Armageddon - Max Hastings [92]
Alexandr Klein, a Red Army officer captured by the Germans, escaped back to the Russian lines, where he faced an interrogation characteristic of Soviet paranoia:
Suddenly the Major raised himself sharply, and asked, “Can you prove that you are Jewish?”
I smiled, embarrassed, and said that I could—by taking off my trousers.
“And you are saying that the Germans didn’t know you were a Jew?”
“If they had known, believe me, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
“Ach, you yid mug!” exclaimed the dandy, and kicked me in the lower stomach so hard that I suddenly gasped for breath and fell.
“What are these lies? Tell us, you motherfucker, with what mission were you sent here? Who are you involved with? When did you sell yourself? For how much? How much did you give yourself for, you creature for sale? What is your code name?
Klein was sentenced to death, reprieved, and finally sent for twenty years to one of the worst camps in the Soviet Gulag. Alongside such people as his interrogators were the Western allies seeking to destroy Nazi tyranny.
Stalin issued an order giving high priority to mopping up rear areas behind the Red Army: “All agents, saboteurs and terrorists must be captured, [together with] all those who have served in German police units, as public prosecutors, leaders of local fascist organizations, editors of newspapers and magazines, members of the so-called ‘Russian Liberation Army’ as well as other suspicious elements.” Already 31,089 NKVD troops were operating behind the Soviet front. A further four divisions and four independent regiments—27,900 men plus 1,050 “experienced NKVD specialists”—were sent to reinforce them.
To the very end of the war, German military intelligence continued to dispatch agents behind the Soviet lines. The Germans used Soviet renegades with absolute ruthlessness, parachuting them into Russian-occupied territory in full awareness that their prospects of survival were negligible. Two Armenians in German pay were arrested in the Crimea in July 1944. They were ex-Komsomol members who had been trained by the Germans and dropped into the area with a transmitter. The NKVD used them to play a “radio game” with their German controllers. The prisoners sent some forty signals, announcing the creation of fictitious sabotage groups and demanding more agents and supplies. The Germans swallowed all this, and asked for daily local weather reports. On 23 December, they parachuted another agent into Soviet hands, carrying 427,000 roubles in cash and new radio batteries. Such wretched men, shuttlecocks between such adversaries, could expect mercy from neither.
IN THE WINTER of 1944, Churchill felt isolated in his struggle against Stalin’s ambitions in eastern Europe. After more than five years of strife in the name of freedom, tens of millions of people were merely to exchange one tyranny for another. Some historians highlight the notorious slip of paper which the prime minister handed to Stalin in Moscow in October, acknowledging Russia’s hegemony in large parts of its conquests. The Soviet dictator casually ticked the note. This exchange represented, say Churchill’s critics, an unworthy and indeed unprincipled acquiescence, which belies his claims as a crusader for east European freedom. Even those Americans who recognized the malevolence of Soviet intentions, such as Harriman, recoiled from Churchill’s apparent willingness to concede much of eastern Europe as a Soviet sphere of influence. The United States deplored the very concept of spheres of influence, whether Russian or British. Its government argued that it was committed to the rights of all peoples everywhere to self-determination.
Yet Churchill perceived himself reluctantly to be accepting some faits accomplis, in order to throw everything into the struggle to save Poland and Greece from Stalin’s maw. Several leading members of the U.S. administration were by now thoroughly alarmed by Soviet behaviour. Their