The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

Sixth Army soldiers dreamed of celebrating Christmas ‘in the German way’. They prepared small gifts to give to each other, often little carvings or secretly hoarded food, which they could ill afford. In their bunkers under the snow, an extraordinary generosity of comradeship developed in the face of adversity. On Christmas Eve, they sang ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’, the familiar words making many break down in tears at the thought of their families back in Germany. Yet Christian instincts did not extend to the Soviet prisoners held in two camps within the Kessel. Deprived of any food so as not to reduce German rations, the few survivors were reduced to eating the bodies of their comrades.

President Roosevelt announced that the Allies intended to achieve the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan. Churchill then stated that Britain was in full agreement, even though he had been taken by surprise that Roosevelt had decided to make the aim public. In his view, the implications had not been fully thought through, even though he had obtained the War Cabinet’s agreement in advance. Yet this declaration, which would go some way towards reassuring the suspicious Stalin, probably did not make that great a difference to the outcome of the war. Both the Nazi and the Japanese leaderships intended to fight to the very end.

On 6 February Manstein met Hitler, who at first accepted responsibility for the defeat at Stalingrad, but then blamed Göring and others for the disaster. He complained bitterly about Paulus’s failure to commit suicide. Yet the Japanese were even more upset by the news. In Tokyo, Shigemitsu Mamoru, the new foreign minister, and an audience of about 150 Japanese generals and senior officials, watched a film of Stalingrad made by Russian cameramen. The scenes which showed Paulus and the other captured generals shocked them deeply. ‘Can this possibly be the case?’ they demanded in disbelief. ‘If it is true, why did Paulus not commit suicide like a real soldier?’ The Japanese leadership suddenly realized that the invincible Hitler was going to lose the war after all.

A part of the increase in the Red Army’s strength came with the recruitment of young women to a maximum strength of 800,000. Although many had served from early in the war, and well over 20,000 had done so in the Battle of Stalingrad alone, the greatest intake began in 1943. Their military roles now extended well beyond their previous ones of doctor, medic, nurse, telephone operator, signaller, pilot, air observer and anti-aircraft guncrew. The bravery and competence shown by women, especially during the Battle of Stalingrad, encouraged the Soviet authorities to recruit more, and there were more women serving in the Red Army than in any other regular army during the war. Although there had been a number of women snipers who became famous for their deadly skills, the main influx came with the establishment of a woman’s sniper school in 1943. Women were considered to resist cold better than men and to have a steadier hand.

British soldiers were generally better disciplined, but they too were imbued with the racist ideas of the time. Only a few made friends with the locals. French troops were no better. Ironically, these officers and soldiers from the former Vichy army wanted to take revenge on their Arab subjects who had in many cases collaborated with the Germans, largely because of their anti-Jewish policies. Yet even as the campaign edged towards its end in victory, relations between the three Allies seemed to worsen, with British arrogance provoking a rampant anglophobia among many American officers.

Well over 100,000 served, with widely differing degrees of enthusiasm and effectiveness, in General Vlasov’s Russian Army of Liberation, and in a ‘Cossack’ corps fighting partisans on Soviet territory and later in Yugoslavia and Italy. The Ukrainian police and concentration camp guards achieved a terrible reputation for cruelty. Himmler also turned to conscripting Latvians, Estonians, ethnic Caucasians and even Bosnian Muslims into Waffen-SS formations. He also formed a Ukrainian division in 1943, but it was called the SS Galicia Division so as not to provoke Hitler’s anger. A hundred thousand Ukrainians volunteered, of whom only a third were accepted.

Göring, in charge of the war economy, simply wanted to strip the occupied areas and starve their populations, while Himmler wanted to cleanse them by mass murder to prepare for German colonization. Rosenberg thus had no control over security, food supply or the economy, which meant no control at all. He even had no authority over Erich Koch, the Reichskommissar for Ukraine as well as Gauleiter of East Prussia. Koch, a brutal drunkard, referred to the local population as ‘Niggers’.

Nazi ideas for the future constituted little more than a grotesque fantasy. The General Plan East envisaged a Germanic empire reaching to the Urals, with autobahns linking new cities, satellite towns and model villages and farms manned by armed settlers, with Untermenschen helots tilling the soil. Himmler dreamed of gemütlich German colonies, with gardens and orchards built across the former killing grounds of his SS Einsatzgruppen. And to provide a holiday centre the Crimea, renamed Gotengau, would become the German Riviera.

