Endgame 1944
How Stalin Won the War
Jonathan Dimbleby
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In memory of Nicholas Dimbleby (1946–2024), who was always intrigued.
Illustrations
1. General Nikolai Vatutin
2. General Ivan Konev (Azoor Photo / Alamy Stock Photo)
3. General Georgy Zhukov
4. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H01758 / CC -BY -SA 3.0)
5. Soviet soldiers marching through a muddy field (Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo)
6. Soldiers with a horse-drawn carriage marching on a muddy road (Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-711-0438-05A / Menzendorf / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
7. Major-General Egon von Neindorff
8. German Army surgeon Peter Bamm (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo)
9. General Hermann Balck (Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-732-0118-03 / Bauer / CC -BY -SA 3.0)
10. Hans-Ulrich Rudel (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo)
11. General Konstantin Rokossovsky
12. General Ivan Bagramyan
13. Field Marshal Ernst Busch
14. General Hans Jordan (Bundesarchiv BA rch PERS 6/299948)
15. A massive three-hour artillery onslaught signalled the start of Operation Bagration (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)
16. German Prisoners of War march through Moscow (INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo)
17. Soviet civilians arrested by German as partisans in 1944. (Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo)
18. Faye Shulman and Soviet partisans
19. Boris Komsky (Blavatnik Archive)
20. Sofya Uranova (House-Museum of V.A. Igosheva)
21. Adolf Hitler (Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)
22. General Heinz Guderian
23. Field Marshal Walter Model (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo)
24. General Sergei Shtemenko
25. Heinrich Himmler (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R99621 / CC - BYSA 3.0)
26. Oskar Dirlewanger (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S73495 / Anton Ahrens / CC - BY - SA 3.0)
27. German patrol in Warsaw (Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo)
28. General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski and Erich von dem BachZelewski (History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
29. Ryzhard Zgorski with family and friends (Private Collection)
30. Zgorski’s identity card (Private Collection)
31. Admiral Miklós Horthy with Hitler
32. Adolf Eichmann
33. Hungarian Jews force marched through Budapest (Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)
34. Hungarian Jews force marched through Budapest (Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-680-8285A-05 / Faupel / CC -BY -SA 3.0)
35. Otto Skorzeny
36. Ferenc Szálasi
37. General Rodion Malinovksy
38. Romania, Summer 1944 (Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo)
39. Bulgaria, Summer 1944 (Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo)
40. Bolesław Bierut (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
41. Stanisław Mikołajczyk
42. Ilya Ehrenburg (Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)
43. Konstantin Simonov (Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)
44. Vasily Grossman (Album / Alamy Stock Photo)
45. Anthony Eden
46. Henry Wallace
47. The ‘Big Three’ (CBW / Alamy Stock Photo)
48. Crossing the Oder (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo)
49. The Red Flag hoisted over the Reichstag
Maps
Europe, January 1944 xiv–xv
The Eastern Front, January – December 1944 xvi–xvii
The Eastern Front, January 1944 xviii
Ukrainian Offensives, December 1943 – April 1944 xix
Leningrad Front, January – March 1944 xxi
Liberation of the Crimea, April – May 1944 xxii–xxiii
Festen Plätze, Spring 1944 xxiv
Partisan Warfare, 1943–44 xxv
Operation Bagration, June – August 1944 xxvi–xxvii
Northern Front, Autumn 1944 xxviii–xxix
Hungary, October – December 1944 xxx
Soviet Advance, January – February 1945 xxxi
Europe, May 1945 xxxii–xxxiii
Europe, January 1944
Protectorate of Bohemia andMoravia
The Eastern Front, January – December 1944
Odessa
Bobruisk Vitebsk
Pskov
Soviet Union
to 30 April to 19 August to 30 August to 31 December Soviet advances
Volg a
Moscow
Sevastopol
Yalta
Kerch
Stalingrad
Kursk
Kharkov
Black Sea
R . Dnieper
Kharkov Stalingrad
FRONT WESTERN FRONT LENINGRAD FRONT VOLKHOV FRONT
2 nd UKRAINIAN FRONT 3 rd UKRAINIAN FRONT 4 th UKRAINIAN FRONT 1 st UKRAINIAN FRONT 1 st BALTIC FRONT 2 nd BALTIC FRONT
Zhitomir Proskurov Chernovtsy Rovno Lutsk Ternopil Lvov Lublin Brest-Litovsk Minsk Grodno Mariampol Vilnius Polotsk Leningrad Vitebsk Bobruisk Berezina Mogilev Rogachev
GROUP NORTH
R. Dnieper R.Dniester R. Nemen Pripyat Marshes R. Bug
Kirovograd Uman Korsan Cherkassy Vinnitsa Kamenets Podolsky Odessa Kherson Nikolayev Black Sea Krivoi-Rog Nikopol
GROUP CENTRE Sevastopol
Berezina Rogachev
Bobruisk
Minsk
Pripyat Marshes N Ukrainian O ensives, December 1943 –April 1944
Berdichev Shevchenkovsky
Zhitomir
Dniep
Cherkassy
Kirovograd Uman Korsan
Belaya Tserkov
Vinnitsa Kamenets –Podolsky
Krivoi Rog Nikopol
Sevastopol Kherson Nikolayev Black Sea
Odessa
Botoshany
Iasi¸ Rovno
Group Centre
GROUP CENTRE
Lublin Brest-Litovsk
Dubno Brody Lutsk Ternopil Lvov
Proskurov Dolyna
Leningrad Front, January – March 1944
Gulf of Finland
Lake Peipus
ARMY GROUP NORTH
Pskov
ARMY GROUP NORTH
Lake Lagoda
LENINGRAD FRONT
German front line
VOLKHOV FRONT
14 January
German front line
31 March
Soviet advances
0 80 km
0 40 miles
Leningrad
Novgorod
Luga
Vyritsa
Narva Lyuban
Pskov
Polotsk
Pustoshka
Volkhov
R. Volkhov
R. Narva
Main Map
Hungary
Romania
Soviet Union
Poland
Black Sea R. Dnieper
2nd BALTIC FRONT
Liberation of the Crimea, April – May 1944
8 APRIL
11 APRIL
12 APRIL
13 APRIL
15 APRIL
7 MAY
Perekop
Simferpol
Sevastopol
Balaklava
Yalta
Black Sea
Cape Khersones
ARMY GROUP A
4th UKRAINIAN FRONT
Gneisenau Line encirclement Soviet advances
Sea of Azov
INDEPENDENT COASTAL ARMY 11 APRIL 12 APRIL 8 APRIL
Kerch
Black Sea
Sivash
Sivash
Festen Plätze, Spring 1944
Brest-Litovsk
Kovel
Dvina
Riga
Pskov
Polotsk Vitebsk
Mogilev
Minsk
Vilnius
Bobruisk
Pinsk
Brody
Ternopil
Uman
Kiev
Black Sea
Lvov
Odessa
Kerch
Sevastopol
Novgorod
Partisan Warfare, 1943 – 44
Memel
Vilnius Königsberg
Minsk
Treblinka
Warsaw
Poland
Auschwitz
Leningrad
R . Narva
R. Volkhov R . Luga R . Dvina
Vitebsk
Partisan region
AK (Polish ‘Home Army’)
Partisan bases and units 200 miles
B a l t i c S e a Black Sea
Soviet Union Riga
Brest-Litovsk
R. Pripyat
Cracow Lvov
Kiev
Cherkassy
Kharkov Kursk
R . SouthernBug R . Dniester R. Dnieper R . Donets
Krivoi Rog
Odessa
Operation Bagration, June –August 1944 front line, 23 June front line, 28 July front line, 29 August Soviet advances
R. Berezina
Minsk
Stolbtsy
Grodno
Bobruisk
Front, Autumn 1944
Soviet forward positions, 1 October Soviet forward positions, 15 October Soviet forward positions, 28 October Soviet advances
50 km
30 miles
Königsberg
Kaunas
Goldap
Mariampol
Gumbinnen
Nemmersdorf Angerapp R.
