Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Twentieth Century
German Historical Perspectives Series
General Editors:
Timothy Garton Ash and Gerhard A. Ritter
ISSN 0953-363X
Volume VI
Escape into War: The Foreign Policy of Imperial Germany
Edited by Gregor Schllgen
Volume VII
German Unication: The Unexpected Challenge
Edited by Dieter Grosser
Volume VIII
Germanys New Position in Europe: Problems and Perspectives
Edited by Arnulf Baring
Volume IX
Western Europe and Germany: The Beginnings of European Integration 19451960
Edited by Clemens Wurm
Volume X
The Military in Politics and Society in France and Germany in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Klaus-Jrgen Mller
Volume XI
Culture in the Federal Republic of Germany, 19451995
Edited by Reiner Pommerin
Volume XII
The Problem of Revolution in Germany, 17891989
Edited by Reinhard Rrup
Volume XIII
Science in the Third Reich
Edited by Margit Szllsi-Janze
Volume XIV
The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality
Edited by Hans Mommsen
Volume XV
The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-war German History
Edited by Christoph Klemann
Volume XVI
Towards an Urban Nation: Germany since 1780
Edited by Friedrich Lenger
Volume XVII
Germany and the European East in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Eduard Mhle
Volume XVIII
Britain and Germany in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Manfred Grtemaker
German Historical Perspectives/XIX
Russian-German Special
Relations in the Twentieth
Century
A Closed Chapter?
Edited by
KARL SCHLGEL
DD120.R8R85 2006
327.4304709'04--dc22
2006012198
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
www.bergpublishers.com
Contents
Editorial Preface
Timothy Garton Ash and Gerhard A. Ritter vii
Contributors ix
Index 217
Editorial Preface
vii
This page intentionally left blank
Contributors
ix
x Contributors
1
2 Karl Schlgel
which not only evidently left the era of extremes behind in 1989,
but which also entered a new era on 11 September 2001: an era
with new borders and frontiers, with new dangers and enemies in
an entirely transformed network. But the questions arising from
this are not specically German, not specically Russian. They
affect Europe and the world as one entity.
We could now dene the current state of German-Russian re-
lations as normal. Part of this is that we can now, post festum, once
again delineate the history of our relations. We can do what was
impossible in the preceding decades. We have relatively free access
to archives and sources which had long been restricted. We can
carry the sometimes controversial debates across borders with-
out thought for the censors involvement. The ideological battles
are over, and the past is allowed to be as complex and complic-
ated in historical narratives as it actually was. Of course, we have all
become sceptical of grand narratives and of master narrators.
We are satised when the blanks are lled, and the overall image
is reassembled piece by piece. This is also the idea of this volume.
It is the product of a seminar held at the European Studies Centre
at St Antonys College in Oxford in 2002, and was extended by
three further contributions to complete the account. The most
important staging posts of German-Russian relations are visited in
chronological order. The aspects treated will not render our image
of these relations in the twentieth century entirely redundant, but
they will certainly elaborate and make more precise particular
features. The most signicant insight is perhaps that the networks
which could lead to the appearance of a special relationship have
been eroded. The capacity of total mobilization has exhausted
itself in an incomparably destructive and self-destructive process.
Negative Poland policies (Klaus Zernack) can no longer function
as the driving force in German-Russian co-operation after the end
of the German Reich and the Soviet empire. The contributions
in this volume take another look at the past from this post festum
perspective.
Dittmar Dahlmann is concerned with the contributions and im-
pact of German merchants and entrepreneurs, as well as Russian
students and scientists, in the period before the First World War.
