Vladimir Gelfand. Diary 1941–1946 / Echo of Moscow. “Not So” with Oleg Budnitsky: The Great Patriotic War — Soldiers’ Diaries

Echo of Moscow 3 July 2010 “Not So” with Oleg Budnitsky: The Great Patriotic War — Soldiers’ Diaries

Echo of Moscow 10 July 2010 “Not So” with Oleg Budnitsky: Sexual Crimes of the Wehrmacht

Echo of Moscow 17 July 2010 “Not So” with Oleg Budnitsky: Revenge: The Red Army in Germany

Date: 3 July 2010, 14:08 Topic: The Great Patriotic War: Soldiers’ Diaries Program: Not So Host: Sergey Buntman Guest: Oleg Budnitsky Recording: download (10.8 MB), listen (47:24)

THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR: SOLDIERS’ DIARIES

SERGEY BUNTMAN: We continue our programs produced jointly with the magazine Knowledge Is Power. Starting today, and for three Saturdays, we will have programs with Oleg Budnitsky. Good afternoon.

OLEG BUDNITSKY: Hello.

S. BUNTMAN: Today we decided to make a kind of report on the work you have been doing lately, Oleg, because we have not met for quite a long time.

O. BUDNITSKY: A year, actually.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes. We will have several programs on different subjects connected in one way or another with the Second World War and with your recent work. Today we begin with soldiers’ diaries. Here is an immediate question from the Internet. A teacher from Penza asks — I will read several of his questions at once: “A soldier’s diary from the Second World War is now, essentially, a museum exhibit. What happened to the diaries of soldiers who fell on the battlefield? Was diary-keeping more typical of officers, whose average level of education was probably higher?” And another question from him: “Were there cases when a serviceman was severely disciplined for recording secret information in a diary? Was keeping a diary prohibited? What were the rules in this respect among the Germans and in the Red Army? And everyday practical questions: was it actually possible in an army at the front to find a notebook and a pencil for keeping a diary? Where were diaries kept?” So, first of all, thanks to the teacher from Penza.

O. BUDNITSKY: Those are professional questions.

S. BUNTMAN: He has thrown in a whole lot of good, genuine questions.

O. BUDNITSKY: They are the right questions, yes. Then let us answer them straight away, especially since I was going to talk about many of these things anyway. There was, in fact, no special order prohibiting diary-keeping. At least, I have not been able to find one. There were general orders concerning secrecy. Naturally, keeping a diary was an obvious violation of secrecy regulations, and everyone knew that diaries were not supposed to be kept. Fortunately for historians, however, in Russia there are no orders that are never violated or interpreted in some other way. The diaries that have survived are indeed museum pieces; there are very few of them. At least, the published diaries and those that I have managed to find, usually in private archives, are very few in number.

In practice, I repeat, things varied. Some people kept a diary on separate sheets of paper and hid them carefully. Others wrote quite openly, and their superiors even knew about it. Let me give the example of Vladimir Gelfand’s enormous, extraordinarily extensive diary. His commander advised him, for instance, not to write with an indelible pencil but with an ordinary graphite pencil, because it would keep better. His political officer even recommended what exactly he should write in the diary.

S. BUNTMAN: Hmm?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. There is a very amusing passage here. Let me quote the entry: “The political officer told me how to keep a diary. After that incident, when he happened to see various foolish things in the diary, I now write the way the political officer suggested. He says that in a diary one should write only about the work of the company, the course of battles, the skillful leadership of the company command, the talks with soldiers conducted by the political officer, the Red Army men’s comments on those talks, and so on. That is exactly how I shall write from now on.” Then comes an even more astonishing entry: “The political officer caught me at night, and again today during the day. I have now climbed out of my trench onto the mortar position” — he was a mortarman — “and perhaps that is even more convenient for me. I am delighted. After all, if it were not for the political officer, who would direct my actions?” It gives the impression that something had happened to the man’s head — if not shell shock, then...

S. BUNTMAN: Or he is writing specifically for the political officer.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. Two weeks later an entry appears: “For the first time here I wrote openly, because I got rid of the political officer who had instructed me how to keep a diary and what to write in it.” After that, those very “foolish things” continue — foolish things in quotation marks, of course — which are precisely the most interesting things for us, but which were naturally unacceptable to the political officer and to the other people assigned to supervise the views of soldiers and junior officers. Gelfand was first a private and later became a lieutenant.

For example, the diary of Irina Dunaevskaya, a military interpreter, was published recently. SMERSH officers spoke to her several times about what she was writing there. She showed them her notes: they were very brief, almost shorthand, and contained no unit numbers, no locations — nothing of that sort. In the end they more or less left her alone: if you want to write, write.

So in reality it varied. In some cases it was absolutely prohibited. Private Vasily Tsymbal, for example, kept a diary openly from 1945 to 1946, and no one ever asked him any questions about it. Things therefore differed from case to case, although as a rule keeping such records was nevertheless prohibited.

As for whether officers or rank-and-file soldiers more often kept diaries, there are no statistics. I can say only this: when privates kept diaries, as a rule they were not sitting in a frontline trench, because there it was extremely difficult, if not impossible. There were cases of people writing while directly participating in combat at the front, but more often the diarist would be, say, a signalman, who was somewhat removed and had a function different from going into an attack, or an interpreter, or someone of that kind. This did not mean that such people were in guaranteed safety. Not at all.

Irina Dunaevskaya, for example, was a woman and an interpreter who was generally attached to headquarters, first working with intelligence and then with political departments engaged in propaganda among enemy troops. She was wounded several times, fortunately not seriously. Almost everyone who kept the diaries I am going to discuss today was wounded at one time or another and to varying degrees. Some were wounded seriously, some lightly, but nearly all were wounded in one way or another, and in various situations all of them had to take part directly in fighting the enemy — with a rifle, a submachine gun, or some other weapon in their hands.

Diaries written by men who served in the infantry or artillery as scouts are unique. Two such diaries, short but extraordinarily informative and interesting, recently came into my hands: the diary of Boris Komsky, a sergeant who became a lieutenant at the end of the war, and that of Pavel Elkinson. God grant them health; both are still alive, one living in Lviv and the other in Zaporizhzhia, veterans of the Great Patriotic War.

What did they write on, and how did they write? Notebooks and ink really were scarce. It was not easy, and people wrote on whatever they could find. They made improvised notebooks, stitched separate sheets together, and bound them. Vasily Tsymbal’s diary, for example, is absolutely astonishing — I cannot avoid mentioning it. His son, the film director Yevgeny Tsymbal, gave me his father’s diaries to examine and work with. There are twelve notebooks, extremely detailed and covered in tiny handwriting. At first he wrote in books made from the reverse sides of protocols and court rulings of the prerevolutionary Kuban Cossack Host.

S. BUNTMAN: My goodness. So those were papers he had found somewhere?

O. BUDNITSKY: He was from Yeisk and began fighting in the Kuban. There was a special partisan detachment of a rather unusual kind. It was, as it were, in our rear and made raids across the front line. Judging by the diary, to be honest, its main task seemed to be to avoid meeting the enemy.

Later he reached Germany, and there too he found notebooks — pre-bound German forms or protocols printed in Gothic type — and wrote on their reverse sides. The physical form of these diaries is therefore extremely interesting in itself.

They wrote both in ink and in pencil. Ink was scarce; people obtained it somehow, and it was often stolen, incidentally. There are several entries along the lines of, “Someone stole my ink today — outrageous,” and so on.

S. BUNTMAN: Does ordinary pencil deteriorate badly over time?

O. BUDNITSKY: It depends on how it was stored. If it was kept in more or less normal conditions, it remains readable.

S. BUNTMAN: Normal household conditions?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, yes.

S. BUNTMAN: Somewhere in a cupboard, in a drawer?

O. BUDNITSKY: As long as mice did not eat it, it was not flooded, and there were no extreme changes in temperature. In general, the same rules apply as to archival documents. “Private archive” is perhaps too grand a phrase. If it simply lay somewhere in somebody’s home under normal conditions, it can survive quite well.

Who kept diaries? The decisive question was not the serviceman’s rank, but his level of education and general culture.

S. BUNTMAN: And habit as well. Some people simply have a habit of writing.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly.

S. BUNTMAN: Although that habit could arise during the war itself, couldn’t it?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, it could, and I will come to that. But to a considerable extent diaries were kept by people who had kept them before the war or who were preparing themselves for creative or at least intellectual work. Irina Dunaevskaya, for instance, had kept a diary since childhood. Unfortunately, as she herself writes, she destroyed it before joining the people’s militia. She then kept a diary during the winter of the Leningrad blockade. She returned from the militia, lived through that blockade winter in Leningrad, and kept a diary before joining the army proper. She destroyed that one too. Fortunately, she preserved her wartime notes from 1942 to 1945. But when she began deciphering them in the late 1980s and 1990s, as she herself wrote, much of what they referred to was no longer clear even to her. Nevertheless, the text was reconstructed and annotated by her, and it was published this year.

S. BUNTMAN: Who published it?

O. BUDNITSKY: ROSSPEN, in a series called “On the Sidelines of War,” although I do not quite understand why it is called a sideline.

S. BUNTMAN: It sounds more like the road itself.

O. BUDNITSKY: It is the road itself, and a main highway at that: from Leningrad to Königsberg, serving in an intelligence department or in a political department working with enemy troops and the enemy population. Private David Kaufman likewise continued keeping a diary. Before the war he had already published his first poem, and later he published poems that are probably among the finest written about the war. Connoisseurs of literature will already have realized that I mean David Samoilov.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes.

O. BUDNITSKY: For him it was natural. He had kept diaries in the 1930s and continued during the war, although they were not systematic. Along with records of what he saw and took part in, there are many general reflections on literature, which is perfectly natural.

S. BUNTMAN: That is normal. That is a normal diary.

O. BUDNITSKY: In general, almost all... How shall I put it? The diaries were very different, but almost everyone who kept one had completed ten years of school — there are practically no exceptions — or was a university student drafted into the army, some even before the war when deferments were abolished and masses of young people were called up. Nikolai Inozemtsev, for example, began keeping an army diary as a student and kept a frontline diary throughout the war. It was later published. That same Sergeant Nikolai Inozemtsev, who later became a sergeant major, eventually became Academician Nikolai Nikolayevich Inozemtsev. He wrote a great deal afterward, though in a different genre, including speeches for Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. But his frontline diary is extraordinarily interesting.

Almost everyone who kept a diary wanted to write something in the future and regarded the diary as material for future works. Vasily Tsymbal, whom I have already mentioned, was the oldest of them. Before the war and at its beginning he was director of the Yeisk Teachers’ College. He taught literature and recited poetry brilliantly. According to family stories — and judging by his extensive wartime correspondence with various women, colleagues, and former female pupils — all the girls in town were mad about him. He even sent some literary efforts to Gorky. Gorky did not approve of them very much. His diary is a chronicle: he records absolutely everything — what he ate, how he slept, what he dreamed, what sounds he heard. Everything.

