Daughters of the KGB (20 page)

There was also some private enterprise afoot, with at least one officer raiding his own office safe in the Centre and carting the contents to his allotment out in the suburbs, where he burned everything, to the amusement of the other allotment holders.

Whatever the truth, without in any way condoning the Stasi or its personnel’s ruthless sense of duty, one has to acknowledge the sheer professionalism of the officers who flew the main archives to safety when all around them the state they had served was disintegrating and there was a risk that the uncontrolled anger of their hundreds of thousands of erstwhile victims might cost their lives. It contrasts tellingly with the dereliction of duty shown by the CIA officers at Saigon in 1975 who ran away to save their own skins without destroying the lists of their informers. As a result, thousands of men and women the CIA had used against their own people were swept up by the incoming NVA
can-bo
commissars and consigned to the firing squads or the living hell of ‘re-education camps’.

Despite all the secrecy of the previous four and a half decades, some physical evidence of the Stasi’s activities was clearly visible in bricks and mortar. It owned 2,655 separate premises of various kinds and 18,000 apartments including safe houses for clandestine meetings. The vehicles in its garages included 12,000 cars and 5,456 ‘equipped vehicles’ used for surveillance, filming and photographing its targets, which explains how everyone posting a letter in East Berlin on a particular day could be recorded on film. Of its 85,000 personnel, 2,171 were employed steaming open and reading mail; 1,486 were intercepting telephone calls; 2,244 were interrogating suspects and/or recording interrogations; 12,000 were employed on the frontiers; 8,426 were on electronic intercept duty; and nearly 5,000 were bodyguards or on guard duty at various state premises.

Less visible but equally eloquent was the cash salted away in Zurich by the Stasi through an Austrian company called Novum and the Austrian Communist Party, for purposes unknown. This is thought by some informed sources to add up to the staggering sum of DM 50 billion. Even if a lower figure of DM 26 billion – of which only DM 2 billion have been recovered
⁷
– is accurate, that is still a large amount for an intelligence service to have in ready cash. Who has it now?

Notes

1
.    Brogan,
Eastern Europe
, p. 14

2
.    Ibid, p. 39

3
.    Ibid

4
.    M. Bearden and J. Risen,
The Main Enemy
, London, Century 2003, pp. 395−6

5
.    Brogan,
Eastern Europe
, p. 41

6
.    Bearden and Risen,
Main Enemy
, pp. 435−8

7
.    Glees,
The Stasi Files
, p. 118

P
ART
3

S
TATE
T
ERROR IN
C
ENTRAL
E
UROPE

12

T
HE
P
OLISH
UB

C
RUSHING A
S
UFFERING
N
ATION

After carving up the homeland of the Poles on paper under the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty in 1939, Hitler’s first large-scale Blitzkrieg was launched against Poland on 1 September 1939. The Poles resisted heroically but the impossibility of their situation was epitomised by the image of Polish horse cavalry pitted against German tanks. To complete the destruction of the Polish state, on 17 September Soviet armies poured in from the east. As combat ended, Stalin proceeded to install a reign of terror in ‘his’ half of Poland. An estimated 1.5 million of the 13.7 million inhabitants were tortured, imprisoned, murdered or deported to the Gulag with the aim of terrifying the survivors into submission to their new Russian overlords. This enormous total included many thousands of Poles in uniform, who should have been protected by the rules of war.

After the frontier adjustments following the Second World War, Poland is now 95 per cent Catholic and Polish-speaking. In 1939, however, one-third of the population was Russian, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Byelorussian, Lithuanian, German or Jewish. This dramatic change is due in part because the country suffered more than any other in the Second World War, losing one-fifth of its population to German and Russian bullets, the gas chambers, malnutrition and exposure in Siberia and starvation at home. On the German side of the new internal border, which divided the country roughly in half, the initial targets were Jews – and children. A little-known horror within all the statistics is the kidnapping of blond, blue-eyed children, who were brought up in special SS-run orphanages, where they were forbidden to speak Polish, so they would become German-speaking cannon fodder and breeding stock. The ‘rejects’ from these establishments were starved to death in so-called Auslandkinder Pflegestätten or shipped to one of the death camps for disposal.
¹
The murderous carve-up between the two dictators came undone when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, driving out the grotesquely ill-prepared Soviet occupation forces
²
and installing his programme of ethnic cleansing nationwide.

★★★

Scrabbling for any allies who might divert some German forces away from Russia, Stalin subsequently did a deal with General Władisław Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile in London. Under a spurious amnesty – for they had committed no crime – he released tens of thousands of Polish POWs held in Soviet prison camps. Knowing that his brother officer General Władysław Anders was a prisoner undergoing interrogation with torture in the NKVD’s infamous Lubyanka prison, Sikorski named him commander-in-chief of the new Polish force. When he was released, Anders took command on 22 August of several thousand men whose physical condition was understandably poor after being used as disposable slave labour in the camps. By the end of the year, he had 1,000 officers and 24,000 other ranks organised into three infantry divisions. Early in 1942, this small army was transported to Tashkent in Soviet Turkestan, with the addition of another division. If that all sounds straightforward, it was not, for Anders and his staff had constantly to circumvent every kind of administrative and logistical obstacle placed in their way by Soviet military and civil officials.