This includes prominent, even legendary, names: German ind-
ustrial leaders and businessmen such as Knoop and Wogau in the
Russian Empire; Russian students and poets such as Pasternak
and Mandelstam at German universities. Dahlmann sketches the
A Closed Chapter? 3
The Russian Berlin of the 1920s had its match in the German
Moscow of the 1930s. Carola Tischlers contribution describes
Soviet Russia as a refuge for German migrs after 1933. The
German community, particularly in Moscow, was comprised of
doctors, engineers, scientists, communists and anti-fascist migrs
and their families. Taken collectively, they were a strong group,
working in various structures of the Comintern and its front
organizations, publishers and newspapers. Their fates in the 1930s
shows in a markedly paradoxical manner the developments of
German-Russian relations during Stalins terror. In 1938 over 70
per cent of German migrs were victims of Stalins repression. On
the other hand, they were also affected by the consequences of the
Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939 and the resulting open
collaboration between the two totalitarian regimes. Their destiny
took yet another turn after Nazi Germanys assault on the USSR.
According to Carola Tischler, however, the often tragic experiences
of these migrs were not brought to light or reappraised in any
way for decades after their return to Eastern Germany. In this case,
as above, only 1989 brought radical change.8
The secret collaboration between the German Reichswehr and the
Red Army was always one of the topics which demonstrated the
ambivalence in German-Russian relations particularly dramatically.
Manfred Zeidler picks up this case again in the light of new archival
materials. He reconstructs the paradoxical situation that the joint
training and military manoeuvres intended to help ght the
entente actually aided armament and preparation for the German
war on the Soviet Union. It is one of the cruellest ironies of German-
Russian relations that many of the commanders of Operation
Barbarossa had experience of the terrain thanks to Soviet support,
and that the commanders of the Red Army, as German spies, fell
victim to the cleansing of the army leadership in 1937, which at the
very least facilitated German aggression against the USSR.9
Peter Jahn deals with the other war in the East and its traces in
the memories of post-war Germany, where the dimensions of the
genocide against Jews has now been widely acknowledged, unlike
German crimes against Russians, Poles and other peoples of the
East. Jahn assumes that the asymmetrical development of prejudices
from as far back as the nineteenth century was among the ideational
and mental prerequisites for the unprecedented dehumanization
of the war in the East: Russia as not belonging to Europe, inferior,
backwards, Asian; also the battle cry of dictatorship of Jewish
A Closed Chapter? 5
Notes
11
12 Dittmar Dahlmann
The rst toast was on the Emperor. The second one was on me. Then,
after a break, T. Morozov was called out, came back with a dispatch from
the minister of nance, who notied him that at noon of this same day
the emperor had raised me to a hereditary baron. The applause was
endless, I am unable to describe my feelings to you, but I am sure, that
we are one and you feel like me. After this Baranov made a speech
which was beautiful and hilarious, at the end of it I was exhausted,
because my nerves could not endure any more and my whole body was
trembling.4
century: Knoop, von Wogau, Marc, Spies and many others. For the
Germans the Russian Empire offered many opportunities for it was
a big country with just a few internal customs barriers in contrast
to Germany in the rst half of the nineteenth century and after
the end of the Napoleonic Wars it was a developing market.
In dealing with the German merchants and industrialists I will
focus on two examples: the Knoops and the von Wogaus in Moscow.
Their success was unique, but many others were also very successful.