Drava
East Prussia
Siedlce Treblinka
front line, 11 January front line, 17 January front line, 2 February Soviet advances ARMY GROUP A ARMY GROUP NORTH ARMY GROUP CENTRE 2 nd BELORUSSIAN FRONT 1 st BELORUSSIAN FRONT 1 st UKRAINIAN FRONT
Soviet Advance, January –February 1945 Berlin Frankfurt am Oder
Cracow
Europe, May 1945
Author’s Note
Throughout the book I have identified countries, regions and settlements using the names by which they were most widely known at the time. For the avoidance of doubt, I have bracketed their current nomenclature at first use.
As the Soviet term for an army group is ‘Front’, to avoid confusion with battlefield fronts I have bent the rules of grammar slightly in the cause of clarity by capitalizing the former and lower-casing the latter in both singular and plural usage.
Preface
1944 was the year in which, after a protracted and barbaric struggle, the Soviet Red Army finally annihilated Germany’s armed forces on the battlefield. It was the year in which only the most purblind Nazi still failed to detect that Adolf Hitler’s vision of a Thousand-Year Reich was in ruins; the year in which, belatedly, those who had come to realize that the Führer was an incompetent monster sought to assassinate him. It was the year in which Joseph Stalin came to bestride eastern Europe like a colossus. It was the year in which the Allied armies slogged towards Berlin from the Normandy beaches as much to future-proof western Europe against the threat posed by Stalin as to help the Red Army defeat Germany. And it was the year in which – ‘bookended’ by the conferences at Teheran (Tehran) in late 1943 and Yalta in early 1945 – the ‘Big Three’ (Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt) negotiated the post-war future of Europe and laid the foundations of the ensuing Cold War.
The overwhelming majority of English-language histories about the Second World War – among them masterly works – have had an Anglo-American emphasis and a prime focus on the western front in Europe. This is especially true of 1944, when, in the months following D-Day on 6 June of that year, millions put their lives on the line while fighting in Allied armies to eradicate Nazism from the European mainland in the name of freedom and democracy. How this happened and the stories of those who made this sacrifice matter greatly. Their trials and tribulations are of enduring value and significance.
To suggest, therefore, that it was not so much these valiant soldiers but their counterparts on the eastern front who broke Hitler’s armies and so won the war against Germany is to challenge an abiding myth that has long been embedded in the collective Western psyche. To assert, furthermore, that these Soviet triumphs on the battlefield
allowed Joseph Stalin effectively to dictate the terms of the post-war settlement is to compound the challenge to our cherished mythologies. Yet, as this book seeks to demonstrate, by placing the fighting on the ground within the context of its overarching political framework, the evidence for both these propositions – however unpalatable it may be to some – is compelling. For those who have lived through the years that followed the end of the war, this is no cause for celebration but a disconcerting fact of twentieth-century history, whose seismic ramifications persist to this day.
By January 1944 the eastern front had been a cauldron of non-stop warfare for more than two and a half years. It was a peculiarly vicious and desperate struggle on a battlefront that at times extended from the northern tip of the Baltic to the southern rim of the Balkans, a distance of some 3,000 kilometres. Following the liberation of Kiev (Kyiv) in late 1943, the Red Army’s advance deep into the Ukraine (Ukraine) coincided with the liberation of Leningrad (St Petersburg), which forced Hitler’s forces to withdraw from Finland and retreat through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to the very edge of the Baltic Sea. These parallel campaigns on the northern and southern fronts prepared the way for the greatest single battlefield victory of the Second World War. In operational scale and strategic significance, Operation Bagration, as Stalin codenamed this campaign, was of more moment even than Operation Overlord, the overlapping Allied campaign in Normandy that began with the cross-Channel invasion on 6 June 1944. In a little over a fortnight, as the Allied armies struggled to establish more than a foothold in northern France, the Red Army inflicted the most humiliating defeat on Germany’s armed forces in their history. In so doing, Stalin’s forces avenged the ignominy of Operation Barbarossa – the blitzkrieg invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler’s panzers in June 1941 – which, by October, had brought the Nazis to within striking distance of Moscow. By that point, most international observers had come to the conclusion that the Soviet Union would crumble to defeat, leaving Britain and the United States (which entered the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December) to fight the Nazis in
the West without an ally in the East. Instead, Stalin’s armies gradually gained the upper hand as Hitler overreached himself. By Christmas, the Führer’s finest troops had first been fought to a standstill and then – sometimes in chaos and panic – had been driven back by a ferocious Soviet counter-offensive. As I argued in Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War, that setback at the gates of the Soviet capital ended any prospect of a German victory over the Soviet Union by force of arms. Now, in this sequel – Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War – I seek to demonstrate that the Red Army’s successes on the eastern front during 1944 put Stalin in an overwhelmingly powerful position not only to claim that the Nazis had been vanquished by the Soviet Union’s strategic and tactical acumen but also to impose his will on the post-war future of the European continent.