S. BUNTMAN: That is wonderful. Such detail pays for itself in life, in history, and for us.

O. BUDNITSKY: Of course. It is impossible to publish it in full because that would really be reading for specialists, but individual fragments are extraordinarily interesting. Or Vladimir Gelfand, whom I mentioned. He intended to become... He was still a boy, drafted straight from school, went through the entire war, and served with our occupation forces in Germany until 1946. But he was an absolute graphomaniac. He wrote constantly, everywhere. He writes something like: “A shell has just fallen, but on the other side of the trench. He was killed, and I am alive.” And then he goes on writing. It is extraordinary. I am not exaggerating; there really are passages like that.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes, I see.

O. BUDNITSKY: He kept his diary every day, with extremely rare gaps. It is enormous. The Germans translated it and published it in German. It has not been published in Russian, but it is available online. Sooner or later almost all these diarists hint at something like, “Perhaps I will write something.” There is a wonderful passage in Irina Dunaevskaya’s diary. She apparently had no intention of writing a book; she simply had kept a diary all her life and continued. She writes: “If I am maimed and can no longer work, I will write a book about myself, an ordinary girl who grew up between the wars and took part in the Patriotic War. I know I can do it.” Well, she was not entirely an ordinary girl. There could hardly have been many on all the fronts of the Great Patriotic War...

S. BUNTMAN: “Ordinary” is an image, a form of self-presentation that is very interesting in many people.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. What struck me is that just a few pages earlier she notes that in her spare time she is reading Chateaubriand and regrets having to read him in Russian translation because she cannot obtain him in French.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes.

O. BUDNITSKY: A perfectly simple, ordinary girl! She was a student in the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad University and later became an Orientalist. The one person who apparently had no literary plans was Sergeant Pavel Elkinson. He began his diary on 28 August 1944 for a very specific reason. I quote: “At last the long-awaited day of the complete expulsion of the Germans from our soil on our sector of the front has arrived. Here is the pond; here is the border. Only six days have passed since we began the offensive. How much has been accomplished. Bessarabia has been completely cleared; peace has been concluded with Romania; tomorrow we will cross the border. Did I ever imagine that I would find myself abroad? It turns out that I did. How I want to remember everything I see and record it briefly, because something like this happens only once in a lifetime.” A tourist’s notes.

S. BUNTMAN: Full awareness of what was happening.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, a tourist’s notes — except that this tourism involved the highest possible degree of danger. From August 1944 to May 1945 he traveled through Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria.

S. BUNTMAN: Right.

O. BUDNITSKY: And he recorded his impressions and adventures — “adventures” is putting it mildly, because entries about excellent Hungarian wine alternate with entries saying that the intelligence chief with whom he had been speaking a minute earlier was killed beside him that day. He was evidently not inclined to reflection; there are not many general thoughts or emotions, but a great deal of information and impressions of the world around him. Then suddenly he bursts out: “When will this end? For three years someone has been killed beside me every day, and when will it be your turn?”

That thought suddenly broke through: when would it be his turn?

S. BUNTMAN: The sort of thing people do not usually write about so readily...

O. BUDNITSKY: No. Well, they do write about it.

S. BUNTMAN: Writing about oneself — that I too might be killed any day. I do not know whether people write about that.

O. BUDNITSKY: They do, they do. People know it, but it depends on the person and on the mood. Gelfand, for example, complained about life constantly: this was wrong, that was wrong, he had been passed over for a decoration, people were always mistreating him. But of one thing he was absolutely certain: that he would not be killed. “I am certain that nothing will happen to me.” And nothing did. It is astonishing. He is sitting in a trench, shells are bursting around him, and he sits there writing his diary. Besides the diary, he wrote as many as ten letters a day to relatives, girls he knew, and so on. Those are the sorts of things one finds. But for some people, especially after being wounded, when they felt that it really could happen to them...

S. BUNTMAN: They had been close to it.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, and that changes the tone somewhat. Boris Komsky, for example, was wounded in a battle on the Kursk salient. There is another curious story there. He had completed the Orel Mortar School — naturally, at that time the school was not in Orel but in Chimkent. The day before the final examinations they were loaded onto trains and sent to the Kursk salient without being commissioned. They had trained these people for half a year. I understand, of course, that probably every man counted, but surely there ought to have been some logic from the state’s point of view. Why take almost fully trained officers and...

S. BUNTMAN: Send them as ordinary soldiers.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. They were given sergeant ranks and thrown into the meat grinder. Almost all of them were killed. Komsky’s diary for August 1943 is simply a chronicle of the destruction of his regiment: how a regiment became a composite battalion, then a company, and then there was nobody left. Those who were wounded and evacuated to the rear survived. Almost everyone else was killed. Every day he records who was killed, without emotion: “So-and-so was killed, so-and-so, so-and-so.” He breaks down only later, when he is already in hospital and a comrade — perhaps from a neighboring unit, perhaps also there because of a wound — comes and tells him who has been killed, including his close friends. Then there is a real cry from the heart. He lists their names and writes, “How can this be?” Those are the emotional moments connected both with the deaths of friends and with the realization that you yourself may be killed. He later records, retrospectively, that when he was wounded and they somehow crawled out of the battle under fire, he was completely prepared to die, because he believed that battle would be his last.

So the people who kept diaries were, for the most part, not simple personalities, let us put it that way. On the one hand, they were ordinary Soviet people. All of them were absolutely Soviet citizens, however critically they might view the reality around them — and it was difficult not to be critical, given what they constantly encountered. They were all absolutely Soviet and absolutely patriotic, devoted to the cause. And yet their diaries reflected things that we will find nowhere else.

S. BUNTMAN: In five minutes, after the break, Oleg Budnitsky and I will look at exactly what can be found in these diaries.

NEWS

S. BUNTMAN: We continue our program produced jointly with the magazine Knowledge Is Power. We are discussing wartime diaries, diaries from the Great Patriotic War and the Second World War. Oleg Budnitsky is in the studio. There is a video broadcast on the Echo of Moscow website. You can send questions by SMS to +7 985 970-45-45. We are waiting for your questions and comments. Nikolai, for example, writes that he has a wartime diary describing battles in the Baltic region and Poland and wants to publish it.

O. BUDNITSKY: Wonderful. If he needs help from a professional historian, then by all means...

S. BUNTMAN: Nikolai, do not hesitate. Send us an email, for example.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, yes. I would be very happy to help, and in general...

S. BUNTMAN: If necessary, just write to our general email address and say that it should be passed to me. Write “For Buntman,” and I will pass everything on to Oleg Budnitsky.

O. BUDNITSKY: Then we can get in touch.

S. BUNTMAN: Of course. Anton writes: “German diaries seem more candid.” You have probably read them. Anton asks why.

O. BUDNITSKY: Anton, you probably have not read all the diaries written by our servicemen. They are more than candid. Much more than candid. They contain things that no supervisory or controlling authority could have imagined. Fortunately those authorities did not read these texts at the time. I will quote some passages now, and you will understand what I mean.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes, that is what I wanted to look at in the second half of the program. What is actually in them? People write in different ways. They write what they see, but sometimes, as you have probably noticed, they fall into clichés they have heard or read, newspaper formulas. Or are these diaries entirely spontaneous and original?

O. BUDNITSKY: Those clichés are more characteristic of memoirs written later and of various interviews — not all of them, but many. People have heard, seen, and read so many times what one is supposed to know and say about the war that they involuntarily begin using those formulas in their own accounts.

S. BUNTMAN: In other words, there is a model for how one is supposed to speak about this or that subject.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. And some people simply do not want to talk about certain things, whether because of a deeply ingrained caution, almost absorbed at a genetic level, or for some other reason. A person keeping a diary during the war knows that he can be killed at any moment and writes quite differently. Besides, there is not yet any established canon. Attempts are being made to create one, but it has not yet taken hold. People write about what they encounter, what they see, what they experience. It is a completely different story. If we want to understand the everyday reality of the war, what ordinary soldiers and junior and middle-ranking officers actually experienced, official communiqués and reports can tell us something, but only the surface — and a very carefully smoothed and polished surface.

To make clear what I mean, I will quote from an extraordinary, truly remarkable diary called simply Frontline Diary by Boris Suris. He was a very young man, drafted at eighteen, who went through the whole war. He began as a private, eventually became a senior lieutenant, and served as a military interpreter. In Odessa, against his father’s wishes, he had entered an art school and wanted to become a painter; later he became an art historian. His diary is astonishing. What is astonishing about it is the powers of observation one does not expect from someone so young — perhaps the eye of an artist, I do not know — together with wit and, at times, remarkable depth. I quote:

“In a dugout. Words by Surkov. Oh, these poets! I would take them and put them here with us in the dugout. Would he still write then that he feels warm in a cold dugout? Foolish poets looking for romance in war. Today I had my fill of that romance of war. The romance of war is a road plowed up by mines and shells; it is the trudging of clumsy soldiers through mud mixed with blood; it is burned tank crews; it is a red-haired German with his belly torn open and his penis ripped off; it is a twisted severed arm belonging to nobody knows whom; or drunken soldiers shooting at one another. There is nothing to be done: that is what war is, not what they describe.”

That is what can be found in soldiers’ diaries: the reality of war as it actually looked — unappetizing, unromantic, and anything but pleasant.

What did people write about in diaries? Many things: their own combat path, general reflections, sometimes things they had read in newspapers or heard on the radio. They were very interested in what was happening in the West, when the second front would be opened; some followed Churchill’s statements. These were politically aware people, so to speak. But there were three main themes. I recently read the remarkable memoirs of Nikolai Nikolayevich Nikulin, Sergeant Nikulin, who went through the whole war from Leningrad to Germany and later became a doctor of art history and curator of Netherlandish and German painting at the Hermitage. He wrote his memoirs in 1975 as a reaction to the official history of the war and yet another anniversary.

S. BUNTMAN: At that point the history had once again been cast in bronze.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. He clearly wrote the memoirs for his desk drawer. He described the three main subjects of soldiers’ conversations: death, food, and sex. I am quoting him. In fact, those are also the three principal themes in soldiers’ diaries. There is much else, of course, but those three can be found almost everywhere.

Let me give several examples of aspects that are usually not mentioned in official or even less-than-official histories of the war. First, the realities of combat. Boris Komsky is a rare case of a man who came out of battle and wrote down what had happened that very evening. “5 August 1943, in the Orel region. We went into the attack. The Germans ran. Our platoon broke ahead; eight men in the platoon. We passed through the village. The Germans are retreating through the rye, our men are running after them. I dropped to one knee and fired my rifle. One Fritz fell. I rejoice and run forward. I see two have fallen behind. I order my men: ‘Surround them!’ One raises his hands. I run after the other, catch him. It turns out to be the man I shot. Wounded in the head. He thrusts his individual dressing packet into my hands. I did not bandage him. A big healthy Fritz with a medal and medal ribbon. Took his submachine gun, searched him. Someone shouts: ‘Take his watch. What are you staring at?’ That’s right, I think, and take it.” It is almost a cinematic description of a real battle.

What surprised me is that the German hands his personal dressing packet to the Soviet soldier. He has no other hope: he is wounded and bleeding. Who can help him? Only the enemy.

S. BUNTMAN: Well, yes, he is surrendering.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. And it is also curious that Komsky writes, “I did not bandage him.” For us, one might say, that seems natural — he is the enemy. But I have the feeling that Komsky experienced a certain discomfort because he had failed to bandage a wounded man, even though he was an enemy. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but it seems that way to me. I will cite another entry that surprised me. Pavel Elkinson, already in Hungary, writes: “Today I knocked off another one. That makes four. I feel no pity.” Again, what surprised me was not that Sergeant Elkinson had killed another enemy soldier, but that he specifically recorded that he felt no pity. Was he supposed to?

