Memories of Soviet Occupation Soldiers of Everyday Life in Eastern Germany After the War, 1945–1949

In Russia, new themes have entered the public memory of the war. Subjects such as the fate of Ostarbeiter, prisoners of war, and members of penal units unsettle the traditional patriotic retrospective, whose central theme remains sacrifice and victory in the Great Patriotic War against Germany. Revisions to the long-dominant view of history are undeniable and have generally recognized reasons — for example, the critical reassessment of individual Soviet military decisions and condemnation of the Soviet state's treatment of the masses as “living military material.” Yet changing the perspective of individual experience is more difficult. Many historical images are difficult to develop and ultimately resolve. An important difference will always remain between Soviet and post-Soviet memory and German memory of the war: Red Army soldiers, their contemporaries, and their descendants can remember both the victims of the war and victory as an achievement valued and celebrated throughout the world.

This communicative memory of the war also includes the immediate postwar period as a return to peaceful everyday life, albeit one full of deprivation. It is striking, however, that the memory topos of postwar Germany soon became largely indistinct for the victors. While the momentum of victory was cultivated in public memory, recollections of the occupiers' subsequent everyday life in conquered territory as a broadly shared experience remain very rare, even though that experience can be regarded as a mass phenomenon.

Among all the topoi of communicative postwar memory, the image of the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany from 1945 to 1949 is especially coarsely rasterized, politically exaggerated, and stereotyped by those who had no personal experience there. Yet the memory of the actors of that time also appears sparse. Possible reasons for these “blank spots” have repeatedly been discussed. Emphasizing the role of state censorship, historians explain the pale and inadequate public expression of this experience primarily through the political considerations of the Soviet leadership and its direct influence on the media and the arts. It has been argued that, from the rulers' point of view, preserving the occupation experience was dangerous because direct experience of open, cultured, materially prosperous societies might have called Stalinist structures in the USSR into question — the so-called “neo-Decembrist” thesis. This thesis is supported directly or indirectly by researchers who emphasize the occupiers' cultural experience as a central experience “in the West.” Others, by contrast, have argued that the danger of excessive remembrance lay in encouraging overly critical views, especially of the final phase of the war and the last outbreak of violence, particularly against German civilians. Positive aspects would then be ignored, and this one-sided reflection had to be stopped in the interests of new German-Soviet relations. Many war veterans in Russia still hold this view today.

Anyone who has followed East German and German literature after reunification in its attempts to create a realistic public memory of the end of the war and the postwar period cannot fail to recognize how difficult a balanced assessment of the Soviet occupation remains. One-sided pro-Soviet praise — even in some academically ambitious studies — was opposed not only by equally one-sided, but at times dubious Russophobic images whose arguments borrowed from the Nazi arsenal. As Silke Satjukow's publications show, however, this is not inevitable. A cultural-theoretical approach, provided it is also broadened sociologically, can be implemented convincingly with suitable sources.

Old Memories — New Research Questions

For a shared German-Russian memory, the underexposure of the occupation period in Soviet and post-Soviet remembrance is deeply regrettable. For the German side, by contrast, the immediate postwar period was for a long time the phase of the most intensive personal contact with Soviet citizens, at least for Germans then living in central and eastern Germany. The first years of occupation brought the Soviet Occupation Zone an unprecedentedly intensive encounter with East European and Soviet culture, as well as a highly specific encounter between civilian and military life, between victors and defeated. Between 1945 and 1949, several tens of thousands of Soviet citizens lived among and alongside Germans in the Soviet zone.

The history of the extensive suppression of the Soviet occupation experience in public retrospection in the USSR and today's Russia would deserve a separate study, one that included censorship rules and political standards, ideological arguments and self-restraint, but also quite traditional everyday mechanisms for dealing with experience abroad. The prerequisites for such a study are not laid out here. A first point of departure, however, is the observation that, as recent eyewitness interviews show, part of conquered and liberated Germany survived in the personal memories of the occupiers of that time.

