The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [318]
Although Zhukov was relegated after the war to a series of minor commands by a suspicious and jealous Stalin, his eminence and popularity in the West did at least allow him to escape the fate of 135,056 other innocent Red Army soldiers and officers, who were condemned by military tribunals for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’. A further 1.5 million Soviet soldiers who had surrendered to the Germans were transported to the Gulag or labour battalions in Siberia.
On 24 June 1945 an enormous victory parade was held in Red Square, in which over 200 captured Nazi standards were laid on the ground outside Lenin’s tomb, with Stalin standing on the balcony above. The scene outdid anything from Ancient Rome, with the mass of enemy banners – which can be seen today in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow – laid at the feet of the all-powerful conqueror. There can be no doubt, despite the numbers killed, who was the greatest territorial victor of the Second World War. For Britain, the victory brought near-bankruptcy, national exhaustion and years of grinding austerity. The British Empire, until then the proudest on earth since Ancient Rome, and for which Churchill himself had explicitly fought, had to be dissolved, with India being granted independence exactly two years after the end of the war against Japan. France also lay in the dust for over a decade. Nor did the war add any territorial acquisitions to the United States, which wished for none. Yet the war left the USSR battered but militarily supreme, in control not only of the whole of her pre-war territory, but also that of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, the eastern half of Germany and large parts of Austria, including Vienna. Yugoslavia and Finland were effectively client states, and a Communist insurgency in Greece might easily have turned that country into one too. When Stalin visited the tomb of King Frederick the Great of Prussia during the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, well inside the Russian zone of control, it was pointed out to him that no tsar had ever extended the Russian Empire so far westwards. His gruff reply: ‘Alexander 1 rode through Paris.’
Germany, a nation that had unleashed no fewer than five wars of aggression in the seventy-five years after 1864, needed to have the warlike instinct burnt out of her soul. Only the horrors and humiliations of 1945 – Germany’s ‘Year Zero’ – could achieve that. The macabre final scenes had to be played out, with Goebbels reading Thomas Carlyle’s Frederick the Great to Hitler in the bunker as the Red Army closed in. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Heydrich’s successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the propagandist Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg and the six others could be hanged at Nuremberg, but Hitler could only die by one hand to make his defeat complete: his own. ‘The destruction and human misery in 1945 is barely describable in its scale,’ the historian of the German war economy records.109 Some 40 per cent of German males born between 1920 and 1925 were dead or missing when the war ended; eleven million Wehrmacht soldiers were in POW camps, and some of those in Russia were not destined to return for up to twelve years; 14.16 million ethnic Germans were forced out of their homes in eastern and central Europe, with 1.71 million dying in the process. In some major German cities, over half the housing stock had been rendered uninhabitable; hunger hit a population that until the autumn of 1944 had not wanted for food.110 Hitler would not have cared about any of this, of course, as the German people had by their very defeat shown themselves unworthy of his leadership. Had he not warned them in his recorded radio address of 24 February 1945: ‘Providence shows no mercy to weak nations, but recognizes the right of existence only to sound and strong nations’?
The remains of Hitler, Eva Braun and the Goebbels family (Joseph and