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for German industrial production, emptying whole factories of their workforces, provoking a flood of complaints on this score from regional gauleiters, and driving another nail into the coffin of Speer’s armament production. Keitel reminded all commands that the Volkssturm should be deployed only when there was an immediate local threat. But he continued to urge the virtues of Germany’s citizen defenders: “The VS consists of men of all ages engaged in the defence of the Reich, many of whom have suffered severely from the terror-bombing, and most of whom have long experience of important war work. They have been mobilized to assist the defence of the Reich in its most dangerous hour.” In justice to the Nazis, they committed the Volkssturm in exactly the circumstances for which the British trained and prepared their own Home Guard, “Dad’s Army,” in the event of a German invasion in 1940. The Volkssturm’s military value proved small, not least because few weapons were available for its units. In the battle for Germany, some teenagers fought with frightening courage. But most of the Volkssturm’s old men wanted no part of the struggle, and drifted home as soon as they dared.

Even as the front collapsed before the Russian onslaught, however, some Germans impressed the Red Army by the tenacity of their resistance. A Pole quoted a Wehrmacht prisoner saying: “A terrible end is better than terror without end.” A report to Beria from 1st Belorussian Front declared: “There are still a lot of Germans fanatically confident of Germany’s victory.” The same document complained that resistance was being encouraged by the promiscuity with which some Soviet units were slaughtering German prisoners:

Soldiers of 1st Polish Army are known to be particularly ruthless towards Germans. There are many places where they do not take captured German officers and soldiers to the assembly points, but simply shoot them on the road. For instance, [in one place] 80 German officers and men were captured, but only two were brought to the PoW assembly point. The rest were shot. The regimental commander interrogated the two, then released them to the Deputy Chief of Reconnaissance, who shot these men also. The deputy political officer of 4th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Urbanovich, shot nine prisoners who had voluntarily deserted to our side, in the presence of a divisional intelligence officer.

The NKVD’s objections to such practises were practical rather than moral, but the killing of prisoners had plainly attained epidemic proportions if it provoked a protest to Moscow.

Yelena Kogan was an interpreter who spoke fluent German and was often charged with interrogations:

For everyone else, a German was simply an enemy with whom it was impossible to have any human contact. But I could talk to them. I saw in their eyes their awful uncertainty about their own fate, as they wondered if they would be shot. The younger Germans were professional warriors. But the older ones had families, civilian jobs, some experience of the world. I tried to find a common denominator among the fascists, and I usually failed. It seemed to me that they were simply victims of their country’s madness. I only met one real fascist in the whole war—in the spring of 1942, a German navigator who bailed out when his Heinkel was hit while he was bombing us. I asked him: “Didn’t it bother you to bomb defenceless women?” He shrugged: “It was fun.”

By January 1945 the Soviet Air Force, which had begun the war with pitifully primitive aircraft, had become a formidable ground-support arm, equipped with machines as good as anything its enemies possessed. As the Luftwaffe’s squadrons declined steeply in both quantity and quality, those of Russia had improved dramatically. Pilot training was never of the same standard as that available to British and American aircrew, who flew for a year or longer before being committed to combat. Alexandr Markov, a boyish-looking twenty-one-year-old from the Caucusus, spent three and a half years in pilot training among 800 other air cadets at