First of all, one is struck by the persistence of the names of small towns and rivers, and by precise descriptions of unfamiliar landscapes, architecture, and infrastructure. Impressive material abundance is generally remembered. Unfamiliar everyday objects — appliances, items of clothing — work assignments, forms of greeting, and names can be recalled immediately. Exotic details were also remembered. “Do they still have those vegetables in Germany called kohlrabi?” a soldier who had been stationed near Halle in 1946 asked me in 1979. Thirty-three years after he had returned to his native Crimea, I was the first German he had met. Things of this kind are familiar from the memories of Ostarbeiter, who likewise spent roughly comparable lengths of time in Germany, though with very different degrees of freedom of movement from the Soviet occupiers who came later. But if one seeks more complex images, longer conversations are required, including questions about identity: what kind of country was Germany? What people were remembered as “the Germans”? What distinguished them from one's own Soviet existence? How did people get along with one another?

Research into personal occupation experience reflected in autobiographical testimony encounters an acute shortage of sources. The principal reason lies in the gap in Soviet memory culture mentioned above, which to this day has produced only a limited number of written memoirs. Soviet recollections of events in the Soviet Occupation Zone were more common in the GDR than in the Soviet Union, mainly in newspapers, magazines, and local publications. All of them helped sustain the legendary friendship of the newly formed state alliance between the GDR and the USSR. For political reasons shared with the occupation power, the SED did not permit negative depictions of the “friends,” as they were colloquially and politically called in East German usage. Nor was it permissible to report that a stay in an occupied country might weaken ties to the homeland. From 1950 onward, civilians and soldiers of the Soviet Union, officially designated as “liberators,” were included above all in the history of “indestructible friendship” as political emissaries of a friendly country, helpers, advisers, and cultural mediators. In the 1970s the GDR made a few, still insufficient, attempts within the framework of its official interpretation of the past to make the liberator less monumental and more humanly approachable as part of a managed retrospective. Such efforts ceased in the 1980s. Memoirs of well-known “cultural figures,” first presented to German readers in this period, were no longer obligatory in terms of the GDR's educational policy and offered little that was new for contemporary historical scholarship and research.

In any case, they paid little attention to the humble routines of everyday activity that social historians would have wanted. Such memoirs document the individual — or, more precisely, politically censored individual — memory of a political and humanitarian elite, not the collective memory of the “occupiers.” The Soviet leadership permitted several former senior officers and leading employees of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) to publish memoirs. The core of these accounts was the idea of a difficult common beginning, a new start in East Germany under communist political leadership, based on friendly relations between victors and defeated and intended to extend beyond communist-internationalist ties into East German society. It can be assumed that the motives for this form of recollection were a symbiosis of a state educational mission and political conviction, which continued to bear fruit even after 1991. This political task of retrospection was reinforced further by former SMAD representatives whose professional work at home supported humanitarian paradigms — Alexander Dymschitz, Sergei Tyulpanov, Alexander Galkin, Yakov Drabkin, Vadim Chubinsky, Yuri Basistov. Yet the character of their memories was not determined solely by ideological attitudes. The scarcity of cultural-anthropological observations in them was also due in no small part to the limited range of scholarly interests at a time when “everyday life” was not yet a historiographical concept. For this reason the few vivid fragments concerning everyday life in elite memoirs deserve attention. They are simply not trusted very much and are often suspected of embellishment. In principle, of course, every recollection must be measured against other, more objectively verifiable traditions.

Historical Background and the Scale of the Encounter

The archives preserve material from the legacy of the occupation authorities.

In the summer of 1945, with the duration of military occupation still undefined, the victorious eastern power deployed a dense network of command headquarters across its occupation territory. Every German community with more than 5,000 inhabitants received such a base with a permanent staff of between 17 and 40 people. Each had its own guard force, commanded independently of the armies stationed nearby. While approximately 700,000 and later about 350,000 occupation soldiers in garrisons in 1945–1946 remained faceless and anonymous to the overwhelming majority of Germans, a total of 70,000–80,000 soldiers and staff members of command posts stood before Germans personally and were highly visible. Conversely, they had a direct view of Germans: at entrances and on command-post premises, on patrol, at checkpoints and guards, as troops marching through towns, at marshalling yards, in dispatch and raid offices, in negotiations and factory and transport-company inspections, at agricultural collection points, during customs operations, and in police stations. When off duty, they wandered through streets, shops and beer halls, cinemas, bathing establishments, parks and sports grounds. The occupiers maintained hospitals and sanatoriums separately from German patients, but German workers were responsible for much of the care. Housing had to be provided to them on request.