An even more murderous element in the civil war developing in Yugoslavia came from the virulently anti-Serb and anti-semitic Croat Ustaše. The Croat state of Ante Pavelić´ was a loyal ally of the Germans, and the Ustaše brought a reign of terror to the region. Well over half a million Yugoslavs were killed in the factional fighting between rival forces during the war.

Two British SOE officers, parachuted into Greece in the summer of 1942, made contact after many difficulties with both Zervas and ELAS. Their primary task was to organize an attack on the main railway line which brought supplies south from Germany for Rommel’s Panzerarmee in North Africa. They managed to persuade Zervas and ELAS to unite in an operation to blow up the great Gorgopotamos railway bridge. While the partisans assaulted the Italian positions at each end, a demolition team flown in from Cairo attached large charges of plastic explosive to the piers which supported the bridge. It was one of the most successful sabotage missions of the war, cutting the railway line for four months.

Hitler had seen the U-boat campaign against Britain as a just revenge for the blockade of Germany during the First World War. In a similar way the British saw their strategic bombing campaign against Germany as vengeance for the ‘Blitz’ on London. There was also a large element of revenge for Nazi crimes elsewhere. But the main impetus came from British weakness, and the inability to strike back in any other way.

Harris, a great bull of a man with a bristling moustache, had no doubts that the key to victory was the destruction of German cities. This, in his view, would avoid the necessity of sending forces to the continent to take on the Wehrmacht there. As a thick-skinned outsider who had spent a tough life in Rhodesia, Harris saw little reason to compromise towards those he regarded as faint-hearted gentlemen.

It was a young man’s war. Even a thirty-one-year-old pilot was nicknamed ‘Grandpa’. Everyone had nicknames and there was a great sense of comradeship, but to cope with the death of friends they needed to acquire a certain cynicism or cold-bloodedness to protect themselves from the effects of survivor guilt. The sight of another aircraft on fire produced a mixture of horror and relief that it was someone else.

A month after the attack on Lübeck, Bomber Command launched a series of four raids on Rostock, eighty kilometres to the east, causing even greater destruction. Goebbels described it as a ‘Terrorangriff’ – a ‘terror attack’ – and from then on Bomber Command aircrews were called ‘Terrorflieger’. Harris was now openly defining success by the number of urban acres his bombers had reduced to rubble.

Soviet intelligence was already passing back information from prisoner-of-war interrogations which indicated that the morale of German troops on the eastern front was being undermined by concern for their families at home, under British bombing. Stalin never lost his taste for revenge, especially since around half a million Soviet civilians are estimated to have died as a result of Luftwaffe bombing. Red Army aviation had not developed a strategic bombing arm, so he was content for the British to do the work for them.

On 5 March, Bomber Command returned to attacking the industrial heartland of Germany, especially Essen. The raid on 12 March destroyed the panzer construction shop, which delayed production of both Tiger and Panther tanks, thus contributing to the postponement of the great Kursk Offensive. The Eighth Air Force soon followed to join what was called the Battle of the Ruhr, and the total of casualties rose to 21,000 Germans killed.

The Sicherheitsdienst reported on reactions to the raid on Cologne, and the damage done to the cathedral. While many people called out for vengeance, the Nazis were alarmed by the reaction of Catholics. ‘This could all have been avoided if we hadn’t started the war,’ said one. ‘The Lord would not have allowed something like this if right had been on our side and we were fighting for a just cause,’ said another.

Harris’s belief that his strategy was shortening the war to save lives was strikingly similar to the huge slogan behind Goebbels during his speech which proclaimed: ‘Total War – Short War’. The inevitable question of whether waging total war from the air on German civilians was the moral equivalent of the Luftwaffe’s own version is too complicated to answer satisfactorily. In statistical terms, however, the Combined Bomber Offensive turned out to be slightly less murderous in the end, if you include all the western European, central European, Balkan and Soviet citizens killed by the Luftwaffe.

The first priority on almost all newly secured islands was to build an airfield. Naval construction battalions, or CBs, who became known as ‘Seabees’, dynamited jungle, graded the ground with bulldozers, laid perforated steel strips called Marston mat and covered it with crushed coral. Sometimes landing just behind the first wave of marines, they could have a new landing ground ready for action in under ten days. One officer said of these incredibly tough and ingenious gangs that they ‘smelled like goats, lived like dogs and worked like horses’.

The Kursk campaign has long been portrayed, sometimes with exaggerated numbers, as the greatest tank battle in history, yet the aerial engagements were among the most intense of the whole of the Second World War.

