World War II Behind Closed Doors (43 page)

This sense that the Germans were contributing to their own defeat now pervaded even the most junior ranks. ‘Sometimes… you just received orders that were so nonsensical from behind you’, says Heinz Fielder,
⁷⁷
then a twenty-two-year-old private with the 9th Army, ‘from the division or from the army corps. I remember once that one position had definitely to be taken back again, and the young second lieutenant had refused to attack again because more than half of his men had already died and they were just all sacrificed. They attacked again and again until the very last one died and that of course makes you wonder. But those were the men of the General Staff. They had their little flags and they put them on the map and then they say, this absolutely has to be restored, no matter what the sacrifices are’.

Fielder was one of the Germans ordered to defend the
Feste Plätz
of Bobruisk in the wake of the Red Army attack: ‘Everywhere dead bodies are lying. Dead bodies, wounded people, people screaming, medical orderlies, and then there were those
who were completely covered, who were not taken out at all, who were buried there straight away by the bunkers and trenches that collapsed. You don't have any feeling any more for warmth or coldness or light or darkness or thirst or hunger. You don't need to go to the loo. I can't explain it. It's such a tension you're under…. Everything was simply shit. Everything was shit’.

Only after the
Feste Plätz
was completely encircled and had been subjected to continuous bombardment was Fielder's unit at last told it could try and escape: 'And then the last command arrived. Destroy vehicles, shoot horses, take as much hand ammunition and rations with you as you can carry. Every man for himself. Well, now go on and rescue yourself.

Fielder joined a group of other German soldiers who were trying to fight their way through the Red Army troops ahead of them and reach the retreating German line. He ‘headed west – towards the setting sun’ and saw sights that haunt him still: ‘There was a private, a young boy, who sat at a very big birch tree – you know in Russia there are lots of birch trees. So that's where he was sitting, and from his tummy his intestines were streaming and he was crying, “Shoot me, shoot me” and everybody just ran past him. I had to stop – but I could not shoot him. And then a young second lieutenant from the Sappers came. He took off his headgear and gave him the
coup de grâce
with a 7.65 into the temple. And that's when I had to cry bitterly. I thought if his mother knew how her boy ended [here], and instead she gets a letter from the squadron saying, “Your son fell on the field of honour for great Germany”’.

In July 1944 the German army on the Eastern Front lost nearly two hundred thousand men killed or wounded; in August it was nearly three hundred thousand. In total, German losses as a result of Operation Bagration would be calculated at around 1.5 million. There had never been a defeat like it for Hitler and his generals.

The Red Army made swift progress against the Wehrmacht, retaking Minsk, capital of Belarus, on 3 July. ‘Gradually the Germans were losing morale and losing their belief in victory’, says Fyodor Bubenchikov,
⁷⁸
then a twenty-eight-year-old Red Army officer. ‘Germans no longer cried:
“Heil Hitler!”
On the contrary,
they were surrendering. They were crying: “
Hitler kaputt!”’
That summer, Bubenchikov says he felt as if he was ‘flying’: ‘Victory always makes you feel like [you are] flying. It makes everyone feel this, from ordinary soldier to the commander, and all our units were filled with this sensation’.

Operation Bagration – still not as known in the West as it should be – marked the end of a transformation in the fortunes of the Red Army. Not just tactically and strategically, but also in terms of sheer military hardware. The Soviets had managed to increase their manufacture of military equipment – often in the most difficult of circumstances – so that they were now out performing the Germans. There had been signs that this would happen for some time – in 1942, for example, the Soviets made twenty-five thousand aircraft, ten thousand more than the Germans produced that year. And, subsequently, in both 1943 and 1944, the Soviets produced more tanks and self-propelled guns than their enemy.

It had been Stalin's drive to industrialization via the five-year plan in the 1930s that had prepared the way for this massive expansion in production. And added to Soviet output, of course, were the benefits of aid from the Western Allies – the vast majority of it from America. Although this remained only a small percentage of total Soviet military equipment, it was important because of the often superior technology the Western Allies offered – for example, the Studebaker US6 truck, used by the Red Army for the launching of Katyusha rockets.

