only afterwards, because of German "mistakes", that an anti-German partisan movement developed at all.

This is, of course, also a gross over-simplification. The truth is that in the grim months of 1941, following the invasion, everything in the vast newly-occupied territories was in a state of flux and chaos, and very little, if anything, had been done to organise a partisan movement in these parts of the country in advance. In Soviet jargon, no "material base"

had been laid for it—no secret arms dumps, food stores, medical stores, etc., which

would have constituted such a base.

There were, especially in Belorussia, a considerable number of Russian officers and

soldiers who had been originally encircled by the Germans, and were then hiding in the woods, still hoping to find their way to the Russian Front, living as far as possible on the help of the local peasantry, and finally forming themselves into partisan bands.

The woods were also a place of escape for certain party and Soviet officials in

Belorussian cities, for whom it was difficult to conceal their identity, for railwaymen and others who, having been caught by the Germans doing sabotage (or being suspected of

such sabotage) had little alternative to "joining the partisans". But, for a long time, all this was sporadic and unorganised, and the Soviet authorities in Moscow, though liking to talk about the partisans and the role they were playing in the enemy rear, had much more immediate problems on their hands between the time of the Invasion and the Battle of Moscow.

In 1941, the partisans could wait. They required a considerable economic and

organisational effort on the part of Moscow if they were to become effective at all.

And although, in 1942, the partisan movement in the Ukraine, in the Leningrad province, in Belorussia, as well as in certain Russian areas like Smolensk and Briansk, began to be taken much more seriously than before, there is still little doubt that in the Black Summer of 1942 the partisans were again a long way down the Soviet party and military

authorities' list of priorities.

This is not to say that there was not a partisan movement of some importance in 1942, but it had not yet become the broad mass movement into which it was to develop in 1943.

The contrast was, indeed, amazing, as many partisans have since written, between 1941, when they had nothing except some rifles and a few hand grenades, and 1943, when they had mortars and even some artillery. The lack of arms, much more than any goodwill

towards the Germans, explains why there was no major partisan movement in 1941.

Present-day Soviet historians distinguish between the more-or-less sporadic and still largely unorganised partisan movement in 1941-2 and the (mostly) highly-organised

partisan movement of 1943.

Thus, in his well-known history of the war, B. S. Telpukhovsky makes no big claims for the partisans in 1941:

Already at the end of July 1941 there were 200 partisan detachments or groups in

the Leningrad province. In September 1941 there were fifty-four such partisan

detachments in the Orel province and thirty-two in the Kursk province.

But he does not specify how large these "groups" and "detachments" were; they often consisted of only a few dozen men, or even fewer. He then says: "During the first period of the war the partisans chiefly destroyed small enemy garrisons, regimental

headquarters, motorised columns, etc.", which suggests that their main activity was in the nature of smash-and-grab raids.

True, during the Battle of Moscow, and often as a result of substantial units having been sent behind the enemy lines, partisan activity reached bigger proportions; thus, with 10,000 partisans operating in the enemy rear in the Moscow, Tula and Kalinin provinces, the attacks on German trains and motorised columns assumed a certain immediate

importance.

There were then some partisan leaders, such as M. Gurianov, whose men killed about 600

Germans, but who himself was captured and hanged by the Germans and posthumously

awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Another partisan leader, Solntsev, was publicly hanged at Ruza, in the Moscow province, on December 21, 1941.

Altogether, in the winter of 1941-2, the 10,000 partisans taking part (in their own way) in the Battle of Moscow, are credited with having destroyed 18,000 Germans.

It was not till May 30, 1942 that, on the initiative of the Central Committee, the Stavka created in Moscow a "Central Staff of the Partisan Movement" and, later in the year, similar special "Central Staffs" for the partisans of the Ukraine and Belorussia. The partisan movement certainly grew in 1942, though it had not yet become the mass

movement it was to be in 1943. The slowness of the development was at least partly

attributable to the shortage of arms. The personnel and supplies that Moscow could send the partisans by air in 1942 were still very limited, and many partisan units had to be left entirely, or almost entirely, to their own devices, like raiding German arms dumps and depending on the more or less voluntary help of the peasantry.

Telpukhovsky readily admits that German policy in the occupied areas enormously

stimulated the partisan movement, notably in suitable "partisan country" like many parts of Belorussia or the Orel-Briansk forest zone. The régime of terror in the cities, the mass deportation of young people to Germany, which began as early as March 1942, deeply

affected the civilian population.