Ludwig Knoop came to Moscow in 1840 when he was not yet twenty,
as the representative of an English company in Manchester which
belonged partly to one of his uncles, having lived in Manchester for
over two years before coming to Russia. After a couple of years he
married the daughter of a Baltic-German merchant and founded
his rst company in 1852.8
From the moment of his arrival he was a part of the German colony
in Moscow. According to the only general census of the Russian
Empire in 1897, 17,358 Germans of both sexes lived in Moscow.9
Although this was only 1.7 per cent of the citys total population, it
was the biggest colony of non-Russians, with more Germans than
Ukrainians, Poles or Jews. Most of them were Russian citizens, but
over 6,000 were not. More than two-thirds belonged to a Protestant
church over 14,000 with just 3,000 Catholics. Roughly 2,000
were economically self-sufcient as craftsmen, merchants, bankers
or industrialists.10
The Moscow Germans formed an important social group in the
second capital city of the Russian Empire. They inhabited a small
world of their own with newspapers, journals, churches, schools,
hospitals, clubs, restaurants with German food and beer, hotels,
book stores, all kinds of shops in particular doctors and so on. At
one time there was also a German theatre in the city.11 The famous
Baedeker described German life in Moscow and wrote: Theres no
need to worry about nding a German or German-speaking doctor
in Moscow, and in all of the pharmacies German is spoken.12
Besides the family the centre of German life in Moscow, or any
other Russian city, was the church parish and, closely connected to
it, the school. The other important social institution was the club,
i.e. the German club, Deutscher Klub in Moskau, which as a matter of
fact was not as German as its name indicated.13
There were four Lutheran and Reformed Church parishes in
Moscow, the oldest being Petri-Pauli and Michaelis. Both had high
14 Dittmar Dahlmann
Moscow and a member of the Old Believers. Knoop did not only
sell the newest and best English machines, he also hired British
employees and foremen. This form of business became the basis of
Knoops overwhelming success. He was so convinced of the success
of this new factory that he refused any direct payment, instead
taking a 10 per cent share of the annual prots of Morozovs factory.
Over the next fteen years Knoop build another 153 factories and
in all of them held a share in the annual prots of between 5 and
15 per cent. Furthermore he provided the machinery for another
thirty factories, not only delivering the machinery and technical
know-how in the shape of British employees and foremen, but also
becoming the main importer of the cotton that these factories
needed.28
In 1852 Ludwig Knoop founded his own company in Russia,
with the head ofce in Moscow and branches in St Petersburg and
Reval. Another ve years later, in 1857, together with Russian and
German partners, he founded the textile factory Krhnholm,
situated directly on the border of the province of Estonia, on the
banks of the River Narova, close to the city of Narva. The company
still exists it is now the biggest company in the whole of Estonia,
belongs to a Swedish company and is Estonias biggest exporter.29
But let us turn back to Ludwig Knoop in 1857. His four partners
in the founding of Krhnholm were three Russians, members of
the Moscow Old Believer community, and two Germans. The Rus-
sians were Aleksei and Gerasim Khludov and Kozma Soldatenkov.
Together with them Knoop also held shares in the Emil Zndel
company, another textile company in Moscow, and together with
members of the Shchukin family, again an Old Believer family,
held shares in the Danilovskaia factory. So Knoop had very good
relations with his fellow German nationals and with Russian Old
Believers in Moscow, and was well established in Moscow business
circles.30
The capital of the Krhnholm factory was initially two million
gold roubles, later being raised to six million. It was, de jure, what
would be call in German a Kommanditgesellschaft auf Aktien, a part-
nership limited by shares. All the shares were either in the hands of
the founding members and could not be sold without the consent
of the others, or the shares were in the hands of members of the
Knoop family. Some sources indicate that two uncles of Ludwig
Knoop, the two who co-owned the de Jersey company in Manchester,
and Ludwigs two brothers Julius and Daniel, held shares in the
Krhnholm company.31
18 Dittmar Dahlmann
but also that Russia was an integral part of the world economy and
that the process of what we now call globalization was well under
way in the decades leading up to the First World War, before being
