Fighting on all Fronts (32 page)

Punishment battalions meant death. 90 percent of the time they were used for surprise attacks, usually without artillery support. While army advances were backed by tanks, a soldier in a punishment battalion fought with bare hands and virtually all of them died. They could go to hell, because to have been captured, was an absolute crime.
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Oleg Ozerov was taken as a POW to France but managed to join the Resistance there. He was bitter about his return home in 1945. Interrogated by SMERSH, the counter-terrorist department, he felt:

Stalin simply betrayed us. He considered anyone who became a POW to be a traitor. We were not even recognised as having stoically resisted fascist conquest before or after capture. Yet we had created secret cells and organised escapes. According to German figures, 500,000 Soviet prisoners successfully broke out in the war years. Many were recaptured or shot, but those who made it to freedom, joined partisan units and continued the fight against occupation.
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Nevertheless: “The majority of my comrades, former prisoners of the Germans, ended up in the Gulag after the war despite their fighting for the Resistance! Many were shot without a trial or died in Soviet camps”.
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Stalin’s assault on his own people was less intense than against his imperialist rival but the scale was still enormous. When the occupied territories were recovered the NKVD arrested 931,549 people for “checking” of whom two thirds were in the armed services.
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Partisans in occupied Soviet territory, like their counterparts elsewhere in Axis-occupied Europe, acquired a powerful reputation for anti-fascist
activity. Yet their path to struggle was fraught. In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet Union, marshalling the skills and experience of veterans from the civil war period, made considerable preparations for partisan warfare. However, as P K Ponomarenko, who led the Second World War partisan movement from Moscow later wrote, “Due to Stalin’s wrong and mistaken position, that we would only be fighting beyond our own frontiers…all that work was cast aside”.
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Many experts in partisan warfare were killed in the purges of 1937-1938. The movement developed in spite of these obstacles.

It is important not to idealise the red partisan movement. Sokolov suggests that it was often sheer survival under conditions of occupation that drove some to join. Some 60 percent were escaped POWs or Red Army soldiers overtaken by the swift enemy advance.
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The rest were local inhabitants. There were examples of partisans pillaging local villages, massacring the families of those believed to be collaborators, fighting each other or lapsing into passivity rather than confronting the enemy.
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Although the Nazi view that Slavs were “Untermenschen” (sub-human) was a drive towards resistance, defections in both directions indicate that ideological principle was not always the main motivation, with some choosing the path of working for the Germans as an alternative survival strategy.
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Nonetheless, between November 1942 and March 1943 some 125,000 fighters
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undertook 2,500 attacks on the enemy railway system, wrecking 750 locomotives and 4,000 wagons. In the summer of 1943 there were 142,000 partisans with 215,000 reserves.
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A German officer described the impact:

The struggle with the partisans is different to the fighting at the front. They are everywhere and nowhere…blowing up railways, communication routes, acts of sabotage at all existing enterprises, robbery etc. They become ever more brazen and unfortunately we don’t have enough security forces to act decisively against them. We only have the strength, with the Hungarians, to guarantee the main roads, railways and centres of population. Over broad swathes the partisans rule, with their own government and administration.
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Some partisan operations were on a grand scale. The destruction of the Savkino Bridge in March 1943 was the work of a 3,000-strong assault force.
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Such feats were often accomplished without external assistance, arms coming from supplies left behind by the retreating Red Army. In 1942 a
commander in Belorussia sent this radio message: “Young men and women, the old, beg with tears in their eyes to be taken into the partisans, but the numbers we can take are limited by the supply of guns… We need armaments if we are going to put more people on the front line.” This plea was echoed by many others.
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And yet the risks of joining up were enormous. In the autumn of 1943 partisan brigades attempting to force the Dnieper lost 70 percent of their number in a few days.
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Captured partisans were tortured and killed. The Germans reported that:

In the overwhelming majority of cases the interrogation of partisans is very difficult. Despite the brutal methods employed, due to their fanatically-held convictions, members of partisan groups refuse to give testimony. It is only at the moment of their being shot that they confess their devotion to Stalin and membership of the partisans.
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Though red partisans fought heroically like their counterparts elsewhere, they never developed an independent trajectory. Foreign partisans clashed with the Axis and pursued a path different to that of Allied governments. In their situation admiration for the Soviet Union, mistakenly identified as the embodiment of “actually existing socialism”, was no immediate hindrance to this dual struggle (problems arising mainly after the war). But under occupation the proximity of the Stalinist regime across porous front lines tied the red partisans to the Soviet government.

Furthermore, that institution left nothing to chance. Top-down control of the partisans was ever-present. A Central Partisan Headquarters was established in Moscow in May 1942. Stalin’s instructions were that “alongside their fighting activities, the leading organs of the partisan movement, commanders and commissars of partisan units must always disseminate among the population the rightness of the Soviet Union’s cause”.
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Another source of control was through the supply of weaponry. One directive required that apart from arms seized from the enemy, “all arms and equipment for the partisan movement…must go through the appropriate application process”.
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The incredible speed of the German advance, which overtook so many Red Army formations, meant that basic defence tasks often fell to civilians. Veterans describe the role of the people’s militias that formed spontaneously in the defence of Leningrad: “Volunteers showed exceptional heroism, though it was fairly absurd that they were fighting at the
front at all. They had insufficient military training and lacked arms. We had one gun between three! Still, I am quite certain that it was the volunteers who saved Leningrad”.
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The whole population was involved.

Another Leningrad veteran was then a 13-year-old girl. Elena Rzhevskaia watched the militia march off from her window: “There were workers, students, white-collar employees, musicians and professors… They all went to fight the enemy inspired by an enormous wave of patriotism. I didn’t feel like a hero. I simply had to share the fate of my people, of my country”.
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So she joined the partisans in the woods.

