The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (25 page)

5.7 million Soviet POWs who fell into German hands during the war, 3.3 million died in captivity. The mal- treatment of POWs by the German army became widely known in the Red Army and naturally proved to be a considerable motivation to fight fanatically against the invaders.
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Paradoxically, the Nazi state wasted the lives of mil- lions of able-bodied prisoners of war by killing them or allowing them to starve to death at the very time that it desperately needed foreign labor to work in its war industries. The obvious solution was to import labor from the east. From March 1942, under the direction of

Hitler’s labor minister Fritz Sauckel, millions of people were sucked into Germany by force and set to hard la- bor. By July 1942, 697,000 Ostarbeiter, or eastern work- ers, had been deported to Germany; a year later, that number had risen to 1.7 million; by June 1944, 2.79 mil- lion Soviet citizens had been conscripted for labor in Germany, and 2.1 million of them had come from the Ukraine. Many workers resisted and avoided deporta- tion into Germany, and the military police had to resort to surprise roundups and labor press-gangs. Failure to comply with German demands led to extreme repri- sals: the burning of houses and confiscation of prop- erty, savage beatings, death. Captured workers were packed onto boxcars without food or water or toilets. Once in Germany, these people toiled under extreme hardship, lived in rude barracks, were fed poorly, and suffered from malnutrition and disease at rates higher than even the forced laborers from western nations. Easterners were forced to wear a badge with the word OST on their jackets, indicating their eastern origins and subhuman status. They were worked, literally, to death. Heinrich Himmler approved of the formula, declaring in October 1943 that “whether 10,000 Rus- sian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.” These east- ern peoples, he sneered, were but “human animals.”
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Daily life in the German-occupied territories became a nightmarish struggle for survival. As the German occu- piers ransacked the region, the living standards of the average peasants, already dreadfully low, became even worse. In the Ukraine, German soldiers looked upon the peasants as the lowest form of life, and abused them for the slightest infraction, such as failing to ad- dress a German properly, or being late for work. Public whippings and periodic hangings instilled fear in the population. As part of a deliberate policy of depopula- tion, German authorities denied food supplies for the large cities of the Ukraine; famine broke out in Kiev and Kharkov. The German occupation, which some in the Soviet lands had hoped would liberate them, had in fact condemned millions to suffering and death.
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In the summer of 1943, following the defeat of a huge German offensive around the city of Kursk, the Sovi- et Red Army went on the offensive, pushing back the Germans slowly as far as the river Dniepr by the end of the year. A large portion of the eastern Ukraine was liberated; Kiev was retaken in early November. Ilya Eh- renburg, with his gift for vitriol, captured the sense of deadly resolve that now pervaded the Soviet troops. “ We want Germany to drink the bitter cup,” he wrote. “Nothing can save Germany from inexorable retribu- tion.” The scenes that greeted the liberators were ap-

palling and only fueled their anger. “Our soldiers,” wrote Ehrenburg, “see how the Germans introduced feudal labor service for the collective farmers, how they whipped people for insubordination, how they raped, intimidated and infected girls. The invaders will answer for everything.” Vasily Grossman, too, de- scribed the red-hot temper of the Soviet soldiers: “ev- ery soldier, every officer and every general of the Red Army who had seen the Ukraine in blood and fire, who had heard the true story of what had happened in the Ukraine during the two years of German rule, under- stands to the bottom of their souls that there are only two sacred words left to us. One of them is ‘love’ and the other one is ‘revenge.’”

For Grossman, these words had personal meaning. A Jew who grew up in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, ninety miles southwest of Kiev, Grossman was stag- gered to find that the Ukraine’s Jews had been wiped out. As he traveled through village and town, he dis- covered the sheer scale of the slaughter. This killing of an entire people, he wrote, was different from the death of soldiers bearing arms, of which Grossman had seen a great deal. “ This was the murder of a great and professional experience, passed from one generation to another in thousands of families of craftsmen and members of the intelligentsia. This was the murder of

everyday traditions that grandfathers had passed to their grandchildren, this was the murder of memories, of a mournful song, folk poetry, of life, happy and bit- ter…this was the death of a nation.” And it was more even than this: Grossman, speaking to an old neighbor, discovered that in September 1941, his own mother had been among thousands of residents of Berdichev who were rounded up, marched to an airfield outside of town, ordered to stand on the edge of a pit, and shot to death.
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I