For complex reasons, the most important of which was Stalin’s determination that these Poles should not complicate his planned occupation of their homeland later in the war – as they had every reason to do – he directed them to British-occupied Iran, designated Polish 2nd Army Corps. At this stage, the corps totalled about 40,000 military personnel and had with it twice that number of civilian dependents, who were permitted to leave with them because the USSR was already short of food. The uncertainty over their exact numbers is because although some were shipped across the Caspian Sea, other released Poles had to find their own way to the Turkestan–Iran border on foot, and many died of malnutrition, hypothermia and disease on the way. The toughest men survived to see service against the Germans in North Africa and the Italian campaign, where their heroism under dire conditions at Monte Cassino is legendary – at the cost to Anders’ army of 7,000 lives in that one battle alone.

Long before then, Winston Churchill had put in writing to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that a permanent Soviet occupation of eastern Poland would be contrary to the principles of the Atlantic Charter agreed between Britain and the USA in August 1941, and which had subsequently been endorsed by the United Nations, including the USSR. It also ran contrary to the restoration of national integrity enunciated in US President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. However, the US president at that time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was so much under Stalin’s influence that Churchill was unable to obtain from him any support for the restoration of Polish national sovereignty after the war. It was this that drove him to tell General Anders in Italy that Britain could no longer defend the territorial integrity of the country for which it had theoretically declared war on Germany. Anders retorted that the Big Three’s carving up of his country was a calamity.

Poland after 1945 frontier adjustment.

Churchill, presumably ridden by guilt, replied angrily, ‘We have enough troops today. We do not need your help. You can take away your divisions. We shall do without them.’
³

A Polish friend of the author, when asked how he and his comrades in Italy reacted when they heard this, said, ‘We thought, what the hell are we doing here, fighting in British uniforms? They don’t care about our country, so why should we fight their war? But we carried on because, that way, we were at least killing one lot of enemies.’
⁴

In 1943, thanks in part to supplies of materiel shipped in from the West at considerable cost in lives and shipping losses,
⁵
Stalin’s armies launched the massive offensive that would eventually take them as far as Berlin. Included in the Soviet forces was a 75,000-man Polish Communist army commanded by General Zygmunt Berling, formed under Soviet command. The Polish rank and file had joined as a way of escaping harsh-regime prison camps and were disciplined by rigidly indoctrinated Soviet and Polish Communist commissars. In January 1944, they crossed the pre-war border of Poland with the Red Army.

Once on Polish soil, Stalin recommenced his programme of mass murder and deportation of intellectuals and survivors of the Polish Armia Krajowa (AK) or Home Army – the main Polish armed resistance group fighting the Germans. The AK had 300,000 men and women, loyal to the government-in-exile based in London, which anticipated returning to its homeland when German forces had been driven out. Refusing to accept the existence of this legitimate Polish authority, on 22 July in Chełm, one of the first cities to be recaptured, the Soviet leadership formed Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (PKWN) or Polish Committee of National Liberation. Packed with pro-Soviet communists who had spent the war so far in the USSR, it was proclaimed by Moscow as the future government of Poland, being popularly referred to as ‘the Lublin government’ because as soon as that city was recaptured, the government moved there from Chełm. Significantly, its thirteen otherwise skeleton departments already included the 200-man-strong Resort Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego (RBP) – or Department of Public Security – which laid the foundation for a nationwide pro-Moscow Polish secret police force before the Germans had been driven out of even 10 per cent of the country.

Occasionally, RBP personnel came under German fire, but most of their activities were against non-communist partisans who were too busy fighting the occupation forces to protect themselves against this new enemy whom they at first welcomed as allies and who spoke the same language they did. Back in Moscow, in July 1944 Lavrenti Beria reported dutifully to Stalin that he had sent 12,000 NKVD troops into Poland behind the Red Army to drive the Home Army out of the forests and punish the civilian population that had been feeding them or providing accommodation. By the end of the year, more than 5,000 AK partisans had been taken prisoner and an unknown number, who could have been fighting the Germans, had been killed by Russian bullets. And so it went on. In the first quarter of 1945, the NKVD itself claimed to have captured or arrested a quarter-million people of many ethnic groups in Poland; 38,000 of these were Poles deported into the USSR, where at least 5,000 died.
⁶

In the German-occupied areas of the country, groups of Armia Krajowa men hid out in the forests. Teenage partisan fighter Bogusław Nowakowski gave the lie to later glorification of the partisan life by recounting how it was extremely harsh, with everyone malnourished, unwashed, stinking and louse-infested. The rare RAF air-drops of weapons to the AK groups brought far too few guns and ammunition, so it was necessary to make raids on German ‘soft targets’ for weapons and on collaborationist businesses to steal money, food and clothing. Enemies were all around. Not only the Germans, but also communist partisans were trying to eliminate the non-communist partisans. Their victims ran into tens of thousands, and Nowakowski’s account is typical.