The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  The partisan movement didn’t develop systematically.17 The first phase, from the outbreak of the war until the spring of 1942, was characterized by failure. Despite Stalin’s rhetoric, the Soviet Union was not prepared to fight a guerrilla war. The concept of ‘defence through attack’ – the idea that any future war should be carried out on the enemy’s soil – had, in theory, rendered partisan warfare unnecessary. And Stalin’s natural suspiciousness meant that he was innately illdisposed to the idea of armed bands operating behind enemy lines far from the control of Moscow. That, plus the belief in many quarters in the early months of the war that the Germans would win, combined with the hopes of those, like Aleksey Bris, that the Germans would prove sympathetic conquerors, meant initially that Soviet partisans were isolated. The massive German anti-partisan actions of early 1942, such as Operation Hanover, marked the partisans’ lowest ebb. But with Stalin’s growing support, and motivated by the belief that Germany might conceivably be defeated, the movement began to grow in effectiveness. The actual number of Soviet partisans engaged in the fight against the Germans is notoriously difficult to estimate.18 One of the latest calculations is that at the end of 1941 there were 2000 partisan detachments giving a total of 72,000 partisans, and that by the summer of 1944 around 500,000 partisans were fighting the Germans. (Communication with Moscow was spasmodic – for much of the war 90 per cent of the partisans had no radio contact with their own side.)

  Mikhail Timoshenko was one of Stalin’s Soviet partisans – a member of an NKVD special unit. He conducted the fight against the Germans and the ‘traitors’ in the occupied civilian population with a ruthlessness that the Soviet leader would have approved of. As a general rule he ordered any German prisoners whom his unit captured to be shot. ‘What could we do with them?’ says Timoshenko. ‘Release them so they could kill us again?’ He would ask for volunteers from amongst his men to do the actual shooting, and there was never a shortage of willing killers. ‘You know they considered them as enemies they had to destroy,’ says Timoshenko. ‘Understand that these people had had their houses burnt down – with their parents still inside them. These men were vengeful.’19

  Living behind the lines, mundane considerations, such as where to get enough food, became a major problem. The partisans occasionally had parachute drops of supplies, but for the most part they lived off the land – or off the Germans. Timoshenko always snatched the packs of the Germans he had shot ‘because in them, especially those belonging to the divisions that had come from Europe, there was rum and chocolate. There were salami tins! They were stuffed with food and we needed to be fed.’

  When there were no Germans to ambush, the partisans took food from the local villagers. And that could be a major cause of conflict. Ivan Treskovski was a teenager living with his family in a ramshackle farmhouse on the edge of the village of Usyazha deep in the Belorussian countryside. He remembers how he cowered upstairs and listened when the Soviet partisans came to pay a call on his father: ‘They’d be drunk, drunk!’ he says. ‘They’d take our fat, our chickens and our clothing. They’d take it to another village and sell it or change it for vodka – that’s what they did.’ On one occasion in the winter of 1942 he heard the partisans shout at his father, ‘Give us some bacon fat or we’ll kill you!’ For the locals in this region life became a daily round of terror. In the daytime there was always the fear that the Germans would come, and during the night they were at risk from the partisans.

  Whilst German lines of communication did risk disruption at their hands, the greatest impact the partisans had was on the lives of the occupied population. Stalin himself authorized his partisans to kill any locals who were helping the Germans. Mikhail Timoshenko admits that he and his band of partisans killed those who they thought had collaborated.20 Indeed, so strong was his reputation for shooting ‘traitors’ that one of the German propaganda newspapers printed a caricature of him. Underneath there was the caption: ‘This is the leader of the partisan movement who destroys everything he gets his hands on: he steals cows and robs collective farms.’ Timoshenko remembers that his hands were shown ‘covered in blood’. He felt this attack was ‘unfair’: ‘They’d written that I killed local traitors. Well, there were instances when we did kill traitors. We killed any of the population who helped the Germans. But they said that I shot people who wouldn’t give me their cattle. That’s nonsense, of course.’