S. BUNTMAN: On the one hand, perhaps he is monitoring himself as a human being. On the other, one cannot live otherwise.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. That is very interesting.

S. BUNTMAN: You cannot fight a war otherwise. It is a form both of reflection and of persuading oneself.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, very interesting.

S. BUNTMAN: Or simply noticing something about oneself. That is interesting.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. And for them these Germans were not mannequins. That is important. The most striking — I cannot call it “interesting”; it is a terrible entry — comes from Suris’s diary. He is interrogating a German and writes that the German is pleasant-looking, a large blond man, badly wounded clean through the chest. The prisoner tells Suris that he had actually opposed Nazism. Probably everyone said that, of course; he says he and some friends tore down a flag or did something of the sort. In any event, Suris feels sympathy for him. Then he thinks: “He is badly wounded. What can we do with him?” After the interrogation he takes him to the nearest tent and shoots him. The next day he goes back to look at the German’s corpse — something draws him to it. Frost has already set in; there is a bright patch of blood beside the man’s head. Suris writes that someone has already removed his boots and turned out his pockets. He returns to the dugout and rewrites Ehrenburg’s famous slogan “Kill the German.” Suris writes: “Kill the German and empty his pockets.” Horror and black humor at the same time.

Another striking feature is the very critical view of what was happening around them. I am amazed that Boris Suris kept a diary of this sort. I do not know whether he was afraid or not, but it is a substantial text. What worries him most? The quality of command. At the higher level — insofar as he could see it from headquarters — he is astonished by operations being poorly prepared, flanks not being secured, objectives not being clearly communicated to battalion commanders, and so on. He returns to these matters constantly, apparently unable to understand why it happens. But what concerns him most is the quality of junior and middle-ranking commanders. He writes:

“Our misfortune lies in the poor quality of our human material — the soldiers are poor, and the commanders are not what they should be. If he is a regular officer, he may be an excellent drillmaster, know all the regulations by heart, and perhaps have combat experience, but he clearly lacks general education and theoretical knowledge. He lacks knowledge even of his own specialty, let alone related ones. If he is an engineer, his ideas about communications are already extremely vague. It seems to me that the Germans do not have this problem, and that is their strength. Whatever else one may say, those bastards have a strong officer corps.”

Suris knew this well because he constantly worked with captured German documents and with prisoners. He was also irritated, if one can put it that way, by the aesthetic side of the officer corps. I quote: “It is disgusting to look at these newly minted lieutenants with whom the regiment is full. It seems to me that they know even less than the old regular junior commanders” — meaning sergeants. “These are poorly educated fellows who have retained all their coarsest boorish manners, their peasant voice and village appearance. I have no faith in these commanders.” There is, of course, a certain urban snobbery in that.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes, the snobbery of a city man who has also already been through combat.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. On the one hand, that is true. On the other hand, he notices a great deal. We constantly forget that the USSR was a peasant country. With all my respect for the peasantry...

S. BUNTMAN: Despite all the industrialization and everything else, of course...

O. BUDNITSKY: Two-thirds of the population.

S. BUNTMAN: Of course.

O. BUDNITSKY: And the Russian peasantry bore the main burden of the war. But in the conditions of modern warfare, these people, who were not very well educated, had no experience with machinery, and lived according to an entirely different rhythm, suddenly found themselves in the meat grinder of war. If they were also responsible for other people, the consequences for the army were often very serious.

There is also a curious reaction in Suris’s diary to the introduction of shoulder boards. At first everyone was bewildered — what was this supposed to be? Then came irony. He writes: “Our men are putting on shoulder boards; headquarters is covered in stars until it hurts the eyes. On some men the shoulder boards sit like a skullcap on a pig. But in general, the thing is impressive and dignified.” So there is still a certain shift in attitude. And immediately afterward comes irony: “Yesterday there was an inspection of our ‘imperial army.’” In quotation marks.

S. BUNTMAN: Understandable.

O. BUDNITSKY: “A depressing impression, made worse by the fact that they are not properly uniformed and are in rags. A motley crowd of youngsters and very old men. Several thoroughly degenerate-looking types. You will go straight to hell with fighters like these. Only the signal company and the flamethrower company seem more or less all right.” Such were the realities, written by a man who cared deeply about what was happening.

S. BUNTMAN: Of course. He lives by it, and his life depends on it.

O. BUDNITSKY: His life, yes. And yet, despite all these “individual shortcomings,” to put it mildly — shortcomings that were actually widespread — victories began to come. Suris took part in the Battle of Stalingrad and then in operations on the Don. He writes: “The Russian people astonish me. After being beaten like this for two years in a row, they found the strength to recover and now, striking blow after blow, are beating and driving back the strongest army in the world. They are doing it after choosing the hardest season for an offensive — winter. They are doing it while themselves remaining ignorant and downtrodden (there is no point deceiving ourselves that this has disappeared). They are doing it even though on the other side our brothers are standing against us.” The last two remarks require some explanation.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes.

O. BUDNITSKY: By “ignorant and downtrodden” he meant educational level. The Cultural Revolution was to a considerable extent a myth — not in the sense that there had not been enormous progress, but that even after this progress the level remained very low. On the eve of the war, a quarter of the regular army consisted of people with fewer than six years of schooling. Once wartime mobilization began and twenty-seven additional age cohorts were called up, the average educational quality only declined. So by “ignorance and backwardness” he meant the low level of education and the fact that most people were rural inhabitants to whom much of modern life was utterly unfamiliar.

As for “brothers,” that is a very specific subject. During the fighting on the Don, intelligence reports said that Cossack formations were fighting on the German side, which was indeed the case.

S. BUNTMAN: Was that when Krasnov appeared there?

O. BUDNITSKY: Krasnov made an appearance there.

S. BUNTMAN: So he did appear.

O. BUDNITSKY: Suris constantly records information from intelligence and prisoners that in a German formation — say, four hundred men — a hundred were Cossacks. I think that is a considerable exaggeration.

S. BUNTMAN: Probably, yes.

O. BUDNITSKY: But it reflects the opinion and mood of the time. He also writes that the most savage treatment of our prisoners and detainees came from our own people — the police and formations recruited from residents of those areas.

More generally, perhaps because of Stalin-era upbringing and its total distrust, perhaps because people behaved in very different ways in occupied territory, or perhaps because hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens really did fight in the German armed forces or provide services to them, there was a very pronounced distrust of those who had lived under occupation and of former prisoners. And this was not only among NKVD personnel but among...

S. BUNTMAN: Ordinary soldiers and officers generally.

O. BUDNITSKY: For example, refugees are walking back. The Germans had tried to remove residents from territories being liberated by the Red Army so that labor and potential conscripts would not again fall under Soviet control, although this time they failed. And what do our soldiers say to these refugees? “Well, what happened? Didn’t you make it to Berlin? Didn’t your friends help you?” These were unfortunate people who had lived under occupation and had been uprooted, yet that is what our soldiers said to them.

Sometimes there may have been real grounds for suspicion. Boris Komsky, while walking through the Orel region after being wounded, was put in charge of a group of convalescents traveling from central Russia into Belarus to join a special reserve regiment from which men would later be assigned to units. He records his impressions of the Orel peasants: “The people here are angry. They call everyone ‘snakes.’ Soldiers are snakes — meaning Red Army soldiers. Germans are snakes. Partisans are snakes. All the same, all snakes.” In one village, he writes, “A blind man greets us with bread and salt. Well, he probably greeted the Germans the same way yesterday.” Or he records reports that “the Orel peasants fought the partisans together with the Germans.”

When he leaves the Orel region — and I do not want to say anything bad about its inhabitants; I am merely reporting what was written by this specific Sergeant Komsky, who walked from village to village there in the late autumn of 1943 — he, a convinced Soviet man, is disturbed when peasants in areas more favorable to the soldiers seem entirely Soviet, yet “in the collective farms they speak of the partisans with a sigh.” Of course, partisans differed greatly, and peasants, as we know, had to feed both Germans and partisans.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes.

O. BUDNITSKY: So they had reasons to sigh.

S. BUNTMAN: And very often both sides demanded food under threat.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. Those are the kinds of entries we have. Moving now to Pavel Elkinson’s diary and his impressions of Europe: when he writes about populations being liberated, he sometimes finds people enthusiastic and elsewhere simply exhausted by everything and indifferent. Perhaps they had always been indifferent — who knows? That needs further study. I repeat, soldiers’ diaries give an extremely varied picture. He writes of the marvelous reception in Bulgaria: they are constantly well fed and drunk; “we cannot possibly drink any more,” but people keep bringing bottles and barrels of wine. And he writes: “Nowhere in Russia or Ukraine did they greet us like this.” [Everyone laughs.] In Bulgaria, Serbia, Yugoslavia. One had to accomplish something quite extraordinary in Eastern Europe for people who greeted the Red Army in that way later to become so negatively disposed toward the Soviet Union.

S. BUNTMAN: But Bulgaria, of course, had seen practically no foreign army in the preceding years except its own — and the Germans.

O. BUDNITSKY: And the Germans, yes. Serbia was much the same; the reception there was also very warm. Romania, of course, had fought against the USSR, so things were somewhat different there. By the way, here is another grim entry from Boris Suris. After one locality was liberated from the Germans, he writes: “In the hospital they finish off wounded Germans; Romanians they do not.” War was quite a brutal business.

S. BUNTMAN: Indeed.

O. BUDNITSKY: As it appears in soldiers’ diaries, it is nothing like the rosy, romantic, embellished picture that so often appears in some historical studies, let alone in fiction or cinema. War was not cinema. It was not romance. If we want to understand what it was really like, we should turn to primary sources — texts created by people who took part in it.

S. BUNTMAN: And created at that very time.

O. BUDNITSKY: At that very time.

S. BUNTMAN: They do not contain the entire reality of what happened, but they contain very important things.

O. BUDNITSKY: Of course.

S. BUNTMAN: Thank you very much. Oleg Budnitsky, we will continue our series next Saturday.

Date: 10 July 2010, 14:08 Topic: Sexual Crimes of the Wehrmacht Program: Not So Host: Sergey Buntman Guest: Oleg Budnitsky Recording: download (10.4 MB), listen (45:30)

SEXUAL CRIMES OF THE WEHRMACHT

S. BUNTMAN: This is our historical program produced jointly with the magazine Knowledge Is Power. We have a short series, a trilogy with Oleg Budnitsky, on different aspects of the Second World War. We talked about the diaries of soldiers and officers. Today we will talk about sexual crimes and, more broadly, sexual behavior. This is not a program that belongs in a late-night slot, so to speak. The subject matters historically. Whenever an army passes through a territory — whether in Mother Courage and the Thirty Years’ War or in any other war, whether it is its own territory or somebody else’s — all kinds of events of a sexual nature occur, with differing degrees of cruelty, violence, organization, and so on. Let us look at this. The Wehrmacht and not only the Wehrmacht. Right, Oleg?