N THE MINDS of President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the phrase “the liberation of Europe” meant something quite concrete: the removal of Nazi oppression from the subject peoples of Europe; the restoration of the free- dom and self-government that had obtained before the war began; and the creation of a European order in which peace and democratic rule might flourish. For the western leaders, liberation promised not simply military victory over Germany, but a return to stability, freedom, and national sovereignty in a world of peace-

able states.

Josef Stalin, however, did not conceive of liberation in

these terms. For Stalin, the chief aim of the war against Germany was, of course, military victory, but once that was secured, Stalin did not desire to return Europe to the status quo ante bellum. On the contrary, Stalin saw the political order of pre-1939 Europe, with its mul- titude of small, independent, and anti- Communist states in the Baltic, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans, as a threat to Soviet security. Poland had long been a thorn in the side of the Russians; the Poles went to war against the nascent Soviet Union in 1920, a war that had ended in humiliation for the Soviets. The Bal- tic states were fiercely anti-Russian; Hungary, Roma- nia, and Bulgaria had all entered the war on the side of Hitler; and Yugoslavia was a “nest”—one of Stalin’s favorite words—of royalists, nationalists, Fascists, and British subterfuge. Through the Hitler- Stalin Pact of 1939, Stalin had gone some way to expanding the Sovi- et Union’s borders westward: he swallowed up the Bal- tic states and secured for the USSR the eastern half of Poland. These achievements had all been endangered by Hitler’s attack of 1941, but now that the tide of war was turning, Stalin envisioned not only recovering the prizes he had seized in 1939, but expanding his control into central Europe through a territorial and political settlement that favored Soviet strategic and ideologi- cal interests. He also could begin to think about the to- tal elimination of Germany as a threat to the USSR by

carving up the Nazi state into smaller pieces. And he sought to ensure ideological control of the region by establishing powerful Communist parties that would organize a postwar realignment of Eastern Europe with the Soviet Union. Stalin by late 1943 had the power to achieve these aims: he possessed a gigantic army of

5.5 million men under arms in 480 divisions, now well equipped with tanks, air support, artillery, and weap- ons. These huge armies were now just a hundred miles from the 1941 borders, and would soon be well across them and on into Germany itself. Stalin knew that soon he would be in a position to “liberate” Eastern Europe in a manner that suited his own ideological and strate- gic interests.
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Stalin’s powerful position within the anti- German co- alition became perfectly clear to the western powers at the first wartime meeting of the Big Three leaders, which took place in late November 1943 in Tehran. President Franklin Roosevelt had been trying for some time to arrange a meeting with the Soviet leader, yet Stalin consistently refused to travel outside his own country. Churchill had been to Moscow, but the Big Three had never met together. With the change in the military fortunes of the Red Army, and especially with his desire to press on his allies the vital need for a sec- ond front in Europe against Germany, Stalin finally

agreed to leave Moscow to meet his counterparts in Tehran. The narrative of this Big Three meeting cannot be rivaled for sheer drama and intrigue. As the delega- tions converged on the Iranian capital on November 27, the Soviets announced that they had intelligence of a German plot to assassinate one or all of the Big Three. They therefore urged that Roosevelt and his entourage move into the large Soviet legation instead of remain- ing some distance away in the American Embassy, and FDR accepted this hastily prepared arrangement. The meetings were held in the British and Soviet com- pounds, which were next door to each other. Secu- rity was tight, with phalanxes of Soviet secret police shoulder to shoulder with a brigade of Anglo-Indian troops—turbaned Sikhs, in fact. The twenty-four- year-old Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had taken over from his pro- German father only two years earlier, briefly appeared on the scene to greet the three great leaders; he was politely brushed to the side of the proceedings. As the meetings went on, there was ample time for the Big Three to socialize. One evening, FDR mixed iced martinis for Stalin. On November 29, in a solemn ceremony that featured an honor guard of Russian and British soldiers, Churchill presented to Stalin a jewel-encrusted sword, designed by His Maj- esty King George VI, in thanks for the victory at Stal- ingrad; Stalin kissed the blade with great reverence.

