Ivan’s War (61 page)

It is unlikely that every one of the scores of veterans who agreed to talk to me was guiltless in this gruesome tale, but they have no incentive to discuss it now. Back then, they had a war to win. They fought, they suffered, and many would end up as victims, as invalids, themselves. What they remember after sixty years may not be a moment of rage but the long days in hospital, or else the lads, the night marches, the songs. Women –
baby
in Russian, a dismissive word that translates somewhere on the scale between bitches and old bags – would not be worth a thought compared with the regiment, the victory.
Baby
were not worth much at home in Russia. Why should they be so special in this other world? Why should they count against the crime of Maidanek, the tears of Russian children? ‘You want to hear about the war,’ the old men say. ‘Let’s talk about that. Only journalists want to know about those scandals.’

The men took more than memories from Prussia. This may have been a hard campaign, with tens of thousands of casualties, but it was also a time of strange abundance. Germany was rich. Hungary, too, and even Bucharest, were full of goods to loot. On paper, the last phase of the war marked the final triumph of communism. In reality, it was like the first day of a great bazaar. As with all other crimes, including rape, the Soviets were not the only guilty men. Their allies in this war ransacked cellars and wealthy homes as well, as did the thousands of former prisoners and other displaced persons who now found themselves at liberty on German soil.
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But the Red Army did everything on a monumental scale. It had suffered and lost more
than anyone, and now it demanded its recompense. Stalin insisted that the Reich owed his people at least ten billion dollars’ worth of reparations.
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The army, more or less with government connivance, would set about securing a portion of this as soon as it set foot on German territory.

A set of regulations was in place by 1944 to cover the capture and despatch of ‘trophies’. The list was comprehensive. Anything that was captured in battle or abandoned by the enemy, including weapons, supplies of ammunition, fuel, food, boots, livestock, rolling stock, railway track, automobiles, amber and cases of vintage champagne, was deemed to be the property of the Red Army and Soviet state. Whole factories would be dismantled later in the war. Eighty per cent of Berlin’s industrial machinery had been hauled away by the Soviets before their allies entered the city in 1945. ‘They had dismantled the refrigeration plant at the abattoir,’ an American officer observed, ‘torn stoves and pipes out of restaurant kitchens, stripped machinery from mills and factories and were completing the theft of the American Singer Sewing Machine plant when we arrived.’
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The context was the utter devastation of the western regions of their own empire, but even so, the destruction was often pointless, at least as far as observers from the West could see. Meanwhile, back in the Soviet Union, the labour of German prisoners, ex-soldiers, was deemed to be a war trophy as well. If anyone could reassemble the dismantled German plant, these were the men.

It was inescapable that troops faced with the chaos of a battle zone would help themselves to anything they found. Indeed, some looting was essential to the war effort. The supply lines for Zhukov’s advancing armies were stretched to breaking point. When Aronov or Ermolenko sat down to German meals in Insterburg, they were getting the best rations that they had seen for weeks, not indulging mere gluttony. One officer wrote to his family about the meal he enjoyed with his exhausted and hungry men just after the fall of Koenigsberg. The unit was issued with passes to the local military store, a repository for all kinds of trophy food and other goods. They entered the premises at eleven and came out at five, having drunk beer, wine and vodka, eaten sausages, and stuffed themselves with tongue, biscuits, chocolates, truffles, raisins and dates.
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When their own stomachs had been filled, some men began to think about their families at home. They knew that there was nothing in Russia to buy. Their leaders were already packing crates with fine china, bedlinen and rich German furs. Senior officers requisitioned cars to get the stuff home and even, later in the war, a fleet of special trains.
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The men began to think on the same lines. On 26 December 1944, well in time for the Russian new
year, the Soviet ministry of defence confirmed a regulation that authorized all army personnel to send parcels back home from the front line.
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It was, effectively, a licence to loot. In fact, an officer who heard that his men were not sending much back home henceforth was liable to tell them to ‘get better at grabbing’.
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As ever, the looting process was graded by privilege and rank. Only soldiers of good conduct were permitted to send their parcels back east, and even then they were supposed to send just one parcel a month. The permitted weight varied from 5 kg for soldiers to 16 kg (a notional limit in practice) for generals.
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Kopelev leafed through a library of exquisite rare books. His comrades in arms chose antique paintings, hunting rifles and even a piano.
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Frontoviki
had the first pick and often destroyed anything they did not take.
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It could be a misfortune, suddenly, to be assigned to the second echelon. ‘I’m really miserable,’ Taranichev wrote to his Natalya. ‘They’ve just said that we can send ten kg of stuff a month [this was the allowance for officers], but I’m in a place where there is nothing, it’s all been looted, and the prices are absolutely crazy.’
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He would soon overcome his disappointment, for even the least warlike of officers and ‘rearguard rats’ could fill their quotas when they learned to look. A favourite item, predictably, was food. ‘Eat for your health,’ an officer scribbled to his wife and daughter as he enclosed canned meat, sugar and chocolate, ‘and don’t have any pangs of conscience, and don’t think of giving any of it away.’
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Other men sent packets of nails back home, or even panes of glass, as well as more attractive gifts like china, tools and piles of German shoes and clothes.
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The jamboree involved no guilt. Even today, the veterans can talk of it without embarrassment, like recounting a particularly fruitful jumble sale. Getting the best things was a sign of skill, of concern for one’s family, of an ability to deal with the new beast, capitalism.