By 1944, Hitler’s already weakened forces were locked into a series of furious rearguard actions as they withdrew across the bloodstained remains of the Nazi empire in eastern Europe that he had expected to endure for a millennium. Throughout that year, Hitler’s Ostheer (Army of the East) fought with the courage of desperation but, although the Soviet Union’s victories were won at immense human cost (a human price to which Stalin was indifferent), they were also, for the most part, carefully planned, closely co-ordinated and impressively executed. The Red Army’s offensives were crafted by war-hardened generals in command of millions of generally wellequipped young soldiers who were hell-bent on driving the hated intruders from their land. The aggressors, who had swaggered into Russia in June 1941, certain of early victory, now fought not only to save the Fatherland but also to avoid military annihilation and the vengeance which, with good reason, they feared would otherwise await them.
Contemporary accounts of their worsening predicament set against those of their Soviet conquerors provide vivid evidence of what it was like to fight on the eastern front in this endgame year. For this reason I have drawn liberally from the diaries, letters and reminiscences of the soldiers on both sides – from the most senior generals to the most junior foot soldiers. Their testimonies, especially those of the young men who did the fighting on the ground – many of which are
translated and published here for the first time – provide unvarnished evidence of what it was like to endure the charnel house of the eastern front during the bloodiest and most brutal mega-conflict in the annals of human warfare.
Stalin’s two partners in the Grand Alliance against Hitler observed the Soviet juggernaut muscling westwards in 1944 with both admiration and steadily growing consternation. Even by the time that the Big Three met together for the first time at Teheran in late 1943, it was clear to both Churchill and Roosevelt that Stalin’s armies were all but certain to recover every part of the Soviet Union and very probably most of eastern and central Europe as well. It was also clear both to them and to their political and military advisors that it would be impossible for the United States and Britain, equally preoccupied with the war on other fronts in Europe and the Pacific, to dictate terms to the Soviet Union for the post-war future of the European continent; rather, they would find themselves obliged to accommodate themselves to Stalin’s wishes. The most they could hope to achieve was to persuade him to confirm that the peoples of those territories soon to be occupied by the Soviet Union should be allowed to shape their own destinies free from outside interference. Stalin was content to provide such an undertaking, though only in the vaguest terms. From the Western perspective, the dictator’s oral commitment at Teheran was, at best, a hostage to fortune. Although he was never to spell it out so bluntly, it became increasingly clear during the course of 1944 that Stalin was resolved to build a buffer zone of surrogate states around the Soviet Union to ensure not only that neither Germany nor any hostile alliance of irredentist states could ever again threaten the survival of his anti-capitalist empire but also, chillingly, that no Western notions of individual freedom or democracy would be allowed to stand in the way of that overriding objective.
As a result, Churchill and Roosevelt soon found themselves fighting a rearguard diplomatic action that was no less consequential than the struggles on the battlefield. In this case, though, their adversary – though not yet identified so blatantly – was not their Nazi enemy but their communist ally. The negotiations between Washington,
London and Moscow took place in secret via telegrams and letters and behind closed doors in tête-à-têtes and conference rooms: a contest of wills that was sustained, intense and sometimes explosively combative. Although the outside world, for entirely sound reasons, was kept in the dark about this process, the issues between the two sides were of the greatest significance: the future of Europe, and indeed the world, following the ‘unconditional surrender’ which all three leaders had agreed should be imposed on Nazi Germany.
It was a markedly uneven contest. This was not only because Stalin’s armies occupied so much of the battlefield but also because, for much of the time, Churchill and Roosevelt approached this problem from very different standpoints. Each of them had a distinct vision of how best to secure lasting peace and freedom in the European theatre of war and beyond. They also had very different attitudes towards Stalin. Roosevelt was anxious to enlist ‘Uncle Joe’ as a future partner on the global stage; Churchill, though, viewed the Soviet dictator through a prism coloured by frustration and suspicion. On occasion, the ideological and strategic clashes between London and Washington made it virtually impossible to present Stalin with a united Western front, a feature the wily, thuggish and charming Soviet leader exploited unmercifully.
The intensity of the diplomatic struggles within the Grand Alliance was, in its own way, as profound as – and certainly no less fateful than – the struggles on the war front. As with the soldiers, therefore, so with the politicians: to illuminate in personal terms the conflicts, tensions, animosities and full-on rows that were inevitably provoked by the historical magnitude of the issues at stake, I have similarly drawn extensively from the reports, diaries, minutes, memoirs and letters of the principal actors, their officials and their advisors from all sides.
Moreover, since this diplomatic struggle was inextricably linked to the military one – not only determining the immediate outcome of the war but also shaping the history of the twentieth century – I have woven them together into the narrative of 1944 during which, with the benefit of hindsight, it is increasingly clear that Stalin’s
prospective victory in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as Stalin termed the struggle against the Nazis on Germany’s eastern front, would eliminate one European tyranny only to nurture another.
In this narrative, the advance towards that grim apotheosis begins with a view from a bunker on the banks of the River Dnieper (Dnipro) on the very first day of that endgame year.
PART ONE
1. A New Year Dawns
High winds and driving snow on New Year’s Eve had obliterated almost every feature of a landscape that seemed to drift back into infinity from the banks of the River Dnieper. As dawn broke on 1 January 1944, Günter Koschorrek, a machine-gunner serving in Army Group South’s 6th Army, peered out of his freezing foxhole on the west bank of the river, trying to identify the shadowy outlines of the men who had started to creep forward from the Soviet gun battery that was half-concealed by the blizzard no more than a few score metres to the east.
Koschorrek had endured more than enough of the Second World War. He had emerged unscathed from the carnage at Stalingrad a year earlier, when scores of thousands of his 6th Army comrades had been among the more than 500,000 soldiers estimated to have been slaughtered or taken prisoner, many already too close to death from starvation or wounds to survive, but he had found no respite. Instead he had found himself trudging back westwards, never victorious, always on the retreat – for upwards of 1,200 kilometres. He was now on edge:
Every now and then I peer through the telescopic sight and get angry. The Russians are running back and forth, bent double, well within range, but here we are and we can’t even raise our heads . . . as soon as they see the least bit of movement they fire at us . . in front of us, a sniper has dug himself in, so well camouflaged that I can’t pick him out.1
Koschorrek shared his foxhole with a fellow gunner – whom he identified only as Paul – who was no less frustrated by the Soviet sniper fire but rather more impetuous. When a shell landed a few metres away, throwing up a great cloud of earth, rubble and snow, Koschorrek knew enough to crouch low but his friend could not
resist raising his head to identify their tormenter. There was the crack of machine-gun fire.
