Armageddon - Max Hastings [200]
Where civilians were foolish enough to remonstrate about looting, the troops simply torched their homes. Once some Russian women, forced labourers, appeared at Vasily Krylov’s headquarters and began to explain the difference between good and bad local Germans. An officer said roughly: “We don’t have time to start classifying fascists.” The scale of plunder in East Prussia overwhelmed the officers’ 32-pound monthly parcel allowance: “You could hardly send an accordion.” But Krylov’s orderly managed to dispatch a magnificent tea set to his family, and when he himself got home to his collective farm near Novgorod after the war he found his mother and sister wearing clothes he had sent them from East Prussia in January 1945.
The invaders swiftly overran the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg, the vast headquarters complex from which Hitler had directed the operations of his eastern armies. Russian soldiers wandered curiously among the buildings, awed by the sophistication of its defences and bunkers. The German staff and guards were long gone, but in the commandant’s office the occupiers found an order dated 8 January, instructing all personnel that they were bound by a lifelong oath of silence about everything they knew concerning the Führer’s affairs. A Russian flicked curiously through the headquarters telephone directory. Hitler’s extension number, he reported, was inevitably “1.”
Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev’s infantrymen were fascinated by the ghostly emptiness of most East Prussian villages. They kicked open the doors of houses, and found ovens still warm, food on tables. The only people they met were foreign forced labourers on the farms, abandoned among the livestock. Special units following the advance were deputed to herd captured beasts into Russia, to replace the enormous numbers which had perished since 1941. They also herded “liberated” slave labourers into the Red Army, the factories, or—in the case of hundreds of thousands of “suspicious elements”—NKVD camps. Soldiers became warier about looting after early experiences with booby traps, which the retreating Germans had left behind in large quantities, wired to tempting prizes. “Our boys would open a door, we’d hear a loud explosion, and that would be that,” said Lieutenant Alexandr Markov. His artillery unit learned to attach a telephone cable to a door before opening it from a safe distance. But such precautions offered no defence against the Red Army’s terrifying vulnerability to alcohol. Markov’s brigade captured a railway station in which they found a tanker wagon full of neat spirit. Many men were reduced to helpless stupor before the Germans counter-attacked. The unit only narrowly avoided disaster.
The Red Army did not behave with universal brutality. Indeed, many Germans were bewildered by the whimsicality with which they were treated. In one village, local people were praying in church, awaiting their end, as the first occupiers arrived. The villagers were astounded when instead a Soviet officer brought them bread. One German woman marvelled: “The Russians have been here half a day, and we are still alive!” Forward units often behaved in a punctilious, even kindly fashion, but warned local inhabitants: “We can vouch for our people, but not for what is coming behind”—the great undisciplined, wantonly barbaric host which followed the spearheads. It was in East Prussia that the Red Army began to rape women on a scale which surpassed casual sexual desire and reflected atavistic commitment to the violation of an entire society.
At first, it seemed that Königsberg would fall immediately, that the entire defence of East Prussia would collapse. Yet, once again, the Wehrmacht took desperate action. The 372nd Infantry Division, supported by assault guns, was rushed into the line north of the city, and by a margin of minutes