After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (50 page)

Soviet lieutenant Grigory Sukhorukov was Captain Yakushev’s second-in-command. He recalled:

On the 9th May we had fought our way into Prague, with our tanks garlanded with flowers and young Czech girls sitting on top of them. On the 10th our soldiers were invited as guests of honour to a local wedding. On the 11th we were given a new military mission. The surrender may have been signed in Berlin and the end of the war announced in Moscow, but we were now to carry on fighting. We were ordered to advance with all speed to the area around Nepomuk [24 miles south-east of Pilsen] and capture the Vlasovites.

On the evening of 11 May Yakushev’s motorised force sped out of Prague. Generals Vlasov and Bunyachenko remained locked in fruitless negotiations with the local American commander, Captain Donahue. The discussions took place in the genteel surroundings of Lnare’s seventeenth-century castle, but were far from cordial. Donahue made it clear that he could not accept the surrender of the 1st Division of the Russian Liberation Army. He added that Lnare was to be included in a designated Soviet zone and that his troops would very shortly evacuate the town and hand it over to the Red Army. In Austria, the Americans had already returned General Mikhail Meandrov and the remnants of the 2nd Division of the Russian Liberation Army to the Soviets, so the omens were scarcely promising. The US commander concluded bluntly: he had received strict instructions not to let the Vlasov forces cross over the agreed demarcation line, whatever the circumstances.

As Vlasov and Bunyachenko received this dispiriting news, Captain Yakushev’s Soviet motorised battalion was rapidly approaching. Lieutenant Grigory Sukhorukov, sent on an advanced reconnaissance mission, drove straight into a body of US troops stationed near by. He greeted the commanding officer, introduced himself – and asked whether his American counterpart had any news of the Vlasov Army. The American spread out a map and showed Sukhorukov the exact location of all the United States, German and Vlasov forces in the vicinity. Marshal Konev had made his dispositions fearful of American intentions; in reality, his Western ally could not have been more helpful.

‘I was amazed at the accuracy of the intelligence,’ Sukhorukov related, ‘and very grateful.’ The Soviet troops were closing in on their prey. He continued: ‘Our soldiers were invited to stay for dinner – but I politely declined.’ His parting words were wonderfully understated: ‘We are rather pressed for time,’ he told his American hosts.

Early on the morning of 12 May Captain Donahue summoned Vlasov and Bunyachenko to a final meeting. He informed them that the Soviet 25th Tank Corps was approaching from the east and Lnare would be handed over to the Russians later that day. The Vlasov Army would have to fend for itself.

General Bunyachenko drove to his divisional headquarters at Jezbyre, a mile north of Lnare. A week earlier, he had drafted a rousing exhortation to his men to come to the rescue of beleaguered Prague. His last command to his soldiers ended not with a martial bang but a despairing whimper: ‘The division is to disband immediately,’ Bunyachenko stated. ‘Form up into small groups and avoid major roads and populated places. Try to reach southern Germany. Look for me there.’

More than 15,000 Vlasov troops were left utterly leaderless. Some burnt documents and buried their weapons. Others changed into civilian clothes provided by the civilian population. Thousands lay listlessly on the ground. They were too tired to undertake another march. All the fight had been knocked out of them.

Captain Yakushev’s Soviet soldiers were now advancing cautiously into the woodland around Lnare. The main body of Major General Fominykh’s 25th Tank Corps was moving up close behind. These men would take care of the majority of the Vlasov troops. Yakushev was focused on one objective – to find and arrest their commanders.

And then there was a breakthrough. The Soviet motorised battalion found a group of Vlasov soldiers. Their commanding officer – disillusioned at being abandoned in such peremptory fashion and hoping to save his own skin – turned informer. He told the Red Army troops that Generals Vlasov and Bunyachneko were about to leave Lnare in a convoy of four vehicles. There was no time to lose. ‘Yakushev took an armoured car – and I jumped in beside him, with a couple of other officers and the Vlasovite turncoat,’ Lieutenant Sukhorukov recalled. ‘Which road are they leaving from?’ he yelled at the informer. ‘They were heading south, towards Horazdovic. Our driver put his foot hard on the accelerator.’