I stare aghast at the fist-sized hole in Paul’s head just above his left eye, from which blood is leaking in dark red streams onto his steel helmet and from there right over his face and into his mouth . . . I am in total panic . . . The blood is now streaming out . . . My hands are trembling, my knees go weak and shake. I can’t do anything more: his face is already as white as a sheet.2
Another fatality, another statistic, another victim of Hitler’s refusal to acknowledge that the malign vision which had inspired his invasion of the Soviet Union two and a half years earlier was destined yet again to turn the eastern front into a charnel house of death and suffering over the course of the next twelve months.
On the same salient, Guy Sajer,* an infantryman in the Grossdeutschland Division, had also been retreating for many weeks. He was hardened to being on the receiving end of artillery fire. Nonetheless he shuddered as a shell exploded only a few metres away:
The ground shook beneath me . . . I felt like a pea inside a ferociously beaten drum. I was lying flat on the ground among the bodies of comrades killed only a few minutes before . . . Torrents of snow and frozen earth poured down on us . . . Trapped by the weight of earth, I began to howl like a madman.3
The teenage Sajer, who had joined the army eighteen months earlier, had already lost faith in the Führer: ‘We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich – or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-
* Sajer was the nom de plume of Guy Mouminoux, a prominent French cartoonist who was brought up in Alsace, which was annexed by the Third Reich in 1940. Drafted into the Wehrmacht at the age of sixteen in 1942, he was seconded to the Grossdeutschland Division. One or two historians have argued that his wartime memoir The Forgotten Soldier is more of a roman-à-clef than an accurate account of his experiences. However, though some factual details have been contested, it has been recommended by the US Army Command and General Staff College as an authentic portrait of the Second World War on the eastern front line.
ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear, which was our motivating power.’4
Such sentiments would not have surprised Oldwig von Natzmer, a colonel serving in the same division, which was attached to Army Group South. He had recently noted:
A degree of exhaustion has infected all portions of this unit, up to and including the regimental staffs, so badly that we simply cannot overstate it. The result of these unceasing battles is that most of the officers and almost all the non-commissioned officers are falling apart. The men are so apathetic that it is entirely the same to them whether they are shot by their own officers or by the Russians. Whether we can hold our current positions, or any other, is completely unclear.5
On the other side of the same line Boris Suris, one of the 750,000 men serving in General Nikolai Vatutin’s 1st Ukrainian Front, was sheltering in a forward position when he heard the familiar sound of an enemy warplane. He glanced up as a squadron of Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter-bombers flew over his position, whistling and howling, so low that we are able to see the profile of the aircraft. We could see the bombs couched under the wings . . The aircraft tore along and disappeared behind the hillock and from there came the muffled sound of explosions followed by the chattering of machine guns and submachine guns . . . Cowardly Captain Alabin [his commanding officer] immediately bolted and hid in a ditch.
Like Koschorrek, Suris, a former art student who would later become renowned for his monographs on famous twentieth-century painters, had survived Stalingrad. He was not given to deference and had little patience with weaker souls.
As it was New Year’s Day, the unit’s supply chief, the ‘Professor’ as he was nicknamed, had prepared a feast with fried meats, chicken stock, fried potatoes, pickles and plenty of blueberry tea with which to wash it all down:
The party was small but warm. We drank, we ate and we drank again . . . I got briefly carried away by the grey-eyed Lyuba, the
postwoman, but quickly switched to sauerkraut since with Lyuba I had no prospects whatsoever . . . I went outside. It was frosty, the ground was slightly powdered with snow . . . someone was singing in the distance.6
Further south, Gabriel Temkin, a Polish Jew who had fled to the Soviet Union from the Nazis in 1939 and was now serving in the 78th Rifle Division, was nursing a hangover. The previous evening he had been on a fruitless mission to recover the bodies of two regimental comrades who had been killed in no-man’s land while on reconnaissance. Temkin had already been drinking and nearly stumbled into the German lines but was pulled back by his comrades just in time. ‘As we sat in despair and sorrow,’ he wrote, ‘the guys pulled out a couple of bottles of ill-smelling moonshine.’ All he could remember of the hours that followed was ‘sobbing and crying, drinking and in sorrow . . . I think I was crying bitter tears not only because I had been plunged in grief over the death of my comrades. Their death brought out of me the deep, hidden feelings of frustration with this terrible just war I was in up to my neck.’ He vowed to avoid getting drunk again.7
In the same sector, Konstantin Boldin, a military surgeon leading the 340th Division’s medical team, had no New Year respite but worked round the clock trying to salvage young Soviet lives. ‘Regardless of how many wounded are waiting and whatever the situation is at the front line, one has to work fast as one never knows how the situation might change in an hour. That’s how the entire [medical] platoon is working, like a well-tuned mechanism . .’ he noted. Injured men were coming into his medical unit at the rate of 600 a day. One of many cases which were beyond hope clearly haunted him. The man had an inoperable stomach wound: ‘He was looking at me hopefully . . It was hard to meet his eyes, which were asking “Why aren’t you operating on me, what are you waiting for?” ’ Boldin prescribed a powerful analgesic, applied a fresh dressing and instructed his staff to tell the dying man that the operation had been successful: ‘If he has to die let him at least remain unaware that nothing could be done, let him hope till the last minute.’8
Such scenes were replicated all along a front line that wove its way southwards for 3,000 kilometres from the Baltic to the Black Sea in a struggle that had already far exceeded any other in the annals of warfare as a source of misery and death. In the two and half years since the launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, a total of some 9.5 million young men and women had been killed or declared ‘missing in action’ on the battlefields of the eastern front. More than 80 per cent of those victims – 8 million out of 9.5 million – were Soviet soldiers, a gruesome imbalance in the totality of suffering. Yet those statistics, macabre as they are, disguised others that in military terms were far more telling. In January 1944, despite the Red Army’s appalling losses, the Stavka (Soviet High Command) could still field 6.25 million troops as against the 2.46 million available to OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht – the German High Command that oversaw the activities of all German land, sea and air forces, collectively known as the Wehrmacht).9 The imbalance between them in military hardware was even greater. The ten Soviet Fronts (as the Stavka called its army groups) were equipped with more than twice as many tanks (5,800 versus 2,300) and four times as many aircraft (13,400 versus 3,000)10 as the four German army groups retreating from them. Only one statistic showed a narrowing imbalance and that would have offered no comfort to any German soldier: while the annual Soviet death toll was steadily falling, theirs was rapidly rising – so much so that, in the course of 1944, German battlefield fatalities at over 1.23 million would reach 90 per cent of the Soviet total for the year.11 In consequence, Hitler’s pool of young cannon fodder, which had always been far shallower than that of his nemesis, was now shrinking much faster. Taken together, all these statistics would have given most military leaders pause for thought, to wonder for how long their armies could avoid annihilation without a drastic change in strategy. But the Wehrmacht’s commander-in-chief had a habit of ignoring unpalatable facts.