  These partisan groups made their own laws, and Timoshenko admits that part of his job was, as Stalin would have wished, to deal with those ‘who had lost the conviction that Soviet power would be victorious’. If he suspected a particular villager was a ‘traitor’, he would send two men to his house at night to snatch him. They would interrogate him and then, as was most likely, believing him to be an informer, they would shoot him. ‘There were no courts,’ says Timoshenko. ‘There was no power other than my own. . . . It was essentially a terror, but a terror against dishonourable people.’

  The potential for abuse in such a system is, of course, enormous. Ivan Treskovski recalls that there were villagers who might, out of spite, tell the partisans that someone had links with the Germans – and then the one who was denounced was murdered. As he puts it: ‘Whoever had the gun was the master and did whatever he wanted.’

  Eastern Belorussia, with its thick forest close to isolated villages, was ideal country for partisan activities, and teenager Nadezhda Nefyodova and her family discovered personally how they could bring their murderous vengeance down on anyone they chose. One night in November 1942 the local partisans came to the tiny village of Prilepy, just outside Minsk, and murdered her sister and her husband. There was no explanation – the partisans didn’t need to justify their murder. The deaths led to speculation that perhaps one of them had been seen talking to the Germans. Then, since other people were also killed that night, a theory grew that the whole village had in some way offended the partisan leader. In a civilized society someone is accused, convicted and punished. In this shadowy world of suspicion and revenge, villagers were first murdered and then speculation grew about what crime they might conceivably have committed.

  Nadezhda Nefyodova’s family took in and hid the murdered couple’s two small children, who were little more than babies and had been cowering underneath the bed while their parents were murdered. But the local partisans seemed to want to kill the children as well, because now they pursued the whole of Nadezhda’s family. During the day it was safe for them to stay at their house, but at night, when the partisans might come, the family scattered. Her father slept concealed in hay at the other side of the village, whilst Nadezhda, her mother and the two little children all went to other relatives in nearby villages. The next day they would reassemble and begin work in the fields around their home, trying to grow enough food to survive.

  The local partisans were led by Petr Sankovich, a committed Communist who had been the chief vet for the area before the war. His most faithful lieutenant was Efim Goncharov, the local headmaster and a member of the district party committee. The lawless atmosphere of the time is captured in this official report from another Belorussian partisan, Vladimir Lashuk, dated May 1942: ‘I served with Goncharov, and we completed a whole series of attacks on the Fascist occupiers, turncoats, traitors and other German supporters.’21 And, of course, they themselves decided who was a ‘turncoat’ or a ‘traitor’.

  But Nadezhda Nefyodova and her family didn’t suffer only at the hands of the Soviet partisans. In March 1943, a drunken Soviet partisan shot at a German plane from just outside Usyazha, Nadezhda’s village. Reprisals followed. The next day Stukhas dive-bombed the village, and then the German-controlled police arrived. Most of the villagers hid in the nearby woods as soon as the bombing started, but Nadezhda’s brother Siyonas stayed behind. Bravely, he climbed on to the wooden roof of their house and tried to put out the fire caused by the incendiaries. He managed to save the house but it cost him his life because he was still in the village when the German police arrived
. They set fire to the barn in which he took refuge and then, as he emerged, shot him. Twenty-seven out of twenty-eight houses in the village were destroyed in the German reprisal attack and twenty-nine villagers died.

  ‘Do you know how hard it was to live in the middle of all those garrisons?’ Nadezhda asks. ‘Germans during the day, and at night those bandits would arrive. You had to be afraid of all of them because none of them came with good intentions. And if you protested, what did it mean to them to kill you? You were a mere fly! You were living all the time – from morning till evening and evening till morning – in such tension . . . You didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, so you just lived for that day . . . just for that hour.’ Surprisingly, given the Western perception of Hitler’s war in the East, she concluded by voicing her view that as far as she was concerned it had been the Soviet partisans – not the Germans – who had been the more ‘terrifying’ enemy: ‘Of course the partisans were crueller – they came at night and to their own kind.’

