Uprising

On this date in 1943, several hundred Jewish prisoners at Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in Poland, rose in revolt and attempted escape.  About three hundred avoided the gunfire from camp guards and made it to the surrounding woods.  Somewhere between 50 and 70 were still alive at the end of the war in May 1945.

Treblinka was one of three major death camps, the others being Sobibor and Belzec, along with some smaller sites, built by the Nazis for the extermination of Jews living in the Government General of Poland, the area of that former country not absorbed into the Reich.  

Unlike concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald, where prisoners were housed under horrible conditions, starved, used as forced labor, and subject to arbitrary violence, dying at terrible rates, the death camps were designed to receive and quickly kill as many people as possible, keeping alive only the bare minimum to help keep the camp running.  In most cases, those arriving by train transport were dead within one to two hours of arriving.  During just over a year in operation, approximately 800-850,000 were murdered at Treblinka, 450,000 at Belzec (with only two known survivors), and 170,000 at Sobibor (which had several dozen survivors after an uprising in September 1943).

Auschwitz was a mixed camp with an industrial side using forced labor, opened in 1940, as well as an area constructed in 1942 for the the murder of Jews. About 1.1 million Jews died at Auschwitz, along with more than 100,000 Poles, Gypsies, and Russian prisoners of war.

At Treblinka, in addition to Polish Jews, about 8,000 Jews from the former Czechoslovakia and 11,000 from Thrace and Macedonia, along with 2,000 Romani were also killed. 

In addition to the German commanders and German and East European guards, each death camp also had a contingent of Jewish prisoners who were spared immediate death in order to keep the camp running.  At Treblinka this amounted to between 600 and 1,000 men divided into three groups.  The first to manage the unloading of those arriving on the train transports, including the undressing process before they were herded into the "showers".  The second sorted through belongings left behind so they could be collected and sent to Germany for civilian use.  The final group removed the dead from the gas chambers, burying them, and later, in 1943, digging up the corpses so they could be incinerated.  Every few weeks those in the three groups, with a few exceptions needed for continuity, would be murdered and replaced by new prisoners.

In 1943 as the number of arrivals dwindled and the digging up and incineration of the dead accelerated the workers were aware that the day of their termination was approaching, leading to the planning for the breakout.  They were also inspired by the news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April.  Under very difficult circumstances planning proceeded and a key to the German arsenal was forged, allowing the group to access guns and grenades. 

During the August 2 breakout, several guards were killed and the main gate and fences destroyed allowing about 300 to cross the antitank obstacles and ditches to reach the forest.  Though many were hunted down by the Germans or died under other circumstances a few dozen were to survive and bear witness.

Fire set during the breakout. Photo by railway worker.

 

Treblinka was finally closed in September 1943.

Names of Some of the Survivors 

Samuel Rajzman

Yankiel Weirnik 

Abraham Kolski

Richard Glazar

Chaim Sztajer

Dov Freiburg

Kalman Teigman 

Samuel Willenberg (the last survivor, died in 2016)

 

Grants from the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute, the Capital City of Warsaw and Wolf & Dora Rajcher Memorial Found have enabled a Book of Names database to be assembled of those who perished at Treblinka, many of whom had no surviving family to remember them.  The database currently has 130,859 names. 

The Annotated Roads To Moscow

An edited and updated version of a post from the past about the finest pop song about an historical event, Al Stewart's Roads To Moscow.  It seems appropriate for today as not only is it the 85th anniversary of the state of Operation Barbarossa, the start of the titanic struggle between two evil regimes but because it appears the reputation of both the Communism and Nazism is seeing a revival, including in the United States - as seen with people like Tucker Carlson and the current mayor of New York City, Zorhan Mamdani (1).  This development is stunning to see and represents a failure of our political, cultural, and educational systems.

We are also seeing the fading of historical memory so that the full context of this song is lost on many who might hear it today.  An indicator of this loss of historical knowledge came when looking at YouTube videos of Roads to Moscow using war footage to illustrate its lyrics and watching recent videos of people reacting to the song.  All of them got the references to the horrors of war and how bad the Nazis were but none understood the significance of the final verses of Roads To Moscow nor the horrors of the Soviet  regime before the war.

For over a decade before Barbarossa, the Nazis and Communists alternately collaborated and competed, with Hitler and Stalin carefully watching and, by some accounts, taking tactical inspiration from each other.  The parallels between Hitler and Stalin are made explicit in Vasily Grossman's towering novel, Life and Fate, written in the 1950s and 60s, but suppressed in his Soviet homeland and not published until the manuscript was smuggled to the West in the 1980s.  

Although Nazis and Communists clashed at times in Germany during the years before Hitler came to power in January 1933, both made their priority the weakening of Weimar democracy, each believing they would be its successor.  Stalin specifically issued instructions making Weimar the communist target more so than the Nazis, even as that regime was in its death throes.  Stalin's directive was part of a more general Soviet doctrine, in place until the summer of 1934, that democratic socialists and fascists were "twins" and thus the common enemy of communists.

While Hitler only became Chancellor in 1933, Stalin had been the leading figure in the Soviet Union since Lenin's death in 1924, achieving complete control by 1929, cleverly outmaneuvering all of his opponents within the Communist Party.  Stalin then launched his agricultural collectivization program utilizing direct repression as well as starvation as tactics to break any opposition.  Though the Holodomor in Ukraine has attracted the most attention, a huge toll was also taken in other Soviet republics, resulting in five to ten million deaths. The grain taken from starving peasants was sold in other countries to generate the foreign exchange necessary for Stalin to finance his plans to build a massive heavy manufacturing industrial complex during his Five Year Plan.  Financed by peasants and Gulag slaves, Soviet industrialization in the 1930s was dependent on the expertise of American and British companies and engineers. Despite continued reliance on central planning, the Soviet economy was to fall further behind in the decades after the war as it was never able to innovate and update its civilian manufacturing infrastructure.  For more on this failure see Khrushchev Reflects.

Soon after coming to power, the Nazis opened the first concentration camps to house, and occasionally murder, political opponents.  In June 1934, Hitler purged his internal opposition, including within the Nazi Party and German Army, in the Night of the Long Knives, with perhaps a thousand being killed in that episode.

In the summer of 1934, Stalin's policy changed to that of urging a United Front alliance against fascism, both to defeat the fascist threat and to facilitate the subversion of anti-fascist groups by communists (as was to happen during the Spanish Civil War).  Stalin continued this policy until abruptly entering into his alliance with Hitler in 1939.  The original suggestion for the change in policy came from Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian and head of the international Comintern.  The Comintern, headquartered in Moscow and under Stalin's direction, was the tool for spreading communist revolution worldwide.  Dimitrov died in 1949, likely poisoned at Stalin's direction. 

On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, head of the Communist party in Leningrad, and the other Bolshevik leader approaching Stalin's popularity, was assassinated.  It is still a subject of debate whether Stalin arranged the murder or merely capitalized on the event to launch the Great Terror.  Starting in 1936, Stalin began a massive purge of the Communist Party, the military(2), and of foreign residents within the country.  Millions more were arrested and the final death toll remains unknown.

An example of the depths to which the Communists descended occurred in 1937-8 when provincial party officials were given numerical quotas by Moscow for Category One (to be shot) and Category Two (to be deported to Gulag camps) with the first round of quotas collectively amounting to precisely 386,798 in Category One and 767,397 in Category Two.  The quotas, if not fulfilled, subjected provincial officials to purging by the security apparatus.  To prove their efficiency and loyalty, the provinces exceeded their quotas and asked for more, even though that failed to save many of these same officials who were caught up in the subsequent waves of the purge. 