But elsewhere in the Soviet Union, as the Red Army celebrated victory after Operation Bagration, some of the many people whose lives had been changed for the worse by this reoccupation of Soviet territory were just beginning their new and bitter existence.

THE TATARS IN EXILE

The majority of the Tatars deported by the NKVD from the Crimea were sent to Uzbekistan. And the story of what happened to them there is important – not only because it represents the
climax of one of the most ruthless acts of ethnic cleansing in history, but also because it demonstrates the attitude of the Soviet authorities at a time when the West was about to discuss with Stalin the fate of those eastern European people shortly to be under Soviet occupation.

The journey to Uzbekistan took several weeks on board the freight trains commandeered by the NKVD. Conditions were so bad that a large number of people – particularly the old and the young – died en route. One estimate is that as many as seven thousand Tatars lost their lives in the transports
⁷⁹
before they reached Uzbekistan. ‘In our wagon…one small child died’, says Musfera Muslimova, who was eleven at the time. ‘And so as not to upset us, the others in the wagon [said]: “Children, don't look in that direction”’. The child's body was left by the railway track at the next stop.

And when the Tatars arrived at the ‘special settlements’ in Uzbekistan they faced persecution from many of the indigenous population. ‘The Uzbeks were told: “The people who are being brought here are cannibals”’, says Musfera. ‘“They eat people, especially children. Don't let them see them [the Uzbek children]! They suck the blood of children”. And the people believed this. Neither the Uzbeks nor us Tatars were very literate’.

‘The Uzbeks didn't like us’, confirms Nazlakhan Asanova,
⁸⁰
who was fourteen when she was deported to Uzbekistan. ‘[They used to say]: “There go the traitors!” And who were we really? Honest people…. It was truly terrible. It's not even possible to describe it. There isn't enough paper to do that’.

Even without the antipathy of the local population, life for the Tatars in Uzbekistan would have been grim. They had swapped one of the most fertile parts of Europe – a region famous for its temperate climate and aromatic wine – for a dry and arid wilderness in which little could grow. In the summer the temperature in Uzbekistan could easily exceed 40 degrees Celsius. In winter it would drop regularly below minus 20.

‘Special settlements’ for the Tatars had been established by the NKVD. They were little different from labour camps – though there was no need for barbed wire. The nature of the wilderness,
plus the presence of regular NKVD guard posts, meant the Tatars were effectively imprisoned anyway. The Tatars were made to work long hours, in cotton fields on collective farms or in factories, but no matter how hard they tried to stay alive, the conditions were such that many of them began to die.

The combination of lack of medicine and proper food was devastating. ‘They forced us to work for ten hours at a time – hard agricultural labour’, says Refat Muslimov, who was twelve years old in 1944. ‘Well, after that the diseases began. One of the most dangerous diseases was dysentery, which came from filthy water. People [also] began dying from the disease malaria. There was no medicine. There were no doctors. There was no hospital. And people just began dying. My grandfather died after a week. My mother's sister, my favourite aunt, survived for about twenty days. And then one day she just died because of the climate – from the heat, you understand…. And when my brother [who was fifteen years old] could no longer work they began to beat him, and we complained to the commandant. We said: “Look how badly they have beaten him up!” And he said: “They shouldn't have just beaten him up – they should have killed him! They should kill you all!”’

Starving as they were, the Tatars were ripe for exploitation. ‘My cousin’, says Refat, ‘went up to an Uzbek and she asked him for some bread. And he was married. He forced her to come home with him, raped her and then gave her a small pie. And she thought this behaviour was normal because she was so hungry. She would have agreed to anything’.

