World War II Behind Closed Doors (57 page)

Despite the difficulties, the Red Army fought with immense conviction in Berlin, fuelled by the sense that they were on a mission of retribution. ‘We are proud to have made it to the beast's lair’, one soldier wrote home at the time. ‘We will take revenge, revenge for all our sufferings’.
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And one form which that ‘revenge’ should take was articulated by Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet propagandist, who wrote: ‘Soldiers of the Red Army. German women are yours!’
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The rapes in Germany were on a massive scale – even more so than those in Hungary. Around 2 million women were attacked. In one of the worst examples of atrocity, a Berlin lawyer who had protected his Jewish wife through all the years of Nazi persecution
tried to stop Red Army soldiers raping her, but was then shot. As he lay dying, he watched as his wife was gang raped.
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Potsdam, just outside Berlin, which was to be the site of the forthcoming final Allied conference, was devastated and much of it lay in ruins. Ingrid Schüler,
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who lived in a block of flats within a mile of the site of the proposed conference, was seventeen years old when the Red Army arrived in April. ‘My parents hid me’, she says. ‘And we were extremely lucky because my mother was not raped…women were of huge importance to them [the Soviets]. That was the worst thing: the rapes…. I can tell you about a baker's family in our street. The Russians had gone into their house intending to rape the baker's wife. Her husband, who happened to be at home, stood in front of her trying to protect her and he was immediately shot dead. With the passage to the woman clear, she was raped’.

The scale of atrocities perpetrated by the Red Army in Germany in the first six months of 1945 was clearly immense. And the motivational factors were obvious as well. Vladen Anchishkin puts it this way: ‘When you see this German beauty sitting and weeping about the savage Russians who were hurting her, why did she not cry when she was receiving parcels from [German soldiers on] the Eastern Front!’ Only very occasionally, in their letters home, did the soldiers admit what was happening. ‘They [the women] do not speak a word of Russian’, recorded one Red Army soldier in a letter he wrote in February 1945, ‘but that makes it easier. You don't have to persuade them. You just point a Nagan [a type of revolver] and tell them to lie down. Then you do your stuff and go away’.
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Of course, as with the atrocities committed by the Red Army in Hungary, the rapes must be seen in the overall context of violent retribution. For years the Red Army had been fighting an enemy who had announced they were themselves conducting ‘a war of annihilation’. This is something that Anchishkin can confirm because he himself committed the ultimate act of revenge in Czechoslovakia. When he and some of his comrades were fired on by a group of retreating SS soldiers, all his pent-up hatred burst
through. Once they were captured, he had a number of these Germans brought in to see him – one by one.

‘I was in such frenzy, I said: “Come on”. There was this entrance into the apartment block. I said, “Bring them here for interrogation,” and I had that knife, and I cut him…. I immediately killed that man with the knife’, he says. ‘You can't imagine what a man is [like] – a man is as mellow and soft as a piece of butter, and the knife goes in very smoothly. Just one moment and the throat is cut. In films they show it not like the way I did it. [In real life] it's very quick and your victim no longer cries – you just see the bubble coming from his mouth and that's it. I was in such a state…. What could I feel? I can feel only one thing, revenge. You stab him here and you cut his throat. And then you only push him [over], and that's all. I felt, “You wanted to kill me? Now you have it. I waited for this – you were hunting me down for four years. You killed so many of my friends in the rear and on the front, and you were allowed to do that. But here I have the right”. It's difficult to find decent words to express it. If you wanted [to know what I said], “You bitches! You asked for it”’.

In Berlin the Germans could not hold out against the Red Army, and on the afternoon of 30 April 1945 Hitler took his own life. Typically, since the Führer could never accept that he had personally created the circumstances of this catastrophe, one of his last recorded statements was: ‘If the German people lose the war, then they will have proved themselves unworthy of me’.
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A week later, early in the morning of 7 May, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the German High Command, signed a document of unconditional surrender. The war in Europe was over.