interrupted by the great catastrophes of two world wars and the
division of Europe and the world, until the late 1980s and early
1990s.42
In the second part of this chapter I would like to show the intensity
and density of the relations between Germany and Russia in terms
of scholarly or scientic relationships at the turn of the twentieth
century. From the second half of the nineteenth century, when
Russias need for an intellectual elite was steadily growing, but could
not be satised by the countrys own universities, more and more
Russian students went abroad, partly with the support of the Russian
government and partly at their own expense.43 Their main interest
was not what some famous, but unusual, sources seem to indicate
philosophy and revolution, or vice versa but sciences, medicine
and architecture. Apart from Berlin, in particular after the 1870s,
and some universities close to the German-Russian border, most
students from Russia went to the technical universities: Karlsruhe,
Darmstadt, Munich and the Bergakademie Freiberg, famous in
Russia ever since Mikhail Lomonosov had been a student there in
the rst half of the eighteenth century.44
For obvious reasons Russian students founded clubs and unions,
but had one speciality: the Russische Lesehallen (reading-rooms),
where members could read newspapers, magazines and books,
have tea, and where from time to time balls and other social gath-
erings were arranged. As censorship was not as harsh in Germany
as in Russia and differed from state to state, they could also read
the illegal literature of Russian Social Democracy, the Socialist-
Revolutionaries or of the liberal opposition. One of the oldest
reading-rooms was founded in Heidelberg in 1862, named after the
famous Russian physician Nikolai Pirogov. Before the outbreak of
the First World War, there were Russian reading-rooms or clubs in
20 German university towns, including 6 in Munich, 5 in Dresden,
3 each in Berlin, Freiburg and Freiberg, and 2 in Heidelberg.45
Historical research has mainly focused on the revolutionary
aspects of Russian students in Germany, Bolsheviks being the
prime object of research. Not only in the East, but also in the West
the focus was on Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Germany, not on
the scholarly relations which developed at the turn of the century.
Those who came from Russia to study at a German university did
22 Dittmar Dahlmann
Notes
1. I will not deal with the long discussion about the concept of culture
and cultural history (Kulturgeschichte). It is different in the German-
and English-speaking world. In Germany the latest book is Ute Daniel,
Kompendium Kulturgeschichte. Theorien, Praxis, Schlsselwrter (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).
2. Klaus Heller, Auslndische Kaueute und Unternehmer im Russischen
Reich bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts, in Dittmar Dahlmann
and Carmen Scheide (eds), . . . das einzige Land in Europa, das eine groe
Zukunft vor sich hat. Deutsche Unternehmen und Unternehmer im Russischen
Reich im 19. und frhen 20. Jahrhundert (Essen: Klartext, 1998), pp. 27
48; Viktor N. Sacharow, Von Nowgorod nach Petersburg. Deutsche
Kaueute in Russland von den Zeiten der Hanse bis zum Anfang des
20. Jahrhunderts, in Dittmar Dahlmann (ed.), Eine grosse Zukunft.
Deutsche in Russlands Wirtschaft (Berlin: Reschke & Steffens, 2000), pp.
1221; also published in a Russian version (Moscow, 2000); Dittmar
Dahlmann, Unternehmer als Migranten im Russischen Reich, in
Mathias Beer and Dittmar Dahlmann (eds), Migration nach Ost- und
Sdosteuropa vom 18. Bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart:
Thorbecke, 1999), pp. 23544.
3. The most famous example is the Amburger Family. Erik Amburger,
Deutsche in Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Russlands. Die Familie
Amburger in St. Petersburg 17701920 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986).
4. Adele Wolde, Ludwig Knoop. Erinnerungsbilder aus seinem Leben. Gesammelt
und fr seine Nachkommen niedergeschrieben von Adele Wolde (Bremen:
Schnemann, 1928; repr. Bremen: Hauschild, 1998), p. 44; cf. Dittmar
Dahlmann, Ludwig Knoop: ein Unternehmerleben, in Dahlmann and
Scheide (eds), . . . das einzige Land, pp. 36178; Stuart Thompstone,
Ludwig Knoop. The Arkwright of Russia, in Textile History 15 (1984)
no. 1, pp. 4573; Stuart Thompstone, The Organisation and Financing of
Russian Foreign Trade before 1914, Ph.D. dissertation, London University
(1991), chap. 5.
5. I use the terms German and German-speaking in more or less the
same sense: persons born in the German Empire (Deutsches Reich)
before 1806 or after this date in those states which were part of the
Deutscher Bund and had German as their mother tongue.
