Armageddon - Max Hastings [198]
The Germans had located strongpoints in the cellars of houses commanding crossroads and key strategic points. Some bunkers boasted guns mounted in cupolas. German propaganda slogans had been painted in huge letters on many buildings: “WAR HAS ARRIVED ON OUR DOORSTEP, BUT TILSIT SURVIVES DESPITE THE TERROR”; “SOLDIERS! ALL OUR HOPES NOW REST UPON YOU”; “THE DESTINY OF THE FATHERLAND LIES WITH YOU”; “OUR CITIES CAN BE STILLED, BUT NOT OUR HEARTS.”
A matching message had gone forth to every Soviet soldier of 3rd Belorus-sian Front:
Comrades! You have now reached the borders of East Prussia, and you will now tread that ground which gave birth to the fascist monsters who devastated our cities and homes, slaughtered our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our wives and mothers. The most inveterate of those brigands and Nazis sprang from East Prussia. For many years they have held power in Germany, inspiring its foreign invasions and directing its genocides of alien peoples.
In the days before the Red Army crossed the border, political officers held meetings explicitly designed to promote hatred of the enemy, discussing such themes as “How shall I avenge myself on our German occupiers?” and “An eye for an eye.” Later, when orders came from Moscow to adopt a less savage attitude towards Germans, to encourage surrenders, it was far too late to change an ethos cultivated over years of struggle. “Hatred for the enemy had become the most important motivation for our men,” writes a Russian historian. “Almost every Soviet soldier possessed some personal reason to seek vengeance.”
Early signals to Moscow from advancing Soviet forces reported that the civilian populations of Tilsit, Hurnbigger, Tallin, Rognit and other towns had vanished. Water and electricity were cut off, but the occupiers were gratified to discover houses still well endowed with personal property. Prisoners told Soviet interrogators that the civilians had been evacuated from the forward area several weeks earlier. Russian soldiers, who had never set foot beyond their own homeland, looked in wonderment at the prosperous towns and villages of East Prussia. Many Russian soldiers asked each other: “Why did the Germans want to come to Russia when they had so much here?” Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko said: “German villages looked like heaven compared with ours. Everything was cultivated. There were so many beautiful buildings. They had so much more than we did.” Vladimir Gormin shared his enthusiasm: “Great country! So clean and tidy compared to ours!” Political Departments expressed alarm during the months that followed about the ideological impact upon the Red Army of perceiving the wealth of Germany. This contradicted years of propaganda about the triumph of socialist economics over that of fascism. The spectacle of a rich Germany implied the failure of an impoverished Soviet Union. In the view of some Russians, rage about the wealth of the enemy, in contrast to their own destitution after decades of sacrifice, helps to explain Soviet soldiers’ manic destruction of artefacts of beauty and symbols of riches during the battle for Germany.
Throughout the campaign in the east, an ugly contest persisted between the propaganda arms of the rival tyrannies, to expose each other’s atrocities. Even as the soldiers of Chernyakhovsky and Rokossovsky were killing