Daughters of the KGB (5 page)

Few people in the West knew at the time that, after the Russian invasion of Poland in 1940 and the occupation of the eastern half of the country under the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Stalin had decided to kill some 26,000 Polish officers and civilian intellectuals, held in three concentration camps after being taken prisoner while fighting in uniform against Soviet troops during the invasion. His decision was partially implemented at Katyn, near Smolensk, during April and May 1940, where 4,443 Poles held in the Kosielsk concentration camp on the Polish–Russian border were herded to the edge of mass graves and machine-gunned into them. A further 3,896 officers held in a camp at Kharkov/Kharkiv in Ukraine were also murdered by security troops of the NKVD, one of the several forerunners of the KGB.
¹²
In a way, the most gruesome executions of the captured Poles was effected at the camp of Ostrakhov, where Stalin’s favourite executioner, Vasili M. Blokhin, dressed in a slaughterhouse apron, rubber boots and leather gauntlets before arming himself with a 9mm Walther automatic pistol to shoot up to 250 Polish prisoners in the back of the head inside a specially soundproofed killing room
on each of twenty-eight consecutive nights
. For the shocking total of 6,287 murders in his month’s work, Blokhin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and given a small cash bonus. Also executed at this time were 7,800 other Poles – some for no other reason than being
osadniki
or settlers, whose parents had moved into formerly Russian-occupied regions of their country that were awarded to Poland after the First World War. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned and tortured for no obvious reason at all.
¹³

As far as the Western Allies were concerned, any help that enabled the Poles in Warsaw to hold at bay the German forces razing their city to the ground during August 1944 was also a way of tying down divisions that Hitler could otherwise employ against the advancing Allies in France or the Soviet forces on the eastern front. Churchill therefore desperately tried to gain Roosevelt’s support in the matter, having put in writing to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in 1942 that permanent Soviet occupation of Poland would be a violation of the principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter signed by Roosevelt. Cold-shouldered by the US president, the British prime minister was obliged instead to inform the Free Polish leader General Władysław Anders that Britain could not longer guarantee the territorial integrity of the country on whose behalf it had declared war in 1939.

Like most Poles, Anders had no illusions about Stalin’s intentions after the war, having already personally suffered as a prisoner in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. He warned Churchill that the Red Army advancing into Poland was systematically arresting all Poles in the occupied areas who had shown any resistance
to the Germans
on the grounds that they might also resist the Russian occupation of their country. Many of them were never seen again. Churchill then assured Anders that Britain would not abandon its Polish allies. It was a promise that was not kept by Britain’s post-war governments.
¹⁴

So, Stalin had good reason to think that, after the withdrawal of the British, French and US troops from the western zones of occupied Germany and Austria, the Soviet-occupied zones under their Communist governments controlled in Moscow were bound to subvert, and come to dominate, the western zones when reunified with them, changing the political shape of Europe for ever.

On that balmy autumn night in Sochi, it seemed to the
vozhd
that he was bound to be the victor in the most momentous game of chess to be played out in the twentieth century.

Although it was too late to save the European satellite states from a half-century of state terror, Stalin’s intention to grab Turkish territory and the Dardanelles was blocked by President Truman’s secretary of state informing the Kremlin that such a move would be resisted by the Western Allies even at the risk of starting a third world war. Similarly, when Stalin announced that he was not going to withdraw Soviet occupation forces from northern Iran, he was told in plain language that this would not be accepted by the West. On both occasions he gave way. As Winston Churchill remarked at the time, ‘There is nothing [the Soviets] admire so much as strength.’
¹⁵

Notes

1
.    S. Sebag Montefiore,
Stalin, the court of the Red Tsar
, London, Phoenix 2004, p. 524

2
.    Russia sold its North American colony to the United States in 1867 for $7.2m

3
.    For more detail see Boyd,
Kremlin
, p. 174

4
.    The full story is told in D. Boyd,
De Gaulle, the man who defied six US presidents
, Stroud, The History Press 2014

5
.    Quoted in D. Pryce-Jones,
Paris in the Third Reich
, London, Collins 1981, p. 64

6
.    Boyd,
De Gaulle
, p. 176

7
.    L. Rees,
Behind Closed Doors
, London, BBC Books 2008, p. 130

8
.    T. Hickman,
Churchill
’
s Bodyguard
, London, Headline 2005, pp. 167–74

9
.    Boyd,
Kremlin

10
.  He wished, understandably, to remain anonymous

11
.  Rees,
Behind Closed Doors
, p. 345; also Boyd,
Kremlin
, pp. 160–2

12
.  There were several, of which the longest lived were the Cheka, from the initials of Chrezvychaynaya Kommissiya or Special Commission for combating counter-revolution and sabotage 1917–22; Obedinyonnoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskiye Upravleniye (OGPU) or United State Political Administration 1922–34; Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennykh Dyel (NKVD) or National Commissariat for Internal Affairs 1934–46; Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Dyel (MVD) 1946–54 and Komityet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosty (KGB) or Committee of State Security 1954–89

13
.  Boyd,
Kremlin
, pp. 159–64

14
.  Rees,
Behind Closed Doors
, pp. 294–5

15
.  M. Copeland,
The Real Spy World
, London, Sphere 1978, p. 201

P
ART
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TASI IN
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EMOCRATIC
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EPUBLIC

3

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EUTSCHLAND
U
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USSLAND

Most European national anthems invoke the protection of the Christian God for a sovereign, or declare the ideals of a revolutionary state. Since 1841, the German national anthem, set to music by Haydn, was a claim to own territory west to east ‘from the Meuse to the Memel’ and south to north ‘from the Adige to the Belt’. This has something to do with the origin of the German word for war,
Krieg
, which is the root of
kriegen
, meaning ‘to get’ [territory for expansion of the Fatherland, called
Lebensraum
under Hitler]. However, since the first line is
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
, meaning, ‘Germany above all’, it ought to have been changed in May of 1945 to
Deutschland, Deutschland unter Russland,
at least for the vast stretches of the former Third Reich that lay under Soviet occupation.