Obvious parallels for this can be found elsewhere; thus, in France, the biggest factor that swelled the ranks of the maquis was the introduction of forced labour in Germany. In Russia, the Untermensch treatment meted out to the population acted as an additional incentive to fight the Germans by joining the partisans. But, as in France, the number of effective partisans was inevitably limited for a time by the shortage of arms.

It would be idle to speculate about what motives were the most important in persuading people to take the desperately dangerous step of joining the partisans—pure disinterested patriotism? injured national pride? a desire to get away from the Germans and their

oppression and deportations? an attachment to the Soviet régime and to Stalin, now

identified more than ever with the idea of "Russia"? All these motives mattered, but their order of importance obviously varied from place to place. Much is made in present-day Soviet histories of the leading role played in all partisan activity by the Party—all the way from the Central Committee in Moscow to the clandestine party obkoms and raikoms (provincial and district committees) still operating in the German-occupied areas and to party members who were commanders of the various partisan units.

At the same time, there is a tendency to minimise the role played in the partisan

movement, especially in Belorussia, by the officers who, though encircled by the

Germans in 1941, had evaded capture and went on fighting as partisans instead.

We shall later deal with some specific cases of partisan activity in 1941, 1942 and 1943; but Telpukhovsky claims that as early as the summer of 1942 the partisans tied up

"enormous numbers" of German troops and police (either German, allied, or mercenary); that in the Briansk area alone 30,000 Hungarian troops were used for fighting the

partisans and that in the summer and autumn of 1942, the partisans in various parts of the Soviet Union had wrecked as many as 3,000 German trains. This sounds like an

exaggeration.

In September 1942, when things looked blackest in the south and south-east, Stalin issued a special order to the partisans saying, that, with German rail and road communications now longer and more vulnerable than ever, it was immensely important to start blowing up railways, bridges and trains; it is probable, therefore, that these big wrecking activities began towards the end of 1942, rather than in the summer.

1942 saw the development of "partisan regions"— partizanskie kraya—where there were no Germans and where the partisans had, in most cases, re-introduced the Soviet régime.

Such "partisan regions" were to be found in the northern (wooded) parts of the Ukraine, in large parts of Belorussia, in the Briansk forests, in the Orel province where 18,000

partisans (belonging to fifty-four detachments) controlled an area comprising 490

villages; in the Leningrad province and south of it, such as the famous "partisan region"

round Porkhov. Substantial areas in the Smolensk province were also controlled by

22,000 partisans belonging to seventy-two detachments. In the winter of 1942-3,

according to Telpukhovsky, the "partisan regions" accounted for as much as seventy-three per cent of the whole area of Belorussia (a proportion reduced to sixty per cent by the official History.)

Officially, the "partisan regions" were the "supply bases" for the partisan troops, and, by the middle of 1942, runways began to be built in these and were soon used by planes

bringing supplies from the "mainland" and evacuating wounded partisans and other persons. Supplies were also amassed locally; thus, on January 1, 1943, in the Baturinsk district in the Smolensk province there were supply dumps amounting to 207 tons of rye, 700 tons of potatoes and 1,000 head of cattle.

There is no doubt that by the autumn and winter of 1942 the partisans played an

important part in wrecking the long lines of German communication to the Stalingrad

area; we know, for instance, that the Manstein offensive of December 12 had been

delayed by the slowness—caused by partisan action—with which military supplies were

reaching the Don country.

Nevertheless, the partisans did not become an enormous mass movement until after Stalingrad. There was now an additional incentive to joining the partisans: the near certainty of fighting on the winning side and of not dying in vain. This was a motive which some partisans of older standing were later to treat with some bitterness. There was also the simple fact that in 1943 most of the partisan units were well-supplied by Moscow; they now had mortars and even heavy guns, including special anti-tank guns for destroying locomotives, more adequate food supplies and, very important, medical

supplies. One of the horrors of the early days of the partisan movement was the almost total lack of medical supplies, which condemned many of the even lightly-wounded to

death.

