Armageddon - Max Hastings [372]
Some of the Western sympathy extended to repatriated Russians who fought in Wehrmacht uniform seems misplaced. Appalling atrocities were carried out by Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks and men from the Baltic states under German command in northern Italy, Yugoslavia, Poland, not to mention the Soviet Union. Thousands of Ukrainians and citizens of the Baltic states who served as concentration-camp guards, and were eventually returned to Stalin, must rank low on the roster of those deserving of pity. This should be reserved for millions of other Russians, hapless captives of the Germans, often victims of the concentration camps, on their return to Soviet jurisdiction. They were subjected to the same repatriation procedures as Russians who had actively served the Nazis. Only some 20 per cent were allowed to return home. All Stalin’s citizens who survived captivity were marked for the rest of their lives as suspect persons—“socially dangerous.” Few were permitted to rise or prosper in the post-war Soviet Union.
Genrikh Naumovich survived Mauthausen concentration camp after refusing to join the Vlassov Army fighting with the Germans. He was liberated by the Americans on 5 May, his twenty-second birthday, one of 68,268 inmates who lived. Another 195,000 prisoners had died there. Naumovich spent some weeks at the end of the war driving for a Red Army division’s medical team. Remarkably, he harboured no animosity towards the German people. “The SS and Gestapo were animals. But ordinary German soldiers suffered as much as we did.” When at last Naumovich returned home, his mother fainted. She had always waited for him, but knew nothing of his fate. He was not held in an NKVD screening camp when he returned, but his papers bore the indelible mark of an ex-prisoner. He could find no work. Finally, in despair, he went to the local police chief and demanded to know how he might support himself. The man replied with a sneer: “As a prisoner of the facists, you’re lucky to be allowed to live in this city at all. You can clean shoes on the Nevsky Prospect!” Naumovich finally found work as a mechanic. “I hated Stalin. The very word made me feel sick. The Germans used to say to us: ‘We can do exactly what we like with you, because Stalin has washed his hands of you!’ Now, I believed them. All the prisoners who came home were unjustly treated. Was it their fault that in 1941 they were asked to fight without rifles? Was it their fault that the artillery ran out of shells?”
Eighteen-year-old Viktor Mamontov returned from Belsen to find that among his entire extended family only his mother, a seamstress, survived. He himself was “detained” in Belorussia for many months, constantly interrogated by the NKVD. When finally released in February 1946, he was refused a passport and could get work only on a construction site. His health never fully recovered. Many people who had endured his experience, he said, “started to hate not only the Germans, but each other. Many ex-prisoners drank themselves to death. After the war, it was very hard to live.”
Liberated in Germany by the Americans, seven-year-old Valya Brekeleva and her family of slave labourers went home to Novgorod as non-persons. “Most of the people from our village who went to Latvia survived. But most of those who were sent to Germany had died. For those of us who remained, the suspicion was always there.” Most of her family were killed by one side or the other in the course of the war. Her mother died in 1947, worn out by the struggle to keep her daughters alive. She was thirty-six. Her father completed his sentence for “political crimes” and came home from