The commandant's offices were militarily protected strongholds in the urban landscape and at the same time the most important organs of authority, initially endowed with many individual bureaucratic powers. They guarded numerous occupation facilities and acted as law-enforcement bodies in the sense of both police and criminal police. At first they were also self-sufficient institutions operating farms, food-processing enterprises, and warehouses. Their personnel not only instructed and supervised Germans; they were also, officially, tenants, language learners, employers and customers, and not least consumers and users of services. In their free time they liked hunting and fishing. Family members of senior officers moved about freely in civilian clothing, went on small-group excursions, and visited black markets. Children were born in occupation families, and those who died after the war were buried in Germany. In 1945–1946 the “Russians” intruded relentlessly into many German apartments and courtyards, sometimes more or less as guests, sometimes as helpers and peacemakers. “Russians” were involved in countless traffic accidents. Many also participated in underground criminal groups.

The command posts functioned as hinges of occupation authority. There were district headquarters of three different sizes, smaller sector headquarters, autonomous city headquarters, and, in large cities, additional borough headquarters. At times there were also higher-level regional commandant's offices. By the end of 1945 the network comprised about 650 command posts. Their number was repeatedly reorganized and sharply reduced to 342 in 1946, 247 in 1947, and 178 in 1948, until almost all were finally dissolved in 1949.

For completeness, one must add an even greater number of smaller, partly mobile Soviet facilities: radio communication nodes, internal postal and banking offices, hotels, workshops, hospitals, supply depots, railway and port control posts, dismantling units, and filtration camps. This is not to mention inter-Allied institutions in Berlin, where Soviet representatives came and went. There were also sites of political persecution such as special camps, SMERSH offices, and branches of the NKVD/MVD and NKGB/MGB.

The district headquarters probably left the strongest mark on German perceptions. Their initial staffing was naturally a consequence of the course of the war and the subsequent deployment of troops. In the summer of 1945, for example, the Bernau district command had 1,073 personnel — 158 officers, 239 sergeants, and 676 soldiers. By the summer of 1948 it had fallen to one eighth of that: 137 people — 32 officers, 25 sergeants, and 80 soldiers. In January 1948 the district command in Döbeln, Saxony, had around 85 employees, including approximately 30 officers and sergeants.

As early as 1945, within the general demobilization, 14,000 people from SMAD and headquarters staffs were sent home in two stages: first the seriously ill and older age groups, then graduates of technical schools born between 1906 and 1915, teachers, older personnel, including wounded veterans, and all women in junior ranks. From March 1946 roughly 8,000 men born between 1916 and 1922 were released, and in March 1947 another 10,000 men born in 1922 were sent home. Because the operation of the headquarters suffered heavily from these reductions, some candidates for discharge were offered voluntary extensions of service. Some of those leaving were replaced by voluntary civilian employees recruited from among Ostarbeiter or former prisoners of war, some of whom were still formally counted as being in military service. In 1947, 5,000 men from units of the Group of Soviet Occupation Forces were assigned to headquarters duty. At the beginning of 1948 the first 3,200 newcomers from an age cohort without front-line experience arrived in Germany.

This indicates the impressive scale of personal and collective exposure to postwar German life among representatives of the victorious power. One particular experience of command-post personnel was witnessing all kinds of everyday conflicts between occupiers and occupied. The command offices had oversight of Soviet military personnel and the civilian population of the region whenever they entered the civilian life of occupied Germans — that is, whenever they left the confined duty rooms of barracks or military units. As police bodies they recorded all manner of extraordinary incidents, received German complaints, responded to public-order violations, fire alarms and political warnings. They registered poor supplies, traffic accidents, injuries, epidemics and more. German and Soviet military personnel, civilian employees and foreign workers, Western Allied delegations, and displaced persons could all be involved in these processes. Command-post employees thus became special observers and recorders of German-Soviet postwar encounters.

Alongside official encounters, there were of course private ones. Friendships and love affairs existed everywhere. Intimate relationships were lived out, marriages planned, private trips made incognito, and plans for joint escapes to the West devised and in some cases carried out. People met in parks, cinemas, or at friends' homes. In individual cases, genuine family-like ties briefly developed.