According to Telpukhovsky, "the partisan movement began to expand enormously after the Red Army had begun its Stalingrad counter-offensive". In this connexion he quotes the following significant figures for the largest partisan area, Belorussia:

February 1943, 65,000 armed partisans

June 1943, 100,000 armed partisans

October 1943, 245,000 armed partisans

December 1943 360,000 armed partisans

In the Ukraine, by the end of 1943, there were 220,000 armed partisans, and "many tens of thousands" in the parts of the RSFSR (i.e. Russia proper) still in German hands. Often, he says, whole families, or even entire villages would join the partisans, if only to evade ruthless German punitive expeditions.

On July 14, 1943, the Soviet Supreme Command ordered the partisans to start an all-out Rail War. Preparations for this had obviously already been made, for on July 20-21 great co-ordinated blows were struck at the railways in the Briansk, Orel and Gomel areas, to coincide with the Russian offensive against Orel and Briansk following the Kursk

victory. During that night alone 5,800 rails were blown up. Altogether, between July 21

and September 27, the Orel and Briansk partisans blew up over 17,000 rails.

In Belorussia the partisans did even better. Between January and May, even before the official Rail War had begun, they had derailed 634 trains. On August 3, the partisans started another great wrecking operation on the Belorussian railways, two-thirds of which were put out of action, sometimes for weeks on end. Thus, the Molodechno-Minsk

railway was blocked for ten days. Altogether, between August and November, 1943, in

Belorussia:

200,000 rails were blown up;

1,014 trains were wrecked or derailed;

814 locomotives were wrecked or damaged;

72 railway bridges were destroyed or damaged.

The Germans became increasingly alarmed by these developments. On November 7,

1943, Jodl admitted that in July, August, and September that year there had been 1,560, 2,121 and 2,000 railway-line explosions (Streckensprengungen) respectively; and these, he said, had had a great effect on military operations and the withdrawal of troops

(Räumungstransporte).

Telpukhovsky's semi-official History claims that in three years (1941-4) the partisans in Belorussia killed 500,000 Germans, including forty-seven generals and Hitler's High-Commissioner Wilhelm Kube (who, as we know from German sources—though the

Russians for some reason don't mention this—had a partisan time-bomb put under his bed by his lovely Belorussian girl-friend).

In the Ukraine, according to the same writer, the partisans killed 460,000 Germans,

wrecked or damaged 5,000 locomotives, 50,000 railway wagons, 15,000 automobiles,

etc. Some of these figures, especially the total of nearly one million Germans killed by the Belorussian and Ukrainian partisans, sound distinctly exaggerated.

According to Telpukhovsky and other official and semi-official Soviet histories, "all the main work of the partisans" was directed by the Party. In the parts of Belorussia still occupied by the Germans in early 1944, there were 1,113 primary party organisations in partisan detachments and brigades, 184 clandestine territorial party organisations,

including nine obkoms (provincial committees), and 147 town and district committees (gorkoms and raikoms). The membership of all these had risen during the war from 8,000

to 25,000. The number of party members among the Ukrainian partisans in 1943 was

14,000, and there were 26,000 komsomols—i.e. only about fifteen percent of the total number of partisans; the proportion of party and komsomol members among the

Belorussian partisans was even lower, if anything. Among the Belorussian partisans, we are also told, there were 1,500 Poles, 107 Yugoslavs, 238 Czechs and Slovaks, and some Rumanians and Italians, and even "many Germans".

The official Soviet thesis is that, especially since the autumn of 1942, there was the strictest co-ordination between Moscow and the Army Command on the one hand, and

the partisans on the other. The latter wrecked trains, blew up railways, killed German garrisons, etc., as part of a general plan, the main lines of which were laid down by Moscow.

Up to a point, this is true. The military effectiveness of the partisans grew enormously once they began to receive supplies, officers, etc., from the "mainland". But this version of the partisan story, making the partisans out to be a sort of Second Red Army fighting in the enemy rear, grossly over-simplifies the human aspects of the Partisan Drama. For it was drama. The partisans were not like an army that was methodically supplied with

food, medical care and arms, and which had an enemy in front of it, and nowhere else.

There are two recent books, one on the Kaluga and Briansk partisans, Narodnyie mstiteli

—"The People's Avengers"—by V. Glukhov (Kaluga, 1960), and another, much bigger book published by the Belorussian Academy of Sciences at Minsk in 1961, called Iz Istorii partizanskogo dvizheniya v Belorussii, 1941-4 ("From the History of the Partisan Movement in Belorussia"), the latter consisting of forty-five "memoirs" written by leading participants of the partisan war in Belorussia.