6. Joachim Mai, Heinrich Schliemann als Unternehmer in Russland
18461864, in Dahlmann and Scheide (eds), . . . das einzige Land,
pp. 34960; Joachim Mai, Ich gelte hier als der schlaueste,
durchtriebenste und fhigste Kaufmann. Heinrich Schliemann in
Russland, in Dahlmann et al. (eds), Eine grosse Zukunft, pp. 2025;
Igor A. Bogdanov, Dolgaia doroga v Troiu. Genrikh Shliman v Peterburge
(St Petersburg: Glagol, 1995).
26 Dittmar Dahlmann
31
32 Gerd Koenen
Around the turn of the century there was the rst major change of
the signposts, which of course was related to the change of German
imperial policies after Bismarck under Wilhelm II, towards inter-
national politics (Weltpolitik). For one thing there was a growing
mood of dissonance among the Prussian gentry against Russia, not
only because of the economic quarrels about the export of grain
and other agrarian goods, but also through general disappointment
and mistrust towards their fast-developing and industrializing
eastern neighbour. Added to that were Prussias military alliance
Thomas Mann and Others 33
with France, growing social instability (long before 1905) and again
the continual mounting German phobic and pan-Slavic tendencies
among the Russian public.
This mistrust and bad feeling were now systematically nurtured
by a whole class of Baltic migr intellectuals and ideologues, who
for more than a decade were the leading commentators within the
conservative press. Under the guidance of the rst ordinary pro-
fessor for Russian history at Berlin University, Theodor Schieman
believed that these tendencies of Russophobia had been system-
atically worked out. The central argument of Schiemann was that
Russia, because of its inner heterogeneity, would always be an
expansionist colossus, whose position would become more and
more hostile to Germany as her only serious rival on the Continent,
and also because of her massive inferiority complex. Schiemanns
strongest arguments were long quotations he took from the Russian
press, in which the nal battle between Germans (Teutons) and
Slavs was again and again evoked.
But Schiemann who in fact was never able to form a school
found after 1908 a potent rival in his former scholar Otto
Hoetzsch, who as a historian argued on a much more sound and
scientic basis, and revived the old admiration and aspiration of
German conservatives for a state-induced and state-controlled way
of industrialization, which he saw in full development in Russia.
It was specically the reforms of Stolypin after the Russian defeat
against Japan, and the Revolution of 1905, which Hoetzsch saw as a
demonstration that Russia was neither invincible as a potential foe
nor incapable of a dynamic development on her own. For him it
was clear that Germany and Russia were natural allies in a world of
rising imperialist tensions.
In fact it was much more Otto Hoetzsch who became the real
founder of German Eastern European Studies, rather than Theodor
Schiemann, so much so that in autumn 1914, months after the
outbreak of the First World War, Schiemann was replaced by his
rival Otto Hoetzsch as the chief commentator of Russian affairs in
the semi-ofcial conservative newspaper Kreuz-Zeitung.
The point of conict was very clear: Schiemann as a fervent
Russophobe had to argue in favour of peace, and even of a future
alliance with Great Britain. Otto Hoetzsch naturally argued against
a bold peace agreement with Russia, even at the cost of Austria,
which could have made Germany the hegemonistic power of central
and western Europe, and against the combination of forces of both
34 Gerd Koenen
But we have advanced a little bit too quickly in following the major
tendencies of these times. When I write of the change of signposts
around 1900, this did not only refer to the conservatives, but also
and perhaps more importantly to the national-liberal middle spec-
trum of the bourgeois parties and to the leading representatives
of German industry. Take for example, Walther Rathenau the
young heir of the mighty electro-technical company AEG, who
later became an eminent writer, the organizer of German wartime
industry, and for a short yet decisive period in the early 1920s the
foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, who signed the treaty
of Rapallo in 1922 but was murdered soon afterwards. Rathenau
wrote in an early article in 1898 on the Trans-Atlantic Warning
Signals of a new entente on the seas between Great Britain and the
emerging United States of America: what is left open at the table
of this partie carre are the corners, which could only be occupied
by the Germans and the Slavs, who had already inherited the one-
time position of the Romans, i.e. France.
