soviet army in Germany in Soviet documents

[Oleg Grigoryev]

Directive of High Command Headhunters (Stavka)
To the commanders and military council members of 1st Byelorussian and 1st Ukrainian fronts
In regards to attitude toward German POWs and civilian population.

April 20th 1945.

Stavka orders:

1. Enforce the better treatment of civilians as well as POWs . Cruelty towards Germans cases the later to be afraid of us and forcing them to stubbornly resist our advance as well as not surrender. Civil populations, terrified of revenge, is organizing bands. This is not acceptable. Humane treatment of Germans will make fighting for us easier , and will undoubtedly soften their resistance.
2. In German areas west of line mouth of Order-Fursteburg-Neise German administrations are to be created; the cities are to be rulled by German burgomasters. Small-time members of Nazi party, that are loyal to the Red Army are not be touché. Only big leaders are to be arrested.
3. Better treatment of Germans are no to grow into fraternizations with the later.

Signed Stalin, Antonov.




From order by Peoples Commissar of Defense from February 23 1942.

The Red Army goal is expulsion of German occupiers from our country. Most probably the war would end with destruction of Hitler’s clique. We would salute to such an end. However it is not right to associate Hitler with German people, with German state,. History show -various Hitlers come and go but German people, German state is to remain there.

From the report by member of Military council of 1st Ukrainian Front to the Head of Political department of RKKA in regards to political situation on occupied German territories. April 4th 1945

In second half of March our forces had taken 10 German towns. Most of the population was evacuated prior to our arrival. Those who remain are mostly elder folks, women, children. Due to German propaganda Civilians are utterly horrified of the Red Army. Suicide cases are common occurrence – for instance in village Mednic 58 women and young adults cut their veins in order not to be taken over by Red Army . Outwardly appearance of Germans is more or less calm though.; they are accurately fulfilling all orders given to them and show understanding of exiting reign as being caused by the time of war.
However occasional cases of rape and violence on part of soldiers untreatably make Germans very nervous. Military council takes all the steps need to prevent any such occurrences in the future.


Lieutenant- General Karinukov.


From the report of chief of political department of 8th Guards army to the chief of political department of 1st Byelorussian Front - in regards to attitude of German population and its treatment by the soldiers April 25th 1945 General impressions from Berliners – they are loyal towards us – they trying to constantly underline it by saying things such us “we did not want to fight in the first place –let Hitler fight now”. They are trying to illustrate that they were never supportive of Nazi polices , were never affiliated with Nazis, many trying to convince us that they are communists.


In the Wilhelmshaffen some restaurants are open –owners sell provision to our soldiers and officers. They were asked to close them till the fighting is over.

Germans are generally are being more calm since we began to pass city management to military commandants and German Burgomasters Commandant seemed to be well respected as an authority figure – that show in constant bombardment of the later with request of various kind form the population.
Berliners are actively working on the city restoration . Military commandants are organizing food supply in general and bred production and distribution in particular, however since local stock is so small we were forced to share our own. Level of violence by our soldiers went sharply down in the last days but more work on it steel needs to be done.

Major-general Skosarev.





Some statistical info for those who say that no Soviet soldier was ever punished for violence towards Germans during first months of 1945 only number of officers prosecuted for violence towards German population exceeded 4000.

[Panzermahn]

aah, brilliant piece of manifesto from Herr Oleg, i'm not sure the validity of the document but even though it existed without any doubt, the order was never implemented fully to lower echelon of the Red Army


Tell that to German civillians in Silesia, Poomerania, Nemmersdorf, Berlin Gumbinnen, Goldap, Danzig, Sudentenland that Uncle Dzugashvilli asked the Red Army troops to treat german civillians and POWs humanely..

[Oleg Grigoryev]

aah, brilliant piece of manifesto from Herr Oleg,

I am Russian so don't call me Herr.

i 'm not sure the validity of the document

can you provide something that would give any inclanation to doubt it validity or you just hogwashing as usual?

but even though it existed without any doubt, the order was never implemented fully to lower echelon of the Red Army

your educted oppinion I presume? so how then 4000 prosecuted officers do fill in that picture of yours?

[Panzermahn]

typical russian nationalistic answer to crimes committed by the Russians against the German people in retaliation for the crimes committed by Germans against the Russian people.

[Oleg Grigoryev]

typical russian nationalistic answer to crimes committed by the Russians against the German people in retaliation for the crimes committed by Germans against the Russian people.

I see- asking for proof is now considered to be an attribute of Russian nationalist. So can you substantiated any of allegations you posted above or the only thing you good for is making wild accusations and making up insults for the army that gutted you beloved Whermaht. ?