THE NEW PRESIDENT

As the Red Army prepared to celebrate victory in eastern Europe, the deceased Roosevelt was replaced by his Vice President, Harry Truman, a sixty-year-old former senator from Missouri. Truman immediately brought a new energy to the presidency, as George
Elsey, working in the White House map room, discovered: 'Harry Truman was utterly unlike President Roosevelt in terms of a personal relationship. First of all, our impression of him – here's a guy who can walk. And he was vigorous, physically vigorous. He was only a few years younger than Franklin Roosevelt but in behaviour, attitude, speech and so on one would have thought he was twenty, twenty-five years younger. When he first came into the map room he walked briskly around, introduced himself to each of us – “I'm Harry Truman”…and he took an intense interest in what we had in the map room, wanted to read our files…. Truman was open and eager to learn, and was very willing to admit that he didn't know. Roosevelt would never have admitted that he didn't know everything himself.

As for the Soviets, they knew little about this provincial politician – and what they did know, they disliked. After all, it had been Truman who had been quoted in the press as saying, in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, that the Americans should assist whichever side was losing ‘and that way let them kill as many as possible’.
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Truman was unaware of the intricacies of American foreign policy; and so, in those early weeks of his presidency, in his dealings with the Soviet Union he relied on the old hands, Harriman and Hopkins. On 25 May, six weeks after Roosevelt's death, Harry Hopkins arrived in Moscow at Truman's request. He had spent much of the Yalta Conference in bed, sick with the cancer that was to kill him the following year, and although he was still unwell, he was anxious to help the new President.

Hopkins met Stalin on the evening of 26 May. It was an important meeting, not so much in terms of what was decided, but because Stalin's behaviour demonstrated that there was no doubt that he – rather than, allegedly, the ‘people behind him’ – controlled Soviet policy. In the initial moments of the meeting, Hopkins emphasized that ‘public opinion’ in America had been badly affected by the ‘inability to carry into effect the Yalta agreement on Poland’.
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Stalin replied by putting the blame for the failure squarely on the British, who, he said, wanted to build up a
‘cordon sanitaire’ on the border of the Soviet Union, presumably in order to keep the Soviets in check. Hopkins denied that the United States wanted any such thing, and added that the Americans were happy to see ‘friendly countries’ along the Soviet borders. The use of the trigger word ‘friendly’ seemed to cheer Stalin up, and he said that if that was the case, then ‘we can easily come to terms’ about Poland.

These two remarks by Hopkins – about the power of public opinion in America and his reiteration that the United States wanted a government that was ‘friendly’ to the Soviets – were used to his disadvantage by Stalin in the second meeting, on 27 May. The Soviet leader said that he ‘would not attempt to use Soviet public opinion as a screen’ but would, instead, speak about the feelings of his government. He then stated his position – which was just as Roosevelt had predicted it would be: the Yalta agreement meant that the existing Lublin government could simply be ‘reconstructed’. ‘Despite the fact they were simple people’, added Stalin, ‘the Russians should not be regarded as fools, which was a mistake the West frequently made, nor were they blind and could quite well see what was going on before their eyes. It is true that the Russians are patient in the interests of a common cause but their patience had its limits’.
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Stalin also remarked that if the Americans started to use the issue of Lend Lease as ‘pressure’ on the Russians, this was a ‘fundamental mistake’. (The Soviet leader clearly wanted to ensure that any post-war aid from America was not linked to political matters.) It was a bruising performance, and Hopkins was duly bruised. He denied both that he was ‘hiding’ behind American public opinion and that he was attempting to use the issue of Lend Lease as a ‘pressure weapon’. Stalin replied that he had observed that his remark about public opinion had ‘cut Mr Hopkins to the quick’.