O. BUDNITSKY: Today, primarily the Wehrmacht — the Wehrmacht, the SS, and other German armed formations.

S. BUNTMAN: There are books and a body of literature on this now; it has more or less begun to be written about.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, but mostly not in Russian. Paradoxically, the sexual crimes of the Wehrmacht are studied in Germany, Switzerland, the United States — almost anywhere except the former Soviet Union. The subject of sexual relations during wartime was taboo for a long time. As the old joke has it, “we had no sex”; apparently we had none during the war either, and so it was not studied. Yet the problem existed and people were well aware of it. Paradoxically, the subject even made its way onto the screen. I personally, then a young boy, first learned that such things had happened from the famous Soviet film Chairman.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes.

O. BUDNITSKY: You remember it, with Mikhail Ulyanov?

S. BUNTMAN: Yes.

O. BUDNITSKY: Ulyanov’s character, Yegor Trubnikov, returns from the war. His brother, a negative character, has a whole crowd of children — six. Trubnikov asks him: “Are they all yours? No presents from the Fritzes?” “One,” his brother Semyon replies. “Petka.” Semyon explains: “What was I supposed to do? Get myself shot? At least I saved the house and saved the family.” The film does not pursue the subject any further. If I am not mistaken, that was 1964 or 1965. I am quoting from Yury Nagibin’s screenplay. The problem was recognized and it existed, but it was never studied scientifically.

Let us first define what I mean by sexual crimes. I am speaking of two categories: rape and coercion into prostitution. If we are talking about the Wehrmacht, this concerned not only the former Soviet Union but all territories occupied by the German army. The issue of soldiers’ sexual behavior and the army command’s attitude toward it arose in July 1940 after the occupation of France. It was raised by none other than the commander-in-chief of the German Army, von Brauchitsch.

Why? What concerned the military command above all was venereal disease and the resulting losses.

S. BUNTMAN: That already had a history going back to the First World War.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. During the First World War, losses to the German army from venereal disease amounted to about two million cases. Looking ahead, I should say that in the Second World War — and this illustrates that sexual relations are not only part of the history of people in war, which is what interests me, but also strictly military history — losses were lower than in the First World War but still very large. With German precision, the exact figure is 706,000 men. Those were men who contracted gonorrhea or syphilis and consequently could not fight for a certain period.

S. BUNTMAN: So to some degree these were permanent losses?

O. BUDNITSKY: No.

S. BUNTMAN: They returned to service?

O. BUDNITSKY: They returned. Antibiotics were not yet in use, but the average treatment period in the German army was three weeks for gonorrhea and half a year for syphilis. To understand what 706,000 means: it is almost three times the German army’s losses at Stalingrad. On an average day the army was short by fourteen battalions, or seven thousand men. That was the scale. It would naturally have been even larger had the German command not taken measures.

First, there was a strict prohibition against sexual relations with the local population, especially in the East. But, as Brauchitsch wrote, and I quote: “Given the differing nature of men, tensions and needs in the sexual sphere are unavoidable, and we cannot and must not close our eyes to them.” They did not close their eyes. The German army decided to establish state-run brothels. And once decided, it was done. I should add that there was also fear of homosexuality developing in the army, including among heterosexual men. This too drew on the experience of the First World War, and the German military wanted to account for what it regarded as these undesirable consequences.

According to historians and surviving documents, the German army organized 569 brothels during the war, employing at least fifty thousand women. Some more conservative estimates give thirty-five thousand. We will never establish the exact figure, but I think fifty thousand is closer to the truth.

S. BUNTMAN: In this context the exact number is not fundamental. It matters for the details, but thirty-five or fifty thousand...

O. BUDNITSKY: Well, fifteen thousand are still fifteen thousand human beings.

S. BUNTMAN: Of course. But either figure shows the scale.

O. BUDNITSKY: I should say at once that the German army was not unique in this respect, but among the major belligerent armies the only other one to practice something comparable was the Japanese army.

S. BUNTMAN: There was that whole case, reopened not so long ago, involving Korea.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly.

S. BUNTMAN: The Korean women. For a long time the issue was debated: had they been forced into prostitution?

O. BUDNITSKY: Undoubtedly they had. We will look in a moment at how women were recruited into the German brothels. Compared with the Japanese, the Germans were “humanists” — in quotation marks, of course. The Japanese army forced between eighty and one hundred thousand women to service its soldiers, very often simply through brute force. People say the East is a subtle matter, but in this case there was nothing subtle about it: people were simply forced.

S. BUNTMAN: Direct and brutal.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. In addition to official brothels, there were many field and mobile brothels established by individual units. About half of all these brothels were created in the East, including on the territory of our country. Military brothels existed in many different cities, from Lviv in the west to Krasnodar and relatively small towns such as Labinsk or Kropotkin in the Kuban.

How were women recruited? In different ways. Different sources give different accounts. In Kharkiv, for example, there were reports that relatively attractive young women were simply pulled out of lines at the labor exchange and taken by force into this particular form of service. Another method was to present an alternative: either go to Germany for forced labor or go to a brothel.

S. BUNTMAN: Not exactly a cheerful choice. One can still call that coercion. There may have been an alternative, but both alternatives were harsh.

O. BUDNITSKY: The main source, however, was nominally voluntary recruitment. I read the memoirs of a Volksdeutsche interpreter named Tiesenhausen about my native city of Rostov. He reproduces a conversation with a local doctor who also worked under the Germans. Neither man sympathized with the Nazis, but people had to make a living, and both knew German. The doctor says to him: “Can you imagine? They have opened a brothel here in Rostov.” “Where do the girls come from?” “You know,” the doctor replies, “there are more applicants than places.” Tiesenhausen was shocked. The doctor explains: “Imagine: a husband has been drafted, there are children, perhaps two or three, elderly parents, there is no work and no bread — so the woman goes to work there. In fact, the Russian woman is capable of such self-sacrifice.” I think there is a certain exaggeration and literary embellishment in that. I find it difficult to imagine respectable mothers of families, first, being accepted to work in brothels and, second, lining up to enroll.

S. BUNTMAN: They were young women in any case.

O. BUDNITSKY: Investigative records show that such conduct was prosecuted after the war. There were apparently no special criminal provisions apart from articles dealing with prostitution or collaboration, but military tribunals investigated such cases. According to their records, the overwhelming majority of women who entered these brothels were either unmarried girls or fairly young women, usually without children. So the old doctor somewhat idealized the women who went to work there. They were, I repeat, very different people. But there is little doubt that they went because it was a way to earn a living.

S. BUNTMAN: To survive and to earn money.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. Conditions were generally made more or less decent, according to the same doctor. Each woman had a separate bright room with furniture; she was provided with clothing, underwear, and rations, and paid wages. Those things existed. But this was still coerced prostitution.

S. BUNTMAN: Oleg Budnitsky. I want to mention a few technical details. There is no video broadcast today, and that is not our problem; it is a Rutube problem. Since noon we have been having video difficulties. But the SMS number works, and you can send questions to +7 985 970-45-45. So, in any case, this is coercion into prostitution.

O. BUDNITSKY: Absolutely. I should add that many German soldiers were not particularly fond of going to establishments of this kind because they were subject to strict medical controls. I will spare you the details about injections and the various other delights that preceded and followed the pleasure obtained there, as well as the queues standing out in the street. German soldiers therefore very often dealt with their sexual needs in other ways.

At first, that frequently meant outright violence. As early as January 1942 the Molotov note of 7 January 1942 concerning Nazi crimes was presented to the international community. Among other things, it described rapes, very often accompanied by murder and other atrocities against women. This practice continued throughout the war. Some of the most savage cases are known, oddly enough, from German judicial and investigative records, because rapists were prosecuted on rare occasions.

I should say at once that the courts never had the protection of the woman as their objective. This was almost always emphasized in the reasoning of the judgments. The argument typically began along the lines that “since Russian women have lost the concept... ...of female honor, there can be no question of a German court protecting them.”

The issue was, first, that German soldiers were violating discipline and, second, that by doing so they were damaging the Wehrmacht’s reputation in the eyes of the population. It is characteristic that most of these trials — there were only several dozen altogether — took place in 1943 and 1944.

S. BUNTMAN: As late as that? 1943–44?

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. That was when the Germans wanted to improve relations with the population, or at least reduce the partisan movement. Some of these episodes show what was actually happening. When you look at whom they prosecuted, it sometimes looks very much like an effort to get rid of a particularly undisciplined soldier. In one case a German soldier raped a woman on two evenings in succession. He was tried. His record is revealing: he had already been convicted four times of other offenses, and apparently his commander decided to get rid of him. He was sentenced to several years in prison, but in practice was sent to a penal company, which was of course far more dangerous.

In another case a German serviceman attempted to rape a woman. She resisted, and he shot her. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, but the commander again commuted it to service in a penal company, because in 1944 — this trial took place in 1944 — prison would have been a resort compared with the front.

S. BUNTMAN: And was the reasoning again that such conduct toward civilians violated something?

O. BUDNITSKY: Violation of discipline and, yes, exactly, damage to the Wehrmacht’s reputation among the population and to normal relations with civilians. I repeat: the Germans began thinking much more frequently in those terms in 1943–44.

The most outrageous case involved five soldiers who raped two teenage girls. The records themselves say that the girls were raped brutally. It was a unique case: the military judge who had to confirm the sentence sent it back, saying that the case was extraordinary and that he would recommend the death penalty. It is the only such case I know.

But the battalion commander said these were young soldiers who had otherwise performed well, that one had to take into account the circumstances in which everything happened, and so on, and argued that they should not be shot. In the end the higher military commander — ultimately it was the commander, not the judge, who decided — sent them to a penal camp and from there to the front.

Such cases illustrate the circumstances. Of course, the overwhelming majority of acts of violence went not only unpunished but unnoticed. Given the general policy toward the population — treating people as second-class human beings and “Untermenschen” — there could naturally be no question of strict punishment on a mass scale.

In addition to the state-run brothels I have mentioned, there were establishments created either by individual units or by local collaborators. Lieutenant Vitaly Stekolshchikov left a curious sketch in a letter to his beloved in September 1943 after one town had been liberated. I quote: “Here is a house they did not manage to burn. They had a hotel in this house, as the sign on the wall of the Ukrainian hut says. Next to the word ‘Hotel’ there is a red crayfish painted on the wall, and on another wall an entire picture: three girls sit at a table drinking while a young waiter serves them. Let it be a ‘hotel’ in their language; in ours it is a little whorehouse. The mistress of this house lived there with her daughter, and on their door hung a piece of paper saying: ‘Here live [names omitted], aged 46 and 9.’” Forty-six, in those days, was evidently considered an older woman; the notice, so to speak, made sure no one mistook the door — the brothel was over there, not here.

SS Einsatzgruppe D — a special group created to murder Jews and other people regarded as undesirable by the German command — was quartered in Taganrog and created a theatrical troupe. The troupe consisted mainly of young women. After performances the SS men organized dances with refreshments, where arrangements of some sort were made with the women. In a suburb several houses were cleared of residents and used to accommodate these women. So there were improvised brothels of this kind as well.

S. BUNTMAN: A more elegant arrangement, so to speak.

O. BUDNITSKY: It was an entire industry. On Soviet territory there were certainly not merely two hundred and fifty such brothels; there were many more, and it is probably impossible to count them all.