The foreign residents caught up in the Terror included thousands of Americans, some who came to the Soviet Union seeking work as the Depression in the U.S. reached its peak, some true believers in communism, some who came under contract to supervise construction of the USSR's industrial infrastructure.  All came under suspicion in the late 1930s, with many being shot and others sent to the Gulag where a few survived to tell their stories years later.  You can read more about their fate in The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis. 

During this phase Stalin took the opportunity to purge many of those with Jewish ancestry from the ranks of the party and security apparatus.  At the same time, the Nazis were promulgating the Nuremberg Laws, revoking citizenship of German Jews, and accelerating the expulsion of Jews from society and commerce.

In March 1938, Hitler seized Austria and in the fall took possession of the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia, with the acquiescence of Britain and France.  

Then, in November 1938, following Stalin's purge of the military the previous year, Hitler removed, using a trumped up sex scandal as pretext, the top leaders of the German Army who had opposed his Czechoslovakia strategy, allowing the Fuhrer to take direct control of the Wehrmacht and have its soldiers swear a direct oath of allegiance to him.  While Stalin executed most of those purged, Hitler let the purged officers of 1938 live, though some were ultimately executed after the failed assassination plot of July 1944.

In March 1939, Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia and then launched preparations for an attack on Poland, setting a date of September 1 for the beginning of the war.

The world was shocked when, on August 24, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Treaty occurred (the treaty was backdated to August 23). While the public parts of the treaty set forth a ten year non-aggression pact, it was the secret provisions, only revealed years later, that were the significant aspects of the agreement.  The Nazis and Communists agreed on how to divide up Poland between them.  They also further defined spheres of influence with the three Baltic states falling to the communists, who occupied them in June 1940 and proceeded to execute or deport anyone who might object to their rule. For more on the treaty, read The Pact.

At the time of the signing of the Nonaggression agreement, the USSR was in the midst of a large battle with Japan in Manchuria.  Japan's defeat in that undeclared war, led to that country's decision to expand south into the Pacific and Southeast Asia, rather than north into Siberia as Japan's military leaders had been advocating.  For more on those events read The Secret of Khalkin Gol. 

Finland and the Bessarabia region of Romania also fell within the Soviet orbit.  The latter was occupied the Soviets in 1940, while in late 1939, the Red Army initiated a surprise attack on Finland.  While the early part of the war was an embarrassing disaster for the Soviets, the greatly outnumbered Finns were finally worn down and agreed to cede some of their territory. 

The occupation of Bessarabia (along with the smaller province of Bukovina) posed a threat to Germany as it brought the Soviets close (within 150 miles) to the Romanian oilfields at Ploesti, the major fuel source for Germany's army.  In addition, the main rail route used for conveying fuel from Ploesti to Germany ran through Bessarabia, placing German access at the discretion of the Soviets. 

Poland was dismembered.  Along with placing the Jewish population in ghettos (the extermination camps were to begin operation in 1942), the Germans executed about 60,000 Polish bureaucrats, intellectuals, and priests in a program to eliminate what they deemed the most capable elements within Poland.  Meanwhile, the Soviets were conducting a similar program of executions and deportations in their portion of that country.

From the signing of the Pact until Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union was Germany's primary external supplier of war materials, supplies that enabled the Nazi assaults on Norway, the Netherland, Belgium, France, and Britain in 1940 and on Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941.  Stalin also ordered Communist Parties in Western Europe to undermine their governments attempts to prosecute the war against Germany, while directing communists in the United States to campaign against any American assistance to, or involvement with, Britain and France, an effort that party members like Pete Seeger and Dalton Trumbo wholeheartedly supported. 

Stalin anticipated the Germans would become bogged down in a prolonged campaign in the West and was startled by the quick defeat of France in 1940, prompting him to accelerate the already frantic campaign to rebuild the Red Army, quadrupling its size, and building a network of air bases near the new Soviet-German border.  The Soviet economy was already on a war footing, aided by the construction of factories using the assembly line techniques pioneered by Americans (and with American engineers overseeing the construction) while German manufacturing remained customized, though of excellent quality.  The Red Army was also developing offensive doctrines consistent with Stalin's belief that war with Germany was inevitable.  While the Soviet Union was still under prepared in 1941 it actually had six times the number of operational tanks available to the Germans.  There is a very controversial theory that Stalin actually planned to attack the Germans later in the summer of 1941.  Having not examined the underlying evidence I can't make my own assessment as to that theory's validity.

The original start date for Barbarossa was May 15, 1941 but it was delayed for five weeks due to the final escalation in tensions.  In preparation for the invasion, the Germans had protected their flank and ensured support by all of the Balkan states (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia).  However, in early April a coup, supported by the Soviets, occurred in Yugoslavia overthrowing the pro-German government and installing a regime opposing the alliance with the Nazis.  Hitler ordered prompt retaliation and the resulting invasion of Yugoslavia, and subsequently Greece, led to a quick German victory but also the resulting delay in launching Barbarossa.

War was coming between Germany and the Soviet Union, the only questions being of timing and who would initiate. 

 And now we come to Roads to Moscow . . .  

 

I saw Roads to Moscow performed in the fall of 1974 at the Orpheum Theater in Boston when Stewart toured in support of his new album Past, Present, and Future.  The performance was both musically and visually striking, as Stewart and his band played backed by three enormous video screens stretching across the entire stage showing war footage and ending with a picture of Alexander Solzhenitsyn on all the screens; The Gulag Archipelago had been published in December 1973 and Solzhenitsyn expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1974. 

The events described in the song began on June 22, 1941 as Operation Barbarossa, the German surprise attack on the Soviet Union, triggering the worst of the many conflicts that made up World War Two.  By its end in May 1945, 4.3 million Germans were dead, mostly military personnel (along with three quarters of a million of its Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Finnish allies), and perhaps up to 27 million Russians, two thirds of them civilians (German pre-war plans called for the starvation of 30 million Russian civilians in order to free up food supplies for civilians and military and to allow for German immigration to the occupied territories).  Horror upon horror piled up.  Soviet secret police routinely executed all imprisoned political prisoners in cities from which the Red Army was retreating in 1941 and upon the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe in 1944-45 more imprisonments and executions followed - the Soviets had already executed 15-20,000 captured Polish officers in the spring of 1940 (which they tried to blame on the Germans).  When they reached Germany, Soviet forces were unleashed and encouraged by commanders to engage in an orgy of murder and rape in revenge for the monstrous atrocities committed by the Nazis against Soviet civilians.  It was in the wake of the German attack in 1941 that the first Nazi organized and systematic killing of Jews took place with roaming units, often assisted by local collaborators executing an estimated 1.5 to 2 million in mass shootings (many of them in the region from which my ancestors fortunately emigrated decades earlier). The beginning of Barbarossa also saw the start of planning for the Final Solution, culminating in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 which set as its goal the extermination of the eleven million Jews in Europe.

Stewart's song balances a vivid, poignant, brilliantly constructed, and historically accurate lyric with a striking melody, a Russian influenced chorus, and an evocative and emotional arrangement.  He tells the story of a Soviet soldier, one of tens of millions of people caught in the horrific tragedy caused by two of the most brutal regimes to ever be inflicted upon the human race - Nazi Germany, led by Adolph Hitler, and the Communist Soviet Union of Josef Stalin.  It's a world of spiritual darkness and limited and terrible choices for the people trapped by those events, a dilemma also brought to life by Alan Furst in his splendid series of novels set in the same time period - particularly Night Soldier and Dark Star.  Most of those in Eastern Europe who opposed both Nazis and Communists ultimately suffered a tragic fate (see, for instance, the astonishing and inspiring story of Witold Pilecki, the man who volunteered for Auschwitz).

Let's look at the lyrics and explore the song in more detail.

They cross over the border the hour before dawn

At about 315am on the morning of June 22, 1941, the German army launched Operation Barbarossa.  The attack, including 14 Finnish and 13 Romanian divisions (the Italians and Hungarians joined later), involved 3.8 million soldiers, 3,400 tanks, 3,500 aircraft and 700,000 horses.  Facing the onslaught were about 2.5 million front line Soviet troops (the Red Army had about 4 million men under arms in total in the European part of the country).

