Armageddon - Max Hastings [353]
The grotesque comedies precipitated by the Red Army’s addiction to alcohol continued even now. On the night of 2 May, the Russian commandant of Lodz became drunk and ordered the city’s sirens to be switched on to celebrate the fall of Berlin. This caused panic. Anti-aircraft gunners opened fire, believing there was an air raid, which in turn provoked a flight of civilians. Russian soldiers manning roadblocks saw cars and civilians hastening towards them and supposed themselves under attack. They began shooting, killing and wounding dozens of people. The NKVD arrested the commandant.
Many Russians found in the service of the Wehrmacht were summarily dispatched. “Vlassov’s men were kicked to death on the spot,” said Gennady Ivanov. “In general, we tried to persuade men not to kill prisoners, but it was very hard. We were living an existence in which people’s lives had absolutely no value. All that seemed important was to stay alive and look after oneself.” A day or two before the end, Valentin Krulik was ordered to take twenty-five men to accept the surrender of a large body of Germans waiting in their trucks down the road. When he reached the column, he was alarmed to find himself among so many fully armed enemy soldiers. He gestured the German column to follow him into the Russian lines and walked ahead of them until they reached a field headquarters. “What’s in the trucks?” an officer demanded. “Germans,” answered the lieutenant. “Then get them out of the vehicles, and take them 500 metres into the fields.” Krulik never asked what happened to the prisoners, but he guessed.
There were anguished protests from German communists that when they joyfully revealed themselves to their Soviet deliverers they were treated no better than Nazis. Yelena Kogan, the NKVD interpreter in Berlin, saw a man standing with his pregnant wife shouting: “Hooray! The filthy fascists have been smashed by the workers!” His Soviet listeners responded scathingly: “Where were all you German workers when Germany invaded Russia?” Vasily Filimonenko felt no trace of pity for the Germans. “Let us not kid ourselves—they had attacked our country. They deserved everything they got.” The son of dirt-poor, illiterate peasants from a village near Novgorod, he had fought for four long years. His seventeen-year-old sister Evdokia had died as a nurse at Stalingrad. He was outraged, much later, when Germany was allowed to build a war memorial in Russia, “on land steeped in our blood. It is not a matter of vengeance, but of justice, the memory of the devastating pain of our country. For the sake of all our people who died, the war crimes of Germany can never be forgiven.”
Yelena Kogan said: “What the Red Army did in Germany was the darkest stain on its record in the war.” As the first revelations of Russian behaviour, of the reign of terror sweeping the east, began to seep through to the Western allies, many American and British soldiers were baffled. Since 1941, they had been urged to think so warmly of their ally “Uncle Joe.” Captain David Fraser wrote cynically: “The British people were surprised and shocked at that time to discover that many European peoples regarded the Soviet regime and the Red Army with a horror and alarm greater than that previously aroused by Nazi Germany. Any sympathy with the victims of the Bolsheviks . . . smacked of incipient leniency to the Germans.”
Dorothea Goesse, wife of an Austrian officer of the Wehrmacht’s Cossacks, stood in the middle of the border town of Klagenfurt and watched the British Army march in. Then, from the opposite direction, she saw approaching a column of Yugoslav communist partisans: “They looked like Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves.” She remembered