Private Worlds of Life

An ideal-typical occupation soldier cannot yet be reconstructed. Nevertheless, files of the occupation authorities show that most soldiers and officers were veterans. Most were Russian by nationality. Ranks cannot be assigned precisely to particular age groups, but statistics show that lower ranks — soldiers and sergeants — were occupied almost exclusively by very young men; because of the war, however, officer positions were also held by very young men who had no civilian profession. Accustomed to little luxury, most had far more money at their disposal than at home, especially well-paid senior officers and generals. Radios, cars, motorcycles, elegant clothing, musical instruments, hunting weapons, tableware and jewelry, as well as editions of classics in Russian, could be acquired relatively easily. Even a noncommissioned officer could save enough for expensive souvenirs. Salaries and wages were initially paid mainly in marks and to a lesser extent in rubles, which many saved or sent home; in 1948 the pay system was changed. In addition, the German postwar economy offered opportunities for black-market trading and speculation.

It is difficult to reconstruct the men's consumer behavior. They acquired many things for money in special stores that Germans could not enter. Container shipments for entire families are documented, but there are also photographs of demobilized men carrying only small suitcases. In general, documents make it difficult to judge life goals and values, let alone relate them to social and cultural attitudes. We know more about leisure, which the occupation authorities energetically sought to regulate from about 1946 onward. Sport and cinema were popular.

Here, as in other matters, families naturally behaved differently from young single men.

At the end of 1945 officers and generals were permitted to bring relatives to Germany, and their wives and children were incorporated into the military supply system. Women also entered Germany illegally or followed their partners under false arrangements. In 1946 the USSR attempted to act against unregistered unions, which from then on were regarded as illegal, particularly in order to bring order to state welfare provision. Only a marriage sanctioned by the state was recognized and entitled a woman to support. In the Soviet Occupation Zone a deadline was set in the summer of 1946 by which the marriage had to be formalized; otherwise the partner and Soviet citizen had to leave Germany. At the beginning of 1947 relatives began to depart. In the case of senior generals these often included adult children, sons- and daughters-in-law, mothers-in-law, and even grandchildren who had to be fed. Thereafter, middle-ranking posts in Germany were deliberately filled only with single men. Until 1953 relatives were not allowed to accompany them.

Such restrictions were probably connected with the fact that wives and children of senior officers and generals placed additional demands on the occupation authorities and tended to form relatively closed family circles. At the same time, many women who had come to Germany experienced emancipation through life abroad. Special employment and educational programs were eventually developed for women.

The majority of male occupiers, however, were young and unmarried and had only wartime experience of love and sexuality. Relationships with German women — long-term, fleeting, or paid — were almost normal. Such contacts were often tied to exchange, because in everyday postwar Germany almost everything was “organized” and “traded.” Until the middle of 1946 no strict measures were taken against personal relationships, although they were clearly prohibited. Germans could be prosecuted if they offered overnight accommodation without permission. Yet, with or without overnight stays, Red Army soldiers took an active part in East German “postwar society” and in some cases replaced missing young male family members and sexual partners among Germans. Only after occupation institutions were concentrated and SMAD and command staffs were moved into sealed residential compounds from the summer of 1947 did private contacts noticeably decline. Disciplinary punishments, soon justified with political arguments of the Cold War, began to be used. Selective punitive transfers did the rest. Even so, private contact never ceased completely.

The documents show that the formal daily routine at headquarters was everywhere the same: the same duties, ranks and agendas, the same basic military exercises, political activities and leisure arrangements. As at home, local conditions naturally affected service, and the specific tasks of occupation facilities in the social and economic spheres were shaped by local profiles. Yet the reports make clear how strongly conditions of service depended on Soviet leaders. In 1945–1946 many city and district commandants were politically, organizationally and morally overwhelmed by the task of governing a medium-sized administrative district amid foreign postwar chaos. They could perform their duties with any degree of success only if they had some experience leading their small detachment and if they themselves were accepted as authorities. There also appears to have been a gradient of conflict escalation from south to north, due in large part — though not exclusively — to what had happened at the end of the war. Saxony and Thuringia were regions with relatively low levels of conflict, while Berlin, Brandenburg, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania were characterized by constant tension in the occupiers' everyday lives. There was more everyday friction between occupiers and occupied in the north, and Germans there held a much darker image of Russia than in the southern parts of what later became the GDR. In the summer of 1945, especially in districts that had suffered extensive destruction and civilian casualties, troops were stationed that were repeatedly redeployed, often used the area for maneuvers and exercises because of geographical conditions, and whose remote billets in practice encouraged soldiers to undertake unauthorized raids. In addition, the northern rural districts in 1945–1946 — first as areas for requisitioning grain and livestock and later as centers of land reform — were precisely the places where elementary German and Soviet interests collided most sharply. Anti-Soviet sentiment was therefore more pronounced there. Berlin, with its special status at the beginning of the emerging systemic confrontation, naturally concentrated conflicts to some extent. The experience of an occupation soldier thus depended greatly on where he was stationed.

