© Norddeutscher Rundfunk
NDR Info - Forum Contemporary History
Forum / Topic: Contemporary History - NDR InfoVladimir Gelfand arrived in Germany with the victorious Red Army in April 1945 and then came to Berlin. Born in 1923, he was a convinced communist and had volunteered for the army. Yet as a Jew and a sensitive, reflective person he found military reality difficult to endure; his critical attitude toward the army repeatedly met with little sympathy. This is evident throughout his diary, a document without precedent of its kind: the wartime and occupation diary of a Soviet officer published in German.
His notes are particularly interesting in light of current debates about the role of the Red Army and German victims of the Second World War. In Western accounts Soviet troops are often portrayed as a vengeful horde that looted, killed and raped its way through defeated Germany. Gelfand, whose attitude toward Germans was ambivalent, offers little support for such a one-sided image. He mentions acts of violence but never excuses them, and sharply criticizes commanders when they fail to maintain discipline or prevent abuses of power. At the same time he records attempts to restore order, including efforts of his own.
The diary focuses above all on his desire to understand Germany and on his encounters with local people. He became acquainted with Germans, liking some and recoiling from the arrogance of others. His many romantic adventures occupy a substantial place in the diary, although it is not always clear whether the relationships were a means of survival for the German women or were genuinely mutual. Those episodes make lively reading, but more valuable are Gelfand's observations as a victor trying to judge the former enemy without reducing Germans to a single negative image.
Gelfand's diary therefore provides an important corrective to the image of Soviet occupiers that dominates much of the contemporary Western discussion.
ONE OF MANY:
In 1945, shortly before the end of the war, a Red Army soldier pulls a German soldier out of a hole through which he had tried to escape into a cellar. Vladimir Gelfand likewise served among the Soviet occupation troops. His diary from this period had originally been intended only as material for a future novel.