Though Hitler and Stalin had been allies since the August 1939 signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Treaty, which divided Poland and the Baltic States between them, they were long-term ideological enemies and a conflict was inevitable at some point.  However, the specific timing of the German attack was dictated by Hitler's desire to remove what he viewed as Britain's last hope for support in the war, the same motive that drove Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 (for more on this read Bonapartaroo Barbarossa).  

While Hitler and Napoleon had similar motives for unleashing their wars, there was a significant difference in how each waged the campaign.  While some advised Napoleon to mobilize Russian peasants against the Czar by promising to abolish serfdom, Napoleon was not interested in occupying Russia or unseating the Czar, his goal being to force Russia back into the Continental System designed to ruin Britain, so he declined to incite a peasant uprising.

In contrast, once Hitler decided upon war, ideological considerations drove Nazi decisions as to how the war would be conducted.  The Soviet regime was to be unseated, or at least driven behind the Urals, and the European portion of the country permanently occupied. The inhabitants of the occupied portions were to be starved, driven out, or left as slave labor for German settlers, captured Red Army communist commissars executed, roving extermination squads (Einsatzgruppen) would murder Jews who came under German occupation, and captured Red Army personnel corralled and left to die of disease and starvation. Many of the nationalities repressed by the Communists, like the Ukrainians were initially receptive to the German invasion but the brutalities visited upon them led many to eventually join the partisans fighting the Germans.

In the months leading to the attacks, Stalin dismissed multiple warnings from his own intelligence services as well as from Churchill and Roosevelt, claiming they were provocations designed to entice him into a war with Germany that would only benefit the Western capitalist powers.  As late as the night of June 21-22 he ordered the execution of German defectors who entered Soviet lines to warn of the imminent attack.  The result was that Red Army troops were left deployed in forward positions near the border, in vulnerable formations ill-suited to defense.

The Soviet Army was still recovering from Stalin's 1937-38 purge of senior military leadership in which at least 75% were killed, and its poor performance in the 1939-40 Winter War with Finland gave the German military what proved to be unwarranted confidence that the Russians would be quickly defeated. This was on top of the events of the prior year when Germany defeated the French army, considered the best in Europe, in six weeks. This overconfidence also contributed to the inexplicable lack of attention by the Germans to the logistical challenges of a massive campaign designed to penetrate deeply into the Soviet Union, challenges that were ultimately to doom Barbarossa.

The border referred to in the lyric was different from the 1939 Soviet border.  With the 1939 pact, Stalin was able to occupy half of Poland, all of the Baltic States and the Romanian province of Bessarabia.  By advancing the border, he gained strategic depth against attack, while also arresting, murdering, and deporting hundreds of thousands of citizens of those countries who he believed might oppose his plans (a sordid tale told in disturbing detail in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands; I had a friend whose parents, Polish Jews, met after being deported to Central Asia).  In addition, with his surprise attack on Finland in October 1939 he gained buffer room for Leningrad and for the crucial northern port of Murmansk, through which much American and British military aid was later to flow.

Moving in lines through the day
Most of our planes were destroyed on the ground where they lay

The Luftwaffe destroyed over 2,000 Soviet aircraft on the ground that first day, losing only 35 planes in its attacks.  More than 3,900 Soviet planes were destroyed in the first three days, giving the Germans overwhelming air superiority.

Waiting for orders we held in the wood
Word from the Front never came
By evening the sound of the gunfire was miles away

Ah, softly we move through the shadows, slip away through the trees
Crossing their lines in the mists in the fields on our hands and our knees
And all that I ever, was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red, silhouetting the smoke on the breeze

In those first days and weeks many Soviet troops found themselves isolated behind the rapidly advancing Germans, often left without orders amidst the command chaos.  "The Front" refers not to the front lines where the soldiers were, but to the organization of Russian armies into "Fronts", equivalent to American Army Groups on the Western Front.  In other words, they heard nothing from the High Command. Until the German invasion the Soviet equivalent of western ally Army Groups were called Military Districts. Between June 22 and June 25 all of the Military Districts were redesignated as Fronts.

While many isolated or surrounded soldiers surrendered (3 million by the end of 1941, 75% of whom would die in German captivity) many thousands were eventually able to find their way back through gaps between the rapidly advancing German Panzer units and the slower infantry following behind, to rejoin their comrades, our narrator being one of those.  Others remained free but behind enemy lines, becoming the core of partisan units that would harass the Germans for years (and which make an appearance later in the lyrics).

All summer they drove us back through the Ukraine
Smolensk and Vyazma soon fell
By autumn we stood with our backs to the town of Orel

In this passage, the narrator uses the terms "us" and "we" in reference not to his personal location but rather to the overall plight of the Red Army.

The German attack was divided into three army groups.  Army Group North advanced through the Baltic States towards Leningrad, while Army Group South drove the Soviets, "back through the Ukraine", culminating in September with a great encirclement near Kiev in which more than 700,000 Soviets were killed or captured.

The third, and initially most powerful, group was Army Group Center, taking the road to Moscow along which Smolensk, Vyazma, and Orel were located.  The Battle of Smolensk lasted from July 10 to September 10, with the Red Army losing nearly a half million soldiers dead, wounded, or captured.  The battle was prolonged because in its early stages Hitler diverted panzer units to the south for the Kiev encirclement.  The delay in capturing Smolensk may have fatally delayed the German drive on Moscow.

The above map, particularly of the first three phases of Barbarossa through September 9, is deceptive and illustrative of the problems encountered by the Germans.  The phases portray neat solid front lines achieved by Germans as of those dates with the lands behind them conquered and occupied but that impression is misleading.  The front was not solidly held from the Black Sea to the Baltic with gaps between the panzer groups leading the German advance.  And behind those lines there were often fifty to one hundred mile gaps between the panzers and the infantry units following on foot with supplies pulled by horses.  Furthermore, the German advances were confined to main roads with large areas between untouched, leaving time and space for bypassed Soviet personnel to regroup.  The Germans simply did not have enough troops to occupy all of the lands they passed through.

Moreover, the condition of the roads and the wear and tear on troops and equipment meant that by a month into the operation, the German army was running short of supplies and soldiers becoming exhausted.  The model the German military had in mind was that of May 1940, when its armored forces, moving on France's paved roads, advanced the 175 miles from Sedan to the English Channel in a week.  In 1941 it was 425 miles from the German-Soviet border to Smolensk and another 240 miles from Smolensk to Moscow, almost all of it on unpaved roads that were by turns dry and dusty or wet and muddy.

With the panzers returning to Army Group Center, the advance on Moscow resumed in late September, racing against the onset of winter.  During October, the Germans pulled off two more giant encirclements at Vyazma and Bryansk, in which another million Soviet soldiers were killed or captured.  Orel fell on October 3 to General Guderian's tanks.

Closer and closer to Moscow they come
Riding the wind like a bell
General Guderian stands at the crest of a hill

On November 15, the Germans began their final push on Moscow.  General Heinz Guderian (1888-1954), commander of the Second Panzer Army, is considered one of the finest tank generals of the war, performing brilliantly during the Poland invasion and then leading the armored spearheads in the 1940 French campaign.  Guderian's task was to approach the Soviet capital from the southwest and encircle it.  Though he made some advances, his overextended forces were halted short of the capital and left in vulnerable defensive positions.  On December 26, 1941 he would be dismissed from command because of a dispute with his superiors (including Hitler) over how to respond tactically to the recently launched Soviet counter-offensive.  Recalled to duty by Hitler in 1943 after the disaster at Stalingrad, he was charged with rebuilding the army's panzer capabilities.  On July 21, 1944, the day after the failed assassination attempt against Hitler, Guderian was appointed Army Chief of Staff.  Though often arguing with Hitler about tactical decisions, he remained a faithful supporter of the Fuehrer until the end of the war.