The men’s choices were sometimes strange, or at least poignant. Soldiers took typewriters that they would never use, since the Cyrillic alphabet required completely different keys. Taranichev eventually picked out a radio (‘made by an excellent German firm’) but noted sadly that ‘for this, of course, we will need electricity. Wherever we decide to live after the war, we’re not going to be in a place that has no electricity.’
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He did not say it, but a radio was a truly exclusive item back at home. The Sovinformburo had seized the lot in 1941. But other things were scarce as well, including those with more immediate utility. The engineer went on to send home parcels of food, an overcoat, a feather eiderdown with a silk cover, several sets of sheets, and padded trousers for those hunting expeditions of the future. He added a bolt of black silk for his wife, together with some yellow leather to
make boots.
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Like other Soviet wives in other provinces, Natalya was about to bring the fashions of 1940s central Europe to the steppes of post-war Turkestan, not always with accessories to match.

Infantrymen of a guards regiment stowing their bicycles for shipment, May 1945

 

 

More practically, Taranichev also sent shoes for each of his children, choosing sizes that they might grow into within a year or so. He also sent the woollen cloth to make them winter coats, white flannel for their underwear and leather suitable for making extra shoes.
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Again, he packed the parcels up with pride. So did Kirill. The young officer was based in Poland through the last winter of the war. He remembers his task there as a version of peacekeeping; a combination of strong government, light engineering work, and crime prevention. Decent civilians, in his view, had reason to be grateful to
him. When the time came to send something home, he folded up a quilt or two and packed a typewriter, but he also let it be known that he and his wife needed a pram for their daughter. The next morning, two dozen models had been left outside his quarters. ‘I chose the best,’ he smiled. The local people’s generosity seemed to confirm that he was a humane soldier, a communist officer of the best kind.

The parcels helped to boost morale, but postal services were swamped. The soldiers’ packages were deemed to be ‘of exclusive political importance’, which meant that pilfering, delays and poor storage would count as state crimes. But the great despatch began in January, in the depths of the Russian winter. In a few weeks, the railhead at Kursk – and anywhere where soldiers’ families lived – looked like a giant warehouse. Three hundred parcels arrived at Kursk in January 1945. By early May, that monthly figure had jumped to 50,000, and the total for the five-month period was 87,000 parcels. Twenty thousand wagons of plunder were waiting to be unloaded by mid-May. A special tent was built beside the station to keep the rain off packages of printed cotton, tinned meat and jam, typewriters, bicycles, bedding, hosiery and china cups. Storage, however, was only the start. Many of the recipients lived in remote villages, and there were no cars. Soldiers’ families had to rely instead on ‘German trophy horses’, the clapped-out nags that the Wehrmacht had abandoned, many of which were sick or injured. In the end, more staff (and more horses) had to be taken on. A special hostel was set up near Kursk station to accommodate a workforce specially brought in to sort and despatch soldiers’ loot.
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In Germany itself, the soldiers pilfered from each other. ‘I’m afraid to send things home at the moment,’ Ageev told his wife in May, ‘because there have been lots of cases of theft.’
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Some items, however, were never meant to reach the post. Guns and ammunition, strictly forbidden for private use, were selling well on the Polish black market by the late summer of 1944.
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Apart from alcohol and tobacco, the soldiers’ other favourite items included bicycles and wristwatches. Some men were photographed with several watches on each arm, proof of their war record as well as future money in the bank. ‘The German makes always ran down,’ one survivor explained. ‘That’s why we needed several at a time.’ It was the same with bicycles. The men had little grasp of riding, let alone repair. ‘They teach each other to ride,’ one witness wrote, ‘sit stiff on the saddle like chimpanzees bicycling in the zoo, crash into trees and giggle happily.’
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She could have added that the crashed bikes were left where they collapsed. There were always others to be had. A famous photograph from this moment shows a Russian soldier
pulling a bicycle out of its outraged female owner’s hands. Others show the men stowing them away, preparing for the long journey back home.
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The idea of property had become as vague as privacy or peace. Amid the devastation, nothing seemed to belong to anyone much – unless, that is, the new owner was armed or wearing an official badge.