In Europe (67 page)

Almost 800,000 Soviet citizens were executed. During the 1930s an average of 1.5–2 million people were prisoners in the camps. By the early 1950s that number had risen to 2.5 million. Just as in Germany, however, large groups were regularly released. According to the most reliable estimates, approximately twenty-nine million Soviets spent part of their lives inside the Gulag system, or in ‘special exile’, between 1929–53. Four million citizens and their families had their civil rights rescinded during the 1930s, and at least a million farming families and a million others were deported. What is more, the fate of a single condemned man or deported husband had an impact on the life of the whole family; his wife was ostracised, his children expelled, after a ritual humiliation, from school or university. Women and babies were sometimes sent into exile as well. Trotsky's wife, Anna, died in exile in Siberia, as did his two sons-in-law. His own son was arrested in 1937 and died in the Gulag as well.

Stalin's terror, wave after wave of it, lasted until the end of his life, into the 1950s. Around 1930 it was largely farmers and priests who were targeted, as well as the ‘bourgeois specialists’. In 1935, after the excessively popular Leningrad party chief Sergei Krov was murdered at Stalin's instigation, members of the former elite, as well as Stalin's former opponents, became the primary targets. Of the 1,225 representatives to the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, 1,108 were arrested within the year.

The greatest purges, however, took place in the period 1937–8. Now it was no longer about ‘class enemies’, but about ‘enemies of the people’: a subtle distinction to indicate that the ‘enemies’ were now to be sought within the Communist Party as well.

In St Petersburg, Anna Smirnova had told me about a girlfriend of hers at school. Her friend's father had graduated
cum laude
from the military academy, and was a leading communist. ‘One day she came to school, wild-eyed. Her father had been arrested. Everyone was in a tizzy. He had
stomach problems, and her mother was terribly afraid he wouldn't be fed well in prison. But of course, in prison he wasn't fed at all. They shot him right away.’ And what about her own parents? ‘They didn't belong to the party. For years, they could hardly find work. But that was their salvation as well. They couldn't be found on any list.’

Karl Radek was now put on trial as well. According to an anecdote, at an international congress he once heard a comrade use the expression ‘Thank God’. He corrected the man: ‘These days we say: thank Stalin.’ ‘But what is one to say if Stalin dies?’ the comrade asked. ‘Oh, then we'll say: thank God.’ Jokes like that were not appreciated. In January 1937 he was put on trial for having established, on Trotsky's instructions, a ‘parallel anti-Soviet Trotskyite centre’ to serve as a base for espionage and terror.

Like other suspects, Radek admitted to everything, in order to save his family. His irony, however, remained firmly in place. When asked whether he knew that terrorism was a capital offence, he replied that he was not familiar with that book of law. ‘Then you will know it after this trial,’ the people's prosecutor said. Radek: ‘But then I won't know it for long.’ He was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag; two years later he was dead.

Of the 394 members of the Comintern's executive committee in January 1936, only 171 were still alive in April 1938. More members of the former Politburo of the German Communist Party were murdered by Stalin than by Hitler: of the sixty-eight who fled to the Soviet Union in 1933, forty-one were killed. The executioners themselves were not spared either. On 3 April, 1937, Genrich Yagoda – head of the NKVD and the slave-labour camps until 1936 – was arrested. He was accused, among many other things, of complicity in the murder of Kirov – probably rightly so, in this exceptional case – and executed. He was succeeded by Nikolai Yezhov and, one year later, by Lavrenti Beria.

The army, too, received its comeuppance. On 10 June, 1937, the Red Army's most effective generals were all arrested, tried and executed within a day. All of the military district commanders and three of the country's four admirals ended up before a firing squad. Of the eighty-five corps commanders, fifty-seven had disappeared within the year. Half of Russia's
estimated 100,000 military officers were put on trial. Once again: more Russian officers with a rank superior to colonel died at Stalin's hand than at Hitler's.

In spring 1939, the arrests stopped as suddenly as they had begun. A few months after Beria was appointed, the central committee ruled that serious mistakes had been made in the persecution of communists and others. It was time, they said,‘to draw a distinction between saboteurs and people who have done nothing wrong’.

Even after this, however, only a few exiles and prisoners were released. It was not until 1956, after Khrushchev's public admission of Stalin's terror, that the majority of the victims were rehabilitated. Public excuses were offered only to the wrongly punished communists; not a word was said about the hundreds of thousands of non-communist victims. The mass deportations continued until 1953. According to the most reliable estimates, somewhere between 2.5–3 million people died in the Gulag. Between 1928–52, some 10–12 million Soviet citizens lost their lives to purges, famine, executions and forced collectivisation.

GENERAL ALFRED JODL IN A LETTER TO LUISE JODL, JANUARY
1943.

‘That “young officer”, that was me, Winrich Hans Hubertus Behr, known to my friends as Teddy. In the 1950s I worked for the European Community for Coal and Steel, after that I was assistant secretary general of the European Community. From 1965 I served for twenty years as managing director of a telecommunications concern. We made telephones, switching systems, switchboards, alarm installations, things like that. A 12,000-man work-force. Now we live outside Düsseldorf, in a quiet area. A wonderful time.

‘On a few occasions it has occurred to me that my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father and I all have one thing in common: all four of us fought in a war against France, and all four of us were wounded. I can show you a little box containing the Iron Crosses of four generations. In those days that was seen as a great honour for a German family. But there's also something pathetic about it, don't you think?