(Guderian)

Winter brought with her the rains
Oceans of mud filled the roads
Gluing the tracks of their tanks to the ground
While the sky filled with snow

In this section, two weather periods are mixed together.  From late October until mid-November came a period of cold rain, turning the primitive Soviet road network into a sea of mud.  Then came freezing temperatures, making the roads stable and more passable.  The final German push was launched in this window before the onset of brutal cold and snow made offensive operations much more difficult.

(Mud season, November 1941)

And all that I ever was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red silhouetting the snow on the breeze

Now the red is silhouetting "the snow on the breeze" rather than "the smoke on the breeze" of the first verse, signaling the passage of time from the warmth, sun, and disaster of June to the bitter cold, snow, and hope of December.

In the footsteps of Napoleon the shadow figures stagger through the winter

The German offensive continued until December 5 under increasingly taxing conditions with heavy snow and temperatures plunging to well below zero.  Counting on achieving complete victory by the end of fall, German soldiers had not been issued winter clothing, nor were tanks, assault guns, and motor vehicles designed and equipped to operate in these conditions.  At these temperatures the recoil fluid, lubricating oil, and firing pins on German artillery, anti-tank, and machine guns failed, tank turrets would not turn, and trucks had to be kept constantly running, using precious fuel.  And all these troubles were amplified by the already overstressed German supply system collapsing in the winter conditions.

Yet despite these difficulties, isolated German units got within 15 miles of the Kremlin, while to the northwest the main German forces were within 25 miles of the city.  

 

A German officer wrote of conditions during the advance:

It is icy cold . . . To start the engines, they must be warmed by lighting fires under the oil pan.  The fuel is partially frozen, the motor oil is thick, and we lack antifreeze to prevent the cold water from freezing.

The remaining limited combat strength of the troops diminish further due to the continuous exposure to the cold.  It is much too inconvenient to shelter the troops from the weather . . . In addition, the automatic weapons of the groups and platoons often fail to operate, because the breeches can no longer move.

On December 3, the commander of Fourth Panzer Group reported its offensive combat power "has run out" because of "physical and moral over-exertion, loss of a large number of commanders, inadequate winter equipment".

Finally recognizing the reality of the brutal conditions and the disintegration of offensive capabilities Hitler and the High Command issued a halt order on December 5.

References to Napoleon were also a constant theme of Soviet propaganda which constantly reminded German troops of the fate of the last western invader, whose myth of invincibility, along with his army, disappeared in the Russian winter.

Falling back before the gates of Moscow
Standing in the wings like an avenger

What kept the German high command pressing ahead for so long despite the casualties and exhaustion of men and equipment was the persistent belief the Russians had exhausted their reserves and were on the verge of collapse.  It was a massive miscalculation, demonstrating the complete failure of German intelligence assessments.  They underestimated the willingness of Stalin to move troops from the Soviet Far East as well as the capability of the brutal and ruthless Soviet system to mobilize an almost endless number of reserves (unlike Hitler, who resisted fully mobilizing the German economy and populace until 1944, Stalin immediately took such measures).  Between June 22 and December 31, the Soviets lost 4 million men, the equivalent of its entire army on June 22, yet still had 4 million under arms at the end of the year.  It is hard to believe any other society surviving with that scale of human loss in such a short time.

Less than 24 hours after the German offensive halted, the Soviets began launching their own attacks, designed to push back and isolate the German forces near Moscow.  In a series of actions lasting until the beginning of March 1942, the exhausted Germans were forced back more than 100 miles, permanently eliminating the threat to Moscow.

With the exception of the British medium and heavy tanks which reached the Soviet Union before the Moscow offensive, Western ally aid played a small part in stopping the German advance.  However, the scale of British, and particularly American, aid became enormous as the war progressed and without it the speed and scale of the Soviet advances in 1943-44 would not have been possible (3).

While Soviet soldiers were somewhat better equipped for the weather, the winter conditions still took a toll, enhanced by Soviet commanders still favoring frontal assaults.  Thus, despite its success, the tactical shortcomings of the Red Army can be seen in the disparity in casualties during its three month offensive - 1.6 million for the Soviets versus 262,000 for the Germans.

And far away behind their lines the partisans are stirring in the forest
Coming unexpectedly upon their outposts, growing like a promise

You'll never know, you'll never know
Which way to turn, which way to look, you'll never see us
As we're stealing through the blackness of the night
You'll never know, you'll never hear us

Though not a major factor in 1941, by the following year the partisan threat became a major problem for the extended supply lines of the German army.  Partisan warfare in Russia was on a completely different, and larger, scale than in most of the rest of Europe, involving huge numbers, with organized large scale assaults on German rear lines.  Big chunks of the Soviet countryside behind enemy lines remained out of German control throughout the war, forcing many troops to be diverted to fighting partisans.

And the evening sings in a voice of amber, the dawn is surely coming

Using "amber" in this context is very interesting.  Amber is a fossilized tree resin, valued as a gemstone.  From 1500 BC there was an Amber Road by which this material was moved in trade from the shores of the Baltic to the Mediterranean.  The leading source of amber was near what used to be the city of Konigsberg in Prussia, now known as Kaliningrad and part of Russia since 1945.

The famous Amber Room was initially constructed in Konigsberg and gifted in 1716 by the Prussian King to Peter the Great of Russia.  Installed in a palace outside of Petersburg (later Leningrad), the room was expanded, eventually covering 590 square feet and containing over 6,000 pounds of amber on panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors.

(The Amber Room)

 

During the war the German Army dismantled the Amber Room and transported it back to Konigsberg.  Disappearing at the end of the war, its location, or whether it was destroyed, remains unknown, one of the last mysteries of the conflict.

The voice of amber is soothing - its message that things will get better.  The next lines tell us how:

The morning road leads to Stalingrad
And the sky is softly humming

We've moved ahead several months to the late summer of 1942.  Unlike 1941, when the German Army was powerful enough to attack the Soviets from across its entire front, the Nazis summer offensive would be more limited in scope.  On June 28, the Germans attacked in the south, aiming for the oil fields of the Caucasus region and the heavy industrial town of Stalingrad.  The Germans advanced quickly, nearly reaching the Caspian Sea, but became bogged down in Stalingrad, with an increasingly obsessed Hitler insistent upon its capture.  The fighting lasted for almost six months ending in catastrophe for the Nazi regime with the destruction of the Sixth Army and the allied Hungarian and Romanian armies, along with heavy losses in other German units. 

(Russian soldiers, Stalingrad)


On February 2, 1943 the last frozen and exhausted remnants of the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Red Army amid the ruins of Stalingrad, ending a battle that started in the last week of August 1942.  Of  320,000 soldiers in the Sixth Army, 91,000 were still alive to surrender, of whom only 5,000 ultimately survived to return to Germany, most released after Stalin's death in 1953, eight years after the war ended.  Germany's Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian allies lost another 300-400,000 dead, wounded and captured.  As many as a half million Soviet soldiers may have died in the battle; including wounded and missing, Red Army casualties exceeded one million. 

