That was a lie, because at that moment the Soviets were completing plans for the speediest possible conquest of Berlin. The two Western diplomats blithely judged Stalin as “calm and friendly” on the evening, but he was definitely not.32
Churchill complained to Eisenhower that getting Berlin should be a top priority, and he pointed out to Roosevelt, in a statement related in many Russian memoirs, that it was imperative to get there first. The Red Army would soon take Austria and Vienna, he said, and if it was then to capture Berlin, “will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds, and may this not lead into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future? I therefore consider that from a political standpoint we should march as far east into Germany as possible, and that should Berlin be in our grasp we should certainly take it.”33
President Roosevelt was beginning to have doubts about Stalin and wrote him a long letter in which he mentioned his profound concern about the growing Communist dominance in Poland. FDR went so far as to say that the “present Warsaw regime would not be acceptable and would cause the people of the United States to regard the Yalta agreement as having failed.”34
Instead of responding to the alarm in this letter, Stalin heated up the frictions about those secret meetings with the Nazis. On April 3 he wrote an accusatory message to Roosevelt alleging that the Germans had agreed to “open the front” to let Anglo-American troops “into the heart of Germany almost without resistance.” He accused his allies of cooking up a deal that would not “help preserve and promote trust between our countries.”35
Churchill told the president that Stalin’s accusations made it imperative for the Anglo-Americans not to seem afraid and not to look like they could be “bullied into submission.” He wanted to stand up to the insults. “I believe this is the best chance of saving the future.”36 FDR was angered and told Stalin that Soviet intelligence must be at fault. The Kremlin Boss would have none of it, saying that his informants were “honest and unassuming people who carry out their duties conscientiously.”37
President Roosevelt was in the final days of his life and was discouraged by this turn of events. The last messages he wrote on April 11 went first to Churchill. He tried to minimize the “Soviet problem,” which he thought would straighten itself out, and added that “we must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.” Then he wrote a last message to Stalin, expressing the hope that future relations would not be clouded by “mutual mistrust and minor misunderstandings.” However, Averill Harriman, the American ambassador in Moscow, thought the problem was far from “minor.” He decided to delay passing on FDR’s note in order to give the president an opportunity to rethink that part of the statement. But at one-fifteen P.M. on April 12, FDR cabled Washington from Warm Springs, Georgia, to say he wanted the original note handed over. Ten minutes or so later he died. His original message arrived at the Kremlin on April 13, but Franklin Roosevelt had passed away the day before, not living to see the end of the war.38
Commissar Molotov, informed of the president’s death late at night on April 13, went to the American embassy in Moscow at three A.M. to convey his sympathies. Harriman reported that he had never heard the man speak so earnestly. There is no record of Stalin’s reaction on first hearing of Roosevelt’s sudden death. Later that day, he put on the expected show at the Kremlin and appeared “obviously deeply distressed” while shaking the U.S. ambassador’s hand for what seemed an eternity. He sent his condolences to the new president, Harry Truman, and to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.39
In his memoirs, the combative Molotov glossed over FDR’s passing with scant mention. He did not think highly of American leaders, disdained the aristocratic Roosevelt’s attempts to be informal with him, and looked down even more on the folksy Harry Truman. For Molotov, these presidents shared one damning attribute: they were dyed-in-the wool capitalists and imperialists.40
HAMMER AND SICKLE OVER BERLIN
Back on the night of April 1, Stalin told his marshals they had to reach the Elbe River, west of Berlin, within twelve to fourteen days. By now they were all convinced that the Germans would let the Western forces through but would fight all the more tenaciously against the Red Army. That was a fantasy. What was real was the deplorable behavior of the Soviet forces and their reputation for rape, pillage, and plunder. To an extent, this passion for revenge was fueled by how brutally the Germans had acted during the invasion and occupation of the USSR. The actions of the Red Army, however, led to atrocities that went beyond all bounds and played into the Nazis’ determination to stop the Bolsheviks at any cost.
Occasionally, when the Red Army briefly withdrew, people got a chance to see what was in store for them, as happened in the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf (Mayakovskoye) in October 1944. The Wehrmacht reported that at one farm “the bodies of two naked women were nailed through their hands to both barn doors.” Inside they found seventy-three more bodies. Doctors attested that all the females, even girls aged eight to twelve, had been raped—including an eighty-four-year-old woman—and “murdered in a bestial fashion.”41 The account was no invention and the abuse not reserved for German women, for a Polish report on March 19, 1945, from a nearby area told a similar story about the Red Army, with details too appalling to repeat here.42
What was the origin of this behavior? Part of it arose out of the ferocity of the fighting, but some of it can be traced to the Stalinist system of military justice. Red Army soldiers faced the harshest possible punishments for disobeying orders.43 In August 1941 and again in July 1942, Stalin introduced notorious punitive measures. In the course of the war, military tribunals pronounced an astounding 158,000 death sentences. The executions were at times carried out in front of assembled troops. Military courts sent another 400,000 people to prison and forced at least 420,000 to serve in punitive units, which for these shtrafniki, as they were called, could amount to a death sentence. A recent Russian study concludes that no fewer than 994,000 Soviet servicemen and women were convicted by military tribunals alone, with half the sentences coming in the first two years of the war.44
The heavy punishments and horrifying battle experiences enraged soldiers. In addition, the new counterintelligence organization SMERSH (Smert Shpionam—“death to spies”) planted agents in the armed forces and informed on anyone they deemed suspicious, a practice that undermined troop solidarity.45 When they got to Germany or Austria, troops were stunned and outraged to find just how well the enemy lived. In places soldiers unleashed their blind fury on the homes left behind by panicking civilians. Some of them fled in such haste “that they hadn’t even had time to make their beds, and now the mirrors, the dishes, the service sets, the rarest porcelain, the glass goblets, the cut-glass pitchers—all were flying to the floor.” That was how one Red Army man described the first wave of hatred that boiled to the surface in his unit. He said they lashed out at everything in sight, “they took axes to armchairs, sofas, tables and stools, even baby carriages!”46