Questions of mentality, self-assessment, and the feeling of victory are of course the hardest to synthesize from documents. Official records confront us above all with negative behavior, although it has not yet been possible to assemble satisfactory overall statistics on disciplinary violations. Internal data suggest that around 17 percent of all those serving in Germany attracted negative attention in 1947, but the repertoire ranged from dress-code violations and secretly using a superior's car or visiting German restaurants to unauthorized absences and disorderly conduct. And how much remained undiscovered and unrecorded? The scale of desertion still cannot be reconstructed from the documents available to researchers.

Narrative Behavior

Archival sources make it possible to say important things about the occupiers' everyday life, but they hardly reflect subjective experience. This naturally raises the question of whether eyewitnesses can be interviewed. In Russia, where such testimony still largely lacks an institutional lobby, “reports from occupiers below” appear only occasionally, for example in testimony by former Soviet prisoners of war. A considerable number of them continued compulsory military service in the Soviet Occupation Zone after May 1945. One war veteran remembered the period after his release from German captivity as follows:

I passed through Berlin, through Alexanderplatz. I saw how the American barbarians had turned the city into ruins. We stayed with an elderly woman whose son had died in Norway. She gave us his binoculars; we gave her food. Berliners were starving, although the armed forces helped as much as they could. Our unit was stationed in Eberswalde, later in Brederiche [Fürstenberg/Havel], and in other places. I remember Edith Jürgens from Eberswalde, Anna Hornung from Brederiche, and many other Germans who treated us in a friendly way. When I returned to the unit after being wounded at the end of the war, friends gave me an accordion. In our free time we met German young people to celebrate in cafés. I played our songs and dances. Everyone was especially fond of Strauss waltzes and Tyrolean waltzes.

This recollection, written at the request of Germans and extending beyond the period of captivity without any special assignment, demonstrates the potential of traditional images for everyday history while also drawing attention to the formative power of emotional experience. Such material needs to be investigated, with elite memoirs used as key words and a basis for comparative analysis. In the post-Soviet period, memories of lower-ranking occupiers also appeared; these authors naturally mostly belonged to the later intelligentsia, and their accounts contain many references to everyday life. The only complete and authentic diary is that of occupation soldier Vladimir Gelfand.

Barbara Stelzl-Marx bases her excellent analysis of the Austrian “inside view of the Soviet occupation” on numerous interviews conducted between 2002 and 2008, primarily in Moscow. She uses them to investigate subjective weighting and repression, transformation and mythologization of memory.

I have some doubts about the category “interview,” because the observations can be summarized as follows:

• Eyewitnesses to the period in occupied Austria mainly reflect on a significant phase of their lives that involved exciting encounters and experiences abroad.
• They often use broad clichés to describe their principal impression of the people there, namely stereotypes of German national characteristics: cleanliness, order, discipline, good manners, and diligence.
• They frequently remember which modern consumer goods they first saw and used there.
• They speak relatively calmly about looting, from which the eyewitnesses themselves usually exclude themselves; they explain looting through personal losses or the general brutalization caused by war. Rape, by contrast, is not remembered or mentioned; its existence is categorically denied. Stelzl-Marx speaks of a taboo.
• Only eyewitnesses who are not members of veterans' committees speak relatively openly about assaults.

Only the last finding offers an approach to a source-critical, narratological, and historiographical assessment because it relates events, memory, life experience, and present emotional state. The rest largely repeats what had already been established and illustrates preconceived views — oral history, as is well known, is not suited to simple proof — because the interviews were not conceived as a journey of discovery into subjective orientation. One must fear that little was done to encourage genuinely free and extensive narration, and that once again only the topoi of Western retrospection — looting and violence — were raised. The author sees confirmation of her thesis about culture shock in the fact that contemporary witnesses admitted that, as Soviet citizens, they realized that the capitalists had advanced farther than “we” had.

If one leaves aside the question of whether the term “culture shock” is justified by the impression made by a wealthy, well-organized society with considerable average prosperity — and, if not, whether the experience of Germany and Austria in 1945 can really be called that — it should be noted that such impressions would have to be placed within a broader set of questions about their individual and collective meaning then, in subsequent years, and today. In general, analysis of narrative behavior should not be used simply to diagnose “ideologization,” while taboos themselves remain intact.