In a military sense the failure to knock the Soviets out by the fall of 1941 was the turning point in the war, the point where unconditional victory by Germany became impossible, but Stalingrad was the symbolic turning point of the war and both Stalin and Hitler were aware of its symbolism at the time.  The horror of the battle from the Russian perspective is captured best in Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, one of the greatest works of 20th century literature, in a section recounting the struggle of an isolated Red Army squad to hold a ruined building amidst the rubble of the city.  Of course, being a Russian novel, everyone dies.  Grossman, a Red Army newspaper correspondent during the war, had been present for months at Stalingrad, spending time in a building on the front lines like that described in the novel, and later accompanied the troops who discovered the Nazi extermination camps in Poland (of which he wrote the first accounts).  The wartime and immediate post-war experience transformed him, and for years he secretly worked on Life and Fate, a novel portraying Nazism and Communism as equivalent.  When he attempted to publish the book during the years of the Khrushchev "thaw" in the early 1960s, the party reacted by sending the KGB to seize the manuscript as well as the typewriter and ribbon on which it had been written.  Fortunately, one copy survived and in the early 1980s, years after Grossman's death, it was smuggled to the West and finally published.

After Stalingrad, German military leaders no longer believed the war could be won, the question being whether it would be lost.

Two broken Tigers on fire in the night
Flicker their souls to the wind
We wait in the lines, for the final approach to begin
It's been almost four years, that I've carried a gun
At home it'll almost be spring
The flames of the Tigers are lighting the road to Berlin

The lyrics here are very cleverly structured.  The first line tells us of "two broken Tigers" followed by a reference to "the final approach" but we don't know where or when it is.  The next line tells us it's been "almost four years that I've carried a gun", placing us in 1945, but still not giving us a location as Soviet armies are fighting from the Baltic to Hungary.  Then it's revealed that the flaming Tigers are also "lighting the road to Berlin", creating a vivid and precise word picture.

The Tiger was the heaviest and most powerful tank produced by Germany during the war.  Like much German equipment it was over engineered, overly complex to manufacture, requiring high level maintenance to keep it in the field, and well-maintained roads and bridges to support its weight. The Tiger I was produced from 1942 to 1944 and the Tiger II from 1944 on, but fewer than 2,000 made it to the army.  When it was available and running the Tiger proved devastatingly effective.

(Tiger II)

 

It's now April 16, 1945.  The Red Army is less than 50 miles from Berlin.  Much has transpired since the German surrender at Stalingrad in February 1943.  In July 1943 Hitler attempted his last major attack on the Eastern Front near the city of Kursk.  It quickly proved unsuccessful, the Soviets counterattacked, and from then until the end of the war the Red Army was on the offensive. The siege of Leningrad ended and most of the Ukraine was reconquered by the end of 1943.  In June 1944, the Soviets crushed Army Group Center and drove the Germans out of Russia, advancing into Poland where by late July they were on the outskirts of Warsaw.  Then followed another of the countless tragedies of the war when the Polish Home Army rose up to evict the Germans.  Stalin, who opposed the anti-communist Poles, ordered the Red Army to stand by while the Nazis crushed the uprising, killing 200,000 Poles and razing the city (for more on the uprising read Warsaw Does Not Cry).

In late 1944, the Soviets advanced into the Balkans, causing Romania and Bulgaria to switch sides and reaching the borders of Hungary.

On January 12, 1945 the Russians renewed their attack on the Polish front, sweeping away the Germans quickly advancing to the Oder River near Berlin, where they paused to regroup for the final assault.

Ah, quickly we move through the ruins that bow to the ground
The old men and children they send out to face us, they can't slow us down
All all that I ever, was able to see
The eyes of the city are opening now, it's the end of a dream  

The Berlin campaign lasted from April 16 through May 2.   Though the assault contributed to the "ruins that bow to the ground" much of the city was already ruined by American and British air raids, some consisting of more than 1,000 bombers striking the city.

The reference to "old men and children" refers to the Volksstrum ("People's Storm"), a national militia consisting of all men between 16 and 60 capable of bearing arms, formed in October 1944, as the manpower needs of the crumbling Third Reich became ever more desperate (even boys of 14 and 15 would see service by the end).  Poorly armed and trained, the Volkssturm units were of varying effectiveness and took heavy casualties.

Notice the contrast with the opening verse of the song.  In 1941, the narrator speaks of defeat, confusion, and retreat; four years later he is moving triumphantly forwards to victory.

(Berlin 1945) 

Despite the claim that "old men and children . . . they can't slow us down", the Volkssturm and remaining regular Wehrmacht units imposed heavy losses on the Red Army - 79,000 dead and 270,000 wounded in less than three weeks, a per day toll higher than any the Soviets had suffered since the dark days of 1941.  The human cost was made higher by Stalin's cynical move to place Marshals Zhukov and Koniev in competition to be first to Berlin, relentlessly mocking and scolding them, leading to reckless frontal assaults, particularly by Zhukov, the victor at Khalkin Gol in 1939.  And, with the encouragement of Stalin and the Red Army command, the victorious soldiers took a terrible vengeance on German civilians, with uncounted murders and an estimated two million rapes. 

I'm coming home, I'm coming home
Now you can taste in the wind, the war is over 
And I listen to the clicking of the train wheels as we roll across the border

The lyric brims with optimism.  Against all odds, our narrator has survived and looks forward to being reunited with his family.  In reality the odds were low that any soldier on the front line on June 22, 1941 would be alive and healthy enough to be fighting in Berlin nearly four years later.

8.6 million Red Army personnel died in the war; effectively the original 1941 army was killed twice over.  In comparison, the United States suffered 296,000 battlefield deaths with another 100,000 dead due to accidents and illnesses.

Nor were all the Russian dead solely the responsibility of the German army.  Life for the Red Army soldier during the war was brutal.  Commanders employed tactics that wasted countless lives.  If you died, particularly early in the war, it was unlikely your family would be notified.  Any infraction, real or imagined, was subject to harsh discipline and extreme punishment.  During the first 18 months of the war (the only period for which we have figures), 160,000 Soviet soldiers were executed for cowardice or desertion.  By comparison, only one American was executed for these offenses during the entire war.  For those not summarily executed there were the Punishment Battalions and Companies to which officers and soldiers were sentenced to be used, in Stalin's words, at "the most difficult parts of the front, to give them the possibility to redeem their crimes against their country with blood".  The Punishment units were deployed for tasks such as suicidal frontal assaults and the clearing of minefields by marching through them, making it no surprise that an estimated 400,000 died in the process. Their existence was such an embarrassment to the Soviets after the war that the existence of the units was officially denied.

In Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, Antony Beevor tells the tale of a Soviet lieutenant caught in this madness.  Captured by the Germans in August 1942, he manages to escape and rejoin the Red Army, where he is promptly arrested, charged as a deserter, and sentenced to a Punishment Company.  Realizing his sentence is an effective death penalty, he deserts to the Germans!  We don't know his fate but it is unlikely he had a happy ending.

And then there were the Red Army's blocking detachments formed to shoot down retreating soldiers - retreating Red Army soldiers. 

The optimism of those that survived extended beyond the relief of being alive and reuniting with family.  The memoirs and recollections of returning soldiers and officers are filled with belief and hope that conditions in the Soviet Union would be improved.  There was a feeling that the common Soviet citizen had proven to Stalin they could be trusted, that the regime need not fear them, that the fear of being subject to arbitrary justice would end, it would be a new start for the Soviet people and a new and more cordial relationship with their government. It was not to be.

And now they ask me of the time
That I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner
"They only held me for a day, a lucky break", I say
They turn and listen closer

I'll never know, I'll never know
Why I was taken from the line and all the others
To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of Holy Russia
And it's cold and damp in this transit camp
And the air is still and sullen
And the pale sun of October whispers
The snow will soon be coming

In his account of the German-Soviet struggle, Absolute War, author Chris Bellamy writes, "the Red Army was the only one in the world where being taken prisoner counted as desertion and treason".  Stalin believed any soldier who allowed himself to be captured was a traitor and potential counter-revolutionary, and Russians exposed to Westerners for any length of time, a danger to the Soviet state.  Bellamy adds:

The Soviet government and military command had absolutely no interest in what happened to Soviet people in German captivity.  When prisoners of war who survived were released at the end of the war [3 of the 4 million POWs died due to the German policy of exposing them to the elements and leaving them to starve, though a small number survived long enough to serve as guinea pigs for the initial testing of the newly constructed gas chambers at Auschwitz], they were usually sent to the Gulag or shot, and the same fate even befell many who had fought and crawled their way out of German encirclements during the war.