At 2.00 p.m. Vlasov and Bunyachenko left Lnare. Bunyachenko had changed into civilian clothes. Vlasov – more elaborately – had ordered a false floor to be constructed in his car, and was hiding beneath it. Two miles out of the town their convoy of vehicles slowed for a railway crossing. And then a military vehicle sped past them, swerved and blocked the road ahead. Soviet soldiers jumped out of it, machine guns at the ready. The informer had identified General Vlasov’s car.

Captain Yakushev had cornered the Russian Liberation Army’s leaders in the no-man’s-land between the US and Russian demarcation lines. These commanders were regarded with loathing by Red Army soldiers and emotions were running high. But when Yakushev pulled open the door of General Vlasov’s car he found two frightened women huddled together on the rear passenger seat. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ he exclaimed indignantly. But then Yakushev noticed the vehicle’s red-carpeted floor was unusually high. Ripping away the fabric, he found General Vlasov cowering underneath it. He hauled him out, yelling to his comrades: ‘We’ve got the bastard!’

General Bunyachenko, travelling in the car behind, chose to surrender in a more straightforward fashion. Both men were taken to the Soviet 25th Tank Corps headquarters at Nepomuk for initial interrogation. When asked for his identification, Vlasov fumbled in his tunic for what seemed an age, at length unearthing papers identifying him as a general of the Soviet 2nd Shock Army. He stood to attention and presented himself in this fashion. This had been Vlasov’s command when he surrendered to the Germans in the summer of 1942. A lot had happened in the intervening three years. For a moment, Vlasov may have imagined his creation of an anti-Bolshevik army to be a bad dream. If so, he soon received a rude awakening.

Major General Fominykh regarded his counterpart contemptuously. ‘Issue surrender instructions to the remainder of your troops,’ he spat out, ‘or we will round up your gang of bandits and shoot them on the spot.’ Vlasov issued the necessary orders. Three days later he and Bunyachenko were transferred to Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, along with many of the high-ranking officers who had followed them. They were joined there by General Mikhail Meandrov and other Vlasov commanders. They were all tried the following year and hanged for treason on 1 August 1946.

The thousands of ordinary soldiers of the Russian Liberation Army presented a dismal picture. Most would be tried by military tribunal and either shot or sentenced to years of hard labour. Sigismund Diczbalis was one of the few fortunate ones – he managed to escape from his captors and cross over to the American zone. He was not forced to return. The majority of Vlasovites were not so lucky. Looking at the assembled prisoners, Lieutenant Sukhorukov initially felt little sympathy for them. ‘They are traitors to our country,’ he thought, ‘and they deserve their fate.’ But over time, he would gain a different perspective.

Some of the prisoners, possessing useful technical expertise, were briefly allocated to the Soviet 25th Tank Corps, before being sent on to special camps. Over a number of weeks Sukhorukov got to know a former lieutenant of the Vlasov Army who briefly served with them as a mechanic. He had graduated from technical school, joined the Red Army – and then had been captured by the Germans in the autumn of 1941. There followed three years of hell in a POW camp. Thousands of his fellow prisoners had died of beatings or starvation. And then a representative of General Vlasov arrived.

After a long period of physical hardship and emotional disorientation, the blandishments offered by the Vlasov officer gave this man hope: he possessed little news from the outside world, and was told that Germany and the Red Army would wear themselves out in a long struggle – leaving the way open for the Russian Liberation Army to carve a new future for the Soviet people. By the autumn of 1944 there was scant prospect of that – but three years in a POW camp were scarcely conducive to lucid thinking. The man was offered freedom from the camp and decent food. That was enough. His decision was an opportunist one, but as he said to Sukhorukov: ‘I no longer believed I had any real future in this world. I threw myself upon the mercy of fate.’

Fate would not be merciful. This Vlasovite would shortly be sent to a camp and a long sentence of hard labour followed. Sukhorukov hated the Vlasov Army – but could not help but feel sympathy for him.

