Ivan’s War (58 page)

The irony was heartbreaking then, and so it still remains. For that winter, large numbers of these heroes, the agents of the bright future, would embark on an orgy of war crimes. Historians have called them bestial and crude, as if they acted from some instinct, like animals. But their preparation for it all, the party’s careful work, included a good deal of talking and persuasion, deliberate and sophisticated flooding of their minds. As if in reaction to that, too, the men who rampaged through Prussia were giving vent to the frustrations that had built up over years of suffering; not only in the war but through decades of humiliation, of disempowerment and fear. The party that had preached at them and reproved their most human weaknesses now gave them licence, and they took it. The same party also offered them a cloak of indemnity. None of its speeches and reports, and none of the journalism that made it to the columns of
Pravda
, would ever mention Soviet atrocities. They simply did not exist in the language of official life. Accordingly, they did not intrude into the things that soldiers wrote. The brutal images may well have burned into the consciousness of thousands of front-line troops, but though many witnessed murder and rape, their letters home continued to describe the weather.

Lev Kopelev, a Soviet officer and ardent party member, was an exception. He found the words to describe the horrors he saw, and he was brave enough to think about them for himself, to escape from the moral context of the times. He did not blame the men. He did not even blame the enemy, although it was the war itself that gave birth to the violence. His anger was reserved for his own party, or at least for some of the people who controlled it. Whatever the appalling record of the Nazis, it was the communist leadership, in his view, that had created the specific crisis, the humanitarian disaster, that would now unfold. ‘Millions of people had been brutalized and corrupted by the war,’ he wrote, ‘and by our propaganda – bellicose, jingoistic and false. I had believed such propaganda necessary on the eve of war, and all the more so for the war’s duration. I still believed it, but I had also come to understand that from seeds like these came poisoned fruit.’
¹⁶
The bitter harvest began well before the troops crossed their own border, but it was in Prussia that it would be most abundant. The teaching that had helped to win the war now seemed to justify atrocity. ‘These young fellows,’ Kopelev added as he watched his fellow troops, ‘who had come to the front straight from school – what would they be like … having learned nothing except how to shoot, dig trenches, crawl through barbed wire, rush the enemy and
toss grenades? They had become inured to death, blood and cruelty, and each new day brought them fresh evidence that the war they read about in their papers and heard about on their radios and in their political meetings was not the war they saw and experienced themselves.’
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The first rumours of Red Army atrocities came out of Hungary. The fall of Budapest was followed by a rampage by surviving Soviet troops. As one visitor remembered, ‘It was impossible to spend a day or even an hour in Budapest without hearing of the brutalities committed by [Russian] soldiers.’
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Hungarian women and girls were locked into Soviet military quarters on the city’s Buda side and repeatedly raped; houses and cellars were ransacked for food and wine as a prelude to the multiple rape of their female occupants. There was even a story that soldiers from the Red Army had broken into the mental hospital at Nagy-Kallo and raped and killed female patients ranging in age from sixteen to sixty.
¹⁹

This was nothing like the marauding of soldiers in Romania. The cruelty in Budapest was something new. The background was a prolonged battle for the city, the last stages of which recalled the blackest days of Stalingrad.
²⁰
Eighty thousand Soviet troops were killed. It had been a frustrating, slow and deadly campaign. When the civilians of the shattered city emerged from their homes, some of them bearing bread, as well as bacon, eggs and bottles of the local wine, they found a conqueror whom gifts would not appease.
²¹
It did not help, in Hungary as in Germany, that the two sides spoke different languages. From the earliest days of the Hungarian campaign, incomprehension had added to the Soviet wrath that brought catastrophe to local women. Survivors’ depositions tell a graphic tale. ‘Malasz Maria, married, mother of four children, has been raped by three Russian soldiers one after another in the presence of her husband … Additionally, they were robbed of 1,700 pengo … Berta Jolan, born 1923, Berta Ida, born 1925, and Berta Ilona, born 1926. These three sisters were subjected to attempted rape by three Russian soldiers after their parents had been locked up. The soldiers only decided to stop after the girls’ screams called other civilians to the scene …’
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The testimonies could go on and on.

