I received a letter, together with a bouquet of white roses, from Otto Spranger, a person in Munich I did not know. Here is how he explains what prompted him to write to me.
He saw a documentary film by Renata Stegmüller and Raimund Koplin about three women whose destinies were bound up with the war: a Norwegian woman; the famous Italian writer, Luce d’Eramo; and me.
As soon as the footage of Rzhev appeared on the screen, I was electrified. I realized that the Russian woman featured in the film had been a participant in the confrontation at Rzhev, had obviously chosen her pen name with reference to that city and, like a flash of lightning I remembered a close relative who, under particular circumstances, had also received a name in connection with Rzhev. With embarrassment I learnt that at that time Yelena Rzhevskaya was involved in the struggle against my uncle, Colonel Hans Beckmann, my mother’s elder brother: Beckmann von Rzhev, as he was called by his fellow officers.
As a seven-year-old boy, my correspondent had heard the news in his home that Uncle Hans had been awarded the Knight’s Cross, a very high award, for successfully repulsing a massive offensive by Soviet troops attempting to retake Rzhev.
He also recalled that in April 1945 his parents read in the newspaper that their brother Hans, by now no longer a colonel but a lieutenant general, had been awarded an even higher honour, the Order of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, and his mother said ruefully, ‘That means he will soon be hanged!’ Otto Spranger thinks there was an element of condemnation in his mother’s comment about her brother: why serve in such a way as to be awarded military laurels at a time when everyone knew the war had been lost?
Uncle Hans did not have long to enjoy his military successes: as the war was ending he was arrested by Czech partisans, and on the very last day of the war, 9 May, found himself a prisoner of the Russians.
For a long time the family had no news of him, but in 1947 or so, one of his soldiers who had been released brought the news that Lieutenant General Hans Beckmann had been sentenced by a Soviet court as a war criminal to twenty-five years in forced labour camps. The sentence related to a charge that the population of Rzhev had been herded into the church for deportation to Germany.
This was a blow for our whole family. How was that possible? Was it imaginable that a member of a decent, educated family that was no supporter of Nazism could have violated human rights, international law and the moral laws of humane waging of war? I remember very exactly that my mother said at the time her brother had nothing to do with deportation, that was dealt with by the occupying commandant. We cursed Soviet, Stalinist, vengeful, terrorist justice.
There was no prospect of seeing Uncle Hans in twenty-five years’ time: he was already over fifty, but then a diplomatic initiative by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was successful and German prisoners of war were released. In 1955 General Beckmann returned to Germany and lived for a time with the family of my correspondent. Beckmann’s relatives treated him with kid gloves. As soon as the conversation turned to anything painful, tears would come to his eyes. Eventually, when it had become possible to talk to him about the trial and the sentence, he said he had been slandered by false witnesses.
Hans Beckmann moved with his wife to an old university town where his daughter and her family lived. He celebrated his seventieth birthday there, and died a year later. Someone in the Spranger family continued, however, to enquire into the circumstances of his career during the war.
I once asked my mother: ‘What did Uncle Hans say about the Kristallnacht pogrom?’ My mother replied that he said at the time, ‘I think this is a complete disgrace.’ I asked her, ‘Uncle Hans, as a senior army officer and an educated man, must surely have understood what a completely criminal regime was at the helm. Why did not he resign from the Wehrmacht, which was there to fight for that regime? Perhaps that is why he was sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour, and not only because he was falsely accused. Perhaps that is another way of looking at it.
The jogging of Otto Spranger’s memory and conscience after seeing the film led him to the military archives in Potsdam. He found a document signed by Colonel General Walter Model, commander of the Ninth Army, which said, ‘Colonel Beckmann was not at that time in command of his regiment but had been appointed commander of the Rzhev garrison. By his resolute action on 17 August 1942 he managed to avoid surrendering the city.’
Accordingly, deportation of the population was carried out with the full knowledge of Colonel Beckmann, and perhaps on his orders. Otto Spranger visited his uncle’s grave.
I told Uncle Hans I would go to Rzhev. I wished the trip to be a sign of penitence and hoped it would lay the foundation for reconciliation with the people of Rzhev. At his grave I expressed all my troubling thoughts because, as a Christian, I know that he has life after death. I know he is not against my intention and has no objections to it. I believe that he also does not object today, dear Mme Rzhevskaya, that I am sending you, as someone who took part in the Russian resistance to Nazi aggression, this letter and a bouquet of flowers to ask forgiveness for the guilt of my uncle who, like thousands of other top German officers, incurred it by following the orders of his supreme commander-in-chief, the Führer of the regime, even after that regime’s criminal deeds in Germany had been known for some time, especially to the ‘educated elite’, to which my family was always so proud to belong.
I have asked that, together with this letter, you should receive white roses. They were the symbol of the renowned student resistance movement in Munich which called itself The White Rose.
I received the letter and flowers in 1996.
By the time Rzhev was retaken I was the only translator at our army headquarters. Another had gone home to Siberia to have a baby. The need for translation, however, increased. There was a mountain of German bureaucratic documentation: papers of the municipal administration, the city commandant’s office, residents’ personal certificates. Much of it was not strictly relevant to military priorities.
When we had moved on much further to the west, Stalin visited Rzhev. This was his only excursion in the direction of the front. The house where he slept is still standing. He summoned General Yeremenko there and took the decision to celebrate victorious battles with artillery cannonades.
Those whole seventeen months of battles for Rzhev, all that cost in terms of mental anguish and blood, all the orderliness and chaos of war and its daily routines were in pursuit of one great goaclass="underline" to drive the enemy out of our land, and for us that meant retaking Rzhev. We were in a hurry to get back into the crucified city we had forced the enemy to surrender.
The war is an inexhaustible topic. No matter how much I have written about it, I cannot free myself of the feeling that there are important things yet to be said, things not yet fully revealed. Rzhev today and Rzhev back then are still very much a part of my life; I am tied to the city by painful memories that trouble me still in a way very similar to love.
More than twenty years were to pass before I set out to find Zaimishche again. It was very odd: neither on the map of the district, nor in the district executive Party committee was there any mention of Zaimishche, either among the ninety-two villages in the district that the war had wiped from the face of the earth, or among those still in existence. I set out on a quest to find it. A young lad who delivered movies round the villages drove me. His name was Sasha and he was keen to help. The two of us travelled the country roads, driving into villages, collecting films in metal cans that had been projected and leaving new ones, and each time asking people about Zaimishche.