The next evening, Churchill celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday, and was fêted by the world’s most powerful men in the dining room of the British legation, whose walls were inlaid with tiny pieces of mirror and whose windows were cloaked in red velvet. And throughout the four days of meetings, amid lavish dinners and riv- ers of wine, champagne, and vodka, the leaders of the great alliance raised toast after toast to one another, delivering encomiums that ill concealed their mutual rivalry and suspicion.
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For all the rich theater of the meeting at Tehran, enor- mous issues of strategy and the postwar order lay be- fore the men. Each leader had his own objectives, of course. Roosevelt wanted to win Stalin’s support for his cherished dream of a postwar international orga- nization called the United Nations, and he also wanted to win Soviet participation in the war against Japan. Churchill wanted to sustain Britain’s dominant posi- tion in the Mediterranean by hitting Germany through southern Europe, the Balkans, and Turkey. Stalin want- ed a second front in France as soon as possible, to help share the heavy burden of fighting the Germans, and he also wanted to feel out the Allies about the future of Eastern Europe and Germany itself. There was a good deal of friction and tension, especially between Churchill and Stalin, who regarded each other as old

antagonists going back many years. Roosevelt man- aged to ply his traditional charm on Stalin, and wrung a few smiles from that pockmarked, sallow face. Indeed, as the four-day meeting progressed, Stalin found he had reason to smile.

From the very first moment of their talks, Stalin made it plain that he thought that the most important task facing the Allies was to open a second front against Germany. Stalin cast serious doubts on the slow, slog- ging effort of the British and Americans in Italy, which he thought was a sideshow and in any case unlikely to bring about a real threat to Germany. Stalin was impa- tient with Churchill’s lengthy monologues about bring- ing Turkey into the war, or invading the Balkans and thus creating havoc in southern Europe. Stalin wanted an invasion of France, and a big one, as soon as pos- sible. This plan had in fact already been agreed to in August 1943 at the Quebec Conference, but Stalin sus- pected that the Allies were dragging their feet. The Allies had not yet set a date, nor even named a com- mander of the operation. Roosevelt gave Stalin what he wanted, pressing the British to agree that Overlord would occur in May 1944. It was the first of many con- cessions to Stalin.

On the question of Germany, Stalin was also strident in

his views, and went on at some length about the need for a hard peace for the defeated Reich. Their com- mon enemy “must be rendered impotent ever again to plunge the world into war,” he said. Stalin floated the idea of breaking Germany into smaller states, and mused about the hopelessly authoritarian character of the German people. Roosevelt, trying to ingratiate himself with the Soviet leader, said he was “100% in agreement” on this approach to the German problem. Churchill, not wishing to appear soft on Germany, gen- erally assented, but said he thought the German people might be reformed and reeducated after the war. This only added to Stalin’s suspicions of the British leader, who, Stalin implied, “nursed a secret affection for Ger- many.” At dinner on November 29, these dynamics took a nasty turn, when Stalin, evidently intending to provoke Churchill, suggested darkly that in his view, the best way to deal with the German army after the war was to take “at least 50,000 and perhaps 100,000 of the German commanding staff” and shoot them. Stalin was evidently making mischief, though he was certainly capable of this kind of brutality. Roosevelt inexcusably tried to add to the fun, suggesting puckishly that the victors should not go to extremes, but limit the number of liquidated officers to 49,000. Churchill failed to see the humor in this, and shot back that he would have nothing to do with the “cold blooded execution of sol-

diers who had fought for their country,” even if they were Germans. He said he would rather “be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself than sully my own and my country’s honor by such infamy.” Churchill stormed out of the room, only to be coaxed back to the table by a smiling Stalin. It was an awkward moment that perfectly revealed the dominating posi- tion Stalin now held within the Big Three coalition, and the diminishing role held by Churchill, and Britain.
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