Armageddon - Max Hastings [199]
A Soviet officer describing the emptiness of the countryside said that, when his unit crossed the border into East Prussia, the only civilians they saw were two very old men, “whom,” he added casually, “my soldiers promptly spitted on their bayonets.” It took Marshal Chernyakhovsky a week, together with heavy casualties, to break through the German defences. When he did so, many defenders from the Volkssturm and Volksgrenadier divisions streamed away in rout. Rokossovsky’s men, whose attack had begun on 14 January from the Narew bridgeheads, were already racing forward on Chernyakhovsky’s left. By 23 January, Soviet forces had crossed the rivers Deime, Pregel and Alle, the last natural defensive lines before Königsberg. Four days later, the Russians had almost completed the encirclement of the city. The Germans retained only a narrow corridor to the sea.
It is hard to overstate the naivety of most Russian soldiers. They had never seen indoor sanitation. Nikolai Dubrovsky was an intelligent and educated man, yet when his friend caught venereal disease he was perfectly ready to accept that this represented the work of a special German women’s unit which, Stalin’s people were told, sought sexual relations with their enemies in order to disable them. Major Yury Ryakhovsky never doubted the truth of a rumour at his front headquarters that for capitalistic reasons of their own the Americans were selling vehicles to the German army. The paranoia fundamental to Stalin’s Russia infected millions of Soviet soldiers. Vladimir Gormin’s corporal dragged a ten-year-old East Prussian boy in front of the regimental commander, asserting that he had just seen him poisoning a well. The colonel, with uncharacteristic restraint, told the corporal to give the child a cuff and let him go.
From the first day the Soviets drove into East Prussia, they began to loot on an epic scale. This was a practise institutionalized by the Red Army, which allowed every man to send home a monthly parcel of his spoils. On German soil, the invaders found booty beyond their dreams—food, drink, furniture, livestock, clothing, jewellery. Corporal Anatoly Osminov spotted in a billet one day a soldier playing a piano with his toes, while staring fascinated at his own image in a huge gilt mirror placed on the opposite wall. Soldiers in their white camouflage smocks fought, died and pillaged in a rhythm slowed only by the desperate cold, the chronic difficulties of movement in a world in which men ploughed through the snow with the clumsiness of spacemen.
When Captain Vasily Krylov gazed out on the flat, white plain of East Prussia, he thought that it looked like a beautifully pristine bedsheet. “YOU ARE NOW IN ACCURSED GERMANY,” said a Red Army sign at the border. “ON TO BERLIN!” Krylov was his regiment’s reconnaissance chief. Earlier in the war, he was badly wounded when a German shell landed by his truck, showering his face and eyes with glass from the windscreen. It took a surgeon six months to extract the splinters. He was then recommended for rear-area duty, but preferred to return to the front. As the advance moved deeper into the country, the long truck column of his Katyusha regiment was often slowed by fleeing refugees. As the Russian vehicles forced a passage through the throng, his own men succumbed as readily as those of every other unit to the opportunities for rape and looting. “We did our best to keep control, but it was very hard.” Belated efforts by commanders to restrain soldiers’ excesses were dismissed with contempt. David Samoilov, a poet who