‘In 1914, my father was a battalion commander. Right at the start of the war, while leading a sabre charge on the French in a forest close to Maubeuge, he was hit by a grenade. His whole face – nose, eyes, mouth, everything – was torn apart. He lay on the battlefield for hours. Finally
they collected him, sent him to Berlin and patched him up there. His face was completely mutilated. He was blind. That's how he met my mother, she was his nurse. They married in 1915. I was born three years later, on 22 January, 1918. I had a father who never saw me with his own eyes.

‘My whole family originally came from the Baltic States, but at the same time my father was a typical son of the Prussian cadet academies, a real soldier of the imperial generation, just like my grandfather. He could be devastating in his criticism of Wilhelm II, but no matter how he ranted, he always spoke of “
Unser allergenädigster Kaiser
” and “
Seine Majestät
”.

‘He was a colonel on the general staff, and he had learned to type on a Braille machine, so he worked at home. We lived in a chic neighbour-hood, close to the Tiergarten, and high-ranking officers always came to visit. We also took a lot of walks together, my father and I. I would lead him around Berlin, along the former Siegesallee with all those busts of the German rulers, and he would deliver whole history lectures. My father always said: “My boy, I certainly hope you never become a merchant.” What he meant was: a non-official. He considered serving the state the finest thing a man could do, either as an officer or as a senior civil servant. All other professions, in which money was the only object, he considered second-rate.

‘When I was about thirteen, there were two boys I played with all the time. One day, one of them, the son of a hospital watchman, came over wearing a brown shirt. It had an insignia on it, a setting sun. He said: “I've joined the Hitler Youth.” He started talking about everything, about Hitler and about the trips they took in a truck outside the city on Sundays. He said I should come along sometime. So one Sunday morning I climbed on that truck as well. There were about fifty other boys, all of them wearing caps, broad belts and brown shirts.

‘Along the way they sang songs, the truck stopped at a café where they drank schnapps and beer, people told filthy jokes and shouted: “
Juda, verrecke!
” All rude, working-class youth, in other words, all unemployed, with nothing to do. For them it was a real experience, a trip like that. It wasn't my kind of thing, though. That, in what must have been 1931, was my first contact with the Nazis.

‘Meanwhile, a lot of the refined Jewish families in our surroundings began leaving the country, discreetly. Our class at the gymnasium started
off in 1929 with thirty boys. I'd estimate that about half of them came from Jewish families; but to be honest, we didn't really think in such terms. When I took my final exams in 1935, there were only eight boys left in the class.

‘I met a few of my old classmates half a century later, in 1988, when the school had its 300th anniversary. It was nice to see them again. But still. I had been decorated in the Second World War, I had been a member of Field Marshal Rommel's staff, and of course they all knew that. I could feel the question in the air: “How could you have been a part of that?” Fifty years of tragic history, it formed a barrier between us that we tried to bridge, but it was no use.

‘I was eighteen in 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, and I felt grand. Such a bond between the peoples, so much common interest. That's how I felt about it. The next year I went to the
Kriegsschule
in Munich. So I became an officer, perhaps because that was the only thing that meant anything to my father.

‘Because of his work for the general staff, he was very well informed about everything. “This half-baked painter, my goodness, that's going to be a lot of trouble for all of us,” I heard him mumble quite often. I didn't see it that way, I was wildly enthusiastic. I took part in the invasion of the Sudetenland with our Berlin armoured division. That was no war, that was only a festive march. People were waving flags everywhere, we received an enthusiastic reception, and we thought: Hitler is slowly but surely taking Versailles apart. The march into the Rhineland went the same way. As young officers, we realised that Hitler was playing a game of high stakes, but he did it rather skilfully.

‘The older officers were much more cautious. In summer 1939, when we were stationed in Pomerania and rumour had it that things would be starting in Poland soon, they were pretty sombre. “This fellow is dragging us into a new world war,” they said. “This is going to go all wrong.” That was the mood we were in as we advanced to within ten kilometres of the border. Then orders came to withdraw to thirty kilometres, and all the older officers started drinking in relief: “Thank God, there's not going to be a war after all. Hitler's done it again.” That was the point at which Hitler had given the British another forty-eight hours to meet his final ultimatum, but of course we didn't know that then.

‘In those days, please forgive me for saying this, there was only one thought that occupied me: dear God, please don't be so cruel to my father as to let his only son die at war. The idea of a messenger coming to my parents’ door with the news “Your son has been killed in action”, that frightened me more than the thought of my own death.

‘Then we went in and the fighting started. The first person I saw die was a young fellow officer. After the war had been going for a few days, we had discovered an abandoned estate. We went into the grounds, there were a few cars parked there, there was a lovely patio, a dining room, and in it a big table set with at least twenty plates, with everything still on them, ham, butter, cheese, poultry, you name it. The occupants had obviously rushed off and left their meal behind. I casually picked up a slice of ham and, as I turned around, suddenly saw three Poles standing among the trees, their rifles aimed at me. Two young officers came up behind me right then. I was paralysed with fear. The Poles shot them, then jumped into a car and drove off. One of the officers behind me died on the spot, the other one eventually recovered. That was the first time the war really closed in on me.

‘A few months later, in November 1939, we were sent to Krefeld, close to the Dutch border. I had to keep watch on a road that led into the Dutch city of Venlo, had to report on everything that happened there. We spent that whole winter on alert, ready for the invasion. In the end our division moved a little further south, to Aachen, and on 10 May, 1940 we rolled into Belgium and France, past Maubeuge. I didn't send my father a postcard.