‘This was face-to-face battle,’ said a gun-layer called Trofim Karpovich Teplenko. ‘It was like a duel, anti-tank gun against tank. Sergeant Smirnov’s head and legs were torn off. We brought the head back, and also the legs, and put them all into a little ditch, and covered them over.’ Dust from the black earth and cordite smoke turned their food dark grey, assuming the rations arrived. And during the odd lulls in the battle, the men found it hard to sleep in the silence. ‘The quieter it is, the more tense it feels,’ Lieutenant Colonel Chevola explained.

Mussolini’s inability to confide in anybody around him had left him out of touch with reality. He pretended to be the all-knowing, all-seeing dictator, yet none of his entourage dared to tell him that he was loathed by the majority of Italians, and that they wanted to have nothing more to do with his war. The Duce’s compulsion to issue streams of instructions on every subject under the sun also meant that he was, in the words of one Fascist Party secretary, ‘the most disobeyed man in history’. The government was adrift and his son-in-law, Count Ciano, although not daring to oppose him openly, began to plot his downfall in the hope of taking over himself and negotiating a peace with the western Allies.

On 24 July, the Fascist Grand Council met in Rome. Criticism was guarded to begin with, and Mussolini failed to appreciate what was happening. In great pain, he appeared to be apathetic, almost paralysed. The meeting carried on through the night. After ten hours Count Dino Grandi, the pre-war ambassador to London, introduced a motion for a return to a constitutional monarchy and a democratic parliament. Mussolini’s failure to react convinced some that he was simply looking for a way out. Grandi’s motion was carried by nineteen votes to seven. Next day Mussolini, having forgotten to shave, went to see King Vittorio Emanuele III at the Villa Savoia. He acted as if nothing untoward had happened. But when he began to speak, the diminutive King stopped him and told him that Marshal Pietro Badoglio would take over as prime minister. As the stupefied Mussolini left the royal presence, he was arrested by Carabinieri officers and taken in an ambulance to their heavily guarded barracks.

Never before in human history had so many people been killed by so few executioners. At Treblinka a staff of about twenty-five SS men and around a hundred Ukrainian auxiliary Wachmänner managed to kill some 800,000 Jews and ‘Gypsies’ – equivalent, as Grossman put it, to the population of ‘a small European capital city’ – between July 1942 and August 1943.

‘Our car passed the body of a woman lying in the snow,’ wrote Godfrey Blunden near Velikie Luki. ‘Our driver did not stop. Such sights are common in the Russian war zone. The woman who had probably fallen out of line while being marched to Germany had been shot or had died of cold. Who will ever know who she was? She was just one of many million Russians.’

His goumiers pushed on, out for blood and booty. ‘Most wore sandals, wool socks, gloves with the trigger fingers snipped off, and striped djellabas; a beard, a soup-bowl helmet, and foot-long knife at the belt.’ The knives were used for cutting off fingers and ears from the German dead as trophies. The goumiers were formidable mountain fighters. But they terrorized Italian civilians, and there were tales of brutal rapes, which their French officers tended to shrug off as the price to be paid in war.

The 12th SS Hitler Jugend was the most fanatical. Its officers had told their men before the battle that any SS soldier who surrendered without having suffered incapacitating wounds would be treated as a traitor. Hitler Jugend soldiers, if taken alive, would reject transfusions of foreign blood, preferring to die for the Führer. One could never imagine British or American prisoners of war wanting to die for King George VI, Churchill or President Roosevelt. Of course, not all German soldiers were such true believers. Many in ordinary line infantry divisions simply wanted to survive, to see their girlfriends and families again.

Vengeance was exacted in Minsk, especially against any former Red Army soldiers who had served as Hiwis with the Wehrmacht. Others took personal revenge after the savage repression in Belorussia which had killed a quarter of its population. ‘A partisan, a small man,’ wrote Grossman, ‘has killed two Germans with a stake. He had pleaded with the guards of the column to give him these Germans. He had convinced himself that they were the ones who had killed his daughter Olya, and his sons, his two boys. He broke all their bones, and smashed their skulls, and while he was beating them, he was crying and shouting: “Here you are – for Olya! Here you are – for Kolya!” When they were dead, he propped the bodies up against a tree stump and continued to beat them.’

The British Second Army thus found itself under attack by seven panzer divisions, including four SS panzer divisions and part of a fifth. At that very moment, the whole of Army Group Centre in Belorussia had just three panzer divisions, and that was after being reinforced. So Ilya Ehrenburg’s sarcastic remark that the Allies in Normandy were fighting the dregs of the German army could hardly have been further from the truth.

