The Second World War (133 page)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a young artillery officer in East Prussia, described scenes of looting as a ‘
tumultuous market
’, with soldiers trying on Prussian women’s outsize drawers. ‘
Germans abandoned everything
,’ a Red Army soldier wrote about the sack of Gumbinnen. ‘And our people, like a huge crowd of Huns, invaded the houses. Everything is on fire, down from pillows and feather-beds is flying about. Everyone starting with a soldier and ending with a colonel is pulling away loot. Beautifully furnished apartments, luxurious houses were smashed within a few hours and turned into dumps where torn curtains are covered in jam that is
pouring from broken jars… this town has been crucified.’ Three days later he wrote: ‘Soldiers have turned into avid beasts. In the fields lie hundreds of shot cattle, on the roads pigs and chickens with their heads chopped off. Houses have been looted and are on fire. What cannot be taken away is being broken and destroyed. The Germans are right to be running away from us like from a plague.’

In the hunting lodge at Rominten, which had belonged to the Prussian royal family and then been taken over by Göring, Soviet infantry had smashed all the mirrors. With black paint, one of them had scrawled ‘khuy’, the Russian for ‘prick’, across a nude of Aphrodite by Rubens.

Most of the incoherent anger came from encountering a standard of living, even in farmworkers’ houses, which was unimaginable in the Soviet Union. The bitter thought was almost universal: So why did they invade us and loot our country if they were so much richer? Field censorship, alarmed by the letters home which described what soldiers had discovered, passed them to the NKVD. The Soviet authorities became nervous about the widespread perception that all the propaganda about their ‘workers’ paradise’ as opposed to the terrible conditions in capitalist countries was a lie. They were all too conscious of the way that the Decembrist revolt of 1825 had been influenced by the better way of life which Russian armies had seen in western Europe in 1814.

Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front continued its headlong pursuit, day and night. Tank drivers frequently fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, but the exhilaration of pursuit kept them going. Retreating German troops were machine-gunned, and if they caught up with a staff car with German officers inside they simply flattened it under their tracks.

On 18 January, General Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army attacked Łód
five days ahead of schedule. Members of the Home Army emerged to help in the fighting. Chuikov was not pleased when he had to take part of his Stalingrad army to tackle the fortress city of Pozna
. Their street-fighting skills counted for little there. It took a month of bombardment with their heaviest artillery and assaults with satchel charges and flamethrowers before the survivors surrendered.

On the southern flank of the advance from the Vistula, Konev’s troops overran Kraków. Fortunately the ancient city was abandoned without a fight. On 27 January in the middle of the afternoon, a reconnaissance patrol from the 107th Rifle Division emerged from a snowbound forest to discover the most terrible symbol in modern history.

Just over a week before, 58,000 inmates deemed capable of walking were forced westwards
from Auschwitz
in front of the Red Army advance. Those who were to survive this death march, an experience which was
probably worse than all the horrors they had suffered so far, found themselves dumped in other concentration camps, where squalor, starvation and disease increased dramatically in the last three months of the war. Dr Mengele seized all the notes from his experiments and left for Berlin. IG Farben executives destroyed their records at Auschwitz III. The gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau were blown up. Orders were given to liquidate the prisoners too ill to move, but for some reason the SS killed only a couple of hundred out of the 8,000 left behind. They concentrated more on attempts to destroy the evidence, but there was more than enough left, including 368,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats and dresses, to say nothing of seven tons of human hair.

The 60th Army immediately ordered all its medical staff to Auschwitz to care for the survivors, and Soviet officers began to question some of the inmates. Adam Kuri
owicz, the former chairman of the Polish railway workers’ union, who had been sent to the camp in June 1941, recounted how the first tests of the gas chamber had been carried out on eighty Red Army soldiers and 600 Polish prisoners. A Hungarian professor told them about the ‘medical experiments’. All the information was sent back to G. F. Aleksandrov, the chief of Red Army propaganda, but, apart from a small article in a Red Army newspaper, nothing was said to a wider world until the very end of the war. This was probably because the Party line insisted that the Jews did not represent a special category. Only the suffering of the Soviet people should be emphasized.

The treks increased from Silesia as well as East Prussia, and soon started in Pomerania. Nazi officials estimated that by 29 January ‘
around four million people
from the evacuated areas’ were heading for the centre of the Reich. This figure appears to have been too low, since it rose to seven million within a fortnight and to 8.35 million by 19 February. The Red Army’s rampage had produced the most concentrated shift of population in history. This ethnic cleansing suited Stalin perfectly, with his plans to shift the Polish border westwards to the Oder.

Several hundred thousand civilians still remained trapped in Königsberg and on the Samland Peninsula, as well as within the encirclement of the Fourth Army at Heiligenbeil on the shore of the Frisches Haff. The Kriegsmarine made strenuous attempts to rescue as many as it could from the small port of Pillau, and evacuations began from harbours in eastern Pomerania. Soviet submarines, however, torpedoed many large ships, including the liner
Wilhelm Gustloff
which sank on the night of 30 January. Nobody knows how many were on board, but estimates of the number who died range from 5,300 to 7,400 people.

