All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [393]
British SOE officer Basil Irwin was astonished to witness the contempt the Soviets displayed towards their allies: ‘They treated us with no hostility or suspicion, but they treated the partisans like dirt … It was such a shock to [them], who thought here was the welcome they were giving to their brother Slavs and the great Russian army.’ When Stalin was taxed with this, he merely shrugged. Milovan Djilas wrote bitterly: ‘Illusions about the Red Army, and consequently about the communists themselves, were being destroyed.’ In Belgrade, Tito protested personally to the local Soviet commander, Korneyev, that his followers were dismayed by the contrast between the correct behaviour of British soldiers and the savagery of the Russians. Korneyev exploded: ‘I protest most emphatically against the insults being levelled at the Red Army by comparing it with the armies of the capitalist countries!’
In Yugoslavia, as everywhere that Stalin’s soldiers went, the Soviet Union declined – as modern Russia still declines – to acknowledge the crimes committed by those wearing its uniform. Pravda observed sardonically on 22 April 1945: ‘The British press displays just indignation in reporting the atrocities committed by Germans in Buchenwald concentration camp … Soviet people can understand better than anyone else the anger and bitterness, pain and resentment that have now overtaken British public opinion … We saw the enemy for what he was a long time ago. Our allies have not seen what we have seen. Now they will understand us better, more readily appreciate our insistent demands for the indictment of the fascist butchers.’
Following Hitler’s death, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz assumed the mantle of Führer. He postured in that role for a fortnight, attempting to buy time for German forces to escape westward from the Russians by staging partial capitulations and seeking to parley with the Americans. SS General Karl Wolff had already concluded a unilateral negotiation for the surrender of his army in Italy, signed at Caserta on 29 April. German forces in north-west Germany, Holland and Denmark surrendered to Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath on 4 May. Resistance on the American fronts ended two days later, while the Red Army closed up to the Elbe. The dying continued to the end: Captain Nikolai Belov, whose diary vividly described his experiences in action, had been wounded five times since 1941. On 5 May 1945 he was killed in action.
Patton’s army reached Pilsen and might have advanced to Prague, but the Russians insisted on taking the Czech capital themselves. They finally accomplished this on 11 May, after a disastrous uprising against the Germans by local partisans provoked a final spasm of bloodshed. Meanwhile, a delegation from Dönitz reached Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims on 5 May, seeking an exclusive surrender to the Americans. The Supreme Commander required a simultaneous and unconditional surrender on all fronts, which Gen. Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s senior military adviser, signed on 7 May. The 8th was celebrated by all the Western Allies as VE-Day. Stalin, however, insisted on a further ceremony in Berlin, at which the Russians were full parties. This took place on 8 May, and the 9th thereafter became Russia’s own appointed date of victory: in this, as in so much else, Stalin’s nation chose to march to its own step.
Sporadic exchanges of fire persisted in the east for many weeks, with NKVD troops killing Poles and Ukrainians who refused to accept the substitution of Soviet tyranny for that of the Nazis. British Lt. David Fraser wrote: ‘There was still too much