Both British and American army psychiatrists wrote after the war that they had been struck by how few cases of combat exhaustion they had found among German prisoners of war, although they had suffered far more from Allied bombing and shelling. They concluded that the Nazi regime’s propaganda since 1933 had almost certainly helped prepare their soldiers psychologically. In a fairly similar fashion, one could say that the great hardships of life in the Soviet Union had toughened all those who served in the Red Army. The armies of western democracies could not be expected to withstand the same levels of hardship.

The Red Army had indeed suffered grievous losses during Operation Bagration: a total of 770,888 casualties of which 180,000 were ‘irrecoverable’. Army Group Centre losses may not have been so high at 399,102 killed, missing and wounded, but they were irreplaceable, and so were the guns and tanks abandoned in the retreat of over 500 kilometres. Overall, those three months alone accounted for a total of 589,425 Wehrmacht dead on the eastern front.

The Lublin committee naturally accepted Stalin’s border along the Molotov–Ribbentrop Line, which had roughly followed the Curzon Line, named after the British foreign secretary who had suggested it in 1919. The Lublin Poles were closely controlled by Nikolai Bulganin and Commissar of State Security Ivan Serov, the NKVD chief in 1939 who had overseen the mass deportation and killing of Poles. Bulganin and Serov were also both keeping an eye on that half-Pole Marshal Rokossovsky, commanding the 1st Belorussian Front on Polish territory. Stalin’s attitude towards the Poles appears to have been that ‘my enemy’s enemy is still my enemy’.

Warsaw, his men appeared to enjoy their work. The wounded in Polish field hospitals were burned alive with flamethrowers. Children were massacred for fun. Home Army nurses were whipped, raped and then murdered. Himmler encouraged the idea of annihilating Warsaw and its population both physically and ideologically. He now seemed to consider the Poles to be as dangerous as the Jews. Some 30,000 non-combatants were slaughtered in the Old Town alone.

It has been estimated that six in every ten of the 1.74 million Japanese soldiers who died in the war succumbed to disease and starvation. Whatever the scale of their war crimes against foreign nationals, the Japanese chiefs of staff should have been condemned by their own people for crimes against their own soldiers, but this was unthinkable in such a conformist society.

A reign of terror was established by mass rallies where suspects were denounced, with slogans and insults screamed at them. Confessions were extracted through physical and psychological torture and brainwashing. Mao’s regime, with its obsessive use of thought control and ‘self-criticism’, proved even more totalitarian than Stalinism. Mao did not use a secret police. Ordinary citizens were compelled to take part in the witch-hunts, torture and murder of alleged traitors. And Mao’s personality cult exceeded that of Stalin.

On 15 September, Roosevelt and Churchill, in one of the most ill-considered decisions of the war, agreed the plan of Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the Treasury, to split Germany up and turn it ‘into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’. Churchill had in fact expressed his revulsion at the plan when he first heard of it, but when the question of a $6.5 billion Lend–Lease agreement came up, he pledged his support.

Roosevelt was unconcerned about any post-war threat. He was sure that he could charm Stalin, and he said that in any case the Soviet Union was made up of so many different nationalities that it would fall apart once the common enemy of Germany had been defeated. Churchill, on the other hand, although wildly inconsistent in many ways, still saw the Red Army’s occupation of central and southern Europe as the major threat to peace in the post-war era.

As the discussion moved on to the Balkans, Churchill produced what he called his ‘naughty’ document which later became known as the ‘percentage agreement’. It was a list of countries with a suggested division between Soviet and western Allied influence. Romania: Russia 90%; the others 10%. Greece: Britain (in accord with USA) 90%; Russia 10%. Yugoslavia: 50% 50% Hungary: 50% 50% Bulgaria: Russia 75%; the others 25%.

In the wake of the Soviet retreat, an atrocity was discovered. A number of the women and girls in the village of Nemmersdorf had been raped and murdered and the bodies of some victims were supposedly found crucified on barn doors. Goebbels rushed in photographers.

Increased repression also began in Soviet ranks. To make up for its huge losses, the Red Army was forcibly recruiting Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles and men from the three Baltic states, which were once again under Soviet control. ‘Lithuanians hate us even more than Poles do,’ a Red Army soldier wrote home on 11 October, ‘and we pay them back in the same manner.’

to the rear, vengeance on a mass scale was being carried out against ethnic minorities who had welcomed the Germans in 1941 and 1942. In December 1943, Beria had deported 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan. Some 20,000 of these Muslims had served in German uniform so the remaining 90 per cent had to suffer, although many others had fought well in the Red Army.

