Iron Curtain (22 page)

Many were embittered by the experience.
Lucjan Grabowski, the young man from the Białystok region, had stayed with his Home Army unit until he was asked to kill one of its members for treason. Suspecting the man was innocent, he refused to carry out the order. “They were terrible times, brother was killing brother for any kind of reason.” Finally, “I began to become conscious of a few facts that until then I hadn’t paid attention to and hadn’t thought much about. A lot of my friends, former partisans, had gone to the West. Others had started university courses, or were finishing high school diplomas and working. And I was still fighting, for the fifth year in a row.” Grabowski turned in his weapons along with forty other men, mostly from WiN. All had tears in their eyes: “We left the secret police building without weapons and no longer the same people we had been a few hours earlier.”
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Others kept fighting. Tiny numbers of men—one or two dozen—remained in the forests for many years. One small group of NSZ partisans gave itself up in 1956, after Bołeslaw Bierut’s death. One lone operator,
Michał Krupa, remained in hiding until he was finally tracked down and arrested in 1959.
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But most of those who kept fighting did so knowing there was no hope.

Among them was an underground leader known by the pseudonym
“Mewa.” According to the Polish security police who tracked his movements, Mewa, who fought with the Home Army during the war, had returned to the armed struggle in 1945 out of desperation and disillusion: he was suicidal, a psychological profile of him explained, “he wants to die.” Many of the 300 members of his gang—some former Home Army, some deserters from the Polish division of the Red Army—felt the same way. Most were from southeastern Poland, and their morale was low. In May 1945, they held an outdoor mass and pledged allegiance to the Polish government in exile in London—a government that was no longer recognized as legitimate by its allies or by anyone else, as all of those present knew perfectly well.

From then on, Mewa’s group slowly shrank. In the months that followed, many of Mewa’s men drifted back to their family farms or decided to leave the area and head to the former German territories, now part of western Poland, in order to begin new lives. Some of those who stayed began to steal from the local Ukrainian population, at that time still a large percentage of the inhabitants of southeastern Poland. More than once they burned Ukrainian villages to the ground. The archival record of their exploits says a lot about their desperation. In January 1945 they attacked a factory director, a Polish communist, and stole 100 zlotys of Polish currency. In April they stole two horses. In July they killed a Ukrainian peasant and threw his body into the river. By the end of 1945, the local police were working hard, but not very competently, to break up Mewa’s group. They infiltrated two agents into the gang, only to learn that one turned back against them and the other had been uncovered and murdered. His body was thrown into a river too. Over the year and a half of its existence, the group carried out 205 attacks and murdered many local communist officials—until finally, in July 1947, Mewa was captured. As he must have expected, he was sentenced to death.
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A decade later, the ambiguity of this moment was perfectly captured in
Ashes and Diamonds
,
Andrzej Wajda’s classic film about this period. The movie tells the story of a partisan with a dilemma: he must choose between a girl he has just met and a political assassination he has been ordered to carry out. He chooses the assassination, but is shot himself while carrying it out. In the final scene he runs, stumbles, and finally dies on a field full of garbage. The metaphor was clear enough to Polish audiences: the lives of the young men who joined the resistance had been thrown away on the trash heap of history.

Though precise figures are hard to calculate, the NKVD itself reckoned that
in 1945 between January and April alone it had arrested some 215,540 people in Poland. Of this number, 138,000 were Germans or Volksdeutsche—local people who had claimed to be of German descent. Some 38,000 Poles were also arrested in this four-month period, and all were sent to camps in the USSR. Some 5,000 died “in the course of the operation and investigation.”
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Among them must have been thousands of Mewa’s men who fought until the end, knowing they would lose.

Once the war had ended there was no sustained or armed resistance to the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany. Hitler had hoped there would be: before his suicide he exhorted the Germans to fight to the death, to burn cities to the ground, to sacrifice everything in one last violent struggle. He also ordered the Wehrmacht to create youth battalions that would conduct a partisan struggle against the Red Army after his death.

