Ivan’s War (66 page)

The superpowers were destined to be enemies for decades, but for a while their soldiers seemed to be making friends. The attraction was based on respect, gratitude, and complementary social skills. American troops enjoyed the Russians’ spontaneity, their talent for impromptu drinks and music.
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Red Army men were grateful for the razor blades, the cigarettes, the bright packets of gum. For Soviet utopians, too, Chicago was a prototype, these square-jawed, healthy men the models for their own children to come. America was starting to look dangerously glamorous. The devil, they say, always has the best tunes, and it worried the
politruks
that blues and jitterbug was gaining ground on the Red Army’s hymns. The longer they
remained in Germany, the more uncertain – from an ideological and disciplinary point of view – the war heroes seemed likely to become.

It took a while for wartime discipline and the fear of the
shtraf
unit to crumble among victorious Soviet troops. The new mood developed in a setting of lawless devastation. The Red Army’s own campaigns had destroyed Germany, but now – just like their former enemies – they had to make a life amid the dust and rubble that they had created. A stone’s throw from Berlin itself, for instance, was the city of Potsdam. In July 1945, this once-elegant suburb would become the setting for a summit meeting between Stalin, Churchill, and the new American president, Harry Truman. But it was no luxury spa. Scarcely a single large building remained intact. On 14 April, Allied bombers had destroyed the city’s main industrial plants, as well as the power stations, railway depots, food warehouses, water treatment plants and the tram park. When the Red Army reached it on 27 April, it was already without supplies of medicine, clean water, electricity or gas. Its civilian population had received no fresh supplies of food for two entire weeks. Without clean water or functioning sewers, they were living amid filth and rapidly spreading disease, including typhus and dysentery. Children were especially vulnerable, but the population as a whole was close to moral and physical collapse. To make matters worse, the city had become a staging post for refugees. Finally, in late April, it would host a pitched battle, complete with all the devastation of the howitzers and mines.
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The reconstruction of this wasteland – and the scores of others like it – would have been a daunting task at any time. There were no resources to call upon, no food or fuel reserves to spare. Just as seriously, there was a shortage of experienced personnel. Typically, the Red Army employed its less able officers to take charge of reconstruction after the front line had moved on. In Potsdam, the teams of men who helped to rebuild bridges and clear up the streets were staffed by individuals who were unfit for front-line service, by ex-prisoners of war and by volunteers drawn from the thousands of expatriates the Soviets discovered as they liberated German soil. ‘Many of these … are extremely undisciplined,’ the military authorities lamented. They ‘take part in drinking sessions and in looting’. Getting the locals to assist was essential, but most civilians feared to work. The women whose job was to cart away the rubble that blocked Potsdam’s streets knew that they risked assault and rape. On one occasion, all six young women in a work brigade were raped at the end of their working day. The bodies of others would turn up like old timber in the piles of debris that littered the streets.
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After the peace, rape was sporadic, provoked by impulse or the arrival of
new troops. Some German officials believed the Soviets tacitly sanctioned it, especially on public holidays, which were perilous times for women near the soldiers’ bases.
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Frontoviki
now claim that the offenders in cases like this were rearguard rats and civilians, but there is evidence against all groups of men. Indeed, the mood that allowed for disciplinary infringements was often strongest among former front-line soldiers. Back home, staff officers and politicians were enforcing distinctions of rank, but at the former front a cosy familiarity was developing between officers and men. Ironically, the effort of defeating fascism had been a catalyst for breaking down the fear and mutual suspicion that Stalin’s regime had worked so long to engineer. It was against regulations, for instance, but many officers habitually used the friendly and informal ‘
ty
’, for ‘you’, in place of the more formal ‘
vy
’ in conversations round the camp. Sergeants were the worst offenders, and old soldiers especially, but even lieutenants seemed to neglect the rules, including those that detailed how to wear the correct uniform.
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As they settled down, assigned the chores, and whitewashed the new barracks walls, the soldiers’ lives, viewed from outside, had begun to look like versions of domestic bliss.
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During the war, good officers had learned to know their men, to lead them by building their trust as well as showing who was boss. Too often now – or too often as far as the NKVD’s observers could see – these same officers were making themselves comfortable amid the men, condoning crimes if that helped everyone to thrive. Beyond their base, a whole country was in collapse, but inside the perimeter life could almost feel pleasant. At Potsdam that June an army village sprang up round the troops. The soldiers built it themselves, creating versions of bourgeois houses by seizing timber, glass and even window frames from German ruins. Their main preoccupation after that might have been called housekeeping. It was such a domestic business, such a matter of bedlinen, eggs and heating fuel that a report at the time referred to their activities as ‘self-service’.
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There were even gramophones – another piece of loot – on which the men could play American jazz and jitterbug. And self-service did not stop at the barracks fence. Elsewhere in Germany, soldiers were taking food from farms, demanding regular supplies of eggs and meat. One captain was caught with a haul of three horses and a pony trap, 30 kg of butter and twenty-one live geese. Another had demanded that the German population near his base deliver a daily tithe consisting of 100 eggs and twenty-five litres of milk.
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A good deal of this requisitioned food was sold on for stupendous sums in cash. The black market continued to do well. Almost no item was deemed valueless. Even if the wires were down, a telephone receiver had a future
somewhere in Europe. The trick was only to find a buyer. In one small town, Red Army troops corralled a total of 1,500 bicycles within a few weeks of the peace. Fuel was also a valuable commodity, especially as soldiers themselves liked to screech through narrow streets in lend-lease trucks and stolen motorbikes. And for the connoisseur, there was a chance of works of art. Many German treasures, including valuable paintings and other objects looted from western Europe, were designated as reparations by the Soviets in 1945, but the warehouses in which the crates awaited shipment were no more secure than any other army base. The black market that dealt in art involved soldiers of every rank, including military police.
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Later on, such people might embark on even more perilous deals. By 1946, the highest prices could be fetched for hard currency, tickets and precious safe conducts to the West.
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As usual, the Soviet authorities monitored everything that locals said. ‘It is clear,’ one report read, ‘that apart from a few genuine anti-fascists, the entire population is unhappy with the presence of the Red Army on German soil, and hope and pray for the arrival of the Americans or English.’
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Germans expressed their views in a variety of ways. Bilingual signs appeared outside the few cafés or bars that still functioned, the Russian text inviting custom while the German ‘translation’ proferred some form of disdainful abuse.
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More seriously, soldiers who went out on their own at night, or even travelled in small groups, were likely to turn up at first light with their throats slit or a bullet in their skulls.
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If the occupation were to last, and above all if the Soviet zone were not to be a drain on Stalin’s resources, some kind of rapport needed to be built between the Red Army and its reluctant hosts. It was not just a case of taming ex-
frontoviki
. The core of professional soldiers and their officers was outnumbered by conscripts, ex-prisoners and displaced Soviet civilians. All were in shock, uncertain that the war had really ended. That June, the political administration set to work to build a new consensus for the peace.