The evacuation of industry to the east, well beyond the reach of the advancing Germans, was one of the most extraordinary non-military feats of the Second World War. It could not have been achieved without a titanic physical effort. The figures are staggering. By October 1941, 65 percent of the Economic Ministry’s military-industrial enterprises had been relocated. Between July and November 1941, 1,523 factories, 1,360 related to armaments, were transferred using 1.5 million railroad wagons.
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These plants were dismantled, loaded, and reconstructed “non-stop for 24 hours a day, often under enemy bombing”.
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Writing in 1942 a US eyewitness wrote: “Even if Moscow is lost, the Red armies will be able to go on fighting for months, even years, basing themselves on the stronghold of the Urals… All this sums up one basic reason why the Soviet Union has not suffered decisively as a result of Hitler’s attack. The second basic reason is the Soviet people”.
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If in the occupied lands Soviet partisans were unable to develop any real independence from the Stalinist state, were there alternative currents ideologically free from both Moscow and Berlin? We have seen that Stalinist repression in the pre-war period minimised the chances of organised opposition developing in the Soviet Union. Now in the parts under German control there was a new, equally vicious power at work. How would the population react?

We have seen the core of German policy was racism and imperialist exploitation which planned the deaths of millions. But there were counter-currents to this blanket approach. Klaus von Shtraffenberg of the SS wrote in 1942: “The SS, despite its Untermenschen theory, uses people without scruple. And if Himmler organises a Russian liberation movement, he will win for the SS hundreds of thousands of Russians”.
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This more flexible approach opened the way for Germany to encourage collaboration.

Caught in a vice between the two power blocs, some chose the German side, though the number of Soviet citizens who did this is disputed.
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Zhukov and Kovtin think the number between 700,000 and a million, Medinskii suggests 200,000,
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while Burovskii says “millions”.
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Given that there were over 5 million Soviet POWs and the population under German occupation reached 80 million, even the higher estimates show collaboration was limited.

In May 1943 Germany’s “Eastern troops” were formed of 170 battalions, of which 30 came from Turkestan, 21 were Cossack, 12 Azeri, 12 Georgian, ten Ukrainian, nine Armenian and so on.
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Interpreting such data is difficult, and there is no agreement among contemporary Soviet historians about whether the Germans were using the collaborators as their tools or whether these people were leaning on Nazi support as a necessary resource to defend themselves from the Stalinist system. Undoubtedly the motives were varied. Some joined the Axis to escape life as Soviet POWs, whose death rate at the hands of the Germans was 58 percent, compared to 4 percent for British and US POWs.
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Others were reacting to Russian chauvinism stretching back to tsarist times. No doubt some wholeheartedly agreed with fascism and became its willing perpetrators.

The complexity of the issue at the level of whole ethnic groups can be illustrated by reference to the Crimean Tatars and Chechens. During the Second World War Germany hoped to bring Turkey on to its side and so wooed the ethnically related Tatars. “Racial specialists” from Berlin were tasked with reclassifying them from “lower race” to “Eastern Goths”. Between 8,000 and 20,000 volunteered for active military service under the Germans.
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Traffic was not all in one direction, however. At Soviet Partisan HQ the person responsible for the area reported: “The atrocities, pillaging and violence of the Germans embitters and enrages the population of the occupied territories… In the last six weeks 14,060 have joined partisan units, of which there are now 138”.
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Tatars played a part in the Red Army too. While they formed 2.5 percent of the Soviet population, they made up 1.4 percent of those given the military honour of Hero of the Soviet Union. This ratio compares favourably with other ethnic groups such as Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Georgians and so on.
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Chechnya illustrates the link between pre-war Soviet imperialism and the unfolding of events later on. The “Autonomous” Republic of Chechnya had a population of 380,000 in 1939, of whom 57,000 were Chechen and 258,000 Russian, the rest coming from a variety of backgrounds. There were very few city dwellers among the largely Muslim
Chechens whose occupation was overwhelmingly farming. Therefore, they were disproportionately hurt by forced collectivisation in the 1930s. A key element of Chechen personal property was livestock, including horses. In the process of concentration into 490 giant collective farms incorporating 69,400 villages, most livestock was removed. The 1938 purges hit Chechen Communists hard and the party halved in size.
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Despite this background, in August 1942 the region produced 18,500 volunteers for the Red Army and eventually 36 Heroes of the Soviet Union.
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Under occupation it is true that the number of red partisans was limited and collaboration occurred but overall Burovskii concludes: “If you compare those fighting for the Third Reich and the USSR, it seems that the Chechens were ‘less guilty’ than the Crimean Tatars… A lower percentage of Chechens fought for the Third Reich than did Crimean Tatars, while they performed well as soldiers in the Red Army”.
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The Soviet state had no time for subtle analysis and showed no awareness of class differentiation or the legacy of Russian chauvinism and religious intolerance. All Crimean Tatars and Chechens were victimised for the actions of some, because, as one writer puts it, the state adopted a “final solution for these undesirable peoples”.
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In early 1944 Moscow issued a decree to: “Evict all Tatars from the Crimea and place them permanently as special settlers in areas of Uzbekistan”.
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The action took place on 18 May, affected some 200,000 and included Tatars fighting in the Red Army who were sent into forced labour camps. Many people died as a result of this deportation. In February 1944 the entire population of Chechens, young and old, women and men, was declared a collaborationist enemy people and deported. It took 40,200 railway wagons to transport them to their destination.
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In addition hundreds of thousands from other ethnic groups—Balkars, Ingushes, Kalmyks, Karachays and Meskhetian Turks—were forcibly removed from their homes in collective punishment for collaboration.
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