Before the guns had fallen silent, on 27 April 1945 Soviet aircraft flew the ‘Ulbricht Group’ of several dozen Moscow-trained German Communists led by Walter Ulbricht to an airfield inside the perimeter of Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s First Byelorussian Army Group to the east of Berlin. A few days later the ‘Ackermann Group’ of German Communists were flown to the First Ukrainian Army Group south of Berlin, commanded by Marshal Ivan Konev. These several dozen puppet functionaries had orders not to set up immediately a Communist government to rule the Soviet Zone of occupation – which would have alarmed the Western Allies – but to lay the ground for the installation of an apparently democratic government, after the Russian zone of occupation had been completely purged by the Soviet administration. On 9 May 1945 – one day after the official end of the war in Western Europe – peace was officially declared between the USSR and those, mostly bombed-out, bewildered and hungry, inhabitants of the Reich who had survived the consequences of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s ill-timed decision to invade the USSR in June 1941.

Three million Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine personnel were held in Soviet camps, thousands of miles away from their homeland, in Siberia and the Soviet Far North. These POWs lived under appalling conditions that were partly a revenge for the German camps in which between 1.3 million and 1.65 million Soviet POWs
¹
had been deliberately starved to death by their captors or allowed to die of exposure since the outset of Barbarossa. In addition, an estimated 600,000 surrendered Soviet officers and uniformed political commissars taken prisoner had been executed in defiance of the rules of war.
²

German manpower was further reduced by the thousands more POWs held in other Allied countries. A half-million were in the USA. Some of those taken prisoner by British troops were in Canada and other faraway countries of the British Empire, but 162 camps in Britain held another quarter-million men. The author recalls his parents inviting two unrepentantly Nazi POWs to spend Christmas Day of 1946 in an English home, sharing the family’s very limited rations in response to an appeal by the local authorities. France held a quarter-million German prisoners and demanded more to be used as slave labour for repairing damage suffered during the occupation and liberation. Although Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower and General George C. Patton had reservations about handing over German POWs who were almost certainly going to be ill-treated in revenge, the US Provost Marshal’s department found a legal loophole by classifying 750,000 men taken prisoner after the end of hostilities not as POWs, but as ‘defeated enemy personnel’, who were not covered by the Geneva Convention of 1929. The men were taken from camps in the American zone and handed over to France, largely to excuse their captors from having to feed them from US resources. Held in wire cages with no shelter and grossly inadequate rations, thousands died from malnutrition, hypothermia and untreated disease.

The atrocities committed in Soviet territory by the Waffen-SS, the Allgemeine-SS and some Wehrmacht units killed thousands of civilians for no military reason. How many hundreds of thousands? There is no complete record. In addition, the non-combatant Einsatzkommandos massacred hundreds of thousands of Jewish and other civilian men, women and children. No records of this were kept, unlike in the Nazi concentration and death camps, where meticulous record-keeping was the order of the day. However, just now and again, information did leak out. For example, when a column of the armoured SS Division Das Reich hanged ninety-nine hostages in Tulle, France, on 7 June 1944, Major Kowatsch, the commanding officer, actually said to the Prefect of the town, ‘We hanged more than 100,000 at Kiev and at Kharkov. What we are doing here today is nothing for us.’
³
It was therefore understandable, albeit deplorable, that the conduct of Soviet personnel in the final months of the drive into the Reich should include summary executions of soldiers and civilians of both sexes. Rape has always been, and still is, a ubiquitous feature of war between different ethnic groups. Its victims in this case were an estimated 2 million German females ranging in age from infants to grandmothers; one in ten was estimated to have died during, or as a consequence of, the act.
⁴

Many British-held German POWs did not return home until 1949, but few held as POWs in the USSR would return before 1953; hundreds of thousands of others never returned, although were known to have survived being taken prisoner.

In addition, even before the end of the shooting came the looting, both official and unofficial, throughout the Soviet-occupied regions of Germany, designated by the Four Powers ‘the Soviet Zone of Occupation’, as agreed by the Big Three conference at Yalta. Whole towns were emptied of household furniture, including flush toilets and electric radiators, which were loaded onto horse-drawn wagons destined for homes in villages without running water or electricity. Westerners attending the last three-power summit meeting at Potsdam in July–August 1945 blinked their eyes on seeing heating stoves, cookers and mattresses being loaded onto wagons by Soviet troops returning home. Under the
official
reparations programme approved at the Potsdam Conference, between a third and a half of East German industrial capacity was dismantled by German forced labour under Soviet supervision
⁵
and removed to the USSR between the cessation of hostilities and the end of 1947, with 4,500 entire factories transported there. Some sixty major manufacturing companies were left intact, but under Soviet control.
⁶
Although the justification was to replace industrial equipment destroyed in the fighting on Soviet territory, the machinery of many entire factories was still rusting beside remote sidings one and two decades later because nobody in Russia had the technical know-how to reassemble it and get it working – or because nobody knew where it had been dumped. The industrial viability of the Soviet zone and the German Democratic Republic, as it afterwards became, was seriously damaged by the excessive reparations. According to some sources, they represented between 15 and 16 billion dollars in value at the time.
⁷