Adolf Hitler had long been addicted to hate-fuelled triumphalism. But in his New Year message to the troops he forsook bombast, striking instead a shakily defiant and quasi-mystical note as though
embracing whatever fate the Almighty might decree for the Third Reich he had created:
Soldiers! The year 1944 will be very difficult. It is our joint task to transcend the purely defensive in its course and deal the adversary such heavy blows that finally the hour will come in which Providence can grant the victory to that nation which deserves it most . . . [if] Providence gives the prize of life to whoever fights for and defends it most bravely, then our Volk will be received graciously by Him who as a just judge has at all times granted the victory to those most deserving of it.12
As a growing number of his senior commanders had come to recognize, there was no discernible evidence that the ‘just judge’ was minded to intervene in the cause of Nazism. These hardened generals had lost faith in the myth of Hitler’s invincibility and some had started to murmur against him. Most prominent among these critics was Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the commander of Army Group South and the most indomitable, forceful and outspoken of all the Führer’s commanders on the eastern front. He had particular cause. By January 1944 his forces had been forced back across the great natural barrier of the River Dnieper and were clinging on to the west bank, an escarpment that posed a formidable obstacle to the Soviet troops on the opposite side of the river. Vatutin’s forces had retaken the city of Kiev and now threatened to encircle the 4th Panzer Army, which, though weakened during the fighting of the previous months, remained one of Army Group South’s most formidable fighting units. However, he was under orders to stand firm along a line in front of what Hitler chose to call the ‘East Wall’ – as though that designation alone would transform a flimsy, half-finished set of barricades into an insurmountable obstacle.
Not for the first time, Manstein found himself in an impossible position. Over the course of the last twelve months, his armies had been driven back westwards for 1,500 kilometres only to find themselves yet again at bay, defending the indefensible. More than once during those months he had argued that a ‘sweeping withdrawal’ to new defensive lines along a shorter front was essential if the Soviet
juggernaut were to be arrested.13 Hitler had not been persuaded. As a result, Army Group South’s predicament had become, as the field marshal was to put it, ‘progressively worse’.14 He did not overstate the case: in a mere six months, his forces had endured no fewer than 400,000 casualties.
More broadly, Manstein had convinced himself that Götterdämmerung on the eastern front could be averted only if his peers in the other three army groups (North, Centre and ‘A’) were given the freedom to think for themselves and the authority to act accordingly in the sectors for which they were responsible. As it was, they were required to seek approval for every significant operational decision from OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres – the Army High Command). In practice this meant Hitler himself, whose response to the ignominy of retreat had been to constrain his generals even further. In Manstein’s view, the Führer’s implacability threatened to accelerate the very denouement that he could not bring himself to contemplate – defeat on the eastern front and the subsequent collapse of the Third Reich. By January 1944 the field marshal had become so exasperated that he decided to confront the Supreme Commander in person to protest against the strategic straitjacket in which he found himself.
If anyone could have influenced Hitler, it should have been Manstein. He not only had proved himself to be a loyal Nazi who had presided over numerous anti-Semitic atrocities – on one occasion reminding those under his command to ‘appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry’15 – but also had proved himself to be an outstanding strategist whom Hitler had come to admire greatly. A veteran of the First World War and the invasion of Poland in 1939, he had played a key role in almost every major operation on the eastern front since the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. From the opening weeks of that blitzkrieg he had been instrumental in securing critical victories. In the summer of 1941 he had commanded a panzer corps during the rapid advance on Leningrad. Transferred to take command of the 11th Army in the Ukraine in September 1941, he led the assault on Sevastopol, imposing a murderous 250-day siege
on the Black Sea stronghold, which eventually fell less than nine months later. In August 1942 he was summoned back to the Leningrad front with orders from Hitler to raze the besieged city. He thought this a poor idea, observing – in an echo of the decision made about Leningrad’s fate in September 1941 – that ‘it would be preferable to encircle the city and let the defenders as well as the inhabitants die of hunger’.16 His assessment proved to be as sound as it was pitiless. When it duly proved impossible to break into Leningrad, he tightened the German stranglehold with a series of operations that forced the Soviets to suspend their efforts to liberate the starving metropolis.
Fresh from that triumph, Manstein was given command of the newly created Army Group Don, with orders to rescue General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army from calamity at Stalingrad. By the time he had taken up his new post, however, the 6th Army was already encircled and in grave peril. It was at once clear to Manstein that Paulus could neither hold the line nor extricate his broken and exhausted forces without further dreadful losses. He concluded that surrender was the least-worst option and advised Hitler accordingly, but the Führer refused to countenance such humiliation. With little other choice aside from committing his men to mass suicide, Paulus surrendered anyway. Manstein, who had cunningly refrained from aggravating his relationship with Hitler by pressing him further on Paulus’s part, emerged from this military and psychological catastrophe with his reputation untarnished.
Latterly, the field marshal had extricated the Führer from errors that, in the absence of his tactical foresight, would have been calamitous. Following the debacle at Stalingrad, as the commander of Army Group South (as Army Group Don had been renamed) he oversaw the German retreat from the Caucasus and steered the bitterly fought but relentless retreat from the Volga to the Dnieper. In February 1943, in a brief moment of renewed hope, he further enhanced his reputation by launching a successful counter-offensive to retake Kharkov (Kharkiv), 600 kilometres west of Stalingrad. Emboldened by this pyrrhic victory, Hitler decided rashly to launch an all-out assault – codenamed Operation Citadel – against the five Soviet armies mustered some 200 kilometres north of Kharkov in the Kursk
salient. In July, operating in tandem with General Walter Model, the commander of the 9th Army, Manstein was ordered to encircle and destroy the Soviet armies in what became known as the Battle of Kursk.