[Panzermahn]

it takes time to search for documents in the net..however, if your beloved Roten Armee is so clean as you believed it to be, how come major historians like Cornelius Ryan, Anthony Beevor, Alfred Maurice de Zayas professor Siedler mentioned the "kriegsgreuel der roten armee" in their books..why don't they mentioned any single document pertaining to Uncle Dzugashvilli ordering the Bolsheviks to treat german civillians and POWs humanely....

truly, some Russian officers and decent and kind who did their best to treat properly civillians and POWs but you don't expect a Bolshevik to treat german civillians and POWs humanely...These bolsheviks even murdered their own people and Russian civillians...Remember what your beloved, heroic, valiant, courageous NKVD did to russian civillians during the early stages of barbarossa when the red Army was holding the Wehrmacht gallantly? are u so conveniently forgotten the "heroic" deeds of the NKVD..

P.S. the bolshevik term i used here referred only to the political officers of the REd Army, NKVD, criminals, murderers, bandits and anyone who is Stalinist

[Oleg Grigoryev]

if your beloved Roten Armee is so clean as you believed it to be

interesting - on what basis did you conclude that in my opinion Red Army was clean? If anything the above mentioned documents showed that violence towards civilli8ans did take place , however high command tried – an largely seceded to put an end to it.

come major historians like Cornelius Ryan, Anthony Beevor, Alfred Maurice de Zayas professor Siedler mentioned the "kriegsgreuel der roten armee" in their books..why don't they mentioned any single document pertaining to Uncle Dzugashvilli ordering the Bolsheviks to treat german civillians and POWs humanely....

bad research although Ryan cannot be blamed since in his time archival data was largely unavailable, Zays is clearly bias and by his own admission is not very precise, Beevor simply screwed it up – accidently he felt silent when his presented with documented evidence that contradicted the picture he painted; Seidler I don’t know anything about.

but you don't expect a Bolshevik to treat german civillians and POWs humanely...

–why?

Remember what your beloved, heroic, valiant, courageous NKVD

MINE????

did to russian civillians during the early stages of barbarossa when the red Army was holding the Wehrmacht gallantly?

–what?

are u so conveniently forgotten the "heroic" deeds of the NKVD..

– I did? When exactly did I do that?

[michael mills]

The Stalin/Antonov order of 20 April 1945, quoted by Oleg, is touched on by the late Dr Joachim Hoffmann in the conclusion of his "Stalin's War of Extermination".

On pages 336-337, he writes:

The Soviet Commanders-in-Chief at the Front, who had themselves personally called for acts of revenge, soon found themselves compelled to intervene against the descent into savagery and sadism on the part of considerable numbers of their troops. All such efforts nevertheless remained wothout effect in view of the anti-German hate propaganda, which, under Ehrenburg's leadership, continued unabated until shortly before the end of the war, culminating in the demand to "put an end to Germany", as well as in a demand, which Ehrenburg considered "modest and honourable", to "reduce the German population", in which case the only decision that remained to be made was whether it was preferable to "kill the Germans with axes or clubs".

Stalin personally was fully aware of all these monstrous measures and procedures; it was he who personally ordered them; it was he who bore immediate responsibility for them. This is clear from an order of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander, signed by Stalin and the Chief of the General Staff, Army General Antonov, on 20 April 1945, which speaks of the "cruel measures" of the Soviet armed forces - not on humanitarian grounds, nor out of any concern for international law, but purely and simply on the basis of political considerations. As explained by Professor Semiryaga, this order from the STAVKA, signed by Stalin, constitutes an admission that Stalin personally considered the acts of the Red Army to be cruel, "both against prisoners of war and the civilian population" [Source: Semiriaga, Mikhail, "Wie Berijas Leute in Ostdeutschland die 'Demokratie' errichteten", in: Deutschland-Archiv, no. 5. September/October 1996, pp. 741-751].

Perhaps Oleg could tell us something about Professor Mikhail Semiriaga.

Dr Hoffmann also deals with the question of the degree to which the orders of the Soviet High Command were actually carried out on the ground. On pages 309-311, he writes:

The fact - uneqivocally admitted in the order of the military state prosecutor of the 48th Army [ Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Maliarov, on 23 January 1945], as well as in the order of the Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd White Russian Front [Marshal of the Soviet Union Rokossovskii, Order no. 006 of 22 January 1945] - that an increasing demoralization and descent into savagery was now prevalent among the ranks of the Red Army, was, however, immediately hushed up by the subordinate troop leadership and political apparatus. This fact is illustrated by the manner in which shameful incidents of wanton destruction and drunkenness were interpreted for the benefit of subordinates. One example is order no. 026, issued on 25 January 1945 by the Chief of Staff of the 174th Infantry Division, Colonel Romanenko, to the troop commanders, in this case, the 508th Infantry Regiment. In this order, the arsonists are no longer secribed as marauding Soviet soldiers, but rather, as enemy agants and provocateurs - ie Germans, who, "dressed in the iniforms of the Red Army", were alleged to be seeking to prevent the advance of Soviet troops by "burning settlements and individual buildings" [Source: "Vsem Voennym Prokuroram" {=To all military prosecutors}, 25.1.1945, BA-MA, RH 2/2687].