As we know, relations of this kind can result in children. We began with that reference to the “present from a Fritz.” The birth of children to women of the “lower races” greatly concerned the German command.

S. BUNTMAN: We will continue in five minutes and answer the many questions that have already come in.

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S. BUNTMAN: We continue Not So, our program with the magazine Knowledge Is Power. The subject is sexual crimes of the Wehrmacht. We have no video broadcast because Rutube is having problems, but you can send questions to +7 985 970-45-45. Oleg Budnitsky and I had reached the system of brothels created by German troops, the problem of rape, and the problem of violence. Someone asks, incidentally, how widespread violence was in other countries occupied by Germany. Is that known?

O. BUDNITSKY: It is known, of course, but again there are no exact statistics, for reasons that should be obvious. According to general criminological estimates, specialists write that in about 95 percent of rape cases the victims tell no one. During an occupation I think that percentage would be substantially higher, especially on the territory of the Soviet Union.

Why do I also believe the number of rapes in the Soviet Union was far higher than in Western Europe? Not merely because of the number of soldiers and women present here.

S. BUNTMAN: Because of the attitude? The ideology?

O. BUDNITSKY: Because, as I have said, Keitel’s first orders at the beginning of the war already prescribed a special attitude toward the civilian population: these were second-class people, fundamentally different people. The war in the East was entirely different from the war in the West. This applied to men and women alike. In practice German soldiers were given license to kill and to commit virtually any violence against civilians.

S. BUNTMAN: And concern for the Wehrmacht’s image in the eyes of the population came later, in 1943–44, with the struggle against the partisans?

O. BUDNITSKY: Later, yes, though some concern began earlier. Obviously, once territory was occupied, the Germans wanted people to work for them, and they had to maintain some degree of order so that everyone did not decide that resistance was the only option. To some extent they did maintain order. But I repeat: although sexual relations with the local population were strictly prohibited in principle, soldiers largely ignored the prohibition. The command understood this perfectly well and also understood that it was impossible to punish everyone or force everyone to obey. In the overwhelming majority of cases it therefore turned a blind eye.

In the West things were different — very different. Before discussing the children born under occupation, let me cite an almost comic episode in this otherwise grim subject. In accordance with military hierarchy, attempts were made to establish separate brothels for enlisted men, for officers, and for foreign volunteers. In one document I found a remarkable line. The adjutant of an Eastern battalion wrote to his command: “A man who is prepared to die for Germany must have access to a brothel.” He apparently did not realize how ironic the sentence sounded. In any case, they were given access.

S. BUNTMAN: Hmm.

O. BUDNITSKY: Now back to the children. This greatly worried the German command. None other than General Rudolf Schmidt, commander of the 2nd Panzer Army, submitted a report to Hitler on 8 September 1942 estimating that 1.5 million racially mixed children a year could be expected in the East. “The East” meant not only the Soviet Union but also Poland and other eastern territories.

What was his estimate based on? Simple arithmetic. There were six million soldiers in the East; half of them, he assumed, slept with women of the “lower races”; therefore natural consequences would follow and children would be born. The figures were essentially invented.

S. BUNTMAN: A rough estimate.

O. BUDNITSKY: A rough estimate that also reflects rather fantastic notions these self-proclaimed supermen had about their own reproductive powers. The number is pure fantasy. Yet the idea behind the policy was serious: children who met certain racial criteria could be taken to Germany, where birth rates were low, and in effect turned into conditional Aryans. This was discussed at many levels for a long time, but practical steps began mainly in 1943–44. Officials tried to identify children fathered by Germans and inspect their mothers. The “inspection” considered appearance, the woman’s sexual history, and a whole questionnaire. If the woman more or less met certain standards and the child could theoretically be “Aryanized,” the child could be taken to the Reich. There was, incidentally, no corresponding provision for the mother.

The army was given responsibility for registering these children. Either it did the job poorly or the situation had already changed too much, but the information collected indicated only relatively small numbers — tens or hundreds, not hundreds of thousands or millions.

In reality there were undoubtedly many more children than were registered. By 1943–44, for one thing, young women were not eager to announce that they had borne a German soldier’s child. They knew what could happen to women who had had relations with Germans — and, incidentally, by no means all those relations had been forced.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes. There were such relationships here as there were in the West.

O. BUDNITSKY: Many of them. I will come back to that. In the first heat of liberation, reprisals against women who had lived with Germans could be extremely brutal. I will give two cases. One occurred in Feodosia when a Soviet landing force retook the city from the Germans around New Year 1942. I am quoting the memoir of a woman who was fourteen at the time. In the weeks of occupation some girls had already entered relationships with Germans. She recalls that paratroopers first raped a neighbor who had lived with a German and then mutilated her. That was the punishment.

Another case occurred in Kharkiv. Soviet troops, as is well known, retook Kharkiv in early 1943, and a month later the Germans captured it again.

S. BUNTMAN: Early 1942.

O. BUDNITSKY: 1943.

S. BUNTMAN: Early 1943?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, February–March 1943. The well-known aspect is the public trial held there: Nazi criminals and some collaborators were executed, publicly hanged in the square before a huge crowd. A special group of writers published essays about it. Less well known is that reprisals against collaborators were much broader and were not always judicial. When the Germans retook Kharkiv they found that about four thousand collaborators had been killed. Among them were many girlfriends of German soldiers and officers, some of them pregnant.

So it was obvious that registering a child fathered by a German could end badly once Soviet forces returned and began investigating. That is one point. Second, many women could not always prove who had fathered a child, whether a German or someone else. Third, registration brought them no privileges.

S. BUNTMAN: The women themselves received nothing.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. In Norway, for example, women who bore German soldiers’ children could receive certain material benefits and sometimes go to Germany and even establish a family.

S. BUNTMAN: Because Norwegians were considered racially close.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. In the East, marriage to women of the “lower race” was forbidden. Yet, surprisingly, from 1942 onward German soldiers began submitting requests for permission to marry such women. The phenomenon became sufficiently widespread to be discussed at the highest level and caused Hitler great anger. He said the behavior was very strange and complained that the men intended to marry the “worst women in the East” — meaning, apparently, that women who slept with the enemy must by definition be the worst.

No general permission was granted. Later there were some relaxations concerning marriages to women from the Baltic region and Ukraine. Even SS members submitted such requests. Alongside all the brutality, violence, and coercion, there were also cases of love. Under the conditions of war and surrounding horror, many women believed that by living with one particular German they could find, if not happiness, at least security and protection from all the others.

S. BUNTMAN: There were all kinds of situations, including genuine love.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, all kinds. As for how many children there were, Schmidt’s estimates and those of other Nazi officials were greatly exaggerated. Still, Vasily Tsymbal records the following in his diary in the Kuban, in the stanitsa of Staraya Ketorovskaya after liberation from German occupation: “All the girls of fifteen and all the young women are pregnant by Germans or Romanians. All of them.” Probably an exaggeration too, but evidently there were many. If it happened in that stanitsa — I apologize, I am not sure of the correct pronunciation of its name — it presumably happened in many other places, especially where the German army remained for two or even three years.

There was love as well. A Belarusian woman named Galina says in the modern German documentary Love in the Time of the War of Annihilation — German filmmakers interviewed women who had had relationships with German soldiers: “We were young,” she says, naming several girlfriends. “German soldiers came to see us. We had a gramophone, listened to music, danced, had fun, and it seemed as though there were no war.” She speaks only of dancing, but one can suppose it did not always stop there. Modern researchers and psychologists describe this as a search for normality, an attempt by both women and German soldiers to escape the horror around them. Not every German soldier was a sadist or murderer, though there were enough of those as well.

Sometimes these attempts at normal relations with German officers or soldiers ended badly. Let me quote another diary, by a woman published under the name Lydia Osipova, whose real name was Olimpiada Polyakova. She was a collaborator — that is not my label; she herself called her text Diary of a Collaborator. She lived in Pushkin, the former Tsarskoye Selo near Leningrad. Around New Year 1942 she wrote: “One amusement in town ended tragically. Germans were visiting their sweethearts. The officers got drunk and began abusing the girls. The girls resisted; during the fight a lamp fell and the house caught fire. The girls ran away. The officers began hunting them like rabbits — three were killed and one wounded. They certainly had their fun.” Such cases occurred too, and not rarely.

Speaking of children, Germans also removed children from the East to Germany regardless of whether they had been fathered by German soldiers or officers.

S. BUNTMAN: Someone asked about that, incidentally.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. Children were taken from orphanages and sometimes simply taken from their parents under various pretexts. Children of executed partisans or prisoners were taken as well. After physical and other examinations, if a child was healthy and considered capable of Germanization, the child was transported to Germany, placed in an orphanage, or given to a German family. Again the motive was demographic: birth rates in Germany were low; Nazi officials feared the “Asiatic hordes” advancing from the East; Germany supposedly lacked enough people, so why not bring children from the East? Notice how all those racial ideas about blood immediately disappeared when pragmatism intervened.

S. BUNTMAN: A whole set of theories was built around upbringing and the supposedly proper upbringing a child might receive. Pragmatic considerations produced a great deal of ideological construction too.

O. BUDNITSKY: Naturally. The path of “Aryanization” was lengthy and involved various stages, but the issue of blood was simply pushed aside, even though the child’s blood was obviously not “Aryan” but Slavic. It is not accidental that Raphael Lemkin, who introduced the concept of genocide and defined its characteristics, included the forcible transfer of children in his definition.

S. BUNTMAN: Meaning forcibly separating children and taking them away?

O. BUDNITSKY: That is genocide: a people is destroyed by removing its children. It is also curious that the Nazis, while planning ultimately to reduce the Slavic population, tried in the meantime to limit birth rates rather than simply physically exterminating everyone immediately. And how do you think they tried? By distributing contraceptives free of charge. Another little-known page of the war.

Because rubber was scarce, condoms were distributed mainly among soldiers. The civilian population was given chemical contraceptives, in the hope of reducing birth rates so that the Slavic masses — the “Asiatic hordes” in Nazi terminology — would eventually shrink and pose less danger to Germany.

S. BUNTMAN: Oleg, so that we have time: a listener asks an appropriate question. To what extent was this sexual aspect of the various crimes considered at Nuremberg?

O. BUDNITSKY: Not at all.

S. BUNTMAN: Not at all?

O. BUDNITSKY: Not at all. And that partly explains the large body of later literature, especially feminist literature from the 1960s onward, when the social role of women changed and women’s movements developed — and, in a sense, it explains our program too. These aspects remained almost completely unknown. A teacher from Germany has written to me asking why we are “digging up such a terrible subject” — apparently, to him rape and coerced prostitution are not terrible enough in themselves. I say “him” because I am fairly sure the writer is a man. What is the relevance of the subject? Precisely this: mass rape and coercion into prostitution occurred then and went unpunished. In modern armed conflicts we see much the same pattern. It happened in Yugoslavia and in Rwanda.

S. BUNTMAN: Not to mention the classic examples from Vietnam and elsewhere.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. This is not merely yesterday’s problem; it is a problem of our own time. We need to understand that. There is also a characteristically male attitude: well, it is war, these things happen.

