By August 1, the USSR offered the people of Bessarabia and north Bukovina in the south, with around 3.7 million inhabitants, most of them Ukrainians and Moldavians, the glorious “opportunity of joining the united family of Soviet nations… liberated from the rule of Romanian boyars, landlords, and capitalists.” That was how Molotov put it in his address to the Supreme Soviet on August 1. He also spoke of what happened in the three Baltic states. Following elections in each, they decided “in favor of introducing the Soviet system” and incorporating into the Soviet Union. Thus, Lithuania’s 2.8 million people, the 1.9 million in Latvia, and the 1.1 million in Estonia, along with the people in the south, meant that 10 million had been added to the Soviet Union. If those from the former eastern parts of Poland were counted, Molotov noted with pride, it meant that the USSR had grown in excess of 23 million people. He claimed that “nineteen-twentieths” of them had formerly been part of the Soviet Union and they had been “reunited.”
Molotov boasted, but in what was at best a half-truth, that all of this had been achieved “by peaceful means.” That the United States was not pleased with these developments, he added, “causes us little concern, since we are coping with our tasks without the assistance of these disgruntled gentlemen.”
He said that despite the great changes already under way, imperialist appetites—obviously excluding his own—were growing. The powers he had in mind were not Germany or the Soviet Union, who had conquered vast tracts in Europe. He pointed the finger instead at Japan and the United States, even though the latter was at that time basking in isolationism. He warned that the Soviet Union had “to be vigilant in regard to its external security” and reminded his audience of Stalin’s words: “We must keep our entire people in a state of mobilization, of preparedness in the face of the danger of military attack, so that no ‘accident’ and no tricks of our foreign enemies can catch us unawares.”36
Stalin sent representatives to the capital cities of each of the three Baltic states: Vyshinsky to Riga; Zhdanov to Tallinn; and Vladimir Dekanozov to Kaunas. Their mission was by then easy to predict. They would Sovietize each, beginning by dissolving parliaments and local institutions. In July there were new elections, but only Communists were allowed to run. The NKVD moved in quickly, as was standard operating procedure, and arrested fifteen to twenty thousand “hostile elements.” Many were executed immediately. It was after such campaigns and the elections following them that each state “requested” inclusion in the Soviet Union.37
In Estonia an article published on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution in October 1940 stated the goal of the occupation as follows: “Together with the working people of the entire Soviet Union, the working people of the Soviet Estonian Socialist Republic will freely celebrate the twenty-third birthday of the great October revolution. Under the leadership of the Communist Bolshevik Party, the working people of the Soviet Estonian Socialist Republic have begun the building of a new, free, and happy life, exterminating capitalists and big landowners.”38
The same article pointed to the Red Army’s occupation as “the great day of freedom for the Estonian proletariat.” In fact the NKVD began arrests almost immediately, taking into custody around three hundred people a month from August 1940 until the Soviets fled in June 1941. During the year of occupation they undercut and destroyed everything held dear by local culture in the name of bringing about a Communist revolution.
In Lithuania the pillars of the old regime were targeted. Jews were attacked insofar as they were considered capitalists or members of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, it might well be the case that Soviet occupation and deportations proportionally affected Jews more than anyone else as “collectivization was especially hard on traders and small businessmen.”39 Local intellectuals and the elite, like Mykolas Römeris, one of Lithuania’s leading jurists, grew alarmed. He wrote in his diary: “I myself had considerable Soviet sympathies before I encountered the Soviets, and in any event of the two I preferred the Soviet Revolution over Hitler’s National Socialism.” Nevertheless, the Soviets set out “to decapitate Polish and then Lithuanian society by deporting its elites.”40
Hitler’s armies had moved closer with their conquest of Poland, so Stalin determined to root out any possible backstabbers. He met with his security chief on May 7 and 9, 1941, and remarked with his usual coldbloodedness: “Comrade Beria will take care of the accommodations of our Baltic guests.”41 On May 14, Stalin decided to remove “all criminal, socially alien, and anti-Soviet elements” from these areas. There were nine separate categories of all the “usual suspects.” Anyone thought to be politically suspicious or an ordinary criminal was sent to the east. The Soviets pursued those “compromised” by what they or their relatives did prior to the occupation.42
Altogether, in the June 13–14 operation alone, 85,716 people were deported, including 25,711 from the Baltic States; the others were from Moldavia, Byelorussia, and western Ukraine. These bare statistics do not hint at what these unfortunates endured. To illustrate what happened during that fateful night, we should note that the NKVD apprehended the following family members in the Baltic region: 11,038 regarded as “bourgeois nationalists;” 3,240 related to former policemen; 7,124 kin of former landowners, industrialists, and the like; 1,649 relatives of former officers; and 2,907 described simply as “others.”