These youth battalions were the “Werewolves” who featured so largely in both Nazi and Allied propaganda, but who in reality were every bit as mythological as their name implied. With Hitler’s death and Germany’s defeat, they simply melted away: the spell was broken.
Erich Loest, later a prominent East German novelist, was a twenty-five-year-old
Hitler Youth leader and a junior Wehrmacht officer when he was first recruited to the Werewolf movement. He was told of his new role in the final weeks of the war, and even given some partisan training in preparation for the Russian occupation. Yet when the Russians actually marched into
Mittweida, his hometown in
Saxony, the underground struggle was the furthest thing from his mind. Instead of fighting the Red Army, his family helped him escape to an aunt’s farm farther west, where he could safely surrender to the Americans.

Loest never spoke of his Werewolf training in the years immediately after the war—“I am not stupid,” he told me—and he was never arrested. Others were less lucky. During the last days of the war, the SS ordered all of the teenagers in Mittweida to attend a lecture on the Werewolves. No training was given and no oaths were sworn, but an attendance list was passed around. Soviet authorities found the list after the war’s end. “Nothing had happened except for this lecture, but all of them were arrested. Arrested for one year,” explained Loest.
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The legal basis for such arrests was order 00315 of the Soviet Military Administration, issued on April 18, 1945. This edict called for the immediate
internment, without prior investigation, of “spies, saboteurs, terrorists, activists of the Nazi party” as well as people maintaining “illegal” print and broadcasting devices, people with weapons, and former members of the German civil administration. The order resembled the regulations put in place in the other Allied occupation zones, where “active” Nazis were also interrogated on a massive scale.
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The difference between the
Soviet zone and other zones was one of degree: in practice, the Soviet order made it possible to arrest almost anyone who had held any position of authority, whether or not he or she had been a Nazi. Policemen, town mayors, businesspeople, and prosperous farmers all qualified on the grounds that they could not have been so successful unless they had collaborated.

By the time of the Potsdam Conference at the beginning of August, the definition of who could be interned had grown even broader. In an ugly Hohenzollern palace surrounded by green parkland, the Allies—Stalin and now
Harry Truman and
Clement Attlee (following Roosevelt’s death and Churchill’s electoral defeat)—issued a new declaration stating that “Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions and
any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives
shall be arrested and interned” (my italics).
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For the USSR this was an ideal formulation: “Any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives” is a very broad category indeed, and it could be stretched to include anyone whom the NKVD disliked for any reason.