S. BUNTMAN: Oh well, what can you do?

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly: war writes everything off; things happen in wartime. In 1975 the American journalist and feminist Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Unfortunately it has not been translated into Russian. By 1991 it had gone through five editions. She asked for the first time: why, exactly? What does “these things happen” mean? Why should they happen? Why, if a man is armed, does that supposedly give him the right — or at least allow him to exercise a presumed right while others look away — to take from a woman what he wants?

S. BUNTMAN: Another question, so that we have time: is anything known about this in the camps?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. Brothels were created in the camps as well. There is extensive literature on that too, and racial considerations did not prevent it. There were separate brothels for Germans, for Ukrainian guards, and so forth.

There is one more aspect I would emphasize. Something that painfully wounded many Soviet people was the existence of voluntary relations between Soviet women and girls and German soldiers. We have already touched on that. At least seventy million people remained in occupied Soviet territory; roughly seventy-five percent were women. A large part of the remaining twenty-five percent consisted of elderly men or boys. Besides ideology there is physiology, and that too has to be taken into account, as do economic circumstances. Kazimir Matte, one of the leaders of the Mogilev underground, wrote in a report: “A great many young women and girls began actively making the acquaintance of German officers and soldiers, inviting them to their apartments, going for walks with them, and so on. It seemed strange and astonishing that the Germans had so many supporters among our population. Speaking of youth, one could not fail to notice a marked absence of patriotism and Communist worldview among a substantial part of it. This observation applies to Komsomol members and particularly to female Komsomol members.” Apparently the Komsomol girls were not behaving as expected.

Many servicemen, regardless of the exact realities, believed that “our girls” had been going out with Germans. Boris Tartakovsky writes in his diary-memoir about recently liberated Krasnodar: “I remember talk about girls who only recently willingly spent time with German officers and who now instantly switched to our own men.” At the same time there was much talk, and not only talk, about widespread venereal disease, which became a real scourge. In Zheleznovodsk one sanatorium was turned into a venereal-disease hospital. That already concerned our own soldiers. Unfortunately, although this problem in the Red Army also has direct relevance to military history, our information remains extremely fragmentary.

S. BUNTMAN: A listener asks whether we will speak about the Red Army.

O. BUDNITSKY: We certainly will. Another detail once struck me in the memoirs of the well-known poet Inna Goff. After liberation she went to Kharkiv and met old friends. They were sitting in a café, with a group of Soviet officers celebrating nearby. One of her friends said: “A German officer would never have allowed himself to remain seated in the presence of a lady.” An interesting little detail. This kind of comparison existed.

For many people it accumulated into bitterness. Let me quote the memoirs of Grigory Pomerants, who recalls a scene in 1942 when the Party organizer of his unit said: “Where is my wife now? Probably sleeping with a German.” Then he added: “Never mind. We will get to Berlin and show the German women.”

S. BUNTMAN: An uplifting call to arms.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. How the Red Army reached Berlin and what happened there to German women is something we will probably discuss next Saturday, and then I will try to answer the question that has been raised. To sum up today’s discussion, I would say that sexual crimes and crimes against women remain a little-studied and almost unknown page of the history of the war. Yet this is the history of people during the war.

S. BUNTMAN: Exactly.

O. BUDNITSKY: The history of their lives.

S. BUNTMAN: Absolutely.

O. BUDNITSKY: And of course that history did not consist solely of tragic pages. But even when we speak of love between Soviet women and Germans, it almost always ended as a tragedy: usually the woman was left with children or otherwise without a family.

I want to add one thing. In this respect the Soviet authorities actually showed considerable wisdom. As far as I know, there was no mass persecution of these women.

S. BUNTMAN: There was some persecution. Women who had been “with the Fritzes” were a fairly common category in the camps.

O. BUDNITSKY: But laws concerning single mothers were adopted, and they applied not only to women whose husbands had died at the front but to all women with children. The state needed children, and it largely closed its eyes to who the father was.

S. BUNTMAN: Oleg Budnitsky. We will continue next Saturday.

Date: 17 July 2010, 14:08 Topic: Revenge: The Red Army in Germany Program: Not So Host: Sergey Buntman Guest: Oleg Budnitsky Recording: download (10.6 MB), listen (46:15)

REVENGE: THE RED ARMY IN GERMANY

S. BUNTMAN: This is our joint program with the magazine Knowledge Is Power, and within it we have a short series on different aspects of the Second World War, especially diaries, notes, and some of the phenomena reflected in them. Our guest is the historian Oleg Budnitsky. We have spoken about sexual crimes committed by the Wehrmacht and about Wehrmacht policy concerning sexual life. Today we come to Germany, and an important word already sounded in the previous program: revenge. As I understand it, revenge was one of the motivating forces, something visible in statements, notes, and diaries.

O. BUDNITSKY: Without question, yes. Good afternoon.

S. BUNTMAN: Good afternoon.

O. BUDNITSKY: In recent years the subject of the Red Army in Germany, especially mass rape, has become fairly prominent abroad. Dozens if not hundreds of studies appeared particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Russia the subject is still treated as somehow illegitimate and largely confined to the Internet. I would like to frame the question somewhat more broadly: our ideas about the history of the Great Patriotic War and its final phase. When we speak of the Red Army’s presence in Germany, its campaign into Germany, it is usually — I would even say always — presented in terms of liberation, the liberation of the German people from fascism. In the final analysis, that is indeed what happened.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes, ultimately that is true. But I always felt uncomfortable, for example, during the 8 May ceremonies when we had joint events with an East German school. What the director would say seemed to me only part of the truth.

O. BUDNITSKY: Of course. In 1945 it looked quite different from the way it was later explained and taught. If you read the official texts from the Soviet period and the period of the GDR — with socialist German friendship and all that, an inertia that continues to the present day — you might get the impression that the Red Army came to Germany in order to feed German women and children. The most common film image of the Red Army in Germany is a field kitchen with a line of German women and children holding mess tins or tin cans and waiting to receive food. That did happen, unquestionably, especially in Berlin in the first days of May 1945 and somewhat later after the relevant orders had been issued. But in 1945 the Red Army did not enter Germany in order to liberate anyone — at least not the Germans. Nor did it go to Germany in order to provide food for German women and children, who before the fighting reached German territory had lived relatively well compared with Soviet citizens.

S. BUNTMAN: Relatively speaking. They had difficulties of their own, including severe privations that are sometimes ignored.

O. BUDNITSKY: Difficulties of an entirely different order. Everything that contradicted the later official version was carefully removed from books and, generally, from public view. Let me give one striking example. Everyone interested in the history of the Second World War probably knows Alexander Werth’s Russia at War, 1941–1945. I still consider it the best book on the subject.

S. BUNTMAN: It is a very good book.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. I think it remains the best book about the war if one is interested not purely in military operations but in what we call the human dimension of war. Werth himself was in the Soviet Union during the war and spoke Russian perfectly; he was the son of a Russian émigré. When his book appeared in Russian in 1967 it was a bestseller. People devoured it; on the black market it cost absurd sums because it was almost impossible to obtain.

S. BUNTMAN: I was lucky. We got a copy in our family immediately and I could read it as much as I wanted.

O. BUDNITSKY: The edition honestly said that it was abridged, although even so it ran to about 670 pages. Readers probably did not realize how drastically abridged it was. The English original is about 1,100 pages. Russian translation compresses a text somewhat, but even allowing for that, about two hundred Russian pages of material were omitted. In fact Werth’s book had been published two years before its official Soviet publication in a numbered, restricted edition “for official use.” The leadership was allowed to know aspects of the war that ordinary Soviet citizens were not permitted to know. I will quote from that restricted translation, which is sometimes quite awkward. Only a few hundred copies circulated among Party and Soviet officials and in special library collections. Incidentally, when Werth was republished recently, it was again an abridged edition for some reason. A complete Russian text would be roughly 970 pages.

I quote Werth, writing in 1964: “Whatever the authors of official publications may claim, Russian soldiers were by no means gallant knights in shining armor. If in the Slavic countries they behaved reasonably well, though far from perfectly, in Hungary, Austria and then Germany it was an entirely different matter.” He then uses a sentence which, had it been printed in Soviet times, would probably have caused a collective heart attack. He writes that Kazakhs and other Asians sometimes rivaled the warriors of Genghis Khan, especially in Germany, in manifestations of sexual lust. I want to emphasize at once so that no one attributes this to me...

S. BUNTMAN: Yes, let us be clear.

O. BUDNITSKY: First, I am quoting. Second, blaming a particular ethnic group is a common device. In fact, Kazakhs made up less than one percent of the Red Army. The same applies to other people drafted from Central Asia or the Caucasus. The overwhelming majority of Red Army personnel were Europeans, so to speak: people from the European part of the USSR, Slavs and other peoples. So there is no basis for shifting the responsibility onto someone else.

Werth then writes from what he himself witnessed while with Red Army troops: after almost four years of fighting on Soviet soil and seeing thousands of Russian towns and villages in ruins, Russian troops entering Germany could scarcely resist the desire for revenge. As soon as they crossed into Germany, all kinds of excesses began. At first soldiers burned many houses and sometimes entire towns simply because they were German. Theft, looting, and rape also became widespread. Rape was sometimes accompanied by real brutality. Werth quotes a Russian major, whose name he naturally does not give, saying that many German women simply believed it was now the Russians’ turn and that resistance was useless. The major said: “Usually it was very simple. Our fellow only had to say, ‘Frau, komm’ — ‘Woman, come’ — and the German woman already knew what was wanted. Let us be frank: for almost four years the Red Army suffered sexual deprivation. Officers, especially staff officers, found ways around it. Many had ‘field wives’ — secretaries, typists, nurses, canteen waitresses — but ordinary Vanka had almost no such opportunities. Some were lucky in our liberated towns, but most were not.” Werth’s quotation continues in a way that mixes observation with coarse stereotypes. It must be treated as a quotation from its time, not as my own characterization.

S. BUNTMAN: And not generalized ethnically.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. Most Western books and articles — and almost all serious work on this subject has been published in the West rather than here — rely on German evidence, Allied intelligence reports, and sometimes official Soviet documents. They very rarely rely on testimony from Soviet soldiers and officers themselves. There is even an argument, formulated in what I regard as Catherine Merridale’s brilliant book Ivan’s War, that Soviet servicemen did not write or talk about these things and did not want to. That is partly true. She is therefore surprised by the memoirs of Lev Kopelev, repeatedly published in Russia, in which he describes the campaign in Germany, and by Leonid Rabichev’s recollections, initially published as an article and later as the book War Will Write Everything Off. But it is a serious misconception to think there is no Soviet testimony. There is a substantial body of evidence from Soviet officers and soldiers describing what happened in Germany and trying to explain why. Today we will use their testimony and reflections to make some generalizations — not merely to describe what happened, but to try to understand why.

S. BUNTMAN: Why is that necessary? There are two simple schemes. One is simply negative: they entered Europe and wrecked everything, using the war as a pretext. The other is more understandable — the one we just recalled from Alexander Werth: after defending their own homes and seeing the horrors committed by the Germans on Soviet territory, they entered Germany in order to finish the war, reach Berlin, raise the flag, and show the Germans by every possible means how terribly wrong they had been.

