Iron Curtain Read online

  Both the robbery and the destruction would continue for many months, growing more sophisticated with time, eventually taking the official form of “reparations.” But the unofficial robbery also went on for many months. As late as 1946, East German officials were complaining that Soviet officers in Saxony had set themselves up in private apartments and were ordering furniture, paintings, and porcelain from the Saxon state collections to be sent to them from local castles: “Once they leave the area they take them with them.” The owner of Castle Friesen near Reichenbach complained that he had lost a table worth 4,000 Reichsmarks (the prewar currency), three carpets worth 11,500 Reichsmarks, a rococo chest of drawers worth 18,000 Reichsmarks, and a mahogany desk worth 5,000 Reichsmarks. There is no record that any of this was returned.23

  More horrific, and ultimately of deeper political significance, were violent attacks on civilians that began long before the Red Army reached Berlin. They started as the Red Army crossed Poland, intensified in Hungary, and reached an astonishing level as Soviet troops crossed into Germany. To those whom they encountered, the brutalized, angry soldiers of the Red Army seemed consumed by a desire for revenge. They were enraged by the deaths of friends, spouses, and children, enraged by the burned villages and mass graves the Germans had left behind in Russia. Once, Grossman witnessed a procession of hundreds of Soviet children, walking eastward on a road, leaving German captivity. Soviet soldiers and officers stood solemnly alongside the road, “peering intently into their faces.” The men were fathers, looking for lost sons and daughters who had been deported to Germany: “One colonel had been standing there for several hours, upright, stern, with a dark, gloomy face. He went back to his car in the dusk: he hadn’t found his son.”24 The Red Army may have been enraged by its own commanders, their heartless tactics and their constant use of threats and political spies, as well as its own losses. The historian Catherine Merridale, who interviewed hundreds of veterans, believes that they were often expressing political rage: “Consciously or not … Red Army soldiers would soon be venting anger that had built up through decades of state oppression and endemic violence.”25

  The women of the newly occupied territories would bear the brunt of this rage. Women of all ages were subjected to gang rapes and sometimes murdered afterward. Though more famous as the chronicler of the Gulag, the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn also entered East Prussia with the Red Army in 1945, where he encountered, and later put into verse—translated by Robert Conquest—scenes of horror:

  A moaning by the walls half muffled:

  The mother’s wounded, still alive.

  The little daughter’s on the mattress,

  Dead. How many have been on it

  A platoon, a company perhaps?

  A girl’s been turned into a woman,

  A woman turned into a corpse.

  It’s all come down to simple phrases:

  Do not forget! Do not forgive!

  Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!26

  These acts of vengeance were often apolitical, and they were not even necessarily directed at Germans or Nazi sympathizers. As Grossman noted, “Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now. Tonight, some of them are hiding in our correspondents’ room. During the night, we are woken up by screams: one of the correspondents couldn’t resist the temptation.” In his memoirs, Lev Kopelev, at the time a political officer in the Red Army, recounts the fate of a Russian girl who had been a forced laborer in Germany, but who was mistaken for one of the enemy. She was “beautiful, young, cheerful, hair like gold tumbling down her back—some soldiers, drunk I guess, were walking down the street, saw her—‘Hey, Fritzie, hey, you bitch!’—and a spray from a submachine gun across her back. She didn’t live an hour. Kept crying: ‘What for?’ She had just written her mother that she’d be coming home.”27

  Sometimes the victims were Polish forced laborers, who had the bad luck to be in the Red Army’s way: “Just then there was a frenzied scream and a girl ran into the warehouse, her long, braided blonde hair disheveled, her dress torn across her breast, shouting piercingly, ‘I’m Polish! Jesus Mary, I’m Polish!’ Two tank men were after her. Both were wearing their black helmets. One of them was viciously drunk.”28 When Kopelev tried to intervene—theoretically rape was punishable by execution on the spot—his companions upbraided him, grumbling: “ ‘Some commanders … They’ll shoot their own men over a German bitch.’ ” He was similarly reproached for objecting when fellow soldiers shot a feeble-minded old woman as a “spy”: “Are you going to turn against your own people over a lousy German crone?”29

