• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

One among the great host of dispossessed German women wrote, ‘The world is a very lonely place without family, friends, or even the familiarity of a home.’ She learned the meaning of desperation when she saw other housewives, frantic for warm clothing in the icy weather, dash past soldiers engaging the Russians with rifles and mortars to reach a Schloss where they had heard there was a garment store, to seize whatever they could lay their hands on. Fleeing with two small children, she herself plumbed a depth of exhaustion wherein she could no longer push uphill the cart carrying their pathetic baggage: ‘I leaned on all our worldly goods and wept bitterly.’ Two passing French PoWs took pity, and helped them over the crest. A few days later, a farmer in whose house she briefly sought refuge urged her to leave her son behind for adoption by himself. ‘He promised me the earth if I would leave him. What future had the child? There, he might have a good and safe home.’ But this mother clung to a reserve of stubborn courage which enabled her to refuse. ‘I had set myself a task – to take the children to safety and see them grow up. How? I did not know. I just tackled each day as it came.’ This little family at last reached the sanctuary of the American lines, but many other such stories lacked happy endings.

The advancing Soviet legions resembled no other army the world had ever seen: a mingling of old and new, Europe and Asia, high intelligence and brutish ignorance, ideology and patriotism, technological sophistication and the most primitive transport and equipment. T-34s, artillery, katyusha rocket-launchers were followed by jeeps, Studebaker and Dodge trucks supplied under Lend-Lease, then by shaggy ponies and columns of horsemen, farm carts and trudging peasants from the remote republics of Central Asia, clad in footcloths and rags of uniform. Drunkenness was endemic. German harmonicas provided musical accompaniment for many units, because they could be played in rattling trucks. The only discipline rigorously enforced was that which required men – and women – to attack, to fight, and to die. Stalin and his marshals cared nothing for the preservation of civilian life or property. When one of Vasilevsky’s officers asked for guidance about the proper response to wholesale vandalism being committed by his men, the commander sat silent for several seconds, then said, ‘I don’t give a fuck. It is now time for our soldiers to issue their own justice.’

Near Toru in Poland one such man, Semyon Pozdnyakov, glimpsed a German soldier in no man’s land between the armies, shuffling towards his own lines, head bent low, wounded right arm held close to his body, his left arm limply dragging a machine-pistol. Pozdnyakov challenged him, shouting, ‘Fritz, halt!’ The German dropped his weapon and raised his left hand in a feeble gesture of surrender. As a group of Russians approached him, they saw blood on the man’s face, and empty, despairing eyes. ‘Hitler kaput,’ he said mechanically. The Russians laughed at the words they now heard so often, and an officer told them to take the man to the rear. ‘Nein! nein!’ said the German, thinking he was to be shot. Pozdnyakov roared at him angrily, ‘Why are you shouting, you half-dead fascist? You’re afraid of death? Didn’t you treat our people the same way? We should finish you off, and be done with you.’ Such was indeed the fate of many Germans, who sought mercy in vain.

Reckless abuse of weapons caused significant numbers of Russians to kill each other in rage or carelessness, to press triggers as readily as their Western counterparts might spit or blaspheme. For all its commanders’ military sophistication, this was a barbarian army, which had achieved things such as only barbarians could. Paradoxically, its educated elements were driven by a sense of righteousness greater than any that stirred American or British soldiers. They cared nothing for Stalin’s 1939 devil’s bargain with Hitler, nor for Soviet aggression against Poland, Finland, Romania. They