The official explanation for the widespread alcoholism among the members of the Red Army, accompanied by "mass booze-ups" - as Rokossovsky called them - with the participation of Soviet officers and with devastating consequences, was very similar. The Political Administration, which was best acquainted with the Council of War of the 3rd White Russian Front, in an instruction leaflet addressed to the "Comrade combatabts, sergeants and officers" even attempted to place responsibility for unrestrained Soviet drunkenness upon the Germans - the "reprehensible, treacherous enemy" (gnusnogo, kovarnogo vraga) - who was said to be deliberately poisoning the supplies of alcohol and food "in an attempt to cause casualties among our soldiers and officers and to harm the Red Army"[Source: "Tovarishchi boitsy, serzhanty i ofitsery!", BA-MA, RH 2/2687]. For example, if members of a Red Army unit commanded by First Lieutenant Klimets, or some other Soviet commander, drank huge quantities of methyl alcohol, or if a group of Soviet soldiers under the command of the officer Nikiforov quaffed "a barrel containing a fluid which smelled like alcohol", and died horribly, the deceased were, of course, simply the victims of the "treacherous enemy" (podlomu vragu): an enemy which, in his efforts to harm the Soviet Army, never shrank from the "basest, most reprehensible, and horrible means of fighting". The question now arises: how were excesses against the civilian population to be prevented if the impulsive lack of restraint of the Red Army soldiers was mendaciously attributed, as described above, to German treachery, countered with the mere proclamation that the "fascist beasts" ("fashistskie zveri") and "German monsters" ("nemetskie zhveri"), were to be punished for these " treacherous methods" with "renewed, devastating blows"?

The orders issued by the Soviet command authorities, were, therefore, far from unanimous. Many prisoners of war informed the Germans that they had received knowledge of the new rules of conduct in February 1945. For example, Major of the Guards of the Superintendent Service Kostikov of the 277th Guards Infantry Regiment of the 91st Guards Infantry Division (39th Army, 3rd White Russian Front), on 17 February 1945, reported that "strict orders have been issued that the German civilian population is to be left alone, nothing is to be stolen, and German women are not to be molested" [Source: BA-MA, RH 2/2687, 17.2.1945]. According to the testimony of of one Red Army soldier, Shevchuk, the "shooting of civilians and German prisoners of war", which had been customary in the Red Army until that time, was now "strictly prohibited" in the 44th Motorized Infantry Brigade as of 6-7 February 1945 [Source: BA-MA, 2/2685, 5.3.1945]. Similar, quite comparable, prohibitions were also issued with regards to other units [BA-MA, RH 2/2684, 2.2.1944; BA-MA, RH 2/2688, fol. 74, 25.2., fol. 5, 1.3.1945]. When Soviet soldiers wantonly set fire to the city of Gleiwitz, the burning of localities was "strictly forbidden" in that section of the front as well [Source: BA-MA, RH 2/2687, 24.2.1945]. The xommander of the 1042nd Infantry Regiment of the 295th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Chaiko, informed his units that violations of the existing prohibition against plundering would be "severely punished" [Source: BA-MA, RH 2/2688, fol. 75, 6.3.1945]. Generally, the Soviet command authorities were not stingy about threats of punishment; the military tribunals appear to have intervened occasionally. But these were exceptions. members of the Red Army unanimously maintained that the authorities only intervened in rare cases; in practice, everything continued as before.

German civilians and prisoners of war continued to be murdered as before, often upon the inducement of superior officers, usually the "battalion and regimental commanders involved", although a few prisoners of war testified that there were units in "which such crimes were not tolerated". German women and girls continued to be raped as before by "officers and younger soldiers of the Red Army", despite of existing prohibitions, and were very often murdered afterwards. Arson and pillaging with the participation of officers continued just as before. That the numerous orders to the contrary remained a dead letter is illustrated by the fact that anti-German hate propaganda was not amended or modified in the slightest respect. A captured second lieutenant from the 266th Infantry Regiment of the 88th Guards Infantry Division testified that posters with inflammatory slogans were to be seen on the streets everywhere, even in February 1945, such as: "Strike the Fascist Beasts Dead! Take Revenge on the Fascists! Remember the Women and Children Murdered by the Fascists and Take Revenge for Them!" [Source: BA-MA, RH 2/2688, fol. 75, 27.2.1945]. The watchword of agitation upon the 27th anniversary of the Red Army on 23 February 1945 was as follows:

"Let's wreak vengeance on the German-fascist monsters for plundering and destroying our cities and villages, for raping our women and children, for murdering and deporting Soviet citizens to German slavery! Vengeance and death to the fascist fiends!"

Since the powerful political apparatus employed an entirely distinct lanmguage from the command authorities of the Red Army, which had only intervened half-heartedly so far, it is no wonder that violations of international law against German civilians and prisoners of war continued to be committed on a horrendous scale throughout February and March 1945.

The above quote from Hoffmann demonstrates the weight that is to be given to the documents quoted by Oleg. Although the highest levels of the Red Army issued orders prohibiting excesses, they were largely ignored, particularly as the hate propaganda produced by the German-hating Jew, Ehrenburg (justly compared with Streicher by Hoffmann), continued unabated.