In the mightiest single tank engagement of the Second World War, 10,000 tanks – 3,000 German versus 7,000 Russian armoured vehicles supported by a similar imbalance of artillery and infantry – faced one another in open battle. Although the Germans managed to secure an early tactical victory, inflicting severe damage on the Soviet forces, which suffered more than 700,000 combat casualties, they themselves lost upwards of 380,000 killed, wounded or missing in the process. This haemorrhage of precious manpower was aggravated by Hitler’s refusal to allow Manstein to commit his reserves at the decisive moment. It was only after six weeks of unrelieved battle that, in late August, Hitler decided to call off the operation, which, by that time, according to Manstein, had become a ‘fiasco’ as a result of the Führer’s earlier decision.17 A well-prepared Soviet counteroffensive forced the Germans into further retreat. Kursk had proved that the once-invincible German armies could be beaten in a major head-to-head confrontation. More significantly, it had also proved that the Soviets were capable of reversing their initial setbacks to secure an important strategic advantage, confirming that the German defeat in the Battle of Moscow had not been an isolated triumph but a crucial turning point. Since that moment in late 1941, Hitler’s armies had never recovered the strategic initiative. There had been tactical setbacks and operational misjudgements on the Soviet side, but as each month passed it became ever clearer that the Red Army’s overwhelming superiority in manpower and weaponry – enhanced by a steadily growing supply of trucks provided by the Americans and British under the 1941 Lend-Lease Act* – had given Stalin’s forces an advantage that was irreversible.
* Between 1941 and 1945, under the Lend-Lease scheme, the US delivered more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks as well as 12,000 armoured vehicles to the Red Army. The great majority of these vehicles arrived in late 1943 and 1944. They played an important part in accelerating the Soviet advance on all fronts but not to the extent
Seizing the initiative, his armies pressed on, driving Army Group South before them. By November, despite Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy, which entailed the wholesale destruction of every square kilometre of territory to a depth of forty kilometres along the east bank of the Dnieper, four of the ten Soviet Fronts – the 1st, 2nd 3rd and 4th Ukrainian – had established bridgeheads at several critical points in the south, retaking Kiev in the process. Facing what he regarded as a ‘critical state of affairs’,18 Manstein unilaterally ordered the panzers to withdraw to stronger positions 100 kilometres further west and – mindful of Hitler’s limitless capacity for self-delusion – left his headquarters at Vinnitsa (Vinnytsia) to fly to the Führer’s Wolfsschanze headquarters in Poland to explain his decision.
He arrived on 4 January, armed with a reputation for being assertive and outspoken. At least by his own account, he lived up to that billing. In the presence of Hitler’s egregiously craven clique of staff officers, he warned the Führer that ‘if the position here were not cleared up once and for all, the entire southern wing of the eastern front would be in mortal peril, and the Southern Army Group and Army Group A would ultimately meet their end in Rumania or on the Black Sea’.19 He urged Hitler to recognize that only a strategic retreat and a radical redistribution of his forces – which still numbered more than 570,000 men – would save them from further, potentially fatal, mauling. But his commander-in-chief, who found it virtually impossible to distinguish between a strategic withdrawal and a humiliating defeat, refused point-blank to countenance Manstein’s proposal. Seeking to add weight to his decision that Army Group South had to ‘hold the line’, Hitler surmised quixotically and without any tangible evidence that Stalin’s opportunistic partnership with the Western Allies would soon fall apart, which in turn would ease the pressure on the Ostheer. When the field marshal changed
that the head of the joint chiefs, General George Marshall was to claim later in 1944, when he declared that ‘If Russia suddenly lost Lend-Lease the Nazis could still probably defeat her.’ For details, see Hubert P. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941–1945, Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 99, and for the Marshall quote, ibid., p. 139.
tack to ask for reinforcements for his weary and depleted forces, Hitler told him that this was not possible. He could not spare any divisions from Army Group Centre, which was already hard-pressed, or from the northern front, for fear that this would prompt Finland to defect and thereby threaten the ability of the Kriegsmarine (German navy) to access the Baltic Sea; it was also out of the question to withdraw forces from western Europe, where his troops were preparing defensive positions from which to confront an expected Anglo-American invasion across the English Channel.
Frustrated by his failure to make headway in the presence of Hitler’s obsequious advisors, Manstein asked for a private audience with the Führer. Hitler consented. With only Kurt Zeitzler, Chief of the Army General Staff, in attendance, Manstein asked for permission to speak freely. Hitler gave his assent, although, according to the field marshal, his manner ‘if not actually icy, was certainly distant’.20
Twice before in similar meetings (in February and September 1943) the field marshal had ventured an oblique but respectful criticism of Hitler’s military leadership. It had not gone down well. Now he put his job on the line by saying bluntly, ‘One thing we must be clear about, mein Führer, is that the extremely critical situation we are now in cannot be put down to the enemy’s superiority alone, great though it is. It is also due to the way in which we are led.’
Hitler was incensed:
He stared at me with a look which made me feel he wished to crush my will to continue. I cannot remember a human gaze ever conveying such willpower. In his otherwise coarse face, the eyes were probably the only attractive and certainly the most expressive feature, and now they were boring into me as if to force me to my knees . I still went on talking, however, and told Hitler that things simply could not go on under the present type of leadership.
He added unambiguously – as he had intimated at the two previous meetings – that the Führer should appoint both a ‘thoroughly responsible’ chief of staff on whom to rely for all matters of grand strategy and policy and a fully independent commander-in-chief on the eastern front. At this Hitler burst out, ‘Even I cannot get the field
marshals to obey me! Do you imagine, for example, that they would obey you any more readily? If it comes to the worst, I can dismiss them. No one else would have the authority to do that.’21 Manstein did not back off, retorting drily that, for his part, he had never found any difficulty in securing obedience to his orders. This insolence was too much for Hitler, who abruptly terminated the meeting. Manstein returned to his headquarters left with little choice but to reap the whirlwind of his Führer’s decision to launch Operation Barbarossa in June 1941: a land war on two fronts.
The Ten Fronts
Stalin felt no need to deliver himself of a New Year message exulting in past and prospective triumphs; indeed, unlike Hitler, he felt no need to deliver a New Year message at all. As the Red Army’s commander-in-chief, he had presided over the hard-won victories of 1943 and the subsequent liberation of almost every part of Russia. It was all but inevitable that in due course the enemy would also be driven from every region of the Soviet Union and, thereafter, that the future of eastern Europe would almost certainly be his to determine. His confidence was boundless – and with good reason.