[There are, of course, countless other books on the partisans, starting with Vershigora's famous People with a Clear Conscience on the Ukrainian partisans, published in 1948, and Ivan Kozlov's book on the partisans and the communist underground in the Crimea

(V Krymskom Podpoliye, 1950), but many of them; are more romanticised than these two recent books.]

Both books are very badly written and put together; they are hideously repetitive, and some of the exploits described are almost worthy of the Baron von Münchhausen; and

yet, the very repetitive-ness of the themes, and a variety of small details explain more fully than the much smoother official histories the constant nervous strain, the helpless suffering and the frequent horrors of partisan warfare. One of the main obsessions of the partisans was something scarcely known to the regular Red Army: the constant look-out for traitors and the physical and psychological need to kill them—such as starostas, burgomasters and policemen appointed by the Germans. There are several accounts in

Glukhov's book of the hanging of traitors and of raids on the police stations of the German-recruited Polizei.

Another constant worry was the attitude of the peasantry who kept them, more or less willingly, supplied with food and who, in doing so, were exposing themselves and their families to the most savage reprisals by the Germans—regular troops, SS, SD, etc.—or their underlings—Vlasovites, Cossacks, German-hired police, and so on. For if, as

already said, there was one Oradour in France and one Lidice in Czechoslovakia, there were hundreds in the Soviet Union.

Living conditions among the partisans were nearly always terrible, at least until the beginning of 1943, when they began to receive considerable supplies from the

"mainland". More terrifying even than the shortage of arms and food was the lack of medical supplies. There is a reference to this in the reminiscences of F. G. Markov, commander of the Vileya Partisan Unit, who was one of the first partisan leaders in

Belorussia. He began to fight as a partisan in August, 1941.

I should like to make a brief but affectionate mention of those humble and modest doctors who, in incredibly difficult conditions, without any instruments or medical

supplies or even bandages, still managed to save the lives of hundreds of partisans. I particularly want to mention Dr Podsedlovsky, Dr Moisei Gordon and his wife,

Noema Borisovna Gordon, Dr G. D. Mogilevchik, Dr I. V. Vollokh and others.

[ Iz istorii partiz. dvizh. v. Belorussii, p. 282.]

This quotation is also interesting in another respect: most of the partisan doctors

mentioned appear to be Jews, which is in striking contrast with the virtual lack of any reference to Jews taking part in the partisan war—despite the very large Jewish

population in Belo-russian towns like Minsk, Gomel, Pinsk, Vitebsk, etc.

[One of the few references to Jewish partisans is to be found in Ehrenburg's Memoirs. He met in Lithuania, in 1944, a partisan band of 500 young Jews (men and women) who had escaped from the Vilno ghetto. (Novyi Mir, No. 3, 1963).]

Did most of the Jews not even try to escape their fate, or did the partisans not want them?

Or were they—apart from these few doctors—already wholly isolated—or dead—by the

time the partisan movement got into its stride?

The first partisan units were formed in the occupied parts of the RSFSR and in Belorussia in 1941 in a variety of ways. Thus, one of the first partisan units formed at Polotniany Zavod near Kaluga lasted from October 11, 1941, to January 19, 1942. It was first

composed of an anti-paratroop "destroyer" battalion; then it was joined by escaped Russian war prisoners; during the three months of the Battle of Moscow, it attacked

German road columns. Finally, betrayed to the Germans by a traitor, it was more or less exterminated.

No doubt some of the partisan stories in the Glukhov book read rather too much like

Cowboys-and-Red-Indians stuff. It was all very well for the partisans to attack a German headquarters and break up their Christmas party with a few hand grenades; but it was often the villagers who suffered most from such escapades:

On January 17, 1942, in the village of Vesniny, there was a rough engagement

between partisans and Germans. The Germans lost a few dozen men, killed or

wounded. But they then started encircling the village. The partisans, having run out of ammunition, pulled out. The Germans then took their revenge. In two days 200

people, mostly women and children, were shot.

[Glukhov, op. cit., p. 38]

Similarly, other villages suspected of partisan sympathies were dealt with with special savagery. At Rasseta 372 people were killed; at Dolina, 469, again mostly women and