Hoffmann's even-handedness is demonstrated by his citing of the above orders, and his mentioning of Red Army units and individuals who actually obeyed them and refrained from committing atrocities.

[Oleg Grigoryev]

Perhaps Oleg could tell us something about Professor Mikhail Semiriaga.

he is dead and he was famous for throwing accusation without supporting them in the best tradition of old Soviet historiography.

As for Hoffaman:

The Soviet Commanders-in-Chief at the Front, who had themselves personally called for acts of revenge

documented example – an order perhaps?

All such efforts nevertheless remained wothout effect in view of the anti-German hate propaganda, which, under Ehrenburg's leadership, continued unabated until shortly before the end of the war, culminating in the demand to "put an end to Germany", as well as in a demand, which Ehrenburg considered "modest and honourable", to "reduce the German population", in which case the only decision that remained to be made was whether it was preferable to "kill the Germans with axes or clubs".

That came from what Erenburg article?

Stalin personally was fully aware of all these monstrous measures and procedures; it was he who personally ordered them

unsubstantiated allegation – garbage.

Commander, signed by Stalin and the Chief of the General Staff, Army General Antonov, on 20 April 1945, which speaks of the "cruel measures" of the Soviet armed forces

I did not see “cruel measuers” anywhere in the order.

As explained by Professor Semiryaga, this order from the STAVKA, signed by Stalin, constitutes an admission that Stalin personally considered the acts of the Red Army to be cruel, "both against prisoners of war and the civilian population"

unsubstantiated interpretation on Part of Semiriaga –garbage .

members of the Red Army unanimously maintained that the authorities only intervened in rare cases; in practice, everything continued as before.

– to how many Soviet veterans did he talked exactly to produce such a comment?

Strike the Fascist Beasts Dead! Take Revenge on the Fascists!

– the horror …

"Let's wreak vengeance on the German-fascist monsters for plundering and destroying our cities and villages, for raping our women and children, for murdering and deporting Soviet citizens to German slavery! Vengeance and death to the fascist fiends!"

as above…

The above quote from Hoffmann demonstrates the weight that is to be given to the documents quoted by Oleg.

the above quote show mr Hoffaman remarkable choosiness in his sources as well as mr Mills lack of critical approach to the information presented to him. Once again Mr Mills how does 4000 of prosecuted officers fit in that picture of yours?

they were largely ignored

unsupported allegation –garbage

. Hoffmann's even-handedness is demonstrated by his citing of the above orders, and his mentioning of Red Army units and individuals who actually obeyed them and refrained from committing atrocities.

Hoffman pitiful attempt to look even-handed. In the light of his writings – purely laughable

[Panzermahn]

The above quote from Hoffmann demonstrates the weight that is to be given to the documents quoted by Oleg. Although the highest levels of the Red Army issued orders prohibiting excesses, they were largely ignored, particularly as the hate propaganda produced by the German-hating Jew, Ehrenburg (justly compared with Streicher by Hoffmann), continued unabated.

i fully support this..

As for Hoffaman:
Quote:
The Soviet Commanders-in-Chief at the Front, who had themselves personally called for acts of revenge
documented example – an order perhaps?

did Hitler ever produced a written order for his subordinates signed by him for the Endloesung? Please don't tell me about the Hossbach memorandum...that doesn't prove it's a direct order..

Remember what your beloved, heroic, valiant, courageous NKVD did to russian civillians during the early stages of barbarossa when the red Army was holding the Wehrmacht gallantly?
–what?

are u forgetting again the Bolshevik atrocities in Vinnitsa, Lvov....

bad research although Ryan cannot be blamed since in his time archival data was largely unavailable, Zays is clearly bias and by his own admission is not very precise, Beevor simply screwed it up – accidently he felt silent when his presented with documented evidence that contradicted the picture he painted; Seidler I don’t know anything about.

that is your typical russian nationalistic opinion of this authors and historian...For your information, Ryan was invited by Kruschev to do research for his book, the Last battle...De Zayas was primary acknowledge as the leading expert in the matter of mass expulsion of eastern germans and atrocities against them post-WW2
Beevor was a very good historian and truly acknowledge for his facts and documentation..

Everytime anybody post a topic or a reply that put the glorious Soviet Empire in a bad limelight, it seems that you will come to the defence or at least coagitating apology for the behaviour of the Bolshevik...

Maybe another Yan here in making:monkee:

[Oleg Grigoryev]

i fully support this..

really?? can you support with some evidence?

are u forgetting again the Bolshevik atrocities in Vinnitsa, Lvov....

you have decisive proof that was done by NKVD –source?

that is your typical russian nationalistic opinion of this authors and historian...

I gather you a lot of Russian nationalistic accountancies

For your information, Ryan was invited by Kruschev to do research for his book, the Last battle...

so? That data classified back then it did not become available till mid-70s –that is for your information.

De Zayas was primary acknowledge as the leading expert in the matter of mass expulsion of eastern germans and atrocities against them post-WW2

based on German source with total disregard for the sources provided by opposite site.