  Petr Sankovich, the local partisan leader, was killed in an ambush with German forces in February 1944, but Efim Goncharov survived the war, was awarded a medal and became chairman of the district committee. Whilst there are still calls for the prosecution of remaining German war criminals, it is worth remembering the criminals on the Soviet side who prospered long after the war and were never punished. ‘If my sister and her husband had lived, then all our lives would have been different,’ says Nadezhda today. ‘There remains an aftertaste of spite in my heart.’

  Nadezhda Nefyodova and her family in Belorussia lived between the Germans and the partisans and suffered cruelty at the hands of each. But in nearby German-occupied Ukraine there were those who were caught in an even tighter trap. For here there was a third force, the Ukrainian Nationalist partisans, committed to fighting both the Germans and the Soviet partisans.

  Meleti Semenyuk fought with the Ukrainian Nationalists (the Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia or UPA). The disillusionment caused by the harsh German rule offered an opportunity to fight for an independent Ukraine. To the Soviet partisans, and to Stalin, they were as much an enemy as the Germans. ‘The aim of the Red partisans was to eliminate our movement so that they could come back to a clean area,’ says Semenyuk. ‘And those partisans – like animals – I cannot describe them.’ Stories of atrocities committed by the Soviet partisans (often long after the war with the Germans was over, as Stalin ordered the Ukraine to be ‘cleansed’) are commonplace in the Ukraine. A secret Soviet Interior Ministry report acknowledges that the Soviet forces committed ‘anarchic and oppressive actions against local citizens’. In one example of such an action, the report describes how an undercover Soviet group that had infiltrated the UPA ‘brutally tortured a sixty-two-year-old man and his two daughters’.22

  After escaping from his village, Aleksey Bris joined the UPA. He remembers the cruelty of the conflict with the Soviet partisans: ‘The Germans just killed us, but with the Red partisans the bestialities were different. Some of them were cutting the ears off our members. In rare cases they have this Asian way of torturing people – cutting your ears and tongue off. I don’t know if they did this to people who were still alive, but these events happened quite often. It’s sadism which exists in every system. The Germans just hanged people, but I never saw anything like tortured bodies. But, of course, we were quite cruel . . . we didn’t take any prisoners of war and they didn’t take any prisoners either, so we killed each other. That was natural.’

  The secretive and arbitrary way in which the partisans most often conducted their fight, together with the fact that the majority of atrocities against the local population were never reported for fear of further reprisal, means that it will never be possible to quantify accurately the precise numbers of crimes the partisans committed. Nor is it easy to assess the damage these partisan movements actually inflicted on their German occupiers, for their impact was as much psychological as physical. Mere figures for the number of Germans killed by partisans during the war (one estimate is about 50,000) underestimate the effect of their presence on the German infrastructure. This plaintive letter from a Herr Schenk, who ran a mining and steel company in eastern Ukraine, gives some sense of how the Germans could be affected in practical terms by the virtual civil war that erupted during their occupation. He writes, in April 1943, that around him are ‘1. Partisans, who are nothing but Bolsheviks . . .’ and ‘2. There is a large number of national Ukrainian partisans who are also located in these forests . . .’ He sums up the situation between these two groups succinctly, for as well as attacking him, ‘Groups 1 and 2 are also fighting against each other.’ In addition, ‘There are so-called bandits . . . who are disrupting the main-line traffic.’ In this morass ‘travelling by car is today extremely dangerous’. One local police officer remarked to Schenk as he began a journey, ‘If you’re lucky, you’ll make it through.’ Schenk concludes his letter by writing: ‘The economic situation is suffering greatly under these conditions to the point that there is no German administration left at all in many regions.’23

