Armageddon - Max Hastings [293]
It is interesting to contrast the policies of the rival tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler towards their captives. Both were indifferent to humanitarian issues, yet the former proved much more pragmatic. The Soviets realized that they could not allow prisoners to starve in excessive numbers if they were to extract useful service from them. Even Beria recognized that, unless German prisoners ate, they could not work. In September 1944, around 2,895 German PoWs died of starvation in NKVD camps. For the first ten days of October the figure was 1,366. The death rate caused the Russians to conclude that a marginal adjustment of rationing policy was necessary. Beria reported to Stalin: “We have taken steps to improve feeding of PoWs, to increase the productivity of their labour, with the coal industry being given first priority.”
Hitler’s servants, however, seemed content to allow their slaves to starve to death. Captain Vasily Legun weighed 189 pounds when his Yak-4 was shot down over the German lines in the Ukraine in September 1943, and 92 pounds a year later. He was imprisoned at a camp near Mühlberg with some 2,000 other Soviet aircrew. He expected to die there, like so many others. The twenty-seven-year-old son of a Siberian peasant family, Legun was suffering from a badly infected leg. The Russian doctor in the camp wanted to amputate it. But one day, beside his bed, the pilot found two American PoWs from the neighbouring compound, one of them a B-17 navigator. They opened a blanket they had brought, to reveal a jumble of wonderful things: chocolate, canned milk, marmalade. Legun wanted to eat everything at once, but the doctor warned him: “Food can be your enemy, too.” He was given a modest ration each day through the weeks that followed. He gained a little weight, and his leg healed.
The only common ground between the Russians and Americans in the camp was that neither were free to leave. Legun and his comrades wore rags, and indeed depended on seizing the clothing of the dead to cover themselves at all. The Americans possessed uniforms, received Red Cross parcels and letters from home, did no work. The Russians were employed on stone-breaking and enjoyed no contact with their homeland. In their despair, they began to dig an escape tunnel, and had advanced thirty yards towards the perimeter fence when a spring thaw came, causing the excavation to collapse. In February 1945, a large group of Russians escaped. Most were brought back and executed in front of the other prisoners. After that, the survivors waited passively for death or deliverance.
“In the camps, many people died of despair, not hunger,” said Nikolai Maslennikov. He was captured near the Peterhof outside Leningrad in 1942 at the age of seventeen, after a childhood dogged by the fact that his family’s papers were stamped with the fatal words which indicated that they were “persons of the second sort,” the brand laid upon the politically suspect. Maslennikov’s father had once visited England and bought two English suits. In consequence, young Nikolai was forbidden to join the Communist Youth Movement, the Komsomol, and was unable to follow his ambition to study aerodynamics.
His participation in the defence of Leningrad was impeded by the fact that, like many of his fellow recruits to the Red Army, he lacked arms. Most of his unit was killed without the means of firing a shot. He fled homewards to join his parents. The Germans overran their village and rounded up all young men of military age. Maslennikov began his career as a Nazi prisoner working in factories making aircraft parts.