O. BUDNITSKY: I see two reasons why we must speak, write, and study this. The first is professional and historiographical. There is a substantial literature on the subject, and it did not arise only in recent years; people wrote about it in some of the very first works published in the 1940s. Against that background the silence of our historiography looks absurd. It is simply foolish to pretend that none of this happened, that we know nothing about it, and that we must hold forever to views fixed once and for all — especially since, thank God, we live under conditions of relative freedom of speech and historical studies are translated into Russian, including Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945, which caused a great deal of controversy. It appeared in Britain in 2002 and was already published in Russian in 2004.

That is the first reason. The second is more important. Who are “we”? We are the heirs and successors of our ancestors. We cannot say: “These are ours because they were good, but these others are no longer ours because they were bad.” In us as a generation — these are very abstract philosophical categories, which I do not much like — there remains what existed in our predecessors, both good and bad. To understand who we are, we must know who they were. They are part of us. I do not know how clear or correct that sounds, but it seems to me that this is one of the missions of history, because history is a continuous process; the present is, in a sense, the sum of the past.

So let us look through the eyes of people who were there and try to understand what happened and why. I quote Nikolai Inozemtsev, Sergeant Nikolai Inozemtsev, whom I mentioned earlier and who later became a Soviet academician. From his diary: “Burning German towns; traces of brief battles on the roads; groups of German prisoners surrendering in large parties, afraid to surrender alone because they may be shot; corpses of men, women, and children in apartments; strings of carts carrying refugees; raped women; devastated villages; hundreds and thousands of abandoned bicycles on the roads; enormous numbers of cattle, cows bellowing in cowsheds to be milked and watered — all these are the ‘battle scenes’” — he puts the words in quotation marks — “of the offensive by an army of avengers, scenes of Germany’s defeat that will make the surviving Germans and their children swear never again to wage war against Russia.”

S. BUNTMAN: There — exactly.

O. BUDNITSKY: That is what he wrote in Germany at the time. It captures a general feeling. Major Boris Slutsky — I do not think I need to explain who he was — wrote in 1945: “Our anger, our cruelty need no justification. It is no time to speak of right and justice. The Germans were the first to go beyond good and evil. Let them be repaid a hundredfold.” Yet Slutsky later contradicted himself and wrote: “Our cruelty was too great to be justified. It can be explained. It can and must be explained.” Let us try to explain it.

First came the personal losses suffered by Soviet soldiers and what they saw as they passed through previously occupied territory. This created a natural and understandable desire to settle accounts. One could cite many testimonies. Here is one passage from a letter written by Private Vladimir Tseolin to his mother and sister in Belarus in the summer of 1944: “I learned, and I want everyone to learn, what the Germans are. They are not people; they are worse than beasts. Can human beings pour gasoline over people in a house and burn them alive? I do not know what else I will see as I advance across the land the Germans seized in 1941, but what I have already seen is enough to make me want to destroy them like rabid dogs.” That is an ordinary private.

Second came the propaganda of hatred. During the first days or perhaps weeks of the war there was still an idea of class differentiation in Germany — a distinction between German workers and peasants on one side and Nazis on the other — but that ended.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes. “Two met in battle,” as the wartime poem has it, “a foreign soldier and ours.”

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, that approach ended. Here the leading role undoubtedly belonged to Ilya Ehrenburg. Let me quote his famous 1942 article “Kill the German,” which everyone remembered. It ended: “We have understood: the Germans are not people. From now on the word German is for us the most terrible curse. Let us not talk. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you have not killed at least one German during the day, your day has been wasted. If you think your neighbor will kill a German for you, you have not understood the danger. If you do not kill the German, he will kill you. He will take your loved ones and torment them in his accursed Germany. If you cannot kill a German with a bullet, kill him with a bayonet. If your sector is quiet and you are waiting for battle, kill the German before the battle. If you leave a German alive, he will hang a Russian man and” — I emphasize this — “dishonor a Russian woman.” That theme appeared constantly. “If you have killed one German, kill another. There is nothing more cheerful for us than German corpses.” A striking phrase, isn’t it? “Do not count the days. Do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German — your old mother asks it of you. Kill the German — your child begs it of you. Kill the German — your native land cries out. Do not miss. Do not let him pass. Kill.”

I should add that Ilya Ehrenburg was the most popular wartime publicist of the Great Patriotic War. It is a remarkable phenomenon: a Jew, a cosmopolitan, a snob, a man of culture more French than Russian, became the chief publicist of the Soviet war effort. Soldiers were famously forbidden to use newspaper pages containing his articles to roll cigarettes. That was the highest form of recognition. In 1942 and 1943 his propaganda of hatred was entirely understandable and explainable. It was in everyone’s ears and in everyone’s hearts.

S. BUNTMAN: I should remind Alyona that this is far from our first program on the subject. Exactly a week ago we talked about the Germans and the brothels they created here. The transcript is already on the website. Today we are looking at the other side of the coin.

O. BUDNITSKY: Ehrenburg was not alone. There was Simonov, Sholokhov, The Science of Hatred.

S. BUNTMAN: Simonov wrote: “As many times as you see him, that many times kill him.”

O. BUDNITSKY: Let me quote. The poem was originally called “Kill Him.” During the later era of friendship among peoples it was retitled “If Your Home Is Dear to You.”

S. BUNTMAN: It begins with those words, “If your home is dear to you...”

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. Originally it was called “Kill Him,” and again it emphasizes one very specific motive. I quote: “If you do not want to give up the woman with whom you walked together, the one you long did not dare to kiss because you loved her so much; if you do not want the fascists to take her alive, to force her into a corner and violate her...” The poem continues with the image of what the invaders might do to the woman a soldier loves, and concludes with the insistence that no one else will kill the enemy for him and that he has no right to speak of love until he has done so.

S. BUNTMAN: The sense that the person you love and protect has been violated — Simonov expresses the feeling of the time very precisely. Everything with Simonov is still driven by that enormous love, and he captures a person’s state of mind exactly.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. And he ends: “So kill at least one; kill him quickly. As many times as you see him, that many times kill him.” There were hundreds of texts like this, less powerful perhaps, but aimed in the same direction.

Immediately before the Red Army crossed the German border, propaganda of this kind was carried to every soldier. Meetings were held on the theme “How I will avenge myself on the German occupiers.” Diaries contain astonishing passages. Zolgaller writes that before an offensive there was a special meeting where one senior political officer said: “For a while you may forget about the prosecutor.” Boris Komsky’s diary mentions meetings of Party and Komsomol activists where, among others, the famous General Gorbatov said that revenge should be thorough. The newspaper in which the future writer Yelena Rzhevskaya served appeared under the slogan: “Tremble, Germany! Russia is marching on Berlin.”

What else played a very important role in the behavior of the Red Army in Germany? The Stavka order of 20 December 1944 allowing servicemen to send captured goods home in parcels. Enlisted men could send up to five kilograms once a month, officers up to ten, generals up to sixteen. Calling things by their proper name, this amounted to permission for looting. Remember this: it had a very bad effect both on the army’s moral condition and on what Red Army soldiers did in Germany.

S. BUNTMAN: A sense of revenge plus the age-old possibility of receiving a town or village “for three days,” as in earlier centuries — one of war’s motivating forces.

O. BUDNITSKY: In essence, yes.

S. BUNTMAN: We have to interrupt now. Let us mark the point and pause for five minutes. Not So, Oleg Budnitsky. We will continue.

[BREAK]

O. BUDNITSKY: On the one hand, the Soviet leadership evidently believed that after the enormous looting carried out in the USSR by the German army and its associated services there ought to be some compensation, especially since the state had almost nothing with which to reward its soldiers and poverty in the Soviet Union was terrible. On the other hand, it was unquestionably looting, and soldiers’ diaries contain precisely that word. “We understand perfectly well what this is,” they wrote. One ordinary soldier compared it to what Vasily Tyorkin would call looting. David Kaufman, the future poet David Samoilov, wrote that one cannot take revenge on a scoundrel by becoming like him.

Most people, however, accepted the order with satisfaction. Even quite educated men wrote that now ordinary Russian names — Nina, Marusya and so on — would receive parcels instead of German women possessing those things. But I repeat: the method chosen was not a good one, especially for an army in the field.

S. BUNTMAN: It corrupts a fighting army.

O. BUDNITSKY: Without question. Another important factor must be understood. In Germany soldiers ceased to depend entirely on centralized supply. Abandoned houses were full of food and stored provisions, including home-canned goods; cattle wandered about, and men were no longer tied to the field kitchen. Very significantly, soldiers found enormous quantities of wine, homemade wine, as well as depots of alcohol. There is even a view that the Germans left alcohol deliberately, although there is no documentary proof. In any event the Red Army was no longer limited to the famous commissar’s hundred grams of vodka. There could be any amount of alcohol, practically everywhere.

There was another factor: rage at the Germans’ high standard of living. Soviet soldiers had already seen something similar in Romania, even on what one might call the edge of Europe — with apologies to Romanian listeners — where living standards were much higher than...

S. BUNTMAN: Soviet soldiers had been surprised even by what they saw in the Baltic republics.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, but Germany produced a shock. My own academic supervisor, Lieutenant Boris Samuilovich Itenberg, a Muscovite with higher education, wrote to his wife from Germany in astonishment at the extraordinarily good life people had led there: “How they lived! What did they need? Why did they go to war?” There is a certain naïve Marxist notion there that people wage war for material things. But the contrast caused rage and a desire that, if you could not carry something away, you would destroy it.

Let me cite literature — Tvardovsky’s line: “On the road to Berlin, gray feathers from bedding swirl.” That is how this campaign began. Alongside military operations came wholesale destruction of German property. I quote the diary of Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, whom I have mentioned: “The people here, the Germans, fear Russian anger. They flee, abandoning all their households and property. Germany is burning. And for some reason it is gratifying to watch this evil spectacle. Death for death. Blood for blood. I do not pity these haters of mankind.” He wrote this on the day he entered Germany, at the end of January 1945.

Things that could not be carried away were burned or smashed. Estates, houses, even whole towns were burned. In some places that later went to Poland, Polish residents were furious to receive charred ruins rather than intact towns. Soldiers did not yet know how borders would be redrawn; at that moment the places were simply perceived as German.

David Samoilov later wrote: “Our people were neither evil nor cruel, but they had spent so long fighting their way to Germany, and their hearts were so filled with revenge and indignation, that naturally they wanted to run riot with a bludgeon, to smash, burn, make merry cruelly and joyfully, and unburden their souls in the manner of Razin and Pugachev.” That desire was constantly fueled by slogans, poems, and especially Ehrenburg’s articles. Later he wrote reflectively; at the time he cautiously noted in his diary: “Hitler managed to convince the German population that the arrival of the Russians would mean their complete destruction. It must be said that our soldiers are not trying very hard to disprove that conviction.”

Calling things by their proper names, serious lawlessness began and went beyond all bounds.

S. BUNTMAN: Did they begin fighting it? Valentin Pavlovich writes that it is all lies because people were supposedly shot on the spot for such things.

O. BUDNITSKY: Valentin Pavlovich is partly right but largely wrong. It was a mass phenomenon, while only particular individuals were shot. There were demonstrative executions, but not on a mass scale. Between January and March, not only in Germany but throughout the relevant territories, Soviet military courts convicted more than four thousand officers alone. Yet that was a drop in the ocean when several million Soviet soldiers were present in Europe.