  Both the rapes and the violence horrified local communists, who immediately understood what their political impact would be. In public, the rapes were attributed to “diversionists dressed in Soviet uniforms.” In private, local communists petitioned authorities to help take control. One Polish security officer wrote to the propaganda boss of the Polish army in February 1945 to complain that Red Army troops “behave toward Poles in a manner that is harming Polish-Soviet friendship and weakens the feelings of gratitude the people of Poznań had for their liberators … rape of women is very common, sometimes in the presence of parents or husbands. Even more common are situations when soldiers, usually younger officers, compel women to their quarters (sometimes under the pretense that they will help with the wounded) and attack them there.”30

  Others tried to deny what was happening. One young Hungarian, a communist at the time, explained that he hadn’t known about any rapes: “In our family circle one would have said that ‘this is Nazi nonsense’ … at that time we were still convinced that they [the Soviets] were new men.” But over time, they found the “new men” didn’t quite conform to expectations. At one point, he was given responsibility for a group of young Russians: “At night [they] were regularly jumping out of their windows and going to drink somewhere or pick up some whores or whatever else, which we were very embarrassed by. Very embarrassed by them. Didn’t denounce them, but we knew about it …”31

  Some were touched personally. Robert Bialek, one of the few active, underground communists in the then-German city of Breslau, arrived home after his first, celebratory encounter with the Soviet commandants who had occupied the city—as a communist, he wanted to offer them his help—to discover that his wife had been raped. This, for him, was the beginning of the end: “The brutish instincts of two common Russian soldiers had brought the world crashing down about my head, as no Nazi tortures nor the subtlest persuasion had ever done.” He wished, he wrote, “that I had been buried, like so many of my friends, under the ruins of the town.”32

  It is frequently and correctly observed that this wave of sexual violence was not planned, in Germany or anywhere else, and there is no document “ordering” such attacks.33 Yet it is also true that officers such as Kopelev and Solzhenitsyn found that their immediate superiors weren’t much interested in stopping them, and both rape and random killings were clearly tolerated, at least in the early weeks of occupation. Though decisions were left up to local commanders, this tolerance flowed from the highest possible level. When the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas complained about the behavior of the Red Army to Stalin, the Soviet leader infamously demanded to know how he, a writer, could not “understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?”34

  This sort of “understanding” was enhanced by Soviet propaganda about the Germans and Germany, which became especially bloodthirsty during the final attack on Berlin, and by the desire to humiliate German men. “Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed,” wrote one war correspondent, in an article reread and reprinted often after February 1945: “Kill the German—this is your mother’s prayer. Kill the German—this is the cry of your Russian earth.”35

  Even if the looting, violence, and rapes were not part of a political plan, in practice they had a deep and long-lasting
political impact on all of the territories occupied by the Red Army. On the one hand, the violence made people doubtful about Soviet rule, and deeply suspicious of communist propaganda and Marxist ideology. At the same time, violence, especially sexual violence, made both men and women profoundly afraid. The Red Army was brutal, it was powerful, and it could not be stopped. Men could not protect women; women could not protect themselves; neither could protect their children or their property. The horror that had been inspired could not be openly discussed, and official responses were usually oblique. In Hungary, the Budapest National Committee suspended the ban on abortions in February 1945, though without explaining exactly why. In January 1946, the Hungarian Social Welfare Minister issued an evasive decree: “As an effect of the front and the chaos following it there were a lot of children born whose families did not want to take care of them … I ask hereby the bureau of orphanages … to qualify all babies as abandoned whose date of birth is from nine to eighteen months after the liberation.”36

