Inferno - Max Hastings [395]
He turned on the eldest son of the family, demanding, “Stand up. How old are you?” The boy answered, “Twelve.” The Russian said, “About as old as my son would be today. The SS criminals took him from me.” He drew his pistol and aimed it at the boy, provoking frenzied consternation and pleas for mercy from the parents. Finally the Russian said, “No, no, no, ladies and gentlemen. I will not shoot. But you must admit, I have enough reasons to do so. There is so much that screams for revenge.” This encounter ended without bloodshed, because the Russian protagonist was unusually enlightened; many other such meetings climaxed in screams, horrors, sobbing women, wrecked homes, mutilated bodies.
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Stalin was untroubled by the behaviour of his soldiers towards the Germans—or to their supposedly liberated slaves. The Soviets saw no shame, such as burdens Western societies, about the concept of revenge. The war had been fought chiefly on Russian soil. The Russian people had endured sufferings incomparably greater than those of the Americans and British. As conquerors, the Germans had behaved barbarously, their conduct rendered the more base because they spoke so much of honour and professed adherence to civilised values. Now the Soviet Union exacted a terrible punishment. The German nation had brought misery on the world, and in 1945 it paid. The price of having started and lost a war against a tyranny as ruthless as Stalin’s was that vengeance was exacted on terms almost as merciless as those Hitler’s minions had imposed on Europe since 1939.
In those days there were tens of thousands of suicides throughout eastern Germany. Liselotte Grunauer, a sixteen-year-old, recorded in her diary: “The pastor shot himself and his wife and daughter … Mrs. H. shot her two sons and herself and slit her daughter’s throat … Our teacher Miss K. hanged herself; she was a Nazi. The local party leader S. shot himself and Mrs. N. took poison. It’s a blessing that there is no gas at present, otherwise some more of us would have taken their own lives.” Nor were Russian depredations confined to Germany: Tito’s partisans were stunned by the excesses of the Red Army in Yugoslavia, even against people fighting for the same cause. Rape, pillage and murder were inflicted with indiscriminate abandon.
The British SOE officer Basil Irwin was astonished to witness the contempt the Soviets displayed towards their allies: “They treated us with no hostility or suspicion, but they treated the partisans like dirt … It was such a shock to [them], who thought here was the welcome they were giving to their brother Slavs and the great Russian army.” When Stalin was taxed with this, he merely shrugged. Milovan Djilas wrote bitterly: “Illusions about the Red Army, and consequently about the communists themselves, were being destroyed.” In Belgrade, Tito protested personally to the local Soviet commander, Korneyev, that his followers were dismayed by the contrast between the correct behaviour of British soldiers and the savagery of the Russians. Korneyev exploded: “I protest most emphatically against the insults being levelled at the Red Army by comparing it with the armies of the capitalist countries!”
In Yugoslavia, as everywhere that Stalin’s soldiers went, the Soviet Union declined—as modern Russia still declines—to acknowledge the crimes committed by those wearing its uniform. Pravda observed sardonically on 22 April 1945: “The British press displays just indignation in reporting the