72 RH2-2468, 35.
73 A point made specifically – and understandably believed – by German intelligence. See RH2-2338, 44-09, 1.
74 This finding confirms the comments in RH2-2468, 80.
75 RGASPI, 17/125/241, 88.
76 Ibid., 89.
77 Ibid., 91–2; 95.
78 Ibid., 95.
79 Velikaya otechestvennaya, 6, pp. 292–5.
80 Ermolenko, pp. 59 and 62.
81 Kopelev, p. 53.
82 The agitation department’s concern was fully justified. See Senyavskaya, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 91.
83 For other evidence of this, see Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 45-02, 2–3.
84 Beevor, Berlin, p. 34.
85 Their comments were faithfully collected. For examples from the summer of 1944, see RGVA, 32925/1/515.
86 Chuikov, Reich, p. 34.
87 RH2-2468, 6–7, 27.
88 See, for example, the assessment in Glantz and House, p. 214. A more detailed account is given in Erickson, Berlin, pp. 247–90.
89 Weiner, p. 149.
90 RGVA 32925/1/516, 176 (April 1944).
91 RH2-2337, 58.
92 The idea was that these shot around corners.
93 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, 70–71.
94 These jokes are among those recalled for me by veterans, and they came up in more than one interview. They can also be found, lovingly collected, in Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, the Wehrmacht’s own report on Soviet anti-Semitism.
95 For a 1943 soldier’s letter to exactly this effect, see Senyavskaya, Frontovoe pokolenie, p. 83.
96 In fact, civilian casualties were highest among Ukrainians, and proportionately, though not numerically, highest of all in Belorussia.
97 Werth, pp. 702–6.
98 Bartov, The Eastern Front, p. 132.
99 Velikaya otechestvennaya voina, 4, p. 289.
100 See ibid., p. 289; see also Vserossiiskaya kniga pamyati, 1941–45 (Moscow, 1995); Obzornyi tom, p. 406; Glantz and House, p. 51.
101 Werth, pp. 387–8.
102 Ibid., 702; Bundesarchiv, RH2-2337, 104.
103 Garrard and Garrard, Bones, p. 174.
104 Weiner, p. 260.
105 For a discussion of this, see Garrard and Garrard, Bones, pp. 180–7.
106 Pravda, 3 August 1944.
107 Werth, p. 890.
108 Ibid., p. 892.
109 Ibid., p. 702.
110 RGVA 32925/1/515, 2.
111 RGASPI, 17/125/190, 16.
112 I have heard a number of explanations for the pogrom in the city’s Podol district. This one was offered to me by Antony Beevor and is based on archival documents he saw in Moscow.
113 Overy, pp. 309–11; on the Doctors’ Plot, see Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews (New York, 1990); Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov,Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot (London, 2003).
9 Despoil the Corpse
1 Chuikov, Reich, p. 18.
2 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 9 and 24.
3 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1409-19, 6.
4 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 29.
5 Intercepted field post, Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 51 (January 1945).
6 I am grateful to Professor W. Brus, himself a witness to Russia’s war at the time, for this insight into Ehrenburg’s wartime standing.
7 Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich (London, 1991), p. 274.
8 Cited in Werth, p. 965.
9 See Beevor, Berlin, p. 34.
10 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 82.
11 Khronika chuvstv (Vladimir, 1991), pp. 175–6.
12 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 93. Letter dated 26 February 1945.
13 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 86.
14 Werth, p. 944.
15 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.
16 Kopelev, p. 14.
17 Ibid., p. 13.
18 Julius Hay, cited in Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–49 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 70.
19 See Naimark, loc. cit., and also RH2-2686, 37.
20 See Glantz and House, p. 235.
21 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 45-01.
22 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2686, 33.
23 Kopelev, p. 36.
24 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2467, 9.
25 Ibid.
26 Stalin, O velikoi otechestvennoi voine, p. 100 (23 February 1945). This formula echoed a time-honoured earlier phrase about capitalism, used in the harsh years of class war (collectivization). Then, the catchword was that the class enemy would resist with greatest desperation as the victory of the proletariat approached.
27 Ermolenko, p. 105.
28 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 35.
29 Ibid., 38.
30 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13 (captured letter).
31 For a parallel story of captivating inhumanity, see the account of the slaughtered buffalo in Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, pp. 75–6.
32 Leonid Rabichev, ‘Voina vse spishet’, Znamya, 2005, no. 2, p. 163.
33 Ibid, p. 163.
34 Ibid, p. 159.
35 Ibid, p. 165.
36 Kopelev, p. 37.
37 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2338, 44-10, 3.
38 Kopelev, p. 50.
39 Werth, p. 964.
40 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 12.
41 Kopelev, p. 39.
42 Ibid., pp. 46–53.
43 Naimark, p. 74.
44 This seems clear despite the bland statement by Werth (p. 964) that the rapes were just an outlet for the soldiers’ sexual frustration.
45 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13.
46 Overy, p. 260.
47 For discussions, see Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Wilclass="underline" Men, Women and Rape (London, 1975); Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (Eds), Rape: An Historical and Social Enquiry (Oxford, 1986).
48 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1409-19, 6.
49 Rabichev, p. 164.
50 Set in a culture of almost total denial, Rabichev’s article and Kopelev’s book are, to date, among the only discussions of this question in Russian. The time for an honest assessment of the war is still far off, as the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow in 2005 testified.
51 Atina Grossman, ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,’ October, 72, spring 1995, p. 51.
52 Bundesarchiv, RH2-2688, 13.
53 Cited in Naimark, p. 112.
54 Anonymous (sic), A Woman in Berlin, trans. James Stern (London, 1955), pp. 93–4.
55 Temkin, p. 197.
56 Beevor, Berlin, p. 326.
57 A Woman in Berlin, p. 64.
58 Temkin, p. 202.
59 Igor Kon and James Riordan, Sex and Russian Society (London, 1993), pp. 25–6.
60 For a more recent parallel, see Gilles Kepel’s comments about Algerian Islamists, those ‘impoverished young men’ whose crowded family conditions forced them into abstinence and who, in consequence, ‘condemned the pleasures of which they had been so wretchedly deprived’. Cited in Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (London, 2004), p. 133.
61 RGASPI-M, 33/1/261, 27.
62 N. Inozemtsev, Tsena pobedy v toi samoi voine: frontovoi dnevnik N. Inozemtseva (Moscow, 1995), p. 108.