  Even individual responses were often wooden and perfunctory, and so they remained: What was there to say? Many years later, an otherwise eloquent East German pastor who had been a child at the time of the Soviet invasion still slipped and stuttered as he tried to describe what he remembered of that: “The Russians came, then the rapes happened, it was incredible. One simply cannot forget that. I was fifteen … some women had gone into hiding, they’d got others, my mother, it was very difficult … It was horrible and at the same time there was a feeling of relief, of having escaped alive. There was a strange tension inside me.”37

  Only once in Soviet-occupied Europe was mass rape clearly and publicly discussed. In November 1948, the East German authorities organized a public debate on the subject in Berlin’s “House of Soviet Culture.” The meeting was inspired by the journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt—editor, at the time, of the Berliner Zeitung, the Berlin city newspaper, and later editor of the official party newspaper, Neues Deutschland—who had composed a provocative article entitled “About the Russians and About Us.” The debate attracted an enormous crowd, so many that Neues Deutschland later complained the hall was “too small to discuss this topic seriously.”

  Herrnstadt himself opened the discussion by provocatively repeating the thesis of his article, which had been printed in Neues Deutschland a few days before. He declared that Germany “could not overcome its present difficulties without unrestricted support of the USSR,” and he dismissed the public’s anger at and resentment of the Red Army. He belittled those in his audience who spoke of their “brother-in-law who was standing on the side of the road and had his bicycle stolen, and he had been voting for the communists all of his life.” How was the Soviet army supposed to know that the man was a communist? Why wasn’t this man fighting with the Red Army against the Nazis? Why was the entire German working class standing by the side of the road, as it were, waiting to be saved?

  The discussion lasted four hours and would be continued the following night. But as the evening wore on, the focus gradually shifted away from stolen bicycles. At a key moment, a woman stood up and declared that “many of us have experienced things that shape our reaction when we meet members of the Soviet army.” Still using euphemisms, she referred to “that fear and this mistrust with which we approach everybody who wears a certain uniform.” Reading the transcript of the debate, it becomes strangely clear that everyone immediately understood that the real subject at hand was not theft but rape.

  One by one, justifications for Soviet behavior were presented. Germans must learn to use reason to overcome emotion. Germans must carry on with the class struggle. Germans had begun the war. German brutality had taught the Russians to be brutal. Still, there were a few counterarguments—some women pushed back, others wanted to know how Russian women were treated at home—until finally, on the second night, a Russian officer stood up and effectively ended the argument. He declared that “no one has suffered as much as we: 7 million people dead, 25 million lost their homes”: “What kind of soldier came to Berlin in 1945? Was he a tourist? Did he come on an invitation? No, that was a soldier who had thousands of kilometers of scorched Soviet territory behind him … perhaps he found his kidnapped bride here, who had been taken as a slave laborer …”

  After this intervention, the public discussion was effectively over: no real response could be made to his argument. His words reminded everyone in the room not only of the German responsibility for the war and of the Red Army’s deep desire for revenge but of the pointlessness of saying or doing anything about it.38

  Official silence followed. But memories of the mass rape, of the looting, and of the violence did not disappear in Germany, in Hungary, in Poland, or anywhere else. They simply added to the “fear and mistrust with which we approach everybody who wears a certain uniform,” in the words of the woman at the Berlin discussion—a fear that persisted long after the violence stopped.39 With time, it became clear that this peculiarly powerful combination of emotions—fear, shame, anger, silence—helped lay the psychological groundwork for the imposition of a new regime.

  Violence was not the only cause of resentment. Within a few years of the war’s end, the Soviet Union would encourage the rapid industrialization of Eastern Europe—but in the meantime Stalin wanted war reparations. In practice, this entailed the literal dismantling of industry across the region, sometimes with very long-term consequences. Like mass rape, the mass plunder of German factories often seems to have been a form of revenge as much as anything else. Equipment and goods that could not possibly have been of any use in the USSR, bits of odd piping and broken machines, were hauled off alongside works of art, the contents of private houses, even masses of archival documents, ancient as well as modern (the archives of the Grand Duchy of Lichtenstein, of the Rothschild family, of the Dutch freemasons), which were of limited use to Soviet scholars. Random men, rounded up on the street for this purpose, were forced to pack up industrial equipment that required specialist treatment, and the goods were surely damaged as a result.