Our narrator falls into this last group.  His years of valiant service and suffering are to no avail because of the one day he spent within an enemy encirclement.

Also subject to this treatment were civilians who either volunteered or been seized and taken to Germany as slave laborers.  Bellamy estimates that up to 1.8 million returning Soviet citizens were sent to Gulag camps or shot.

To their disgrace, both Britain and America contributed to this horror.  In 1945 and 1946, the two countries forcibly repatriated over a million Russians who did not want to return to the Soviet Union.  While it was the British who insisted on honoring agreements made with Stalin during the course of the war, the United States eventually went along.  The returnees were sent to the Gulag or shot.

For those escaping the Gulag or execution, optimism proved misplaced.  Stalin believed that after the "laxity" of the war years, Soviet discipline needed to be reimposed to prevent any sliding back from the pre-war accomplishments of the state.  The post-war years proved grimly repressive with further waves of purges and the elimination of those tiny, fragile zones of personal autonomy some had carved out during the war.  Stalin even ordered the removal of crippled and disabled war veterans from the streets of Moscow because he felt their presence demoralizing.  It was in this atmosphere that a young returning officer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, found himself sentenced to ten years in the Gulag for telling a joke about Stalin.

And I wonder when I'll be home again and the morning answers, "Never"
And the evening sighs and the steely Russian skies go on forever

I find these the saddest lines in music and no matter how often I hear them they affect me as powerfully as the first time.  They represent the betrayal of the hopes and dreams of people caught up in a horrible time, who thought they'd survived the worst, only to find themselves condemned to death, exile, and lives of  fear and hopelessness.  An estimated 18 million people were imprisoned in Gulag camps between 1929 and 1953, with 2.4 million still in the camps when Stalin, who was planning another massive purge at the time, mostly directly at the Jewish population, died in 1953.  

We take leave of our narrator as he disappears into the mist beneath the steely Russian skies passing to an unknown fate, like so many other millions.  These lines from the poet Osip Mandlestam (1891-1938), who himself died in a Gulag transit camp in Siberia for committing "counter-revolutionary activities" consisting of writing a poem mocking Stalin, provide the tombstone for those souls.

Mounds of human heads
Are wandering into the distance
I dwindle among them
Nobody sees me

(Secret Police photo of Mandelstam.  He died of typhoid fever on December 27, 1938.  His body lay unburied along with others who died that winter, their frozen corpses piled on the ground, until all were thrown into a mass grave dug after the spring thaw.)

(Prisoner 282, Solzhenitsyn)  

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1)  Mayor Mamdani is a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is also fielding many candidates this year for national, state, and local offices.  Despite its name, the DSA is not a democratic socialist group, it is a communist organization dedicated to the destruction of the United States.  The U.S. has had socialist organizations that were actually democratic such as Norman Thomas' Socialist Party in the 1930s which was fiercely anti-communist, as was the DSA when it was founded.

In October 2023, Maurice Isserman resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization that Mamdami and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remain members of.  In 1982 Isserman was a founding member of the DSA, the lead founder being the late Michael Harrington.  Isserman and Harrington actually were Democratic Socialists.  I believe Harrington was mistaken in many of his political ideas but he was a decent and moral person, unlike the current leadership of the DSA. The DSA is another of the many institutions in America that carry the same name from decades ago but have been subverted from within and are now completely different in substance.  The current DSA is a authoritarian communist organization heavily seasoned with settler-colonist ideology.  It is an enemy of civilization. 

Isserman, an academic who has written favorably about the history of the American Communist Party, resigned for several reasons, including:

- The DSA's failure to denounce what he described as the "anti-Jewish pogrom" by Hamas on October 7, which he characterized as "politically and morally bankrupt".

- The capture of the DSA by groups like Red Star, Marxist Unity Group, and the Communist Caucus—which value ideological purity over democratic socialist values.  He described these groups as "entryists", writing, "In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members". 

(2)  Scholars have cited several potential reasons for the military purge, with some believing that German intelligence played a role by inserting false information about a Red Army military conspiracy against Stalin into the Soviet intelligence network, triggering Stalin's actions.

(3) US and British material shipments to the Soviet Union during the war included:

400,000 Jeeps/trucks (1/3 of all Soviet motor vehicles)

14,000 airplanes

13,000 tanks

8,000 tractors

2.7 million tons of petrol

55% of all Soviet aviation fuel

1/3 of all Soviet explosives

2,000 locomotives

15 million pairs of boots

4.5 million tons of food

55% of all aluminum used by Soviets

80% of all copper used by Soviets

35,000 radio stations

380,000 field telephones

956,000 miles of telephone cable

Of Blessed Memory

On this date in 1948, Witold Pilecki was executed by the Communist government of Poland.  The date and circumstances of his death were kept secret for decades, not becoming known until the overthrow of the Communist regime in 1989.  Today, Pilecki is a Polish national hero, though the location of his burial has yet to be identified.

Witold Pilecki fought Nazis and Communists, and volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he spent 2 1/2 years before escaping.  His life is one of astonishing physical and moral courage and was the subject of my post Volunteering for Auschwitz. 

The Chief Rabbi of Poland said of Pilecki:

"When God created the human being, God had in mind that we should all be like Captain Witold Pilecki, of blessed memory" 

Pilecki on entering Auschwitz:

 

Pilecki on trial by the communists:

 

 In my post, I wrote that I had not been able to bring myself to read Pilecki's account of his time in Auschwitz.  Since then I've read the report and hope to write about it at a future date.

Remembrance

Today is Remembrance Day in France.  On May 8, 1945 the Second World War in Europe ended.  As we drove though the countryside today, we passed commemorations being held in several village centers, mostly attended by older folks.

In Domme, where we are staying for a month, the memorial to the war dead was decorated with flags and flowers.  The WW2 side of the memorial has many fewer names than the WW1 side.  It's not the only difference.  The WWI dead were all in the French army when they perished, but the WW2 side shows seven dead in combat, six dead deportees, and six civilians shot by the Germans in local actions.  The latter were members of the Resistance or civilians killed in the summer of 1944.  Partially obscured in the lower right is a later addition marking the death of a resident at the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Yesterday, Mrs THC and I drove two hours north to Oradour-sur-Glane, a somber and disturbing visit.

On Saturday morning June 10, 1944, Oradour was crowded.  Though the commune had a population of about 1,400, the central village contained only 330, but on that morning almost 700 were in the village.  It was a school day so children from outlying farms were there as well as farmers who came into town to get their monthly tobacco allowance.  A half-dozen cyclists were also passing through the village.

Oradour was a prosperous community, in a green setting near the river Glace, only a few miles from the large city of Limoges.  Before the war it was a popular place for Limoges residents to take the tram line to Oradour and picnic by the stream.

In early afternoon about 200 soldiers from the SS 2nd Panzer (Das Reich) Division arrived, sealed off the town, and ordered everyone present to assemble in a field behind the village.  Some 20 to 30 inhabitants realized something was wrong and escaped into the woods but more than 650 people were left in the field.  The Germans separated the 195 men from the 453 women and children, with the latter moved into the small village church.

The men, including the cyclists, were further separated into five groups, taken to buildings and close by farms, shot, and the men and the buildings set afire.  Five men, all wounded, managed to survive.