Beevor was a very good historian and truly acknowledge for his facts and documentation..

by you –maybe. If he had been in fact good research he would include the primary sources in his account failure to do that makes him a bad researcher.

[Panzermahn]

are u forgetting again the Bolshevik atrocities in Vinnitsa, Lvov....
you have decisive proof that was done by NKVD –source?

the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau and the ICRC...documented by de Zayas

De Zayas was primary acknowledge as the leading expert in the matter of mass expulsion of eastern germans and atrocities against them post-WW2
based on German source with total disregard for the sources provided by opposite site.

How can one be sure that german sources are not reliable as in this case they are the victims themselves...How do u expect the Allied provide sources to the public regarding mass expulsions of germans after WW2 accroding to the Postdam Conference..(Read de Zayas's book Nemesis at Postdam)

For your information, Ryan was invited by Kruschev to do research for his book, the Last battle...
so? That data classified back then it did not become available till mid-70s –that is for your information.

Ryan did his book in the 60s...Thanks to Mr Koniev himself...The Soviet government allowed him to interview everyone except Marshal Zhukov

[Roberto]

How can one be sure that german sources are not reliable as in this case they are the victims themselves...

Sources from the victims' side are usually compared with such from the perpetrators' side for corroboration, like in regard to German atrocities in the Soviet Union.

How do u expect the Allied provide sources to the public regarding mass expulsions of germans after WW2 accroding to the Postdam Conference..(Read de Zayas's book Nemesis at Postdam)

Good question, given that it was not the participants at the Potsdam Conference who controlled such sources, but the governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and other countries of Eastern Europe from which ethnic Germans were expelled.

For your information, Ryan was invited by Kruschev to do research for his book, the Last battle...
so? That data classified back then it did not become available till mid-70s –that is for your information.

Ryan did his book in the 60s...Thanks to Mr Koniev himself...The Soviet government allowed him to interview everyone except Marshal Zhukov

I read The Last Battle a long time ago, have it on order again for Christmas and will pull your ears if I find Marshal Zhukov quoted in there.

In the meantime, whoever has the book on hand may feel like checking the accuracy of the above quoted assertion.

[Roberto]

are u forgetting again the Bolshevik atrocities in Vinnitsa, Lvov....

you have decisive proof that was done by NKVD –source?

Oleg, with all due respect, I think there is no doubt among historians that the prison massacres at Lvov and other places in the Western Ukraine/Eastern Poland were carried out by the NKVD.

I refer to the following excerpt from an article by Polish historian Bogdan Musial featured under

http://www.hco.hagen.de/forum/musial01-1.html

that I already translated on another thread:

[...]The Soviet terror of the years 1939 to 1941 in former Eastern Poland climaxed in the first weeks of the German-Soviet war in massacres of thousands of prison inmates and countless encroachments against the civilian population. Compared to other Soviet and National Socialist crimes the absolute number of victims was relatively small (an estimated 20 000 to 30 000 people). Unique, however, were the conditions under which these crimes were committed and then discovered, as well as their consequences.
The carrying-out of the shootings was already unusual, for they took place under extremely unfavorable circumstances from the point of view of the perpetrators. They constituted an ad-hoc measure that was decided upon when the Soviets no longer saw it as possible to evacuate all prisoners from the areas threatened by the German troops. A liberation of the prisoners by the Germans or even their release was out of the question from a Soviet point of view. After all, they were “anti-Soviet elements” which needed to be exterminated anyway.[...]

Ukrainian-American historian Taras Hunczak also mentions these massacres in his essay The Ukrainian Losses during World War II, published in A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, edited by Michael Berenbaum, New York University Press 1990, pages 116-125:

[...]With the German invasion of the USSR, the Soviet rule of violence entered a particularly bloody phase. Unable to evacuate the Ukrainian political prisoners, the NKVD (a predecessor of the KGB) proceeded to massacre them. Some died while being tortured. The evidence of this heinous crime is incontrovertible.
From the reports of the German Security Police, we learn the following of the murders of the NKVD: in Stryi, 150 dead; Lviv, 5,000; Dobromyl, 82; Sambir, 520; Lutske, 2,800; Zolochiv, 700; Lublin, 100; Kremianets, 100-150; Dupno, a “severe blood bath” (ein schweres Blutbad); Ternopil, 600. These are but a few examples of mass murder perpetrated on an unprecedented scale in the western Ukraine.
The mass murder of Vinnytsia, sometime between 1936 and 1941, is a special case. The extent of the atrocity can be compared to the Katyn forest massacre of the Polish officers. The mass graves unearthed in Vinnytsia in the spring of 1943 revealed that the NKVD murdered 9,432 Ukrainians, men and women from all walks of life, and tried to hide the atrocity by burying the victims secretly in a restricted area. Among those murdered were also 28 Poles.
The tragic details of Vinnytsia have come to light since World War II. These are the eyewitness accounts of journalists who were present during the unearthing of the graves and the medical examination of the corpses by an international body of physicians. One such witness was Anthony Dragon, who referred to the scene as “the valley of sorrow and tears, ruin and death.” Equally informative and interesting are the observations of Zenon Pelenskyi, which he conveyed to the U.S. Congress committee investigating Communist aggression. The same congressional committee listened to the testimonies of three other men, natives of Vinnytsia, who essentially confirmed the veracity of Pelenskyi’s statements and added some background information.[...]