More astonishing than this rather sober strategic thought was
the tone, in which Rathenau spoke of Russia as a young giant,
whose feet covers half of Europe and half of Asia and whose breast
and head are shielded by the invincible palladium of his orthodox
faith. The great spectacle of current and future times, Rathenau
continued, would still be the battle between Russia and Britain
about world hegemony. He said, For us Germans, all signs point
to the East and to its ascendancy.
This view was of course not representative in all respects; but
it marked a characteristic change of traditional views within the
German bourgeoisie and middle class.
Even though in August 1914 the First World War began with a
declaration of war against Russia, it had very little to do with any
specic Russophobia in Germany, and not even with direct conicts
between the two countries, but was thanks to the constellation of
powers in general. The rst round of war propaganda against the
barbaric or despotic tsarist regime, the Russian abomination
(Russengreuel) in Eastern Prussia etc., was rather utilitarian and
necessary to engage the wavering Austrians, to force the Social
Democrats into the War, and to denounce the Western powers as
helpers of the reactionary Tsardom. But the real hate propaganda
was reserved for the treacherous Brits, when they entered the
War.
This war brought an incredible and spontaneous outburst of
verse and prose, endless literature, in which nearly every eminent
mind in the country took part. To speak about propaganda is an
understatement. It was an authentic intellectual production, in
which Germany as a nation reinvented herself in a substantialist
way as the country of the midst (das Land der Mitte) the midst of
Europe, the midst of the world, the midst of mankind.
But if you look closer into these so-called Ideas of 1914, they
were nearly exclusively developed in contrast to the Ideas of
1789 or to British utilitarianism. The War developed mentally
and intellectually into a conict between Germany and the West.
Every constituent notion of Western social and political thinking
was surpassed or overreached by a complementary German notion.
Civilization stood against culture, the individual against the
personality, the bourgeois against the Brger, formal citizen
rights against moral law, and so on. And very early on it was
commonplace, even among people of conservative or liberal
orientation, to speak about German socialism as the antithesis to
Western capitalism, not only as an exceptional measure in war-
time, but as a factual and higher mode of production and social
life in the future.
In this German war ideology, as we might call it, the ofcial tsarist
Russia was not a worthwhile antagonist, because it represented no
universal ideal. On the other hand there was an internal opponent
of this regime, namely the suppressed Russian people, who from
the mouth of its great poets and prophets represented a Russian
ideal of all-human importance. This distinction between the
people and the rulers could not be plausibly made in the face of
the Western democracies. Here in the West the battle lines were
Thomas Mann and Others 37
This led to a split with those active forces, who were organized
in early 1919 as an anti-Bolshevist League and fought in the
front line against the Spartakist uprisings. The central gure
was a Catholic activist named Eduard Stadtler, who had followed
the revolutionary developments in Russia as a prisoner of war.
He returned to Germany with the xed idea that in the event of
a political-military collapse it was absolutely necessary to defend
Germany against the wave of anarchist dissolution and moral
depravation coming from the East, with the spectre of hungry,
bare-footed, desperate soldiers Germans as well as Russians,
Latvians, Hungarians and Jews guided by fanatical agitators. He
also thought that an effective defence would only be possible if
the new German parties and authorities took up the spiritual and
intellectual contents and motivations of Bolshevism in a positive
way that of a German socialism which would be more organized,
civilized and constructive. It could be said that Stadtler (without
even knowing anything about Mussolini and his policies in 1919)
held a corporatist view of a social dictatorship, and in this respect
may be regarded as the gure of a German Mussolini manqu.