The figures of these deportations do not say what happened to the heads of households. The women and children were taken into custody without notice and allowed to bring minimal personal goods and food. They were crammed into cattle cars, fifty in each, for a trip that took from six to twelve weeks. They were deposited in the middle of the barren steppe, usually without even a roof over their heads. Their “crime” was that they were deemed by the NKVD to be “socially alien” elements. Beria planned another such large deportation for the night of June 27–28, but that was stopped only because of the Nazi invasion.43
The scope of the disaster for the Baltic peoples during the one year of Soviet occupation can be gathered from the numbers killed or deported. For Latvia, the total has been estimated at 34, 250; for Estonia, 60,000; and for Lithuania, 75,000.44
Like the Great Terror, the murders and forced deportations were—at least in the minds of the Soviet leaders—designed to prepare the country for war, but they were also supposed to help introduce Soviet-style Communist utopia. That was why, after 1945, when the war was over, the “cleansing” operations commenced right where they left off. Thus in Estonia, to mention but one example, when the Soviets returned, they carried out the largest arrest-deportation action in Estonian history. It took place in 1949, when an estimated eighty thousand were banished, with more following on a regular basis until 1952.45
26
THE WAR SPREADS
When Hitler signed the directive for the invasion of the Soviet Union on December 18, 1940, he took a fateful step that would visit on Europe a cataclysm unlike anything ever seen in its long history. The military, economic, and ideological motives for the attack had been fixed in his mind for twenty years, bound together by a combination of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism and summed up in the imperative to destroy “Jewish Bolshevism.” He did not want to stop even to celebrate his victory over France and Western Europe before pressing on as quickly as possible against the archenemy in the east. After delays caused by weather and other matters out of his control, he determined the attack should begin as soon as possible in the spring of 1941.
His one reliable ally in Europe, Benito Mussolini, upset the plans. Without any consultation he invaded Greece on October 28, 1940. He not only failed to get a quick victory but opened the door to the British, who were hoping to put pressure on Hitler from the south. By December 5, Hitler had decided to attack Greece the coming March in Operation Marita, though he would thus have to postpone the war on the USSR for at least four weeks. After March 27, with the coup of Prince Paul in Yugoslavia, a man with whom he was able to deal, Hitler decided that Marita should expand. He told h
is military leaders to prepare for an immediate operation against that country as well.1
By April 6, a joint offensive against both Yugoslavia and Greece had begun. The Royal Yugoslav Army surrendered on April 17, with minimal German losses (151 dead, 392 wounded). Most of the Greek army capitulated a week later, and again the Wehrmacht’s casualties were modest (100 dead, 3,500 wounded). They drove the British from Greece and forced them to evacuate around fifty thousand troops. Hitler chalked up two more easy victories, but military leaders were concerned German units were getting overextended.
Initially only parts of Greece and Yugoslavia were occupied, and most of the fighting forces were withdrawn. Four specially trained divisions were created, mainly from Austrians, and they were sent in to pacify and hold the vast area. On April 2, before the campaign had begun, Halder agreed that the security police and SD would deal with “emigrants, saboteurs, terrorists,” as well as “Communists and Jews.”2Germany’s ally in Yugoslavian Croatia, the Ustase, settled old grievances and turned the country “into one great slaughterhouse.”3 Communist resistance began almost immediately, organized and led by Josip Broz Tito, who was inspired by Lenin and Stalin. The partisan movement that developed fought against the occupation until 1945, but it was complicated by the fact that newly independent Croatia, controlled by the Ustase, was allied with the Axis powers and fought the Communists. In addition, loyalist and nationalist Serbs organized into a force as the Chetniks, opposed the Axis occupation, but also were deeply anti-Communist. The result in Yugoslavia was a combination of the horrors of a foreign occupation, ethnic persecutions, and a three-sided civil war.4
THE JEWS AND REPRISAL POLICIES
The policies adopted by the Germans in Eastern Europe toward the Jews and any form of resistance were far more radical than any they were following at the same time in the west. On April 16, the day the Wehrmacht arrived in Sarajevo, it unleashed a massive pogrom. Within the first six weeks, the commander in Serbia, General Ludwig von Schroeder, ordered that Jews and Gypsies be forced to wear a yellow armband and that all their property be subject to Aryanization, or confiscation. Hitler’s reaction to reports in August of “partisan activity” led him to issue an open-ended imperative to take the “sharpest measures to restore peace and good order.”
Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces Wilhelm Keitel ordered on September 16 that “50 to 100 Communists” be executed for every Wehrmacht soldier killed. In a brief encounter with partisans that soon followed and cost the Germans 21 lives, Franz Böhme, plenipotentiary commanding general in Serbia, ordered that 100 Serbian prisoners be executed for each “murdered” soldier. The prisoners were already in a camp holding mainly Jews and Communists. Böhme’s follow-up instructions on October 10 systematized the reprisal ratio as 100 Serbians for every German killed and 50 for each wounded.
The victims singled out were Jews and Communists, while the executioners were drawn from a variety of sources, initially and mainly from the Wehrmacht itself. Some units that ran into resistance combed through houses afterward and shot the required “quota” in reprisal. The OKW was dismayed at this turn of events, because it would tend to create more insurgents seeking revenge. The occupation leaders soon concluded that not all Serbs were Communists and there should be some investigation before executing them. However, there was consensus that all Jews were by definition anti-German and it was safe to use them to make up the quotas. By October some divisions were reporting that they had a “shortfall” of candidates for reprisals because there were no more male Jews left in Serbia to kill.