[Roberto]

Hoffmann's even-handedness is demonstrated by his citing of the above orders, and his mentioning of Red Army units and individuals who actually obeyed them and refrained from committing atrocities.

I would have more confidence in the even-handedness of Mr. Hoffmann on this subject if, for instance, he had quoted the full text of Stalin's order of 20 April 1945 or at least of Semiryaga's assessment, instead of concluding from the mention of "cruel measures" in that order that Stalin was not only aware of Red Army atrocities, but had also, as Hoffmann believes, had "personally ordered them".

Stalin's attitude towards Red Army atrocities, and the degree of his involvement therein, seems to be more accurately reflected in the lectutre he gave to Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas when the latter complained about rapes of Yugoslav women, which is quoted on pages 261 and following of Richard Overy's Russia's War:

You have, of course, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man's soul, man's psyche? Well, then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade - over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest one? How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors? You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be ... The important thing is that it fights Germans ...

Overy continues:

Stalin adopted the language of oriental despotism: the multiple rape and murder of captured women became nothing more than 'fun with a woman'; looting was transformed into taking 'some trifle'. Stalin did not order the Red Army to commit atrocities against the German population; but he did nothing to prevent it. Ordinary soldiers treated atrocity as routine, a cruel perquisite of war. Aleksandr Solshenitsyn, an artillery officer in East Prussia shortly before his arrest, later recalled without comment the attitude of his comrades: 'All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction. Had they been Polish girls or our own displaced Russian girls, they could have been chased naked around the garden and slapped on the behind ... Only when this violence and disorder, generously fuelled by the many German wine cellars liberated from fascism, threatened military discipline did the tide of barbarism ebb.[...]

The fact that Stalin's order of 20 April 1945 came after Ehrenburg had been finally told to keep his mouth shut suggests that it was an order against such "cruel measures".

[...]
By the middle of April, with the Russians deep inside Austria and Czechoslovakia and the Western Allies sweeping across Western and Southern Germany, and Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky holding the Oder Line, the time was ripe for the final attack on Berlin.
A short digression is called for, however, on the tricky subject of Russian policy towards Germany when the Red Army began to occupy German territory. After all that the Germans had done - and horrors like the destruction of Warsaw and the extermination camps at Maidanek and Auschwitz were still fresh in every soldier’s memory - there was no sympathy at all for the German people. No doubt, there was much respect for the German soldier, but that was different. Having fought the Germans for nearly four years on Russian soil, and having seen thousands of Russian towns and villages in ruins, the Russian troops could not resist their thirst for revenge when they finally broke into Germany.
Ever since Russian troops had been on German soil, some rough things had been going on. In the first flush of the invasion of Germany, Russian soldiers burned down numerous houses, and sometimes whole towns - merely because they were German! (I was to see this later, for instance in a large East Prussian town like Allenstein. The Poles who had taken over the city - now re-christened Olsztyn - were furious at all the repairing and rebuilding they had to do in a town which had originally fallen almost intact into Russian hands). There was also a great deal of looting, robbery and rape. The rape no doubt included many genuine atrocities, but as a Russian major later told me, many German women somehow assumed that “it was now the Russians’ turn”, and that it was no good resisting. “The approach,”, he said, “was usually very simple. Any of our chaps simply had to say: ´Frau, komm,´ and she knew what was expected of her ... Let’s face it. For nearly four years, the Red Army had been sex-starved. It was all right for officers, especially staff officers, so many of whom had a ´field-wife´ handy - a secretary, or typist, or a nurse, or a canteen waitress; but the ordinary Vanka had very few opportunities in that line. In our liberated towns, some of our fellows were lucky, but most of them weren’t. The question of more or less ‘raping’ any Russian woman just didn’t arise. In Poland a few regrettable things happened from time to time, but, on the whole, a fairly strict discipline was maintained as regards ‘rape’. The most common offense in Poland was ‘daí chasy’ - ‘give me your wrist-watch.’ There was an awful lot of petty thieving and robbery. Our fellows were just crazy about wrist-watches - there’s no getting away from it. But the looting and raping in a big way did not start until our soldiers got to Germany. Our fellows were so sex-starved that they often raped old women of sixty, seventy or even eighty - much to these grandmothers’ surprise, if not downright delight. But I must admit it was a nasty business and the record of the Kazakhs and other Asiatic troops was particularly bad.”
The posters put up in Germany, during the first weeks of the invasion, such as: “Red Army Soldier: You are now on German soil; the hour of revenge has struck!” did not make things any easier. Moreover, the press propaganda of Ehrenburg and others continued to be very ferocious indeed.
Here are some samples from Ehrenburg’s articles during the invasion of Germany:

Germany is a witch... We are in Germany. German towns are burning. I am happy.
The Germans have no souls... An English statesman said that the Germans were our brethren. No! it is blasphemy to include the child-murderers among the family of nations...
Not only divisions and armies are advancing on Berlin. All the trenches, graves and ravines filled with the corpses of the innocents are advancing on Berlin, all the cabbages of Maidanek and all the trees of Vitebsk on which the Germans hanged so many unhappy people. The boots and shoes and the babies’ slippers of those murdered and gassed at Maidanek are marching to Berlin. The dead are knocking on the doors of the Joachimsthaler Strasse, of the Kaiserallee, of Unter den Linden and all the other cursed streets of that cursed city...
We shall put up gallows in Berlin... An icy wind is sweeping along the streets of Berlin. But it is not the icy wind that is driving the Germans and their females to the west... 800 years ago the Poles and Lithuanians used to say: “We shall torment them in heaven as they tormented us on earth”... Now our patrols stand outside the castles of the Teutonic Knights at Allenstein, Osterode, Marienburg...
We shall forget nothing. As we advance through Pomerania, we have before our eyes the devastated, blood-drenched countryside of Belorussia ...
Some say the Germans from the Rhine are different from the Germans on the Oder. I don’t know that we should worry about such fine points. A German is a German everywhere. The Germans have been punished, but not enough. They are still in Berlin. The Führer is still standing, and not hanging. The Fritzes are still running, but not lying dead. Who can stop us now? General Model? The Oder? The Volkssturm? No, it’s too late. Germany, you can now whirl around in circles, and burn, and howl in your deathly agony; the hour of revenge has struck!...

And, after visiting East Prussia, Ehrenburg wrote: “The Niezschean supermen are whining. They are a cross between a jackal and a sheep. They have no dignity ... A Scottish army chaplain, a liberated prisoner of war, said to me: '‘ know how the Germans treated their Russian prisoners in 1941 and 1942. I can only bow to your generosity now.’”

It did not take very long for both the Party and the Command of the Red Army to realize that all this was going too far. The troops were getting out of hand, and, moreover, it was clear that, before long, the Russians would be faced with a variety of political and administrative problems in Germany which could simply not be handled on the “anti-Marxist” basis that “all Germans are evil”. The alarm, not so much over “atrocities” as over the totally unnecessary destruction caused by the Red Army in the occupied parts of Germany, was first reflected in the Red Star editorial of February 9, 1945:

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is an old saying. But it must not be taken literally. If the Germans marauded, and publicly raped our women, it does not mean that we must do the same. This has never been and never shall be. Our soldiers will not allow anything like that to happen - not because of pity for the enemy, but out of a sense of their own personal dignity ... They understand that every breach of military discipline only weakens the victorious Red Army ... Our revenge is not blind. Our anger is not irrational. In an access of blind rage one is apt to destroy a factory in conquered enemy territory - a factory that would be of value to us. Such an attitude can only play into the enemy’s hands.”

Here was a clear admission that factories - and much else - had been burned down by Russian troops - simply because they were “German property”.
On April 14, Ehrenburg’s hate propaganda was stopped by a strong attack on him in Pravda by G.F. Alexandrov, the principal ideologist of the Central Committee. According to Ehrenburg’s postwar Memoirs this attack was launched on direct instructions from Stalin. Alexandrov’s article, “Comrade Ehrenburg os Over-simplifying”, took him up on two points: first of all, it was both un-Marxist and inexpedient to treat all Germans as sub-human; “Hitlers come and go, but the German people go on forever”, Stalin himself had said in a recent speech; and Russia would have to live with the German people. To suggest that every German democrat or Communist was necessarily a Nazi in disguise was absolutely wrong. The article clearly suggested that there were now certain Germans with whom it would be necessary for the Russian authorities to co-operate. Secondly, Alexandrov objected to Ehrenburg’s Red Star article two days before, called “That’s Enough!” in which he had raged against the ease with which the Allies were advancing in the west and the desperate resistance the Germans were continuing to offer the Russians in the east. Ehrenburg had said that this was so because, having murdered millions of civilians, in the east, the Germans were therefore scared of the Russians, but not of the Western Allies, who were being deplorably “soft”. They had, he claimed, even ordered Russian and Ukrainian slaves to go on working on German estates during the spring sowing.
While agreeing with some of this, Alexandrov still said that Ehrenburg was “oversimplifying” the issue:
“At the present stage the Nazis are following their old mischievous policy of sowing distrust among the Allies...They are trying, by means of this political military trick, to achieve what they could not achieve by purely military means. If the Germans, as Ehrenburg says, were only scared of the Russians, they would not, to this day, go on sinking Allied ships, murdering British prisoners, or sending flying bombs over London. “We did not capture Königsberg by telephone,” Ehrenburg said. That is quite true; but the explanation he offers for the simple way in which the Allies occupy towns in Western Germany is not the correct one.”
This sop to the Allies was no doubt still intended to be in the good Yalta tradition, but it was perhaps not meant to be overwhelmingly convincing. For, although there was to be genuine rejoicing, especially among soldiers and officers on both sides, when, on April 27, the Russian and American forces met at Torgau on the Elbe, and cut the German forces in two, and although there were friendly demonstrations outside the American Embassy on VE-Day in Moscow on May 9, there continued to be considerable distrust of the Western Allies. True, the Allies did not fall for Himmler’s (or any other) “separate peace” offer, but no sooner had the Germans capitulated than the Russian press was already full of angry screams about “Churchill’s Flensburg Government” - a government which, they later asserted, was not liquidated until the Russians themselves had taken a very strong line about this “outrageous business.”
But that is a different story. The most significant part of Alexandrov’s attack on Ehrenburg concerned the new official line on “the German people”. Very suddenly the hate propaganda against “the Germans” was stopped. Ehrenburg was no longer allowed to write - at least not on Germany. His hate propaganda had served its purpose in the past, but now it had become inexpedient.[...]