The greatest operation to save Jews was mounted by the Swede Raoul Wallenberg who, despite having no more than semi-official status in Hungary, issued tens of thousands of documents stating that the bearer was under the protection of the Swedish government. Later, during the siege, the Arrow Cross invaded the Swedish embassy and murdered several of its staff in revenge for their activities. Along with the Swedes, the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, the Portuguese diplomat Carlos Branquinho, the International Red Cross and the papal nuncio issued their own protection papers to help other Hungarian Jews escape.

De Gaulle was keen to establish good relations with Stalin, partly in the hope that he would keep the French Communist Party under control. He would not be disappointed. Stalin did not want any sort of revolutionary adventures in France for the time being. A Communist uprising might lead Roosevelt to cut off Lend–Lease material to the Soviet Union, or, in his worst nightmare, to use it as an excuse to come to some deal with Germany. Stalin knew how distrustful Roosevelt was of the French. De Gaulle’s other objective was to ensure that, with Stalin’s support, France would be represented at the peace conference and not shut out by the Americans.

On 17 December, the second day of the offensive, Peiper’s SS troopers from the Leibstandarte killed sixty-nine prisoners of war in cold blood, and then in what became known as the Malmedy massacre shot down another eighty-six in the snow. Two men escaped and reached American lines. The thirst for revenge became palpable as the account passed from mouth to mouth, and many German prisoners were shot as a result.

The fighting in Athens continued into the new year, when the andartes pulled out of the city, unable to prevail against the large British force. It was far from a glorious victory to install a far from liberal government. The Greek Civil War, with all its cruelties on both sides, would continue in one form or another until 1949. But Churchill’s obstinate intervention at least saved the country from the fate of its northern neighbours which suffered more than four decades of Communist tyranny.

Looting took place on an epic scale, both individual and state sponsored. Art collections were seized, including the most prominent ones owned by Jews. Even neutral embassies were ransacked and their safes blasted open. Civilians in the street were stopped at gunpoint and relieved of their watches, wallets and documents. Any surviving Jews were robbed just like gentiles. Some soldiers pulled their loot around with them in prams.

Hungarian Communists addressed an appeal to the Red Army, describing the ‘rampant, demented hatred’, which even their own comrades had suffered. ‘Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their own children and husbands. Girls as young as 12 were dragged from their fathers and mothers to be violated by 10–15 soldiers and often infected with venereal diseases. After the first group, others came who followed their example … Several comrades lost their lives trying to protect their wives and daughters.’ Even Mátyás Rákosi, the secretary-general of the Hungarian Communist Party, appealed to the Soviet authorities but without success. But not all Red Army soldiers were rapists. Some treated families, and especially children, with great kindness.

‘Women, mothers and their daughters, lie to the right and the left of the highway and in front of each one stands a laughing gang of men with their trousers down. Those already covered in blood and losing consciousness are dragged to the side. Children trying to help them have been shot. There is laughter and roaring and jeering, screams and moans. And the soldiers’ commanders – majors and lieutenant colonels – are standing there on the highway. Some are laughing, but some are also conducting the event so that all their soldiers without exception could take part. This is not an initiation rite, and it has nothing to do with revenge against the accursed occupiers, this is just hellish diabolical group sex. This represents a complete lack of control and the brutal logic of a crowd gone mad. I was sitting in the cabin of our one-and-a-half-ton truck, shaken, while my driver Demidov was standing in one of the queues. I was thinking of Flaubert’s Carthage. The colonel, who had only just been conducting proceedings, could not resist the temptation and joined one of the queues, while the major was shooting the witnesses, the children and old men who were having hysterics.’

‘Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty,’ observed the Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse, a close friend of Sakharov. ‘It was an army of rapists. Not only because they were crazed with lust, this was also a form of vengeance.’

Under Stalin, ideas of love and sexuality had been ruthlessly repressed in a political environment which sought to ‘de-individualize the individual’. Sex education had been banned. The Soviet state’s attempt to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of ‘barracks eroticism’, which was far more primitive and violent than ‘the most sordid foreign pornography’. And this, combined with the utterly brutalizing effect of the slaughter on the eastern front and the propaganda of indiscriminate vengeance fostered in articles and harangues by political officers, produced an explosive potential when Soviet forces invaded East Prussia.