The Germans set off an incendiary device within the church, which filled with smoke.  As women and children tried to escape they were fired upon by machine guns.  It was death by gunfire, smoke, and flame.  Only one women survived; with both her daughters dead she plunged out a window.  Shot five times she managed to crawl into nearby woods where she was found two days later. Marguerite Rouffanche would spend a year in hospital recovering physically.  She would pass in 1988.  The last survivor, Robert Hebras, died in 2023.  Hebras, then 18, was slightly wounded in the head, chest, and thigh and survived by remaining under a pile of bodies in one of the barns.  His mother and two sisters were killed in the church. After the war Hebras became an advocate for reconciliation between French and Germans.

After the killing spree every building in the village was set afire.

By order of Charles de Gaulle, Oradour was never demolished or rebuilt.  It was left as it was on the evening of June 10, as a permanent memorial to the martyrs.  A new Oradour was built several hundred yards away.

Most of the German officers involved were killed before the war ended.

Below are several photos I took of our visit.  We went into the small church but I felt so overwhelmed thinking about the 246 women and 207 children crammed inside and of the havoc and terror unleashed upon them, I could not take any photos.  Oradour is more than ruined buildings, as you walk around you see sewing machines and cooking pots sitting as they were in 1944.  On the floor of the church are the remains of a baby carriage. We did not see everything in the village.  I'd watched videos, seen photos, and read about Oradour, but the experience of actually walking the streets was much more powerful and after a while we decided we needed to leave. 

This is an aerial view of the village:

 

The classic early 1970s 26-part BBC series, The World At War, opened with photos of Oradour and this narration by Laurence Olivier:

Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead. This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road, and they were driven into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead, in battle. They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial. Its martyrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, China, in a world at war.

This is video explains in more detail what happened that day.  It tells why the Das Reich Division was in the area and its movement north from the area around Toulouse.  The German columns had to pass through the Dordogne, a stronghold of Resistance fighters determined to slow down the Nazi move towards the Allied landings in Normandy.  Two of the towns mentioned where fighting occurred, Groljeac and Carsac, are next to Domme.

Both Germans and French were aware that sometime in the summer of 1944 the Allied invasion would occur.  In May, German forces stationed around the area began sweeps against the various Resistance groups and these continued into August.  Violence escalated with news of the Normandy landings on June 6, when partisans came out of hiding and attacked German formations moving north through the area as they attempted to reach the Allied landing areas.

The list of encounters is long and bloody; here are a few.  

On May 21 in the little village of Frayssinet-Le-Gelat, twenty miles south of Domme, the Germans, in retaliation for the death of an SS officer, killed 15 hostages; ten young men from one-child families and five young women. 

With word of the Allied landings, Das Reich began moving north through Dordogne and the Limoges area while the lightly armed partisans made efforts to block the narrow roads.  Fighting took place in many locations, as well as German reprisals.  On June 8, at Groljeac, seven Resistance fighters were killed, while another four died in Carsac, across the river from Groljeac.

That same day another Das Reich column stopped at a bakery in the village of Rouffillac (10 miles from Domme) and demanded the proprietress make them crepes.  When she refused, she and 15 other civilians were locked in the bakery which the Nazis then burned down.  

Fighting also occurred that day in Cressensac, Noailles, Gabaudet, and in other towns and villages.

On June 7, upon receiving news of the Allied landings, partisans attacked and overwhelmed a small German garrison in Tulle, a town about 60 miles from Domme.  Two days later, Das Reich arrived and retook the town.  In those battles 37 Germans were killed along with 50 to 100 French fighters.  In retaliation, the Germans arrested all men between the ages of 16 and 60, hanged 99 of them, and deported another 149, of whom 101 died at Dachau.

Fifty four (52 hostages and 2 fighters) were executed at Mussidan on June 11.

On June 12 the Germans shot twelve hostages, including the entire Frydman family. 

On June 21 the village of Moutyedier was attacked and burned to the ground; 65 civilians and Resistance fighters were killed.

More fighting occurred in Cenac and Domme on June 26-27.  This was part of a larger wave that included the neighboring towns and villages of Sarlat, La Roque Gageac, Castlenaud, Vitrac, and Vezac where the SS murdered 93 year old Raymond Lespinasse.

Less than three miles from where we are staying is a plaque in memory of Marie Delteil, aged 80, who "fell victim to Nazi barbarism" on June 26.

A couple of hundred yards away from the Delteil memorial is another plaque, on the bridge across the Dordogne at Cenac, just down the hill from Domme, in memory of Louis Desplat "killed here by the German hordes", also on June 26.  A clock-maker and  member of the resistance, Desplat was captured and tortured by the Germans, but would not talk.  He was taken to the bridge, shot, and his body dumped into the river. 

Memorial to Marie Delteil

Memorial to 12 members of the Resistance, including one unknown victim, executed on June 26.  This is on the road up to Domme.  The two Marx brothers were refugees from elsewhere in France.

 

Memorial affixed to the wall of the former hospital in Domme.  Jose Duerto Mendoza was a Spaniard who fled to France after Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War and then joined the French Resistance, as did two of those named on the plaque above.  Mendoza was wounded in the action on the 26th, made it to the Domme hospital, was found there the next day by the Germans who shot him.

 

On June 30, twelve hostages taken at Domme and Cougnac on June 26-28 were executed by the side of the road to Gourdon. 

The mayor of St-André-d'Appelles was executed on July 7 for having placed a tricolor flag on the remains of a resister. 

Fighting in the region continued into August.  It was only with Operation Dragoon, the Allied landing in the south of France on August 15 and their rapid advance, that German troops withdrew from southwestern France, ending the occupation.

Coming Home

 

The remains of Pfc. Norton V. Retzsch, who died on New Georgia in the Solomon Islands were recently identified and will be buried on April 13 in Marana, Arizona, a town near Tucson, 83 years after his death.

Retzsch, 25 years of age and recently married, was with the 1st Marine Raider Battalion.  On July 9, 1943 he and two fellow Marines were caught in a Japanese ambush and killed.  It took decades after the end of WW2 to identify possible remains and have them DNA tested and compared to one of his relatives.  

After Norton's death his wife, Margaret, enlisted in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve.  She eventually remarried and passed in 2005. 

The New Georgia campaign, from June 30 to October 7, 1943 and cost 1,195 American lives, is one of many almost forgotten battles in the U.S. effort to capture the Solomon Islands with most of the fighting occurring between August 1942 and April 1944

The search for remains of the missing continues.  The difficulties in this process can be seen in the Military.com article on the search for Norton Retzsch.

After the war, the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company searched the Bairoko Harbor and Enogai Inlet area from November to December 1947 but found no trace of Retzsch. The military declared him non-recoverable in 1949 and inscribed his name on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines.

What the military did not know at the time was that Retzsch's remains had likely already been recovered. In December 1943, unidentified remains buried at the Enogai Cemetery were exhumed and transferred first to a New Georgia cemetery, then to Finschhafen, Papua New Guinea, where they were designated as Unknown X-182. After multiple failed identification attempts, X-182 was interred at the Manila American Cemetery in 1950.

The case remained dormant for decades until DPAA turned its attention back to New Georgia. Agency researchers flagged a group of unidentified remains from the Enogai and Bairoko area as possible matches for missing Raiders, and in January 2019, X-182 was pulled from the Manila cemetery and sent to the DPAA laboratory. 

In 2013, I wrote of another missing Marine, Alexander "Sandy" Bonnyman, killed during the attack on Tarawa in November 1943.  Bonneyman is the only Medal of Honor recipient photographed during the action for which he received the medal.  In 2015, Bonnyman's remains were finally identified and he was returned home.

Personal Handling

I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department.  Stalin hates the guts of all your top people.  He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to.

President Franklin Roosevelt to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, March 18, 1942, from Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence

I think if I give him everything I possibly can, and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of peace and democracy.