Hoffmann's ensuing statements quoted by Mills are more or less in accordance with the assessments of Overy and Werth.

They are better, at any rate, than Hoffmann's unconvincing speculations presented by Mills on the thread

"Stalin's War of Extermination", by Joachim Hoffma
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/phpBB2/v ... c09be90038

The following assessment in an article I translated from a recent feature of the German newsmagazine "Der Spiegel" about the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans:



may also be of interest:

[…]Those who remained behind in the villages because they could not or did not want to flee were often treated no better by the conquerors than the victims of Nemmersdorf. When the Federal Archives in the mid-1970s evaluated the reports of witnesses, the scientists counted around 3,300 so called crime sites east of the Oder and Neiße where German civilians had been beaten to death or shot, raped to death or burned alive. The Federal Archives concluded that at least 120,000 Germans had died on the flight.
How many people in total fell victim to flight and expulsion has not been clarified. In the 1950s the Federal Statistics Bureau simply estimated the number of Germans who before 1945 had lived east of the Oder and Neiße and therefrom deducted the number of those who after the war were living in the German Federal Republic, Austria or the German Democratic Republic. The difference was more than two million.
That this order of magnitude must be too high became apparent at the time already from lists of missing civilians; only about one-tenth – ca. 200,000 people – were being searched by relatives and friends. So far however only the Danube Svabians [ethnic Germans of Yugoslavia, translators’ note] made the effort to individually document all victims – and halved the estimates of the Federal Statistics Bureau for their region.
Historians estimate at 1.4 million the number of women who were raped back then. Many of them thereafter took the lives out of revulsion or horror. Months later, witnesses reported, children who arrived safely in the West were still playing “Frau, komm!” in the refugee camps.
The Red Army had never been especially disciplined, and besides it had been savaged by the war. There was no home leave, young men had to enter enemy dugouts with flame throwers or watch the entrails coming out of the bellies of wounded comrades without ever being given a chance to process such experiences. “Right after an attack you better don’t look into their eyes”, wrote a Russian field medic, “there’s nothing human therein.”
The annihilation of millions of people, which Hitler had planned for the Russians, Stalin had not foreseen for the Germans. But when the Red Army had reached the western border of the Soviet Union, many were tired, and in order to lift up morale Stalin’s generals loosened the controls that even in war keep soldiers from becoming murderers.
More then a thousand army newspapers had sown the hatred that was now necessary to win. For example Ilya Ehrenburg’s proclamation: “If during the day you haven’t killed a German, your day is wasted. Don’t count the days, don’t count the versts, count only one thing: the Germans you have killed. Kill the Germans.”
The order of the day of the 1st Belorussian Front before the attack on the Reich read as follows: “The time has come to settle accounts with the German-Fascist hangmen. Great and burning is our hate. We will take revenge for those burned in the hell ovens, for those choked in the gas chambers, we will take cruel revenge for everything.”
It seems that Stalin’s generals underestimated the effects of their propaganda. A little plundering, a few excesses, was what they had in mind.
But the waves of murder and destruction in East Prussia and Silesia apparently also frightened the Russian leadership.
On the tenth day of the winter offensive in the Vistula bend the high command of the 2nd Belorussian Front ordered the suppression of “robbery, plunder, arson and mass drinking orgies.” The hate propaganda, however, Stalin had cancelled only when his troops had crossed the Oder and Neiße and reached the ground that the Kremlin leader intended to leave to the Germans in the future – the later GDR.[…]

The whole translation can be read on the thread

“Father, shoot me”
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/phpBB2/v ... c09be90038

As to the scale of Red Army atrocities against German civilians, I recently took a look at a book containing an assessment of these atrocities by German historian Manfed Zeidler, according to which the Federal Archives were able to establish at ca. 24,500 the number of people killed at 2,600 of the 3,300 atrocity sites mentioned in the previous quote, whereas the number of people murdered by the Red Army at the remaining 700 sites could not be established.

The book referred to is the following:



I have it on order for Christmas and will translate the whole of Zeidler’s article when I have received it.