Despite the risks by sea, exhausted and hungry women with children
in their arms waited for the boats, often in vain. Rations were so short in Königsberg, less than 180 grams of bread a day, that many walked out through the snow to throw themselves on the mercy of the Red Army, but they received little pity. In the city, the execution of deserters became frenzied. The bodies of eighty German soldiers were displayed at the northern station with a placard which read: ‘
They were cowards
, but died just the same.’

The rapidity of the advance to the Oder had bypassed thousands of German troops, who tried to make their way westwards individually or in groups. The NKVD rifle divisions in charge of rear-area security found themselves fighting pitched battles. As Konev’s forces advanced on Breslau a panic-stricken flight by civilians began, with crowds storming trains while others trudged off through thick snow. Many if not most of those on foot died of cold. Some made it to safety still clinging to the frozen corpse of a baby or child. The siege of Breslau, which continued until the end of the war, was organized by the fanatical Gauleiter Karl Hanke, who ruled by terror, executing soldiers and forcing civilians including children to clear a runway under heavy Soviet fire.

Zhukov’s armies had smashed through the Warthegau, the western part of Poland incorporated into the Reich. Fleeing Germans were robbed by Poles determined to avenge their own fate in 1939 and 1940. The speed of advance of the 1st and 2nd Guards Tank Armies towards the Oder was protected on their right flank by another four armies spread out across southern Pomerania. Their greatest problem was not German resistance but the difficulties of their supply services, desperately trying to keep up with them on bad winter roads and without any rail line functioning. Had it not been for the American trucks provided under Lend–Lease, the Red Army would never have made it to Berlin before the Americans.

‘
Our tanks have ironed
, flattened out everything,’ wrote one soldier. ‘Their tracks crushed carts, vehicles, horses and anything else that was on the road. The slogan “Forwards, toward the West!” has been replaced by the slogan “Forwards, to Berlin!”’ The town of Schwerin was sacked on the way. ‘
Everything is on fire
,’ Vasily Grossman wrote in his notebook. ‘An old woman jumps from a window in a burning building.’ The fires lit the whole scene as soldiers looted. He also noted the ‘horror in the eyes of women and girls. Terrible things are happening to German women… Soviet girls who have been liberated from camps are suffering greatly too.’

A very detailed report from the 1st Ukrainian Front subsequently revealed that young women and girls taken from the Soviet Union for forced labour were also suffering from gang-rape. Having longed for liberation, they were shattered to find themselves so abused by men they had thought of as comrades and brothers. ‘
All this
’, concluded General
Tsygankov, ‘provides fertile ground for unhealthy, negative moods to grow among liberated Soviet citizens; it causes discontent and mistrust before their return to their mother country.’ But his recommendations did not mention tightening Red Army discipline. He advised instead that the political department and the Komsomol should concentrate on ‘improving political and cultural work with repatriated Soviet citizens’ to prevent them returning home with negative ideas about the Red Army.

There were also rare moments of pure joy. Vasily Churkin, who had advanced all the way from Leningrad and those terrible days on the ice of Lake Ladoga, was with Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front. ‘
We drove closer to Berlin
,’ he wrote in his diary at the end of January, ‘only 135 kilometres remain. The German resistance is weak. There are only our aircraft in the sky. We passed a concentration camp. The barracks where our women had been imprisoned are fenced off with several rows of barbed wire. A huge crowd of women prisoners burst free through the huge gate. They were running towards us crying and shouting. They were unable to believe that this was happening, they had known nothing until the last minute. The sight was striking. But what touched me the most was a soldier finding his own sister. How she ran to him when she recognized him. How they were hugging each other and crying in front of everybody. This was like a fairy tale.’

On 30 January, the twelfth anniversary of Nazi rule, and the day of Hitler’s last broadcast to the German people, panic spread in Berlin. Zhukov’s tank spearheads approached the River Oder, just over sixty kilometres from Berlin. That night, the 89th Guards Rifle Division seized a small bridgehead across the frozen river just north of Küstrin. Early the following morning, troops from the 5th Shock Army also crossed over and captured the village of Kienitz. A third bridgehead was formed south of Küstrin. The dismay in Berlin was even greater, because the propaganda ministry had tried to pretend that the fighting was still around Warsaw. Nazi prestige remained far more important to the regime than any human suffering, even that of its own people. In that one month of January 1945, Wehrmacht losses rose to 451,742 killed, roughly the equivalent of all American deaths in the whole of the Second World War.

Scratch units were formed from local Volkssturm detachments, some Caucasian volunteers (who were later arrested when they refused to fire at their own countrymen), Hitler Youth and a training battalion of teenagers destined for the Panzergrenadier Division
Feldherrnhalle
trapped in Budapest. The guard regiment of the
Grossdeutschland
Division, which had crushed the July plot the year before, was sent to the Seelow Heights in buses. This escarpment, which overlooked the flood plain of the Oder, would become the last line of defence before Berlin.