The two dictators had many similarities but, on the battlefield in 1944, the differences between them were of greater moment. Like Hitler, Stalin was a mass murderer, as brutal and no less ruthless. Similarly, he did not care how many died for his cause; the lives of others meant nothing to either of them. But unlike Hitler, he had an almost inexhaustible supply of men to throw into battle to replace those millions who had fallen. Despite losing 8 million soldiers in the first two and a half years of the war, the Red Army could afford to lose another 1.5 million and a further 500,000 incapacitated by wounds or sickness and still maintain a front-line strength of more than 6 million throughout 1944.1 In contrast, OKW, which had deployed a little over 3 million men on the eastern front at the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, was unable to maintain even that number by 1944, and was reduced to replacing the fallen with raw recruits, many of whom were unfit, ill-trained, too old, or poorly armed, and often all four. German equipment may have been technologically more sophisticated than the Soviet equivalent but it was also more temperamental. In contrast, the Red Army’s weaponry – which poured off the Russian production lines at a faster rate than those of the Reich – was rugged, functional and reliable, a disparity that gave Stalin’s generals a decisive edge in operation after operation. But this
was far from being the only relevant factor in the Soviet Union’s superiority on the battlefield.
Like Hitler, Stalin was clear about his objectives. Unlike Hitler, he had good grounds for believing these were attainable. Moreover, also unlike Hitler, he had learned from his mistakes. While the Führer imposed his unrelenting vision on those unhappy generals who had lost faith in the triumph of their leader’s Wille (will), Stalin had come to recognize that it was possible both to regard himself as the presiding genius and still allow his senior generals to think for themselves.* As Supreme Commander, he still exercised ultimate authority and he did not shrink from intervening personally, but, with his armies on the offensive, he was far less prone to overrule their collective wisdom. As the German forces sank ever deeper into the quagmire that Hitler – with the full support of his most senior commanders in OKW and OKH – had created for them in 1941, the Red Army’s combination of self-reliance and respect for the ultimate authority of the commanderin-chief had accelerated its relentless progress along the entire line, not only in the south but in the centre and north as well.
By January 1944 – the start of the third and final period of the war, as it was regarded by Moscow† – the operational licence that Stalin granted his generals had already proved indispensable. It would be even more valuable in the months ahead. Despite the successes of the past year, the Stavka realized that the momentum could not be sustained over such a wide front with ever-lengthening supply lines. As the Chief of the Operations Directive, General Sergei Shtemenko, a key member of the Stavka’s inner council and also head of its operations directorate, was to record, ‘Military reality forced us to abandon
* This was in contrast to his behaviour before Operation Barbarossa, when he adamantly refused to accept compelling evidence that a German invasion was imminent, or soon afterwards, when he refused to allow the abandonment of Kiev, which resulted in a German encirclement and a massive number of casualties.
† In Soviet historiography, the first phase ran from 22 June 1941 (when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa) to 18 November 1942 (when the Red Army ceased to be on the defensive); the second phase started on 19 November 1942, which marked the start of the Soviet counter-offensive, and lasted until the end of 1943, when Soviet troops reached the Dnieper river in the Ukraine.
use of simultaneous offensives and replace them with powerful consecutive operations more suitable to the new situation.’2 This strategy entailed delivering massive blows on narrow fronts at different times to ‘fracture’ the enemy’s defences with the deployment of tanks, artillery, aviation and infantry in overwhelming numbers.
In essence this was ‘shock and awe’ with the added and crucial ingredient of surprise. The objective was to leave OKW guessing about where the next blow might fall, forcing front-line commanders to rush units from one threatened sector to another but usually too late to shore up defences that had already been breached. This tactical flexibility could hardly have been in sharper contrast to Hitler’s ‘hold the line’ rigidities, which were to leave his armies floundering in a succession of ill-fated last stands. As one Soviet military historian was to put it, ‘The Hitlerite command, disoriented on the strategic situation . . . was forced to conduct large-scale strategic regrouping, throwing its reserve from one sector to another. However, it could not save the situation.’3
The Stavka’s grand strategic plan for 1944 gave all ten Red Army Fronts – a 6-million-strong force – distinct but mutually reinforcing roles. Taken together, their campaigns in the north, the centre and the south were designed not only to drive the Nazi armies from every part of the Soviet Union but also to open the way for a massive assault through eastern and central Europe to the very gates of Berlin. To achieve this would require a remarkable degree of co-ordination at every level and between every command. In the north, the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts were to retake Novgorod and Leningrad and then, in co-ordination with the 2nd Baltic Front, drive Army Group North’s armies back to the south and west until the Baltic States had been recovered. In the centre, the 1st Baltic, Western and Belorussian Fronts were respectively to mount three-pronged assaults on the German strongholds of Vitebsk, Bobruisk and Rogachev, a battlefront that ran for some 260 kilometres along a north–south axis on the western side of the Belorussian border with the Soviet Motherland. These operations were to culminate in a massive pincer movement to retake Minsk, some 300 kilometres to the west, thereby driving Army Group Centre out of Belorussia, or ‘White Russia’ (Belarus), altogether.
In the south, the Stavka’s objective was to expel Army Group South from the Ukraine and to isolate and destroy Army Group A in the Crimean Peninsula, recovering Sevastopol in the process. This was to be the most far-reaching campaign of the first months of 1944 and it was the first to get underway.
The Dnieper– Carpathian Offensive, as it was called, was as massive as it was ambitious. It stretched along a 1,200-kilometre front to a depth of 450 kilometres. Between them, the four Ukrainian Fronts were to mount ten distinct operations that were sometimes sequential, sometimes in parallel and sometimes overlapping, designed to leave the German armies fighting desperately against the odds.