It was classic Stalin – the use of calm, unemotional insults as a way of destabilizing an opponent. Stalin had the power to control his emotions, and to use offensive remarks as a way not of relieving or expressing feeling but as a method of probing the strength of his opponent. He had recently insulted Roosevelt over the question of the alleged Berne negotiations, and then withdrawn the
charge when the American President had shown his upset. Intriguingly, when Churchill had complained about Stalin's behaviour over the same issue, the Soviet leader had written back: ‘My messages are personal and strictly confidential. This makes it possible to speak one's mind clearly and frankly. This is the advantage of confidential communications. If, however, you are going to regard every frank statement of mine as offensive, it will make this kind of communication very difficult. I can assure you that I had and have no intention of offending anyone’.
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Churchill, Roosevelt and Hopkins all appear to have been genuinely hurt by Stalin's insults, which implies that they believed they had a personal relationship with him. But Stalin knew that these negotiations had nothing to do with ‘friendship’ or ‘personal relationships’. Stalin could not care whether anyone liked him or not. What mattered to him was power and credibility; the power to occupy countries on the border of the Soviet Union and impose ‘friendly’ governments on them, cloaked by the credibility of an interpretation – however stretched – of Yalta in order to defend Soviet actions. And in both respects, Stalin was winning. Little wonder that Eden, with all his experience of international negotiations, wrote that: ‘If I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice’.
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At this meeting in May 1945, Stalin was almost toying with the new President's emissary. He told Hopkins that ‘four or five’ of the ministerial posts in the Polish provisional government could be given to Poles from the list ‘submitted by Great Britain and America’ – before allowing himself to be corrected by Molotov and saying it was just ‘four’ because ‘he thought the Warsaw Poles [previously referred to as the ‘Lublin’ Poles] would not accept more than four ministries from other democratic groups’. This idea that he had to bow to the wishes of his own puppet government in Poland was a trick he had used before – but no one had yet dared say to his face that it was obvious nonsense.

Towards the end of the meeting, Hopkins made an impassioned appeal for the Soviets to allow the ‘freedoms’ so dear to the Atlantic Charter – freedom of speech, assembly and religion – to be allowed
in the newly occupied territories. And in his response Stalin once again played with Hopkins, saying that ‘in regard to the specific freedoms mentioned by Mr Hopkins, they could only be applied… with certain limitations’. Eventually, a ‘compromise’ of sorts was agreed – with five Poles from outside joining the new provisional government – something that was far from the ideal that Roosevelt and Churchill had hoped for in the immediate aftermath of Yalta.

The harsh reality was that Stalin and the Soviets were in possession of Poland and most of the other countries bordering the Soviet Union. And the Western powers could do little about it – a reality that was brought crushingly home to all concerned at the final conference of the three powers, held in the Soviet-occupied part of Germany.

THE POTSDAM CONFERENCE

In the wake of the destruction of Nazi Germany, the three Allied leaders agreed to meet in leafy Potsdam, just outside Berlin and the site of the grand palace of Frederick the Great. The location was symbolic not just of the subjugation of Germany but of the dominant role of the Soviets within eastern Europe. As at Yalta, it was the Soviet authorities who organized this conference. It is significant that at no point in the war or its aftermath did Stalin ever travel to a meeting that his own security forces did not oversee. As he knew, the more powerful the person, the more others travel to be in their presence.

At Yalta it had been agreed that Berlin would be divided into sectors, with each of the four powers (France was the fourth) controlling one area of the city. And it was clear to Ingrid Schüler, the teenager who in the early days of the Soviet occupation had hidden from potential Soviet rapists in the attic of the family flat, that ‘there were two completely different worlds – [the world of] the Russians and [the world of] the Western Allies…because Wannsee [a nearby suburb of Berlin] was occupied by the Americans. We could see how wonderful it was. They got along
[with the locals], they chatted with one another. It was wonderful – the streets were safe, people weren't afraid’. As far as Ingrid was concerned, ‘this alliance’ between these ‘two worlds’ was ‘incomprehensible’. ‘In the East [there was] no democracy…it was well known that they had no say, everything was imposed on them, they were told what to do, they had no freedom at all. It was common knowledge that many people were deported even at the time…. And on the other side, that was freedom’.