Under Stalin, ideas of love and sexuality had been ruthlessly repressed in a political environment which sought to ‘de-individualize the individual’. Sex education had been banned. The Soviet state’s attempt to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of ‘barracks eroticism’, which was far more primitive and violent than ‘the most sordid foreign pornography’. And this, combined with the utterly brutalizing effect of the slaughter on the eastern front and the propaganda of indiscriminate vengeance fostered in articles and harangues by political officers, produced an explosive potential when Soviet forces invaded East Prussia.
None were more brutalized than the shtrafniki, the living dead of the punishment battalions. Many were hardened criminals transferred from the Gulag. (On Beria’s order, those condemned for political offences were never allowed to fight.) Even their officers were influenced by the sheer ruthlessness of their lives. ‘A criminal is always a criminal, in the rear or at the front,’ wrote a medical officer with a shtraf company. ‘At the front, in the role of a shtrafnik, their criminal nature always manifested itself. So our company was having fun. A young German woman ran up to me in Halsberg and shouted in German: “I’ve been raped by fourteen men!” and I walked on thinking, it’s a pity that it was fourteen and not twenty-eight; it’s a pity they haven’t shot you German bitch… We, the officers in the shtraf company, shut our eyes to everything, we felt no pity for the Germans and we let the shtrafniki do whatever they wanted to the civilians.’
Looting was combined with mindless destruction. Soldiers would burn down houses and then find that they had nowhere to shelter from the cold. Rabichev described the looting of Goldap. ‘The entire contents of shops were thrown out on to the sidewalks through the broken shopfronts. Thousands of pairs of shoes, plates and radio sets, all sorts of household and pharmacy goods and food were all mixed up. From apartment windows, clothes, pillows, duvets, paintings, gramophones and musical instruments were hurled on to the street. The roadways were blocked with all this stuff. Right at this moment, German artillery and mortars opened fire. Several spare German divisions hurled our demoralized troops out of the city in no time. But Front headquarters had already reported that the first German town had been captured. There was no choice. They had to recapture the place again.’
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 Kuriowicz, 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 num
ber 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.
On the morning of 3 February, the US Eighth Air Force launched its heaviest raid on Berlin, killing 3,000 people. The Reichschancellery and Bormann’s Party Chancellery were hit. Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and the People’s Court were badly damaged. Roland Freisler, the Court’s president who had screamed abuse at the July plotters, was crushed to death in its cellars.
Zhukov, meanwhile, faced the classic quandary of any successful general after a rapid advance. Should the Red Army attempt to push on to Berlin, when the enemy was in turmoil and had no defences, or should it consolidate, to allow its exhausted men to rest, resupply and service their tanks? The debate among his generals was lively, with Chuikov of the 8th Guards Army arguing fiercely that they should attack immediately. The issue was settled on 6 February by Stalin in a telephone call from Yalta in the Crimea. Before attacking Berlin, they must first join with Rokossovsky to clear ‘the Baltic balcony’ of Pomerania on their northern flank, where Himmler, to the despair of Guderian and other senior officers, had taken personal command of Army Group Vistula.
45
Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Tokyo Raids
NOVEMBER 1944–JUNE 1945
Soon after General MacArthur landed so triumphantly on Leyte in October 1944, his Sixth Army faced a much harder fight than he had expected. The Japanese reinforced the island, and rapidly established air superiority. Admiral Halsey’s carriers had departed and the ground was too sodden to construct airfields, after thirty-five inches of rain had fallen in the monsoon. Although the Japanese had intended to reserve their strength for the defence of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines, Imperial General Headquarters insisted that more reinforcements should be sent to the fighting on Leyte. Aircraft were also transferred from as far afield as Manchuria, but by then five American airstrips were in action and Halsey’s fleet carriers had returned.
Fighting on Leyte continued well into December, partly due to excessive caution displayed by Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, who commanded the Sixth Army. The fiercest fighting was for ‘Breakneck Ridge’ near Carigara in the north of the island, furiously defended by Japanese troops. Krueger was, however, helped by a disastrous Japanese counter-attack against the airstrips. But by the end of December the Americans estimated that they had killed 60,000 Japanese. Ten thousand Japanese reinforcements drowned when their tranports were sunk approaching the island. Some 3,500 Americans were killed and 12,000 wounded. Mac-Arthur, never prone to modesty, proclaimed it ‘perhaps the greatest defeat in the mi
litary annals of the Japanese Army’.
The insistence of Imperial General Headquarters on continuing to reinforce Leyte with troops from Luzon made the invasion of the main island, now planned for 9 January 1945, considerably easier. But first the island of Mindoro, just to the south of the main bulk of Luzon, had to be taken to create more airfields. The landings and ground operation went well, but the invasion task force suffered heavily from kamikaze attacks.
General Yamashita, the commander on Luzon who had objected in vain to the strategy of defending Leyte in strength, knew that he could not hope to defeat the forces heading in his direction. He would withdraw with 152,000 men, the bulk of his troops, to the hills of northern central Luzon. A smaller force of 30,000 would defend the air bases round Clark Field, while another 80,000 strong in the hills above Manila would be able to deprive the capital of its supplies of water.
The Second World War Page 95