they were a minority and in the mood of the time, the worst examples were the ones we remembered.’
‘We were constantly trying to step up hatred towards Germans,’ the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front reported, ‘and to stir up a passion for revenge.’ Messages from forced labourers found in villages were printed and circulated to the troops. ‘They put us in a camp,’ one such letter read, ‘in a grey dark barracks and force us to work from morning to night and feed us on turnip soup and a tiny piece of bread. They are constantly insulting us. This is how we have spent our youth. They took all the young people from the village — even the boys who were only thirteen years old — to their accursed Germany and we are all suffering here, barefoot and hungry. There are rumours that “our people” are getting close. We can hardly wait. Maybe we’ll soon see our brothers and our suffering will end. The girls came to see me. We all sat down together to discuss it. Will we survive this terrible time? Will we ever see our families? We cannot stand it any more. It is terrible here in Germany. Zhenya Kovakchuk.’ Another letter from her gave the words of what she called ‘the song of the girl slaves’.
Spring is over, summer has come
Our flowers are blossoming in the garden
And I, such a young girl,
I spend my days in a German camp.
Another method for arousing hatred used by political officers was the ‘revenge score’. ‘In each regiment soldiers and officers were interviewed and facts of atrocities, “looting and violence by Hitler’s beasts”, were established. For example, in one battalion, a frightening revenge score was compiled and it was put on a poster: “We are now getting our revenge for 775 of our relatives who were killed, for 909 relatives who were taken away to slavery in Germany, for 478 burnt-down houses and for 303 destroyed farms”… In all regiments of the [1st Belorussian] Front “revenge meetings” were held and aroused great enthusiasm. Troops of our Front as well as soldiers of the whole Red Army are the noble avengers punishing fascist occupiers for all their monstrous atrocities and evil deeds.’
‘There was a big slogan painted up in our canteen,’ a cypherene with the headquarters of the 1st Belorussian Front remembered. ‘ “Have you killed a German yet? Then kill him!” We were very strongly influenced by Ehrenburg’s appeals and we had a lot to take revenge for.’ Her own parents had been killed in Sevastopol. ‘The hatred was so great that it was difficult to control the soldiers.’
While Soviet military authorities were cultivating their soldiers’ anger ready for the final offensive, their 7th Department for propaganda was trying to persuade the German soldiers facing them that they would be well treated if they surrendered.
Occasionally raiding parties from reconnaissance companies would capture a Feldpost sack full of letters from home. These would be read and analysed by the German Communists or ‘antifas’ — anti-fascist prisoners of war attached to the department. Letters would also be taken from all prisoners for analysis. They were interested in the mood of the civilian population, the effects of American and British bombing and any references to shortages of food at home, especially the lack of milk for children. This information would be passed back upwards, but also put together for propaganda leaflets, printed on a mobile press attached to army headquarters.
One of the highest priorities for interrogation of captured ‘tongues’, deserters and other prisoners was the subject of chemical weapons. The Soviet military authorities were understandably concerned that Hitler might want to use chemical weapons as a last-ditch defence, especially after all the Nazi leadership’s claims of ‘miracle weapons’. Reports reached Sweden that chemical weapons had been distributed to special troops in long boxes, with the inscription ‘Can only be used on the personal order of the Fuhrer’. The Swedish military attache heard that only fear of killing everyone in the vicinity prevented them from being used. If true, this would mean that supplies of Sarin and Tabun nerve gas from the Wehrmacht chemical weapons research centre in the massive citadel at Spandau had been distributed. Field Marshal Kessel-ring apparently told SS Obergruppenfuhrer Wolff that Hitler’s advisers were urging him to use the ‘
Albert Speer, when interrogated by the Americans a few weeks later, readily acknowledged that Nazi fanatics during this period had ‘argued for chemical warfare’. But although Soviet sources allege that a gas attack using aircraft and mortar shells had been made against their troops in February near Gleiwitz, the lack of detail offered suggests that this was either a false scare or an attempt to provoke an interest in the threat. Soldiers were ordered to operate in gas masks for four hours a day and to sleep in them for at least one night. Paper garments and protective stockings were issued, and so were canvas masks for horses. Orders also went out to protect food and water sources, and to prepare basements and cellars in headquarters against gas attacks. But how much attention was paid to these instructions by the Red Army is very much open to question, especially since NKVD regiments were responsible for ‘chemical discipline’.
Training in the German panzerfaust was taken much more seriously. Large quantities of the weapon had been captured and groups of ‘trained fausters’ were organized in each rifle battalion. Political officers coined the rather predictable slogan, ‘Beat the enemy with his own weapons.’ Training consisted of firing one of these rocket- propelled grenades at a burnt-out tank or wall at a range of about thirty metres. In the 3rd Shock Army, Komsomol instructors issued them out and taught the selected fausters how to aim. Sergeant Belyaev, in the 3rd Rifle Corps, fired at a wall fifty metres away. When the dust settled, he found that it had blasted a hole large enough to crawl through and smashed into the wall beyond. Most of those who tried them out were similarly impressed. They saw their advantage in the fighting which lay ahead in Berlin, not in the weapon’s official anti-tank role, but to blast through walls to get from house to house.
12. Waiting for the Onslaught
During early April, as Berlin awaited the final Soviet onslaught along the Oder, the atmosphere in the city became a mixture of febrile exhaustion, terrible foreboding and despair.
‘Yesterday,’ the Swedish military attache reported to Stockholm, ‘the well-meaning von Tippelskirch invited us to another evening at Mellensee, and I went more out of curiosity than anything else. The expectation of hearing anything interesting was not high, since now everything happens from one moment to the next. The evening was quite tragic. The atmosphere was one of hopelessness. Most of them did not even pretend to keep up appearances, but showed the situation as it really was. Some became maudlin, seeking comfort in the bottle.’
Fanatical determination existed only among those Nazis who believed that surrender in any form meant execution. They, like Hitler, were determined to ensure that everyone else shared the same fate as themselves. In September 1944, when the Western Allies and the Red Army had been advancing towards the Reich with great speed, the Nazi leadership wanted to fight on against its sworn enemies even after defeat. It decided to set up a resistance movement to be known by the codename
The name
In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured British time pencils. A whole range of items and even garments made of Nipolit explosive were designed, including raincoats with linings made of explosive.
