63 GARF 7523/16/79, 56.
64 For an example of such propaganda, see Pravda, 13 July 1944, p. 3 (account of Olga Ivanovna Kotova and her ten children).
65 Pushkarev, Po dorogam voiny, p. 154.
66 Belov, p. 469.
67 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1414, 57.
68 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 67.
69 Kopelev, p. 29.
70 GARF, 7523/16/79, 59, has another letter demanding that soldier fathers have control over their children.
71 Exotic German women’s clothes – ‘Gretchen knickers’ – would often scandalize the soldiers’ wives who received them as gifts from their husbands. See Beevor, Berlin, p. 407.
72 Cited in Naimark, p. 108.
73 RH2-2688, 51.
74 Ibid., 52.
75 On this aspect of rape, see Ruth Harris, ‘The “Child of the Barbarian”: Race, Rape and Nationalism during the First World War,’ Past and Present, 141 (November 1993), pp. 170–206.
76 A Woman in Berlin, p. 219.
77 The most comprehensive figure, from Barbara Johr, is a total of two million in the whole of Germany. See Naimark, p. 133. See also Helker Sander, ‘Remembering/Forgetting’, October, 72, spring 1995, p. 21.
78 Atina Grossman, ‘Silence’, p. 46.
79 Venereal disease statistics are available in NKVD files and also in the records of hospitals near the front throughout and just after the war. Although it generally maintained a cool attitude towards the epidemic, the NKVD did occasionally note the pace of infection, as in RGVA 32925/1/516, 178.
80 A Woman in Berlin, p. 17.
81 RGVA, 32925/1/526, 43. See also Naimark, p. 74.
82 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2(3), p. 304 (order of 11 July 1944).
83 For example, the three cases of gang rape dating from April 1945 are cited in RGVA, 32925/1/527, 132. The guilty men in each case were turned over to SMERSh.
84 Rabichev, p. 164.
85 Kopelev, p. 51; Temkin, p. 201.
86 GARF, 7523/16/424, 85 and 98, for example.
87 See Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich, pp. 23–4.
88 Naimark, p. 10.
89 Botting, p. 99.
90 Snetkova, p. 47.
91 GARF, R7317⁄6⁄16, 81.
92 This confirmed the GKO’s resolution of 23 December 1944. Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2(3), 344–5.
93 Temkin, p. 199.
94 Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 2(3), 344.
95 Kopelev, pp. 39–40.
96 Beevor, p. 35.
97 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 146.
98 Snetkova, p. 47.
99 See Beevor, Berlin, pp. 407–8.
100 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 157.
101 Ibid., 152.
102 Ibid., 158.
103 GAOPIKO, 1/1/3754, 5–9.
104 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 139.
105 TsAMO, 233/2354/1, 28.
106 A Woman in Berlin, p. 60.
107 See photo, p. 280.
108 For an account from Poland, see RGVA, 32925/1/527, 86–7.
109 Ibid., 108.
110 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 125.
111 Beevor, Berlin, pp. 177–8. For a different perspective, see Glantz and House, p. 255.
112 The numbers given are two and a half million Red Army and Polish troops and roughly a million German defenders. Glantz and House, p. 261; Overy, p. 266.
113 Glantz and House, p. 260.
114 Pis’ma s fronta i na front, p. 160.
115 Chuikov, Reich, p. 146.
116 Beevor, Berlin, p. 218.
117 Chuikov, Reich, p. 147.
118 Overy, p. 268.
119 Beevor, Berlin, p. 222.
120 Chuikov, Reich, p. 184.
121 A Woman in Berlin, pp. 13 and 17.
122 See Beevor, p. 412. As a military nurse who worked in Belorussia told me, ‘They were all infected with venereal diseases. All of them!’ This was an exaggeration, naturally, but she must have wondered when she would see a patient who was not.
123 A version appears in RGVA, 32925/1/527, 10–11.
124 A Woman in Berlin, p. 107.
125 Overy, p. 273; Beevor, Berlin, p. 372; Chuikov, Reich, pp. 242–9.
126 Glantz and House, p. 269.
127 Chuikov, Reich, p. 251.
128 Beevor, Berlin, p. 405.
129 Belov, p. 476.
130 Glantz and House, p. 269. The higher figure is based on Krivosheev’s global estimate for the campaign on three fronts (1st and 2nd Belorussian, 1st Ukrainian).
131 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 137.
132 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1454, 146.
133 Samoilov, ‘Lyudi’, part 2, p. 96.
134 RGVA, 32925/1/527, 50–3.
135 Other cases occur on almost every page of this same file. See, for example, RGVA, 32925/1/527, 48; 233.
136 Ermolenko, p. 126.
10 Sheathe the Old Sword
1 Werth, p. 969.
2 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1406, 70.
3 One reason for that was the annihilation of Polish Jews, which reduced the population by approximately 3 million. Poland’s total losses, approximately 6 million people, amounted to about 20 per cent of the pre-war total. See John Keegan, The Second World War (London, 1989), p. 493.
4 Figures vary, and to some extent, since all are estimates, it is impossible to compare the scale of losses. But a recent Russian account suggests that the ratio of Soviet to German military losses was 1.3:1 (even taking into account the losses of each adversary’s allies). In terms of battlefield deaths, the true figure may be higher than 1.6:1. See Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 4, p. 292; Glantz and House, pp. 292 and 307; Krivosheev, pp. 152–3 and 384–92.
5 Overy, pp. 287–8.
6 The official exchange rate in 1940 was 5.3 roubles to the dollar, but this has little real meaning in view of the currency controls in operation throughout the Soviet era. Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 4, p. 294; Overy, p. 291.
7 Vsevolod Vyshnevsky, cited in Werth, p. 942.
8 See Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), p. 11.
9 Cited in Drugaya voina, p. 298.
10 GARF, 7523/16/79, 173.
11 Ibid.
12 GARF, 7523/16/79 contains several others, including a demand for general amnesty and numerous requests to review the penal code.
13 Ibid., 17.
14 Overy, p. 292.
15 Dunham, p. 9; Merridale, Night of Stone, p. 323.
16 The rumour was repeated even in the soldiers’ letters home. See, for example, Snetkova, p. 48.
17 E. Yu. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945–1964 (Moscow, 1993), p. 43.
18 On adaptation, see Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (London, 2000), pp. 328–9.
19 Moskva voennaya, p. 708.
20 Ibid., p. 707.
21 Lists of the military participants occupy an entire number of Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv – 12 (3), 2000. The instructions for the day are printed in ibid., no. 8, 2000, pp. 259–77.
22 Werth, pp. 1002–3.
23 RGASPI-M, 33/1/1405, 157–8.
24 Ermolenko, p. 143.
25 For more detail of the campaign, see Glantz and House, pp. 278–82.