Death was probably a better fate – if it were swift – than capture for Red Army troops. ‘Our treatment of prisoners of war,’ a German intelligence officer observed in February 1942, ‘cannot continue without consequences. It is no longer because of lectures from the politruks, but out of his own personal convictions that the Soviet soldier has come to expect an agonizing life or death if he falls captive.’67 The knowledge made Soviet troops fight bitterly and fuelled deeper hate. ‘If the Germans treated our prisoners well,’ a colonel told Werth in 1942, ‘it would soon be known. It’s a horrible thing to say, but by ill-treating and starving our prisoners to death, the Germans are helping us.’68
The tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers who surrendered in June and July 1941 never imagined the fate that awaited them at German hands. But by the late summer, terrible stories had begun to spread. In August, Moskvin met the first of the many escaped soldiers that he would harbour in the coming months. The man’s account would chill his blood. ‘They say there’s no shelter,’ Moskvin wrote, ‘no water, that people are dying from hunger and disease, that many are without proper clothes or shoes. They are treated like slaves, shot for the slightest misdemeanour, or just from mischief, for a kind of fun.’ Ukrainian captives, who already enjoyed, if they so chose, a kind of privilege within the camps, were encouraged to finger communists and Jews. The victims suffered beatings, dug their graves, and died with bullets in their backs.
Moskvin sustained one of his frequent stabs of spiritual pain. ‘I realize how naïve our army training was,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We excluded the idea of becoming prisoners entirely from our view of what was acceptable in war, but what we told the soldiers and ourselves was that the enemy would use prisoners to extract secrets, that he would torture people to persuade them to betray. All our examples were drawn from the last war, the imperialist war, and from notions of class war. But now we’re dealing with the Gestapo and the SS, and as far as they’re concerned we’re nothing more than reds.’69 It was a lesson others also slowly learned. This enemy was not fighting a cartoon battle with the Bolsheviks; its sole aim was to wipe them out.
‘In the town of Rzhev there is a concentration camp with fifteen thousand captured Red Army soldiers in it and five thousand civilians,’ ran a smuggled report of December 1941. ‘They are holding them in unheated huts, and they feed them one or two frozen potatoes each a day. The Germans threw rotten meat and some bones through the barbed wire at the prisoners. This has made them ill. Every day 20–30 people are dying. The ones who are too ill to work are shot.’70 It was a holocaust that devoured millions. Until the German rout at Stalingrad, most Soviet prisoners were held near the front line. ‘Many of them died on the bare ground,’ a German witness admitted at Nuremberg. ‘Epidemics broke out and cannibalism manifested itself.’ ‘It was not until well into 1942,’ Werth commented, ‘that the surviving Russian war prisoners began to be looked on as a source of slave labour.’71
Among the minority of captured soldiers who survived, a disproportionate number belonged to non-Slavic ethnic groups. They owed their lives to German racist fantasies and to the handful of quixotic nationalists, based in Berlin, who had escaped from their own countries during the troubled founding years of Soviet power. These men now toured the camps in search of fellow countrymen. The rescue that they offered was conditional. Those they selected were considered to have volunteered for the so-called legions – Georgian, Cossack, Turkestan – whose sacred duty was to free their homelands from Bolshevism. But the men’s choice could seldom be described as free; their decisions say more about the torment they endured than about their real loyalties.
Ibrai Tulebaev escaped in just this way. In 1942, he was recruited for the Turkestan legion, but he defected back to the Soviet side in 1943. The police who interrogated him filed every detail of his account of the camps that he survived between August 1941 and the spring of 1942. The first of these was on Polish soil. It consisted of twelve blocks, each housing between 1,500 and 2,000 inmates. The men were penned inside at dusk. Any who stepped outside were shot. Each night, ten or fifteen of them died in this way. By day, the German guards used prisoners for target practice and baited some of them with dogs. Sometimes they placed bets on the animals – not on the men – to see which could fight hardest. There was so little food that hungry prisoners ripped flesh from corpses. Disease killed those who survived German sport. But Tulebaev was moved on; the Germans had noted his ethnicity and had already begun to segregate potential nationalist freedom fighters. They had a cruel way of breaking the men’s hearts. In December 1941, Tulebaev calculated, there were about 80,000 prisoners in his new camp. Most were in the light uniforms they had been wearing back in June. By February, all but 3,000 or so had died of cold, malnutrition, typhus and dysentery. Twelve men were shot for cannibalism that December; too few survived for punishment to matter much when the snow melted in April.72
The same stories were repeated in camps across Poland, Belorussia and Ukraine. At Dubno, they beat men to death. In Minsk, they tortured naked victims with alternate jugs of icy and of boiling water. Wherever prisoners were held, the politruks and Jews were shot as soon as they were recognized, and then the Germans started sifting out the non-Russians. It would be months before the new legions were fit to bear arms on the German side. Many had first to spend weeks in special hospitals recovering from the purgatory of their imprisonment. They were not always fully conscious of the turn that events were about to take. ‘They did it for an extra crust of bread,’ the daughter of Georgia’s wartime nationalist leader, Shalva Maglakelidze, told me. ‘They knew my father had saved their lives.’ Maglakelidze, who had not set foot on Soviet soil since 1921, believed that he was raising an army to liberate his people. The Georgians he rescued, by contrast, were clutching at a slender chance of life.
The threat of death was sometimes just as real for the people who found themselves on the wrong side of German lines. This was a war, they soon learned, of annihilation; a war of scorched earth, mass deportation and easy, public slaughter. With little information and no faith in either the Soviet or the German state, each person had to weigh the options for his own survival. In July 1941, thousands of local people joined the German side as politzei, agents of Nazi power in the occupied zone. Some were willing enough; they were the ones who celebrated the coming defeat of every hated feature of the empire that they saw as a Soviet, Bolshevik or even Jewish monster. Others made their choice on impulse, to avoid imprisonment or a bullet. ‘During the retreat of the Red Army our agitation was very weak,’ a Soviet intelligence report conceded in September 1942. It insisted that many joined the politzei and the 1,000-strong paramilitary ‘Ukrainian legion’ that had terrorized the partisans of the Smolensk region that summer to escape death or torture in a German prison camp, but the implication was that, for others, the Soviet dream (if it had ever held appeal) had soured.
In Soviet eyes, the problem was that far too many people in the occupied regions, finding themselves leaderless and stateless, had ‘listened to the Hitlerites and followed them’. 73 Moscow’s answer was to reach these people through a new group of combatants: the partisans. Scant planning had been made for guerrilla war in the months leading up to Barbarossa, but the potential of partisan detachments was soon understood in Moscow. ‘There must be diversionist groups for fighting enemy units,’ Stalin had ordered in July 1941. ‘In the occupied areas intolerable conditions must be created for the enemy and his accomplices.’74 The wartime myth still celebrates these tough guerrilla fighters, the men and women who cut German supply lines by blowing up railways and bridges, the heroes who prepared the way for the Red Army’s troops. That was indeed part of their work – a costly part – but it is doubtful that their true value was sabotage. As a 1942 report put it, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’.75 The partisans’ main task was to maintain the grip of Soviet power.76