The majority of Tatars deported to Uzbekistan were women and children. And they suffered in particular because – not surprisingly – the young children found it hard to function as manual labourers, and the mothers often could not work because they had to look after their small children or babies. As a result, Kebire Ametova and her mother, three sisters and brother soon found themselves starving: ‘When you don't eat for a week, your mind is there, your head is working, but your tongue won't move any more’.

Her mother sold anything she could in order to buy food for
her family – her earrings and other jewellery were the first possessions to go – but after a few months she had nothing left to sell. And Kebire's younger sister, Ziver – who was only two and half years old at the time of the deportation – began to starve to death: ‘My sister was so swollen that, had it not been for her hair, it would have been impossible to know where her face was. Everything was swollen. It was only her hair that enabled one to tell the difference between the back of her head and the front’. Ziver died when she was three years old. Her mother bathed her body and wrapped her in a cloth, and then the whole family helped dig a grave in the hard earth.

Kebire's mother tried to earn money to feed her surviving family by digging turnips on the collective farm, but in the frozen winter she got frostbite on her leg, which then became sore and inflamed. In desperation, she told Kebire and her brother that their best chance of survival was to leave her, walk to the next village, and see if there was anyone there who would take pity on them. Kebire was just ten years old when she left her mother and started wandering. As children, she and her brother were able first to pass the NKVD checkpoint at the border of the collective farm and then to enter the nearby forest. Here they came across an Uzbek man who took pity on them. He took them home, fed them and told them that their only chance of survival was to become beggars. ‘He explained what we should say [when we begged]’, says Kebire. ‘“In the name of Christ, please give us something to eat – we haven't got a father and our mother is ill”. And he told us where to go. He told us to save ourselves, and not feel bashful about doing so. He told us that begging was not stealing, and that it is not a sin to ask people for food…. And we started going around begging. We went round the houses begging for something to eat in the name of Christ. Sometimes we even lied and told them that we had no father or mother and they gave us food…[then] we brought our mother the potatoes or whatever we had been given’.

Kebire and her brother would sleep rough, often in empty barrels, when they were out begging, but occasionally Uzbek villagers would take them in for the night: ‘When they [the
villagers] undressed us and put our clothes on the stove to dry there were so many lice they [seemed] to weigh more than we did!’

Although she managed to survive in this way, Kebire was denied an education and grew up illiterate – something that still embarrasses her to this day. Her childhood, she says, was stolen from her. ‘We did not know what life was – we never saw it…. We went around homeless…. Of course it's very painful’.

The NKVD's own figures show that within eighteen months of arriving in Uzbekistan, over 17 per cent of the Tatars were dead.
⁸¹
The overall death toll during their entire period of exile – which lasted officially until 1989 – is harder to establish precisely. Some believe that nearly half of the Tatars died as a result of the deportations. What is certain is that this is a crime – together with the deportation of the other ethnic groups like the Chechens and Kalmyks, all of whom suffered in a similar way – that ranks alongside some of the worst atrocities committed during the war.

Even after years of exile, some of the Tatars still believed rumours that Stalin had ‘made a mistake’ in sending them away from the Crimea. ‘We were thinking that the next day we would be put back in those trains again and would return to our homeland…that someone had made him [Stalin] do it or that he hadn't understood’, says Refat Muslimov. ‘I'm telling you in all truth that people even packed up to leave, and were saying: “We're leaving. The order has already been given. Stalin has already given the order and we are waiting for the train”’.

But today, now that they know for certain who was responsible, the Tatars direct their anger at the man who authorized the deportations, and who never sent the train to rescue them – Joseph Stalin. ‘He was a butcher’, says Muslimov. ‘Millions and millions of people were killed by him. That butcher. He should be put on trial. People have forgotten about him, but because of what he did he should be put on trial. I demand that he be put on trial! He may be dead but he should be put on trial. He should be punished!’

THE RED ARMY RETURNS

In the wake of the attack on German Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration, the Red Army moved forward into eastern Poland and mounted the Lwów-Sandomierz assault. This powerful thrust involved over a million Soviet soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian front under the command of Marshal Konev.