This type of activist and positive anti-Bolshevism was never
successful and in 191920 became part of the so-called young con-
servativism, which was not then intended as an activist movement
but as a strictly elitist grouping. It merged the Ideas of 1914 with
those of the so-called Jugendbewegung (youth movement). The real
spiritual leader was Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who since 1905
had been the German editor for Dostoevskii together with the
Russian religious philosopher Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and as such
was in the forefront of the efforts to formulate the doctrines of an
integral nationalism. Sentences like Every nation is battling for
its own way of development, its place in the world, as a way to God,
or Every nation has its own socialism were the teachings which
Moeller allegedly took from Dostoevskii.
Moeller transferred the vague spiritual inclinations to the East,
which were predominant in the rst years of the Weimar Republic,
into a perspective of a German political and military breakout, out
of the system of Versailles and towards the young nations. This
was not only incompatible with the perspectives of a leading part of
the German military, the Reichswehr, but also of a large intellectual
current with many prominent gures such as Thomas Mann, who
in the rst years of the Weimar Republic was quite attached to
these young conservative groupings, until he revealed himself as a
40 Gerd Koenen
The question remains: what has been the real impact of these
different, half leftist, half conservative eastern orientations in
Germany before and after the First World War, and the Russian
Revolution?
In the elds of ne arts, literature, music, lm or architecture,
they were part of the astonishing fertility and diversity of the
German culture in the precarious times of the Weimar Republic.
And as Karl Schlgel and others have shown, there was still a
strong element of personal relationship, be it in the sense of an
old, renewed familiarity or of a fertile new differentiation. Berlin
was in particular the meeting point of all the migrations and
inuences, the collisions and collusions between Germany and the
new Russia.
This was in a way a last salute to a whole era of rather dense
cultural relations, a desperate attempt to ignore or to overcome
the cultural and political drift or split which began to run through
the Continent. But the virtual possibility of an eastern orientation
enamed the fantasies and was, in sober retrospective judgement,
an element of the non-capacity and non-preparedness of the new
Weimar Republic to arrange with the changed world situation,
which was not so unfavourable and even potentially promising.
Germany could not decide between the factual socio-economical
and cultural integration to the West, and the seemingly deeper
and more promising prospects of an Eastern orientation. So this
became part of the revisionist complex of the Weimar years, a
moment of German irredentism of the time, or as the Hungarian
social philosopher Istvan Bib put it, of German hysteria.
KARL SCHLGEL
43
44 Karl Schlgel
The Russian emigrants stemmed from the most diverse circles, but they
all found themselves in pitiful conditions, with no money, no clothing,
and most of them without any knowledge of the language of the country
in which they now found themselves, without the skills to pursue a trade,
and completely unsuited for the life of settlers in a foreign country.
In the face of this mass misery, it was rst and foremost a question of
satisfying the most urgent needs of these unhappy people, of supplying
them with food, clothing and shelter.20
This school will in the rst place provide refugee children from Russia
among whom there are, as is well known, many Russian-Germans
the guarantee of a sound German education. Secondly, it will offer
52 Karl Schlgel
German children whose parents have close ties to Russia and might
possibly emigrate there, the chance of a thorough education in Russian
language skills.24
The costs of the school were borne partly through donations and
partly through the Foreign Ofce. The other Russian school in Berlin
was the Higher Russian Private School of the Russian Academic
Society, founded on 10 February 1921 with the aim of educating
children of Russian emigrants according to the curriculum of the
old Russian high schools and in a nationalistic Russian spirit.
Initially it was housed in a private home and later moved into
public school buildings. The school was nanced through dona-
tions, but the bulk of the costs were covered by subsidies from the
Foreign Ofce. As a result of the shortage of funds, the two schools
planned to amalgamate and this ultimately took place in 1931,
the explicit reasoning being that this school will bring forth the
type of personality which, as a well-trained pioneer for political,
military, economic and cultural purposes, will be well-suited to
serve Germany in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Despite the
protestations of the leading educationalists, the former emigrant
school became a German secondary school after 1933, which as an
Eastern school was given the task of imparting a solid knowledge
of the eastern countries.25 Beyond this, two Russian elementary
schools were set up in 1923, one in the Scheunen refugee camp
near Celle, the other in the Alexanderheim in Berlin-Tegel. The
YMCA started a technical school in 1923 in the former POW camp
in Wnsdorf/Zossen, in which the residents were taught practical
occupational skills.