The Red Army duly set up military tribunals, courts without lawyers or witnesses, which continued for several years. These were completely separate from the
Nuremberg trials, which were created jointly by all of the Allies to try the most high-ranking Nazi leaders, and they had nothing to do with international law. Convictions were sometimes made on the basis of Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, the statute that was used to arrest political prisoners in the Soviet Union and that had no relation of any kind to German law either. Sentences were sometimes translated into German but written out in Cyrillic, making them impossible for the accused to read. Prisoners were sometimes forced, after severe beatings and other kinds of torture, to sign documents they couldn’t understand.
Wolfgang Lehmann, aged fifteen, signed a document stating that he had blown up two trucks, though he didn’t know it at the time. Other trials were held in Moscow, where prisoners were convicted in absentia by Soviet judges. Weeks later, they would learn what had happened.
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Some of those arrested really had been Nazis, though not necessarily important Nazis. Little attempt was made to separate real criminals from small-time bureaucrats or opportunists. But in addition to the Nazis, the arrests soon swept up thousands of people too young to have been Nazis—Manfred Papsdorf was arrested at thirteen—or many who, like the teenagers of Mittweida, were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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A few were arrested because their enthusiasm for liberation was too great.
Gisela Gneist was fifteen years old in 1945 and transfixed by the idea of democracy, a word she heard frequently on
American Armed Forces Radio. Gneist lived in
Wittenberg and was resentful of the Soviet soldiers there, some of whom had created a brothel on the top floor of her apartment block. She wanted something better, and along with some other teenagers she created a “political party,” complete with its own amateurish secret codes. They had no idea of the potential danger, and they didn’t have much of an ideology. “My idea of freedom,” she remembered, “was that people should be able to speak freely. I didn’t know what communism was, had never really heard of it.”
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Gneist was arrested in December 1945, along with two dozen of her fellow “party members,” all teenagers. She was put in a “cell without windows” along with twenty other women, some of whom were her schoolmates. The toilet was a milk bottle. There were bugs everywhere, and lice. A Soviet officer interrogated her in Russian for many days running, in the presence of a barely competent translator. He also beat her on the back and on the legs until the blood ran. Gneist, not yet sixteen, eventually confessed: she admitted she had been part of a “counterrevolutionary organization.” A military tribunal found her guilty in January 1946 and sentenced her, just like a real war criminal, to incarceration in Sachsenhausen.
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Surprising though it will seem to those unfamiliar with this odd twist of history, Sachsenhausen, a notorious Nazi
concentration camp, underwent a metamorphosis after the war and lived a second life, as did the equally notorious concentration camp at
Buchenwald. The American troops who liberated Buchenwald in April 1945 had forced the leading citizens of Weimar to walk around the camp’s barracks and to witness the starving survivors, the mass graves, and the corpses stacked like firewood beside them. Four months later, the Soviet troops who subsequently took control of the Weimar region had once again installed prisoners in those same barracks, and eventually buried
them in similar mass graves. They followed the same practice in many places.
Auschwitz was another one of many
labor camps in Poland also to be reused in some manner after the war.
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The Russians renamed Buchenwald Special Camp Number Two, and Sachsenhausen became Special Camp Number Seven.
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In total there would be ten such camps built or rebuilt in Soviet-occupied Germany, along with several prisons and other less formal places of incarceration. These were not German communist camps but rather Soviet camps. The NKVD’s central Gulag administration controlled all of them directly from Moscow, in some instances down to the last detail. The NKVD sent instructions from Moscow on how to celebrate the May 1 holiday in its German camps, for example, and carefully monitored the “political-moral” condition of the guards.
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All of the senior camp commanders were Soviet military personnel, although some had German staff too, and the camps were laid out according to Soviet designs. An inhabitant of Kolyma or Vorkuta would have felt immediately at home.

At the same time, the German special camps were not labor camps of the kind that the NKVD ran in the Soviet Union itself. They were not attached to factories or building projects, as Soviet camps usually were, and prisoners did not go out to work. On the contrary, survivors often describe the excruciating boredom of being forbidden to work, forbidden to leave their barracks, forbidden to walk or move. In the
Ketschendorf camp, inmates begged to work in the kitchens so as to have some kind of activity (and of course to have access to more food).
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In Sachsenhausen there were two zones, in only one of which people were allowed to work. Prisoners much preferred that one.
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The special camps were not death camps of the kind that the Nazis had constructed either. There were no gas chambers, and prisoners were not sent to Sachsenhausen to be immediately killed. But they were extraordinarily lethal nonetheless. Of some 150,000 people who were incarcerated in NKVD camps in eastern Germany between 1945 and 1953—of which 120,000 were Germans and 30,000 were Soviet citizens—about a third died from starvation and illness.
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Prisoners were fed wet, black bread and cabbage soup so bad that Lehmann, who was later sent to the Gulag, remembered that “in Siberia the food was better and more regular.”
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There were no medicines and no doctors. Lice and vermin meant that disease spread quickly. In the winter of 1945–46, it was so cold that the prisoners in the women’s zone in
Sachsenhausen burned bed slats to keep warm.
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As was the case in so many Soviet penal institutions, prisoners did not die because they were murdered but because they were neglected, ignored, and sometimes literally forgotten.