Interviews with war participants who continued serving in occupied Germany show above all that it is easier to talk about the war than about the occupation period. Eyewitnesses today do not lack words or images; rather, they lack practice and a sense of what would be interesting or important to tell about that time. This supports the view that memory is shaped not so much by the depth of an impression as by repeated — and changing — assignments of meaning to it in communication. Something is not remembered and narrated without a reason or purpose. Sociologist Harald Welzer writes that people do so to the extent and in the images that are needed. Eyewitness testimony first of all points to a memory that for a long time was scarcely communicated even in private. Its poverty was caused not only by political pressure, but above all by the fact that this memory had gone unused for many decades.

If, therefore, one must speak here of comparatively limited “narrative competence” — which intellectuals may perhaps compensate for in interviews by rapid mental orientation — what does this say about the possibility of using such interviews to “identify experience and reconstruct the horizons of action of past social systems,” in Albrecht Lehmann's phrase? It imposes a very cautious and critical interpretation that may also need to take account of the particular complexity of bicultural dialogue.

In Russia, a politically sensitive contemporary witness today finds that speaking publicly about occupation experience almost always leads to the issue of violent crimes against German civilians. Evgenia Katseva, who after the war worked as a SMAD interpreter and later became a respected editor of Heinrich Böll in her country, was utterly exasperated by repeated questions about rape in Germany in 2005 and realized with disbelief that it seemed to be almost the only thing Germans wanted to ask about. Yet the Russian-language internet audience likewise discussed the diary entries of occupation officer Gelfand almost exclusively in terms of what was credible or implausible in reports of violence against German women. This is the result of a long-standing taboo, but at the same time of a new and once again one-sided media pressure. Scholars should resist this narrowing of public memory, for example by asking about work contacts and professional experience. The culture-shock thesis should be tested by asking what German or Austrian behavior was repellent at the time or remained permanently unacceptable or questionable, what was observed abroad with curiosity but never practiced at home, and similar questions. Graduates of technical institutes and universities often describe their years in Germany as the most interesting of their lives. It therefore makes sense to investigate what useful things they actually brought home with them, from scientific and technical knowledge to everyday ideas about ways of life and practical wisdom. Asked by a contemporary witness, one man said that after returning home he laid out a small front garden before his house “as in Germany.”

1. This thesis, in various shades, became widespread in more recent Russian historiography. An extreme position was taken by Gennady Bordyugov and Alexander Afanasyev in 1990. See “The Stolen Victory,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, 5 May 1990, pp. 1–2. See also Elke Scherstjanoi, “Neo-Decembrists? On the Reform Potential of Soviet Postwar Society,” in M. V. Kirchanov, ed., Germany: History and the Present, memorial volume for Professor V. A. Artemov, issue 1, Voronezh, 2006, pp. 166–176.

2. In this context the conclusion about a “culture shock” is often repeated rather casually. Barbara Stelzl-Marx, Stalin's Soldiers in Austria: An Inside View of the Soviet Occupation, 1945–1955, Vienna/Munich, 2012, also takes it up with reference to Norman Naimark (p. 313) and later, on the basis of eyewitness testimony, confirms it as a “profound ‘culture shock’” (p. 720).

3. An example is the language and argumentation used by Berit Olschewski, a historian/sociologist/philosopher/physician born in 1969, who received her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 2008 and later worked as a research associate in a parliamentary office: Friends, I Am the Enemy of the Country. The Red Army and German Postwar Society in the Former Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 1945–1953, Berlin, 2009. She describes her research area as follows: “Until December 1945 Soviet Russians raged there particularly violently. […] It will be shown [this is not stated in your report] that the more communists and Komsomol members in the spirit of Stalin [what does that mean?] there were in a unit, the more crimes were committed against the German population” (p. 54).

4. Silke Satjukow, Occupiers: The “Russians” in Germany, 1945–1994, Göttingen, 2008; and Liberation? East Germans and the Year 1945, Leipzig, 2009.

5. Incidentally, this also applies to memories of the period in which Austria was occupied from 1945 to 1955. See Stelzl-Marx, Stalin's Soldiers, pp. 739–742.