The period of European history after Hitler’s fall was unique – with soldiers and civilians traversing a desolate landscape. Red Army lieutenant Boris Komsky and his men were now marching home from Berlin. As they passed through Poland, Komsky was struck by the terrible war damage in Warsaw, writing in his diary:

House by house, street by street, the wide central roads have been cleared of bricks. Only the pavements give this enormous cemetery the barest resemblance to a city and allow one to imagine its past beauty. Not a single building is intact – it is a staggering panorama of lifelessness. The ruins of Pompeii do not come close to this massive flattening of the land.

Some of the mutilated remains preserve traces of beautiful architecture. How many thousands of people died beneath these ruins? How many corpses are buried beneath these colossal brick pyramids? Trees stand, charred and splintered by shell fragments – witnesses of the death of Warsaw. Of 2.5 million people living here before the war only 50,000 survived.

These were chilling statistics – the result of the brutal suppression of the Warsaw uprising in August 1944. And Komsky was now to encounter the grim evidence of the Holocaust. He recalled:

In Kutno in Poland we had a day’s rest. The regiment settled in the fields outside the city. The weather was warm and it was nice to be outside. Officers were allowed to go and find a private apartment where they could stay. My friend and I found some accommodation – we would sleep there and during the day go back and work with our soldiers. One evening, as I was walking back to where I was living, a man came up to me. He looked at me and said: Comrade Lieutenant, are you Jewish? I answered ‘Yes, I’m a Jew’. He pointed to two young women standing on a balcony and revealed that they were the only Jews left in the city. Previously half the population had been Jewish.

These women had looked at Komsky only for a matter of seconds but felt a deep sense of kinship with him. On some instinctive level, they knew that he was Jewish as well.

Komsky met the women – they lived on the second floor of an apartment – and they laid out a table of food to share with him. Two Jews left, out of the thousands who had once lived in the town. In such terrible circumstances, the feast seemed like a celebration of being alive.

Komsky’s experience was very much a personal one, but it also spoke for many others – soldiers and civilians – trying to make sense of the war’s aftermath.

And yet, amid the horror and the loss, there was also hope. The relics of Hitler’s Nazi state were being jettisoned. Two weeks after VE-Day the Dönitz government in Flensburg was finally arrested. This course of action had been suggested to Winston Churchill considerably earlier by Foreign Office under-secretary Sir Orme Sargent – but the prime minister objected to it, fearing that such an action would raise ‘grave constitutional issues’.

Churchill wrote to Orme Sargent on 14 May:

I neither know nor care about Dönitz … The question for me is has he any power to get the Germans to surrender quickly, without further loss of life. We cannot go running around into every German slum and argue with every German there that it is his duty to surrender or we will shoot him.

Do you want to have a handle with which to manipulate this conquered people, or just have to thrust your hands into an agitated ant heap?

But there were no actual constitutional issues involved – this administration had never received formal recognition by the Allies and the instructions in Hitler’s will were scarcely binding on his victorious opponents. The removal of the so-called Dönitz government was long overdue, whatever Churchill’s concerns. American diplomat Robert Murphy, political adviser to the Supreme Allied Headquarters, described Dönitz’s administration rather differently: ‘They are a motley array of individuals who, under Admiral Dönitz, nevertheless style themselves as the “Acting government of the Reich”. Dönitz shows no remorse for Germany’s acts, but instead refers to Hitler’s achievement in maintaining excellent discipline within the Reich – as if the Führer was still standing by his side.’

SHAEF liaison officer Colonel Richard Wilberforce wrote scathingly of the Flensburg government: ‘They try to present themselves as indispensable to the allies – but there are little grounds for such assertions.’ Wilberforce visited Flensburg and took the opportunity to explore the Naval Academy at Mürwik. ‘I went down a long corridor,’ he remembered. ‘The rooms had impressive designations – offices to a variety of supposed ministries. I opened one door and found it was in fact a bicycle storeroom. Another contained a bed, with a woman fast asleep on it.’

The Dönitz regime held ‘cabinet meetings’ every morning at 10.00 a.m. It set up an ‘information service’, placing an old radio set in one of the lecture rooms of the Naval Academy. A minister of food was appointed – although his only responsibility was to fetch the whisky by which the meetings were enlivened. Dönitz was provided with a Mercedes to take him the 500 yards from his home to the Academy. Official pictures were taken of ‘the new government at work’.