The first of these multi-pronged operations – the Zhitomir–Berdichev Offensive – was led by the 1st Ukrainian Front. It was swift, surgical and very expensive. The speed and depth of Vatutin’s offensive owed much to the fact that, with a total of 750,000 men at his disposal,4 his forces greatly outnumbered the 4th Panzer Army in men and weaponry. But it was also the result of the Soviet commander’s battle plan. Rather than attacking along a broad front, he marshalled his assault forces in depth, advancing along a narrow axis to scythe a path through the thinly protected German defences, overrunning the 4th Panzer Army’s rear positions and thereby breaking up any nascent counterattack. But success came at a high price. By the time the three-week operation was over on 14 January, Vatutin had suffered 100,000 casualties including 20,000 fatalities. Nonetheless, they had established a new forty-kilometre front only sixty-odd kilometres from Manstein’s headquarters at Vinnitsa. With the fall of Zhitomir on New Year’s Eve and Berdichev five days later, Manstein had no option but to withdraw his headquarters to the comparative safety of Ternopil, more than 200 kilometres further west. The field marshal was not immune to the symbolic as well as the tactical significance of this decision: in his own mind every step back placed the Reich – to which, as a loyal Nazi, his commitment was unequivocal – in greater peril and the responsibility for this lay less with him and his men than with the Führer. It did not augur well for the commander’s future.
Vatutin’s soldiers had already witnessed the destruction visited by the Nazis in the course of Operation Barbarossa. They were aware that untold millions of their fellow citizens had already been victims of the Nazi invasion; they had seen the bombs that rained from the skies, the shells and rockets that obliterated entire communities, and they had been told about the flamethrowers that indiscriminately incinerated homesteads, churches and synagogues. They had relatives or friends who had been subjected to ‘collective punishment’ for appearing to sympathize – a look would suffice – with anyone who challenged, or might seek to sabotage, the right of the invaders to occupy their lands. Earlier in the war, the essayist and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg sought to harness the anguish and outrage this provoked. In widely publicized diatribes in the pages of Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the official newspaper of the Soviet armed forces, which was widely read by the troops, he sanctified hatred as a weapon of war:
Hate loads our rifles for us, hate drives us into the attack. We never knew it was possible to hate so much . . . the Germans are not human beings . . . Let us kill! If you haven’t killed a German in the course of the day, your day has been wasted. If you don’t kill the German, he will kill you. If you can’t kill a German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet! If you have killed one German, kill another: nothing gives us so much joy as German corpses. Your mothers say to you: kill the German! Your children beg of you: kill the German! Your country groans and whispers: kill the German! Don’t miss him! Don’t let him escape! Kill!5
By 1944, though, sentiments of that kind had become so ingrained that such crude incitement was barely necessary. In a struggle where the rules of warfare had long ago been formally disavowed by OKW, hatred engendered at best callousness, at worst cold-blooded savagery. It affected those with the highest level of cultural education as well as those who had been conditioned by poverty to a brutish existence under the alien protection of the Soviet state.*
* Both the Soviet Union and Germany had ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of the wounded and sick. This commitment was blatantly ignored
On 15 January the art scholar Boris Suris reached the town of Malevanka, a little over 200 kilometres west of Kiev. His unit had been given responsibility for a group of German prisoners of war, one of whom at least was wounded. Suris was ordered to search his belongings. He picked out what he described as ‘something like a pocket chapel, a kind of Gothic box with Saint Mary, rosary and cross’. The man explained, ‘Es ist mein Soldatenglück.’* Suris retorted, ‘Well, man, your luck is rather shitty, don’t you think, as you have been wounded in your balls?’ Then, as though in afterthought, he continued:
If a prisoner is gravely wounded and gives no valuable evidence, it’s not worth taking him to the higher-up headquarters . . Snow, night, low shrubs. He is a young and healthy fellow but he is barely able to breathe as he’s got four bullets sitting in his chest. They interrogated him casually and then led him away. He was told that they were taking him to the field hospital. It is very hard to walk but it isn’t far. He is a medical student, he knows that his wounds aren’t lethal. He is just extremely tired. He sits down to rest on the edge of a small trench and looks indifferently at his guards. One of them, in a white sheepskin coat, goes aside to relieve himself, then takes out his pistol, a German Parabellum, and checks if it is loaded. The German receives the fifth bullet in his eye. He does not utter a sound and remains lying there with his face up, his mouth open: he hadn’t had time to scream. He is lying in the snow in his white camouflage suit.
One of the executioners said, ‘The cold is fierce, he will go stiff soon. It won’t be possible to pull off his boots.’ German military boots were prized by Russian foot soldiers. It made sense to remove them straight away. To detach them from a frozen corpse involved by OKW and OKH during the planning of Operation Barbarossa. Although Soviet troops often killed wounded German captives, many who survived subsequently paid tribute to the care administered to them by Red Army doctors. In the course of the war, Soviet POWs suffered far more than their German counterparts, most notably those who had been wounded on the battlefield. * Crudely translated as a soldier’s ‘lucky charm’ or ‘talisman’.
hacking or sawing off both legs and then thawing them in front of a fire. Suris concluded his diary entry for that day with the words of one of his comrades: ‘Let’s go and drink tea.’6
A few days earlier, Lieutenant Arkady Lykov, a theatre designer by profession, was initiated into a similar rite. He had joined the Red Army as a sergeant. According to the military surgeon Konstantin Boldin, his leadership skills and personal courage would have guaranteed his rapid promotion save for the fact that he had been wounded four times already and spent long spells in hospital as a result. His compensation was to be given a staff job as aide-de-camp to Colonel Zubarev, the 340th Division’s commanding officer.
Zubarev had summoned him to witness an interrogation. Among the prisoners were two men with their hands bound behind their backs. According to Lykov, one was ‘a giant with a fat mug’ and the other ‘a small skinny chap’. Zubarev said, ‘Arkady! These are Vlasov’s men. We haven’t found a common language with them, so we are finished talking here. Take them out.’ Andrey Vlasov had been a senior general in the Red Army, a holder of the Order of Lenin, renowned for his role in the defence of Moscow in the winter of 1941. The following year he had been taken prisoner when his 2nd Shock Army was encircled at Leningrad. In captivity he had apparently acquired a loathing for Stalinism stronger than his aversion to Nazism. A year later, in Smolensk, he announced the formation of a Russian Liberation Army (RLA or ROA) but, on account of Hitler’s abhorrence of ‘sub-humans’, it lacked any formal status within the Wehrmacht for the next two years, serving merely as a rallying cry for Soviet deserters to put themselves at the service of the Third Reich.* In the meantime, ‘Vlasov’s Army’ was little more than a rag-tag unit composed largely of POWs and anti-Soviet White Russian émigrés who were poorly armed and offered little military threat. As Nazi collaborators, however, they were loathed with particular venom by their captors. Lykov had little doubt about what Zubarev now required of him.
* It was not until the autumn of 1944 that Hitler was persuaded formally to recognize the Russian Liberation Army, by which time it was too late for it to serve any useful purpose on the battlefield.