  Unlike the thefts of watches and bicycles, these wholesale reparations were very carefully planned in advance, starting as early as 1943, although Soviet authorities did know what a backlash they might create. Just as the tide of the war was turning, the head of the Soviet Institute for World Economics and World Politics, Eugene Vargas (a Soviet economist of Hungarian origin, also known by his Hungarian name, Jëno Varga), wrote a paper anticipating mass reparations and arguing that they might “alienate the working class” in Germany and elsewhere if done incorrectly. Vargas thought payments in kind were preferable to payments in cash, which might perhaps involve bankers and capitalism. He also thought that any former Axis state that adopted Soviet-style communism should be absolved from paying reparations altogether.40 Vargas and the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, concluded by proposing a mixed form of reparations: the confiscation of German property outside Germany and radical agricultural reform within Germany, as well as the dismantling of German enterprises and their workforces (which could be brought to the USSR to do forced labor) and the reduction of German living standards to Soviet levels. These policies were later carried out, more or less as Vargas described, in the Soviet zone of Germany.41

  The other Allies were aware of these plans. Stalin first spoke about them at the Tehran Conference, and at the Yalta Conference the Soviet delegation even proposed the dismemberment of Germany—the Rhineland and Bavaria would become separate states—along with the dismantling of three-quarters of Germany’s industrial equipment, of which 80 percent would go to the Soviet Union. A figure was plucked from the air—$10 billion—which Stalin said was “owed” to the USSR. There was some mild argument, and Churchill pointed out that the harsh sanctions placed on Germany after the First World War had not exactly produced peace in Europe. But Roosevelt was inclined not to argue. His own Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., was also pushing for the dismemberment and deindustrialization of Germany, which he imagined
would become a purely agricultural society.42 The matter wasn’t resolved in Potsdam either, and discussions of reparations continued through 1947 and although the USSR presented a bill for the total amount of destruction the Nazis had caused in the Soviet Union—$128 billion, to be precise—no treaty to this effect was ever signed.

  In the end, it didn’t much matter because no other Allied power was able to influence what the Red Army did in its German occupation zone, or anywhere else for that matter. By March 1945, a Soviet commission had already drawn up a list of German assets, and by the summer some 70,000 Soviet “experts” had already begun to supervise their removal.43 According to Soviet Foreign Ministry data collected by Norman Naimark, 1,280,000 tons of “materials” and 3,600,000 tons of “equipment” had been removed from eastern Germany between the invasion and the beginning of August.44 These numbers may have been plucked from the air, just like Stalin’s figure of $128 billion, though it is reliably known that out of 17,024 medium and large factories identified by the USSR in their zone, more than 4,500 were dismantled and removed. Another fifty or sixty large companies stayed intact but became Soviet companies. Between a third and a half of eastern Germany’s industrial capacity disappeared between 1945 and 1947.45 In a very real sense, this was the beginning of the division of Germany. Although the other Allies certainly “recruited” German scientists and other experts, no comparable removal effort took place in the western zones of Germany. In the wake of Soviet reparations, the economies of the two halves of Germany began immediately to diverge.

  Even these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Factories can be counted, but there is no way to track the amount of currency, gold, or even food products removed from the eastern zone. German bureaucrats of the Soviet zone tried to keep track. In the files of the Department of Reparations some sixty-five cards, with about twenty to thirty entries per card, form a partial record. They include everything from “68 barrels of paint” to geodetic instruments and lenses from the Zeiss Jena optical factory. According to these records, the Red Army even confiscated the feed for the animals from the Leipzig zoo in October 1945. A few weeks later, the Red Army confiscated the animals as well and apparently took them to Russia.46