Arson and fires were discussed at the Central Committee level. On 28 January Shikin, deputy head of the Red Army’s Main Political Directorate, reported to Aleksandrov, head of the Central Committee’s Agitation and Propaganda Department, about arson and the explanatory work being carried out by political officers. On 27 January Konev, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, issued a very harsh order containing numerous examples — one reason the document was not published and is known mainly from descriptions. There were cases in which tanks could not get to positions quickly because they were stuffed with loot, cases in which drunken tank crews crushed their own artillery battery, and so on. Harsh measures followed, up to execution and, of course, dispatch to penal companies and battalions. Rokossovsky issued a similar severe order for the 2nd Belorussian Front on 6 February. On 1 March another order was issued for the 1st Belorussian Front.

I quote this order from one of the first important books to address the subject, Mikhail Semiryaga’s How We Governed Germany. Semiryaga himself served in Germany in the Soviet Military Administration. The order stated: “All inhabited places along the roads in German territory are clogged with vehicles, carts, and servicemen, both those passing through and those specifically sent out from units to hunt for loot. Officers and soldiers abandon their vehicles and carts in streets and courtyards and go through warehouses and apartments in search of goods,” and so on.

The most tragic aspect of the whole story, of course, was rape — mass rape. Let me again quote contemporaries and witnesses. Captain Solzhenitsyn wrote: “We all knew perfectly well: if a girl was German, she could be raped and then shot, and it would be regarded almost as a combat distinction.” This is from The Gulag Archipelago. His later ideological antagonist, then Lieutenant Grigory Pomerants, wrote: “An idea that takes possession of the masses becomes a material force. Marx was absolutely right about that. At the end of the war the masses were possessed by the idea that German women from fifteen to sixty were the lawful booty of the victor. No Stalin could stop the army.” Boris Slutsky put it more poetically: “Women, well-dressed urban women, the girls of Europe — the first tribute we took from the defeated.”

If one brings that poetic image down to earth, however, it becomes entirely unpoetic. Leonid Rabichev later recalled an episode in East Prussia in February 1945 after a column of refugees had been overrun. He describes a scene of mass sexual violence against women and girls beside the road, with some commanders standing nearby. The description is horrifying and apocalyptic. I should add that it was written many years later. Perhaps I am wrong — he was there and I was not — but I find the picture somewhat concentrated and stylized.

S. BUNTMAN: Let us say, highly concentrated.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, somewhat concentrated. He even writes of colonels standing in line, which I find difficult to imagine. Colonels do not stand in such lines.

Now, Vasily Grossman’s notebooks. Interestingly, they were published near the end of perestroika and even then in censored form. He writes of Berlin: “There are many crying women and girls in the streets.” Full stop. An uninformed reader might imagine they are crying because peace has come. The next sentence was omitted: “Our soldiers have wronged them.” Then Grossman quotes a former French prisoner of war who says that he loves the Red Army but that what it is doing to women and girls is wrong and “harmful to your propaganda.”

S. BUNTMAN: So that we have time, a question: is there information about comparable behavior by the Allies — the British and Americans?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. There is a large body of research. I recently read a book by the American legal scholar Robert Lilly devoted specifically to crimes by American servicemen. About fourteen thousand cases went through American military justice and resulted in convictions. If we ask for exact comparative numbers of rapes by one army or another, we will never obtain reliable figures. I want to say at once that all the numbers quoted in the literature...

S. BUNTMAN: Forgive me, but this is not a world championship in rape. We are talking about the phenomenon itself — how widespread it was and to what degree it was treated as somehow natural in one or another army entering Germany.

O. BUDNITSKY: I mention figures because people always compare them and want to know who did more. In every army rape was formally regarded as a crime — in the Red Army, in Allied armies, everywhere. On the other hand, in the overwhelming majority of cases people often looked the other way. Those fourteen thousand cases that passed through American military justice were only the tip of the iceberg; there were certainly many more. The French were particularly notorious, in quotation marks, during the storming of Stuttgart, where episodes occurred comparable to what happened in Berlin from late April to early May. The British appear to have had fewer such cases.

But there was another difference in this sphere. Unlike Soviet soldiers, Allied servicemen had leaves, passes, and access to an existing commercial sex industry.

S. BUNTMAN: The pressure was not the same for them.

O. BUDNITSKY: Moreover, when they entered Germany they possessed goods with which German women could be paid — chocolate, cigarettes, and other items that had become standard black-market currency. Forgive the details; I am drawing on American studies and soldiers’ memoirs. One recollection says that in 1945 sex with a woman could cost three cigarettes. That does not mean all the women smoked; cigarettes were simply a tradable commodity.

S. BUNTMAN: Currency, essentially.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. Germans later made the bitter joke that the German army resisted for five years and German women for five minutes. I am not judging morality here. When a woman confronts an armed man — “rifle” is a general term; he might have a submachine gun or pistol — her range of choices is very limited. That is one point. Another is that immediately after the war hunger and deprivation pushed many women into prostitution. That is already a somewhat different story, a postwar story.

One can cite many other terrible examples from the writings of our own servicemen, war correspondents, and political officers. Vasily Grossman describes a horrifying scene in which a nursing mother is being assaulted in a barn and relatives approach the perpetrators asking them to pause because the baby is crying and needs to be fed. Yevgeny Plimak recalls finding distraught parents beside a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl who had been raped and shot. The bullet had passed near her heart; she was alive. He had no possibility of taking her with him, so he left a note saying that the first Red Army serviceman to arrive must help her and send her to a hospital. Whether that happened, unfortunately, we do not know, though miracles did occur.

Did the leadership know? Of course. On 17 March 1945 Beria reported to Stalin and Molotov that many Germans — I quote his wording — stated that in East Prussia all German women remaining behind Red Army lines had been raped by Red Army soldiers.

S. BUNTMAN: “All” of them.

O. BUDNITSKY: I am quoting Comrade Beria. He then gives specific examples. At one assembly point NKVD officers found three German women and twelve children who had attempted suicide by cutting their wrists. One woman testified that when advance Red Army units entered the town, soldiers dragged her into the courtyard where she was raped by a succession of twelve men. Other soldiers meanwhile assaulted her neighbors. That night six more soldiers entered the cellar and raped women in front of the children. On 5 February there were three attackers; on 6 February eight drunken soldiers not only raped but beat the women, and so on. The same Beria memorandum says that under the influence of German propaganda about what the Red Army would do to Germans, and after actually witnessing mistreatment, they decided to commit suicide by cutting their veins. This report went directly onto Stalin’s desk. Such was the tragic reality.

S. BUNTMAN: Did it eventually stop?

O. BUDNITSKY: It largely subsided from about the middle of May 1945. Measures had begun, as I said, in late January and early February.

S. BUNTMAN: So measures had already been started?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, first at front level. They reduced the wave substantially but by no means completely. Again I cite Grigory Pomerants: “No Stalin could stop the army.” But whenever we say “the army,” that is a very broad generalization. One group of people did these things — unfortunately not a small group — but it was not the majority of the army. There were also people in the army who took action and tried to stop it.

The attitude was highly contradictory. On the one hand, authorities fought abuses and imposed measures. On the other hand, Lev Kopelev, who tried to stop such outrages, was arrested. For what? “Bourgeois humanism.” Major Lev Kopelev ultimately received ten years in the camps at the very end of the war. There were others. Nikolai Inozemtsev records the words of his comrade Nikolai Safonov, killed in April 1945: “I do not pity the Germans, but they are disgracing the army.” David Samoilov was convinced that Stalin deliberately permitted the abuses so that, as he wrote, “the army would not win a moral victory.” I think that is an unnecessarily complicated interpretation.

S. BUNTMAN: Rather complicated, yes.

O. BUDNITSKY: I am simply quoting Samoilov. The army contained very different people. Stalin himself told Czechoslovak and Yugoslav Communists not to idealize the Red Army: it included criminals and all kinds of people. But we cannot blame everything on criminals. We know approximately how many convicted criminals served in the army during the entire war — a little over 212,000. That was not a critical mass, and not all of them were in Germany, though of course they may have had some influence.

People differed enormously in culture, outlook, and morality. War makes no one better. In my view there is a very mistaken and harmful idea that the war somehow purified people or made them better. People became worse. War makes no one better, and that must be kept in mind. By this stage many soldiers had been drafted from formerly occupied territories and had endured God knows what. Liberated prisoners of war were immediately called back into the army. Liberated Ostarbeiter were drafted from labor camps. The human material was extremely varied, so generalizations should be made cautiously.

S. BUNTMAN: There is another important factor. Even when you are fully conscious of what is happening and categorically oppose it, it is terribly difficult to resist your own comrades, the people beside you.

O. BUDNITSKY: There is certainly an element of group influence.

S. BUNTMAN: It is an aggressive environment, an environment directed toward a certain behavior, and you are connected to it by countless ties. Suddenly becoming completely different from everyone around you is especially difficult for a young man. It is an enormous psychological burden.

O. BUDNITSKY: That is certainly one factor. When was the decisive turn toward stopping revenge marked? One key signal was Aleksandrov’s article in Pravda on 14 April 1945, directed against Ehrenburg’s journalism, saying in effect that “Comrade Ehrenburg oversimplifies.” Ehrenburg had continued writing that the Germans were one criminal gang, that the gallows awaited them in Berlin, and so forth. On one hand he also wrote that civilians should not be raped or killed, but at the same time the propaganda of hatred continued. Aleksandrov’s article on 14 April sent a new signal. On 20 April Stalin issued an order that such behavior must stop. The reasoning was interesting: there was no moral condemnation. The argument was that abuses strengthened German resistance, which was perfectly true. Germans knew what was happening.

S. BUNTMAN: Incidentally, those German orders we discussed earlier were also based on pragmatic considerations: misconduct damaged the German army’s relations with the population.

O. BUDNITSKY: Exactly. People were already thinking about the postwar order. Quite apart from that, the situation simply had to be stopped for practical military reasons. When behavior on this scale occurs, venereal disease rises enormously. On the 1st Belorussian Front the rate increased fourfold from February to March 1945 — four times. Unfortunately I do not have later statistics, but I doubt the situation became better immediately. The authorities had to stop it and think about the postwar future and about how Germany would have to be governed differently.

That is when the field kitchens and the message “we have come to you in peace” began to appear, though it was difficult to stop the army immediately. The peak of the rapes was Berlin, approximately from 25–26 April to 5 May.

S. BUNTMAN: Yes. That happened.

O. BUDNITSKY: After that discipline was tightened sharply. Grigory Pomerants summarized it roughly by saying: “For a German woman they started giving five years; for a Czech woman, ten.” Gradually the army was brought back within the framework of normal military discipline.

S. BUNTMAN: We have less than a minute. Listeners repeatedly ask: what is the purpose of your research? To discredit the victory? Who needs this now? Let us answer once more.

O. BUDNITSKY: I will repeat: truth has never harmed anyone. Sixty-seven percent of our population believes that we do not know the whole truth about the war. When people learn parts of that truth, they do not always like it. But if we want to understand not only history but the present, if we want to understand relations between countries and the ways countries relate to their own past, we must know what actually happened. Pretending that something did not happen merely because we do not discuss it — or that nobody else knows about it — is absurd. We only drive ourselves into a corner. The historian’s work is to tell what actually happened.

S. BUNTMAN: Oleg Budnitsky. The program Not So.

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