President Franklin Roosevelt to former Ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C Bullitt, January 29, 1943, from For the President: Personal and Secret: Correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt 

 

 

There are many things President Franklin Roosevelt got right in the run up to, and during, the Second World War.  He recognized Germany as a threat, not just in Europe, but globally.  FDR also had an ability to spot and promote talent.  Selecting George C Marshall as Army Chief of Staff in 1939 was not obvious, as he was promoted ahead of more than three dozen more senior officers, yet FDR did so after Marshall disagreed with him in a large meeting (for the full story read Management Lessons).  Marshall proved to be a brilliant choice as was Admiral Chester Nimitz, hand picked by FDR to command the Navy in the Pacific.  He also had the good sense to keep Marshall in the U.S. and instead agree that Dwight Eisenhower should command Allied forces for D-Day.

FDR also encouraged dissent.  The military chiefs and his war cabinet engaged in ferocious arguments at time, particularly from 1939 through 1942.   At one point in 1942, Marshall threatened to resign because of his disagreement with the president on the issue of invading North Africa, an issue on which FDR was proven correct - the American army was in no shape to fight the Germans in northwest Europe in 1942, or even 1943.  Marshall, who believed military officers should be apolitical and never voted, was initially a doubter about FDR but became an admirer during the course of the war.

Roosevelt exhibited a good strategic sense in the run up and early years of the war, agreeing with the military chiefs that Germany would be the priority in the event of a conflict with both that country and Japan, and with his instincts of where American military priorities should be in the critical eighteen months after Pearl Harbor.   He also had top notch instincts as to what issues required his involvement and decision making and what didn't.

As I've noted before, in Harry Hopkins he also had an informal channel through whom the military chiefs could take issues, trusting Hopkins, whom they held in high regard, to decide whether, and how, to make the case to FDR.(1)  This stands in stark contrast to LBJ, who in the run up to the Vietnam War, had no such route outside the one official channel controlled by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who prevented dissenting voices from getting to LBJ.  For a comparison of FDR with LBJ on this issue read Dereliction of Duty.

On the debit side was FDR's obsession with China in the lead up to the war.  The military chiefs constantly admonished him for his public statements and pledges in support of China which amounted to writing checks that could not be cashed, refusing to recognize the weakness of America's position in the Pacific and its very limited ability to do anything practicable to assist China in resisting Japan.  They thought his actions ran the risk of precipitating a Japanese attack on the U.S., plunging us into war and running counter to the agreed upon strategy of focusing on Germany first.  On this the chiefs proved correct and FDR was only saved by Hitler's unforced error of declaring war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941.

However, the biggest debit item was FDR's failure to understand the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin and what that meant for his vision for the post-war world.  Chip Bohlen, a Soviet State Department specialist who, in 1953, would become Ambassador to the Soviet Union said of Hopkins that "Harry was inclined to dismiss ideology" and the same can be said of FDR. Roosevelt had a vague notion that the American and Soviet systems would, over time, converge in some unspecific way.(2)  He believed in personal diplomacy and in his ability to charm anyone.  The colonial empires of Britain and France offended FDR and he thought the war should spell an end to them. Why he did not understand the same thing about the USSR, which in that respect was merely a continuation of the land-based colonial empire established by the czars is an interesting question.

That's why even into 1944, when the Allies were clearly winning and the first signs of problems with the Soviets were arising, FDR insisted on continuing lend-lease supplies to the Soviets, including shipping materials that had no obvious short-term value to the war against the Nazis and despite increased evidence of Soviet industrial espionage in America.  At the Tehran conference in November 1943 and even more so at Yalta in February 1945, FDR went out of his way to ingratiate himself with Stalin while poking fun and, at times, insulting Churchill. The President simply could not fathom that Stalin was an ideologue and had no deep understanding of communism.  He completely lacked an understanding of how the Soviets thought.(3)

To illustrate how different the thinking was let's look at Kim Philby, the Englishman turned Soviet agent who ended up in a senior position in Britain's intelligence agency.  Philby would thoroughly betray his country (and the U.S.) leading to the deaths of many East Europeans fighting Soviet tyranny after the war.

After Germany's attack on Russia in June 1941, Philby advised his Soviet handlers that Churchill ordered all British espionage efforts against the USSR to cease, causing the Soviets to wrongly suspect Philby had been turned and become a double agent working for Britain because, in their world, suspending espionage operations made no sense (the U.S., both before and during the war, did not conduct espionage against the Soviets).  After all Soviet espionage against Britain and America during the war not only continued, but was expanded.  After an extensive investigation of Philby the Soviets concluded that his reporting was accurate.

FDR's obsession with the creation of the United Nations, something not a high priority to the Russians, allowed Stalin to winkle more concessions from the U.S. before grudgingly agreeing to its creation. 

Unlike Churchill, FDR remained aloof from Stalin's domination of eastern European countries which became evident during the last months of the war.  In August 1944, when the Polish Home Army rose up against the German occupation of Warsaw, while Stalin's forces halted their advance to let the Nazis eliminate the Poles, who they saw as a threat to the communist future plans for that country, Churchill pleaded with Stalin to allow British planes to fly over Warsaw to drop supplies and then land in Soviet territory to refuel, a request refused by the dictator.  FDR refused Churchill's request to join the British in making the request to Stalin.  For more on this episode read Warsaw Does Not Cry.  During the remaining months of the war FDR continued to resist Churchill's efforts to create a strong joint opposition to Stalin's plans.

Given Roosevelt's death in April 1945, less than three months into his fourth term, we can only be thankful for the big city Democratic party bosses who, in the summer of 1944, rejected FDR's plan to retain Vice-President Henry Wallace on the ticket.  The eccentric and naive Wallace was an unwitting tool of the communists and would have been a disaster as president.(4)  Instead Harry Truman joined the ticket, becoming FDR's successor and proving a much better post-war president on foreign policy than Roosevelt would have been.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) The extent to which Hopkins was also held in high regard by the British is shown in a remarkable incident when Field Marshal Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, came to Hopkins to ask him to intervene in a dispute the British military chiefs were having with Winston Churchill. 

(2)  According to Bohlen, on a return flight from Moscow, on Hopkins last mission to Moscow in June 1945, Harry expressed "serious doubts as to the possibility of genuine collaboration with the Soviet Union", predicting "the American belief in freedom might lead to serious differences."

(3) FDR was not alone in his disinterest in, and failure to understand, ideology.  It was a common failing across the upper rank of civilian and military leaders at the time.  I am a great admirer of George C Marshall but his greatest failure was the year he spent in China as President Truman's special envoy trying to negotiate a settlement between the Nationalist government and its Communist opponents.  Marshall simply had no understanding of underlying communist ideology and his actions undermined the Nationalists.  By later in 1947, Marshall and Truman had a better understanding of the communist threat and responded aggressively in Greece and in Western Europe but by then it was too late and too difficult to save the Chiang's regime in China. 

At the time a common line spun by the USSR about the communists in China and Eastern Europe was that they were not "real" communists but merely "agrarian reformers", and this took in many unsophisticated Americans.  At the end of the war, and in its immediate aftermath, Whittaker Chambers was a senior editor at Time, the preeminent weekly news magazine of the era.  Chambers, a former communist party member in the 1920s and a commie spy in the 1930s before breaking with the party, engaged in a series of back and forths with Time correspondents in Eastern Europe who would post stories about communists describing them as agrarian reformers at which point Chambers would edit out the characterization, despite protests by the reporters that they were the ones on the scene with local knowledge.  Chambers would point out that they did not understand communists.

In September 1939, Chambers met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle to disclose the existence of a Soviet spy ring within the Roosevelt Administration, providing Berle with a list of names, including Alger Hiss.  Berle took the information to President Roosevelt who dismissed it.

(4)  In 1948, Wallace ran as the Progressive Party candidate for president.  He blamed the U.S. for the start of the Cold War and urged America to give up West Berlin in response to the Soviet blockade (for more read Berlin Divides).  Several years later, Wallace acknowledged he had been manipulated during the campaign by the communists who had infiltrated his organization.