  Hitler’s solution to these problems was simple: more brutality, more killings, more oppression. This view was shared by the Wehrmacht Commander-in-Chief in the Ukraine, who reported as early as December 1941 that ‘The fight against the partisans succeeds only if the population realizes that the partisans and their sympathizers sooner or later are killed . . . Death by strangulation inspires fear more particularly . . . only measures that can frighten the population more than the terror of partisans can lead to success. The Army Group recommends resort to such measures as needed.’24

  But, as with most Nazi policies that involved individual discretion, the anti-partisan policy was anything but consistent. Local commanders were free to a large extent to determine their own actions – some even did deals with the partisans in their area. Führer Directive No. 46 of August 1942 attempted to clarify the way the German forces should deal with the partisan problem. But it served only to muddy the waters still further. On the one hand it recognized that the cooperation of the local population was important in the fight against the partisans, but it also warned against confidence in the local population being ‘misplaced’. This one directive shows in microcosm the inability of Hitler and the Nazi hardliners to accept the idea that the population they were dealing with were proper human beings. They knew they needed the locals to help against the partisans, but they also knew that a necessary precondition of gaining their help was to treat them decently – something that went against their basic ideological beliefs.

  Yet it was clear by the end of the summer of 1942 that this policy of harsh repression was not getting the desired results. An alternative was suggested by Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, head of the German Army’s Intelligence Agency for the East, who concluded in a report in November 1942: ‘If the population rejects the partisans and lends its full support to the struggle against them, no partisan problem will exist.’25 The resulting debate mirrored that between Koch and Rosenberg on the Ukrainian political question. This time it was a few army commanders, such as Gehlen, who argued for partnership with the local population against the partisans. Gehlen called for captured Soviet partisans to be treated as ‘normal’ prisoners of war – and in some cases this was done in Army Group Centre (who faced the Red Army east of Smolensk) in 1943. He also mounted propaganda leaflet campaigns against some partisan groups with varying results.

  Unsurprisingly, Hitler did not share Gehlen’s views. The Führer had concluded that ‘only where the struggle against the partisan nuisance was begun and carried out with ruthless brutality have successes been achieved’. Just like the whole war on the Eastern Front, the struggle against the partisans was viewed by Hitler as ‘a struggle of total annihilation of one side or the other’.26 The natural consequence of this attitude was that, despite the best efforts of a few soldiers like Gehlen, the brutality escalated. If each side believes that the only way to fight fear is ‘with more fear’, as Vladimir Ogryzko put i
t in the context of the battle for Moscow, then the only limit on cruelty is the human imagination.

  Some of the harshest German anti-partisan actions of all were launched in eastern Belorussia in the summer of 1943 – a few months after the ‘invincible’ German Sixth Army had been destroyed at Stalingrad and whilst the Red Army fought back the German summer advance at the Battle of Kursk. During this ‘cleansing’ in the countryside around Minsk, on 22 July, German units came to the tiny village of Maksimoky. They burst into the house of teenager Aleksandr Mikhailovski and awoke both him and his deaf and dumb brother. On the dusty road outside, as dawn broke, the Germans assembled eight villagers, including Aleksandr and his brother. They tied their hands behind their backs and ordered them to walk down the road, with the Germans following about 50 metres behind.

  Aleksandr knew what this meant, for the Germans had used this same technique in nearby villages. Partisans had planted mines on many of the roads in the area, and the Germans used the locals as human mine detectors. (This kind of sadism was not uncommon. Curt von Gottberg, the SS-Obergruppenführer who, during 1943, conducted another huge anti-partisan action called Operation Kottbus on the eastern border of Belorussia, reported that ‘approximately two to three thousand local people were blown up in the clearing of the minefields’.)27

  ‘Your heart turned to stone and you went to a living death,’ says Mikhailovski of his treatment at German hands. ‘The people went along just like they were already dead. They knew that only despair and tears awaited us.’ Their dilemma as they walked along the road was a stark one. ‘Whenever we felt there was something suspicious, we’d try to avoid it. But we knew that if we avoided a mine and it blew up a German behind us, then we’d die all the same because they’d shoot you.’