On the eve of military conflict with the Third Reich ‘romantic’ images of the future war as a ‘struggle against the property owners and capitalists’, in which the Soviet troops were received by ‘the working masses’ with enthusiasm, and hordes of proletarians in soldiers uniforms would rush to the side of the Red Army, was not only in the minds of the normal soldiers but also in the thoughts of the political leaders. Such dreams were fed by the experience of similar encounters in the Soviet-Polish War and on the annexation of the Baltic States and Bessarabia in 1939-40. Even the campaign against Finland, with its many losses and the clear refusal by Finnish civilians and those belonging to the military to support ‘the liberation from the yoke of imperialism’, changed little in this stance.5 The offensive Soviet military doctrine, according to which the enemy should be defeated on his territory, ‘with a destructive blow and few own (Soviet) losses’ (maloi krov’iu, moguchim udarom), stood in vivid contradiction to the harsh reality: in the process of the first two months of the War the Wehrmacht had stormed up to Kiev and Dnepr and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers had fallen. By the end of August 1941 1.5 million Red Army soldiers had been captured or had disserted to the Germans under the influence of Wehrmacht propaganda.6 Added to this, noticeable signs of local collaboration with the enemy were coming to light in the occupied areas.
The following events contributed significantly to a radicalization of war propaganda. During the retreat from the recently annexed areas, employees of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del - NKVD) executed thousands of prison inmates and several military personnel, who had been under arrest.7 Russian authors estimate the number of arbitrarily shot inmates of the prisons to be exactly 9,817 people, of whom 2,464 came from prisons in the region of Lvov (Lviv). There were cruel executions on the evacuation march, such as the head of the prison in the town Glubokoe ordering up to 600 prisoners be shot in a wood.8 The Nazis made propaganda gains after the discovery of this mass murder. In the first statement from the Moscow foreign affairs ministry on the subject, the allegation was labelled a ‘libellous accusation’, whose only purpose was to ‘distract’ the public from their ‘own sins’.9 The reports and portrayals of German atrocities in the Soviet media were aimed initially at the criminalization of Wehrmacht personnel. Whoever expressed the slightest doubt about the credibility of such reports was dealt with immediately by the secret police. This happened to the well-known anti-fascist director and theatre manager Bernhard Reich, who portrayed German soldiers in his plays as ‘thinking people’ and not solely as ‘idiots, robbers or animal-like beings’, and thus contradicted the official propaganda. Reich was sentenced to several years in a labour camp on a charge of anti-Soviet propaganda.10
The fate of Heinrich Hoffmann from the village of Rosental in the Volga German Republic serves as one of the countless examples of ‘German bestiality’ and was even temporarily taken into the martyrdom ideology of Soviet heroes. Initially the army newspaper, Boevoi natisk, reported his heroic death on 5 August 1941. On 24 August the central newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda published a photo of Hoffmann’s bloody Komsomol book with the description of a fearless fight and spine-chilling account of the cruelty of ‘Hitler’s soldiers’. As a Soviet German who had courageously fought against his fascist blood brothers and had given his life for the party and for Stalin, Hoffmann at first appeared to be a suitable symbol for the embodiment of Soviet patriotism. In his name soldiers began to swear revenge, but in the midst of the deportation of Germans from the USSR, which began shortly thereafter, he was forgotten.11 That is why this Volga German was not included in the canon of Soviet heroes together with such names as Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia, Aleksandr Matrosov or Musa Dzhalil’, although at first his case followed the normal pattern of Soviet hero-making. The appeal for greater Russian patriotism, together with a more or less discernible anti-German sentiment, now clearly promised a better chance of success in mobilizing the masses. A ‘German hero’, even with the prefix ‘Soviet’ or ‘Volga’, no longer suited the freshly indoctrinated ideological direction.
The agitation and propaganda organized by the Soviet leadership in the first few weeks of the War proved neither to be effective for the mobilization of the Soviet peoples, including the Russians, nor was it a good way to influence the enemy. During his meeting with William Averell Harriman, the representative of the US President, at the end of September 1941, Stalin is reported to have said, ‘We know that the people do not want to fight for a world revolution, they also won’t fight for the Soviet powers [. . .] Maybe they will fight for Russia.’12 After the failure of the first attempts to influence the advancing enemy with the sentiments of class struggle and international solidarity between workers and farmers, the official propaganda quickly became an uninhibited torrent of hate and cruelty. ‘German’ was increasingly used as a synonym for ‘fascist’, which was to have fatal consequences for the Russian Germans.13 The ASSRVG - with representatives in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and in the Russian Federation, and with workers in the state and party apparatus - protested against this U-turn, which went against their formal constitutional rights. The existence of a recognized ‘Soviet’ German minority with vested rights of autonomy certainly presented an obstacle for the war propaganda, with its characterization of the Germans as ‘two-legged animals’, ‘cannibals’ and ‘rabid dogs’.14
On the other hand, as in the First World War, the military leadership attempted to blame their failure on, among other things, the existence of ‘treasonous’ activities of the German population in regions near the front.15 On 3 August 1941 a battle update from the war council of the Southern Front arrived in the headquarters of the Supreme Command of the Soviet forces:
1. The acts of war on the Dnestr have proven that the German population shot on our retreating troops from windows and gardens. Furthermore it has become clear that the German troops invading a German village on 1 August were welcomed with salt and bread. In the immediate surroundings of the front there are many settlements with a German population.
2. We are asking the local authorities to give orders for the immediate removal of this unreliable element.16
Whether this message reflected the real situation or an invented story from the twilight world of spy hysteria, is in this case of secondary importance. This telegram carried Stalin’s note, ‘ Tov-arishchu Beriia. Nado vyselit’s treskom - Comrade Beriia. Out with them with a bang,’ and pointed to another entry: ‘The People’s Commissar [i. e. Beriia] has been informed of this, 25/08/1941.’ With that the fate of the Russian Germans was sealed and on the very same day Beriia presented a draft for the decision to resettle the Germans currently living in the Volga region.17 One result of this draft was the decision by the Council for Evacuation and the War Council of the Southern Front to deport 53,000 Crimean Germans on 15 August. This was thinly veiled by officially calling it an evacuation.18
World History