In East Prussia the story would be darker still. Here above all, three years of hate (and of the propaganda of hate) were to be focused into one cathartic act. As they approached the border the soldiers were entering the beast’s own lair. It was a move with overtones of violation in itself, the breaching of a boundary that no one had invited them to cross. Lev Kopelev had always admired German culture, and he spoke German well, but even he called on his men to get out of their trucks and piss on to the hated soil. ‘This is
Germany,’ he said. ‘Everyone out and relieve yourselves.’
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Another group crept to the border on an active mission near Goldap, a town just south of Koenigsberg. Their
politruks
crawled through the ranks as they advanced, telling each rifleman to look ahead. ‘There,’ they whispered, ‘there behind the trenches, behind the barbed-wire obstacles, there is Germany.’ They added a reminder that this was not merely invasion. The Red Army could still believe itself a liberator, this time of the tens of thousands of Soviets who had been forced to work in German camps. ‘Over there,’ the political officers hissed, ‘over there in Germany our sisters are suffering in slavery … onwards to the destruction of the enemy in his own lair.’
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At the border itself, Soviet troops would set a small red flag into the earth. They often gathered for another short political meeting. They heard again about the crimes that they had come to avenge, about the abduction and abuse of Russian women, the tears of bereaved mothers back at home. At Goldap, seventeen men took advantage of this occasion to apply for Communist Party membership.
²⁵
This was the regiment that would go on to surround and capture Goering’s castle, but like so many others, it was not the tough, seasoned formation that it might have been. Thousands of soldiers on the Prussian campaign, including Aronov himself, had been pressed into service from the occupied zones of Belorussia and Ukraine. Some had received no training, others lacked equipment, and few had combat experience. At Goldap, predictably, the conscripts panicked. Their mutiny had to be quelled at gunpoint. The heavy rate of casualties that followed was not surprising and nor, maybe, was the anger that exploded when the fighting was over. These men had been frightened beyond endurance, they had been forced to savour their own weakness, and most were in shock. But the party reassured them that the Germans were at fault. It positively urged them to take their revenge. ‘The nearer we get to victory,’ Stalin told everyone in February 1945, ‘the greater our vigilance must be and the fiercer our blows against the enemy.’
²⁶

It must have been a dream-like, surreal interlude. First came the border and the lectures about vigilance and justified revenge. The troops were warned that German agents might have poisoned any food or wine they found, that women might conceal grenades, that everyone they met could be a spy. And then came the abandoned settlements, the ghost towns full of unattended loot. Goebbels had warned his people that the Soviets were an Asiatic horde, a barbarous rabble of savages bent on destruction and a primitive revenge. In answer, hundreds of thousands of Prussian civilians packed their bags and fled, braving the bitter winter cold and the threat of bombardment to form the greatest single tide of refugees that would be seen in
Europe in the entire war. ‘There’s not one civilian inhabitant left in the town,’ Ermolenko noted on 23 January when he arrived in a town called Insterburg. ‘So what. We wouldn’t have eaten them.’

The man was a master of self-deception. His army would prove capable of every kind of crime. But it was also poised to suffer yet more violence and strain. This was a time of extremes, of contrasts, and of the daily likelihood of injury or death. The town of Insterburg itself would soon be renamed Chernyakovsk as a memorial to the young general who died in the battle for Koenigsberg. That January, the place was wreathed in flame. Its castle and elegant, spired churches loomed out of the layers of dusty, acrid smoke like sinister bones. Corpses, the bodies of humans and of horses, lay in the streets beside abandoned trucks and burned-out furniture. Smoke hung over the wrecks. The stores, however, had yet to be destroyed. ‘They have butter, honey, jam, wine and various kinds of brandy,’ Ermolenko noted happily. ‘The civilians have left their houses in order. Our radio team has taken a room on the first floor. In the corner is a piano, two sofas, pretty chairs and armchairs, cupboards, flowers. In a German kitchen, on German crockery, we made a fantastic dinner.’
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 A column of Soviet troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front arriving in an East Prussian city, 24 January 1945

 

 

Aronov was in Insterburg that January as well. His last letter to his sister 
was a postcard, a German one, a picture of the cathedral and its delightful square. The NKVD would soon stop soldiers from making use of bourgeois images like this, but he would never need to care. ‘Hello, dear sister,’ he wrote. ‘Greetings from Insterburg. I am alive and well and send you this with best wishes. I kiss you.’
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Some time later, for these days the field post was getting held up on the railways by all the crates of German plunder, his sister would receive another letter. ‘The person who is writing to you is an unknown soldier,’ she read. He was writing from hospital, two days after receiving a grave wound, but he had made the effort to get paper and a pencil as soon as he was able to sit up. ‘Perhaps someone has already told you the sad news,’ he wrote, ‘but as Yasha’s best friend I could not keep to myself, or from you, the news of his death. Your brother and I were together from 10 May 1944 until the end of his army life. How many sorrows and hardships we bore together! And now, right on the outskirts of Koenigsberg, we have been cut apart. I cannot write any more.’
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The close relationships between the men (the soldier who wrote that letter to Aronov’s sister would soon marry her, as if the bond to his best friend could never break) in part explain what happened next, for much of the Red Army’s terrible revenge was enacted in gangs. The relations that mattered here were not between the men and their German victims, but between the men and their mates, and even between the men and their shared memories of horror. The victims themselves scarcely seemed to feature in their minds as people. ‘They do not speak a word of Russian,’ a soldier wrote to a friend in February 1945, ‘but that makes it easier. You don’t have to persuade them. You just point a Nagan and tell them to lie down. Then you do your stuff and go away.’
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The war had inured men like this to violence, but what was happening was far more than an outpouring of rage. The events in Prussia involved the soldiers’ hopes and passions as well as their hate. The passion in question was largely their love for each other, and also their grief – undrownable despite oceans of wine and schnapps – for all the people and the chances they had lost.
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The objects of the hate, whose corpses would soon litter the roads that led to the west, were German women and girls.