The Jewish women and children were confined to a concentration camp at Semlin, across the Sava River from Belgrade. On April 11, 1942, a first request went to Himmler to send a gas van to kill them all, and in early March it arrived. Up to one hundred women and children were forced into the van for each of its deadly trips. It drove through Belgrade while the victims experienced the nightmare, screaming until they died on the way to Avala, ten miles or so outside the city. The van made this trip several times a day (save for Sundays and holidays) over a two-month period. By May 10, its work finished, it had killed seventy-five hundred. Yugoslavia’s Jewish population stood at seventy-five thousand in 1939 and was reduced to around twelve thousand in 1945. In addition, an unknown number of Jews who had sought refuge in Yugoslavia were found and murdered.5
Almost before the shooting stopped in Greece, the German security police pursued the country’s leading figures listed in a “search book.” The Greeks remember the widespread cruelties and initial famine. As in Yugoslavia, the resistance was led by Communists, with a great deal of popular support behind it.
The Jews in Greece were endangered until the Italians were given jurisdiction over most of the mainland and the islands in June 1941. However, the strategically important region around the ancient city of Salonika, home to tens of thousands of Jews, was occupied by German forces. The full horror did not begin until July 8 the following year, when the Wehrmacht commander (not the SS) ordered male Jews aged between eighteen and forty-five to register for work. Three days later thousands who gathered in long lines to sign up were attacked and humiliated in scenes that appalled many Greeks who did not share this anti-Semitism.
Eichmann grew impatient at the lack of cooperation from the Italians, the allies in charge, and finally sent Rolf Günther to Salonika in January 1943. He was soon followed by Dieter Wisliceny, another trusted specialist, and given the task of deporting the fifty thousand Jews in the city. The transports began to roll on March 15 and carried on relentlessly. Although the Jews’ property was there for the taking when they were deported everywhere in Europe, the priority was rather to organize mass murder. “Wild” or disorganized looting was common in Salonika, as individual Germans helped themselves and sent home truckloads of booty.
The economic side of the operation was so ham-handed, however, that of the two thousand or so businesses, factories, and offices owned by the Jews, just six hundred were inventoried. Confiscations were often so hectic that much was destroyed in the process. There was no neat-and-tidy expropriation, with funds flowing to the German treasury, but instead more of a mad scramble for spoils. Germans handed out businesses as a reward to stool pigeons or on a whim. A large array of people got in on the action, from individual Germans in the various services, to the Greeks, Bulgarians, and assorted others.
A sign of the wastefulness of the process—at least from the point of view of the German treasury—can be seen from what happened to the Jews’ homes. These were not neatly sold off, even though Salonika suffered from a chronic housing shortage. The Greek authorities complained that getting rid of all the Jews did not help, because looters broke into homes, tore up the roofs and walls, or dug in basements in search of hidden money and jewels. They made most of the dwellings uninhabitable.6
By the end of the war, of the seventy to eighty thousand Jews who had lived in Greece in 1939, fewer than ten thousand remained.7
STALIN’S UNCERTAIN COURSE AND REFUSAL TO BE “PROVOKED”
Stalin had signed a pact with Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, but that hardly deterred Hitler. It was left to one of Stalin’s cronies to inform the Yugoslav envoy just two days later that Moscow could not maintain its treaty. In private and in public Stalin adopted an appeasement policy, even though he knew very well what the Nazis were doing in the areas they conquered.
He took steps to strengthen the military. The Red Army had to call up reservists for war against Poland, the Baltic States, and particularly Finland. German military studies pinpointed the glaring weaknesses but also noted that the Red Army had instituted reforms to deal with the problems.8
Stalin blamed everyone but himself for the Finnish debacle. On May 6, 1940, he had replaced Commissar of Defense Kliment Voroshilov with Semyon Timoshenko. He also had dismissed Chief of Staff Boris Shaposhnikov, put another in his place, and eventually sacked him as well. On December 24 he finally gave the post to the forty-five-year-old general
Georgy Zhukov, the man who would become the great Soviet hero.
The war in Finland had revealed that the Red Army was not as formidable as it looked on paper, but the contrasts with the Wehrmacht were damning. Hitler had swept through Western Europe with such ease that the Soviet leaders were aghast. When Stalin heard the reports, his nerves cracked. He rhetorically asked Molotov, Khrushchev, Beria, and other leaders who were with him when the news arrived, “Couldn’t they put up any resistance at all?”
Khrushchev, who transmits this disconsolate remark, remembered how Soviet leaders felt at that moment:
Germany, Italy, and Japan were formidable countries, and they were united against us. The most pressing and deadly threat in all history faced the Soviet Union. We felt as though we were facing this threat all by ourselves. America was too far away to help us, and besides, it was unknown at that time how America would react if the Soviet Union were attacked. And England was hanging by a thread. No one knew if England would be able to hold out should the Hitlerites attempt an invasion across the Channel…. We knew very well that we were the next country Hitler planned to turn his army against.9
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler Page 45