The first step was to put a stop to hate. On 11 June, an order from the Red Army’s political administration removed the words ‘Death to the German occupiers!’ from the mastheads of all magazines and newspapers for military circulation. In their place appeared the blander slogan ‘To our Soviet homeland!’
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Soldiers also heard lectures on the errors of their former idol, Ehrenburg. The idea was to turn their minds to other things than killing Germans. Violence, however, had become something of a habit. It would take more than slogans to reverse the hatred that haunted veterans for years. Zhukov, fresh from his triumph in Moscow’s Red Square, applied practical
threats. ‘Many complaints continue about robbery, rape and individual cases of banditry on the part of individuals wearing Red Army uniforms,’ he observed in an order dated 30 June. He gave his army just five days to put a stop to anti-German acts. Henceforth, he ordered, all troops should be confined to army premises unless they were engaged in official business and closely supervised. In answer to the growing problem of Red Army officers and men who took informal German ‘wives’, the new order stipulated that anyone seen entering or leaving a private house was to be arrested and punished. Knowing that officers connived with men in every kind of crime, the marshal added that any officer deemed incapable of maintaining a strict disciplinary regime was to be named and recalled from service.
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The order had some effect in the weeks that followed. Each military base, at least, reported a drop in recorded crime. Later, investigations would suggest that officers were still colluding with their men, suppressing details of infringements to keep Zhukov’s military police off everyone’s backs. But there is a consistency to the figures that suggests a real change of mood.
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Zhukov’s prestige and the men’s deep regard for him may well have played a part. So did the gradual effects of peace. Rape, for instance, became less common from late June, but one reason for this was that soldiers were striking up more stable friendships with the local women. Some would even form households of sorts, hoping to stay and make a life where chance had thrown them. The practice was so common that only the most brazen immorality was disciplined, such as the case of an officer who had left six ‘wives’ pregnant from Poland to Berlin.
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According to the Mayor of Koenigsberg, the only Germans in his town who were adequately fed that winter were the women whom Soviet troops had made pregnant.
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The most frequent military crimes from the late summer would be drunkenness, failure to wear proper uniform, and lack of respect for senior officers.
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The thirst for vengeance had abated.

The other problem in the zone was to persuade the men that peacetime work was important.
Frontoviki
, including former members of punishment units, scoffed at the idea of discipline and regular working hours. ‘I’ve seen it all,’ one veteran remarked. ‘They’ll never keep me here.’
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Men who had trained their bodies and their minds to kill must have found guard duties a bore, and many resented clearing debris from Germany’s streets. It was widely felt, indeed, that German civilians should be given the dangerous task of mine clearance, and in many cities squads of volunteers did this work under military supervision in exchange for extra food.
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But at least the disarming and demilitarization of the Soviet zone felt like a real job. The dismantling
and shipping of the large factories that were to be seized as reparations must have been a stranger task. Wherever they saw evidence of German wealth, the men would wonder why the war had been started at all, what such rich people could have wanted with their Soviet land. But through it all, whatever their demeanour, Red Army men had to believe that they were victors. Whatever tasks they undertook, they had to think that life was getting better from now on.
Frontoviki
, with all their problems, were an élite within the occupied zone.

It was a different matter for the other Soviet troops, the ones whose war had ended with their capture. Only a fraction of the millions of prisoners taken by Hitler’s forces in the first years of the war were still living in 1945, but the total number of prisoners had been so great that there were still thousands of men in central Europe waiting for rescue when the peace was signed. If they had hoped for swift release, let alone for reinstatement in their former homes, they were mistaken. On 11 May 1945, Stalin signed the order that provided for the establishment of another web of camps in central Europe. There were to be forty-five on the 1st and 2nd Belorussian Fronts alone, each one designed to hold up to 10,000 men. By June, there were sixty-nine camps for special prisoners on Soviet territory and a further seventy-four in Europe.
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Their purpose was to intern former Red Army soldiers who had been prisoners of war with the intention of ‘filtering’ them, which meant looking for spies, fingering cowards and assigning punishment to so-called ‘betrayers of the motherland’.