Armageddon - Max Hastings [373]
Georgi Semenyak, who survived the ordeal on the concentration-camp barges in the Baltic, finally returned home on 5 December 1945. His parents had heard no word of him since 1941. He would have relished an opportunity to serve some time guarding German prisoners, but was discharged as unfit for further military duty. He was dismayed to learn that, as an ex-prisoner of the fascists, he was ineligible to go to university. After experiencing great difficulties, he found work as an electrician, but was discharged when his employers discovered that he was an ex-PoW. For the next forty-five years, he performed menial jobs in an industrial plant, all that were available to him, as a “person of the second sort.”
Captain Vasily Legun, a Soviet bomber pilot held prisoner by the Germans for two years, woke one morning at the work camp in Czechoslovakia where he spent his last weeks as a prisoner and found the German guards gone. He and others broke into the camp armoury, seized weapons and took over the local town, some twelve miles from Prague. When they met the Red Army, they were enlisted to round up German stragglers, which involved them in some firefights which continued until 17 May. Then he and the other prisoners were flown to join some 30,000 other former PoWs at an NKVD screening camp in the Ukraine. They endured weeks of brutal interrogation about their captivity, sometimes by day and sometimes by night, once stripped naked. “It was worse than the German camps, because we had no idea what would happen to us. We were now prisoners of the country we had fought to defend. We were all treated as traitors. The experience killed our spirit.” NKVD agents visited Legun’s apartment in Moscow. His wife had been told that he was dead, and now all his personal property and papers were removed. After four months, he was released from captivity, but his papers too contained the fatal words about his former PoW status. For many years he was unable to gain proper employment. He became a gold prospector, eking out a living in the remote northern wastelands of Russia. His Party membership was not restored until 1957.
SIXTY YEARS ONWARDS, any civilized person must react with horror to the human consequences of the catastrophe that befell the German people in the last months of the war. The battle for the Third Reich cost the lives of something like 400,000 Germans killed in ground fighting and by aerial bombardment in 1945 alone, together with anything up to two million who died in the flight from the east. Eight million became homeless refugees. Yet it is hard to conceive any less dreadful conclusion to the nightmare Hitler and his nation had precipitated. When the German people failed to depose their leader, when they made the choice, conscious or otherwise, to fight to the end, they condemned Germany to the fate which it suffered in the closing months of the Second World War. Japan’s surrender in August 1945, before the Allies were obliged to invade its mainland, undoubtedly spared it from death and destruction on a scale to match that which took place in Germany. It is relevant to observe that Japanese casualties from the dropping of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which precipitated that surrender, were vastly smaller than those suffered by the Germans in the struggle to defend their country, and in the flight from the invaders.
In 1918, the German government had surrendered while its armies were still fighting exclusively upon foreign soil. Ordinary Germans suffered severely from famine, and two million of the Kaiser’s soldiers had died upon the battlefield. But the physical fabric of their country remained almost untouched. The foundations of National Socialism were built upon the myth that the German