6. See Alexander Dymschitz, Unforgettable Spring: Literary Portraits and Memories, Berlin, 1970; Vladimir Sergeyevich Gall, My Road to Halle, Berlin, 1988, expanded edition under the title Moscow — Spandau — Halle: Stages of a Life, Berlin, 2000; Sergei I. Tyulpanov, Memories of German Friends and Comrades, Berlin, 1984; idem, Germany After the War, 1945–1949: Memoirs of a Soviet Army Officer, with an afterword by Stefan Doernberg, Berlin, 1986; Tyulpanov, Elfriede Rehbein, Gerhard Rehbein, Foundations of SMAD Work and Its Development, reprint, Dresden, 1975; Achim Roscher, “A Time for a New Beginning: A Conversation with Sergei Tyulpanov,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 27 (1979), no. 9, pp. 41–62; G. K. Zhukov, Memories and Reflections, Berlin, 1969.

7. Reports by defectors published in the West were so questionably motivated that even today they are hardly used as sources in discussions of everyday history. See Grigory Klimov, The Berlin Kremlin, Cologne/Berlin, 1951.

8. Vladimir Sergeyevich Semyonov, From Stalin to Gorbachev: Half a Century in Diplomatic Service, 1939–1991, Berlin, 1995; Vadim Chubinsky, My “Occupation” of Germany: A Russian Officer in Berlin and the District, 1946–1950, St Petersburg, 2005.

9. The SMAD files are held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and are widely accessible. An everyday-life perspective is reflected in reports on public mood. There are also documents concerning disciplinary violations, extraordinary incidents, health conditions, rewards and benefits, service regulations and training programs, as well as complaints from the German population.

10. On institutional history, see Horst Möller, ed., SMAD-Handbuch: The Soviet Military Administration in Germany, 1945–1949, edited by Jan Foitzik, Munich, 2009.

11. From a letter to Kontakte-Kontakty, January 2011, by Alexander Pavlovich Kuzmin, Kirovograd. URL: www.kontakte-kontakty.de

12. See, for example, Yevgeny Plimak, In the War and After the War: Veterans' Notes, Moscow, 2005.

13. Such accounts usually concerned the first year of occupation. Oleg Budnitsky took up old and new memoirs, but again focused only on historically allied themes: “Jewish feelings among the occupiers” and “violence against German civilians.” See Oleg Budnitsky and Susan Rupp, “The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 10, no. 3 (Summer 2009), pp. 629–682.

14. See Vladimir Gelfand, Germany Diary 1945–1946: Notes of a Red Army Soldier, selected and annotated by Elke Scherstjanoi, Berlin, 2005; also published in paperback in 2008.

15. Stelzl-Marx, Stalin's Soldiers in Austria, pp. 703–738. The bibliography lists 64 oral-history interviews, 18 conducted by Stelzl-Marx herself and the remainder by a group of Russian interviewers. The circumstances and course of the encounters are not described. The text mentions in passing that some were interviews “in front of the camera” (p. 738).

16. My reflections are based on roughly twenty such conversations and interviews. They were conducted alongside and as a supplement to historical research into everyday life in the Soviet zone. Naturally, these personal testimonies cannot claim representative validity.

17. Harald Welzer, “Why Do We Remember? Some Questions for the Historical Sciences,” Austrian Journal of Historical Studies 16 (2005), no. 1, pp. 10–35, here p. 15.

18. Albrecht Lehmann, Narrative Structure and Biographical Data: Autobiographical Research, Frankfurt/New York, 1983, p. 93.

19. We met at an event at the Protestant educational center Schwanenwerder near Berlin in February 2005, where she declined an interview because of her disappointment. Ms Katseva died in the summer of 2005. In 1994 SFB recorded her oral recollections. Ulrike Lückermann and Magdalena Kemper, “We Lived Like Relatives: After the End of the War Soviet Officers Were Billeted with Germans,” Radio Kulturtermin, 7 June 2006, RBB. The script was kindly made available to me. See also Evgenia Katseva, My Personal War Trophies: A Life Story, Berlin, 2010.

Text visible in the book images

The cover and title pages identify the volume as Memory of Dictatorship and War: Focal Points of Cultural Memory Between Russia and Germany Since 1945, edited by Andreas Wirsching, Jürgen Zarusky, Alexander Tschubarjan, and Viktor Ischtschenko. The scanned title and copyright pages contain bibliographic and publishing information for the De Gruyter Oldenbourg edition; the substantive chapter translated above is the part relevant to this page.