The most signicant academic institution, however, was the
Russian Scientic Institute. This school owed its foundation to
the initiatives of a number of people and bodies, including the east
European historian, Professor Otto Hoetzsch, the Commissioner
for Refugees of the League of Nations, Moritz Schlesinger, the
Foreign Ofce and the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Public
Education; but its foundation was due above all to the active role
played by important scholars and scientists who had been expelled
from Soviet Russia in the autumn of 1922, and most of whom were
founding members of the Russian Academic Society.26 The institute
could count on approximately 500 Russians studying at Berlin
colleges, along with another 1,500 Russians planning to continue
their education there. Moreover, the Institute acted as a vigorous
Berlin: Stepmother Among Russian Cities 53
Long after Russian Berlin had passed its zenith, churches re-
minded people that the Orthodox Church had also been a pillar
of Russian emigrant life in Berlin. The rst is the St Nikolas and
St Helena Church in Berlin-Tegel that was built before 1914;
Mikhail Glinka, Vladimir D. Nabokov and Iulii Aikhenvald
are buried in its cemetery, near to which the Alexanderheim
used to stand. The other is the Cathedral of Christ Risen on the
Hohenzollerndamm, which was dedicated in 1938. The building
of a new church in the central area of the city, which had hitherto
been served by churches in temporary premises, became pressing
after the Embassy Church on Unter den Linden was handed over
to the Soviet Russians under the terms of the Treaty of Rapallo. In
the 1920s the orthodox Russians belonged to the overseas church,
coming under the jurisdiction of both Evlogii, Bishop of Paris, and
the Church of the Patriarchs back in Russia. The overseas church
under Bishop Tikhon won most of the battles with the supporters
of Evlogii, though. Tikhon, who pronounced the day of the Nazi
assumption of power to be also a day of celebration for the
Russians in Germany, succeeded from 1936 to 1938 in securing
for his church sole jurisdiction overseas, and after the invasions of
Poland and, later, the Soviet Union by the Wehrmacht it extended
its activities into the occupied territories.31
While the success of the humanitarian and intermediary organ-
izations for the emigrants lay in their ability to make life in exile
tolerable, the political organizations had a different agenda:
the justication of their existence consisted in their ability both
programmatically and practically to keep alive the hope of a return
56 Karl Schlgel
home. As long as the civil war lasted and its outcome remained
uncertain, a political line aimed at the armed overthrow of the
Bolsheviks seemed justiable. The isolation of Soviet Russia and
the promises of the intervening powers distracted attention from
the defeat of the White Russians. A crisis of the political parties
of emigration became unavoidable when Soviet Russia began to
be recognized by more and more members of the international
community. If we bear in mind that even in pre-revolutionary
Russia parties were inherently weak, and were then swept aside by
the Revolution at the very time when they had begun to play a
historic role, if we add to that the fact that those parties in exile had
inevitably lost their class-based and socio-cultural roots, then we see
how difcult indeed it is to talk of established parties in emigration.
It was much more a matter of varyingly loose organizations and
groups of individuals brought together by the common experience
of failure and personal endangerment in the struggle against
Bolshevism, little different from the revolutionary migr circles in
Europe before the War and the Revolution. A good number of the
party political leaders forced into exile after 1917 had had previous
experience of the bitter experience of exile. The anti-Bolshevik
consensus that seemed to form the common ground between
all parties in emigration was to prove itself under the pressure
of concrete decision-making as supercial and short lived. The
failure of the diverse attempts at unication by the parties of the
Diaspora in 1920, 1921, 1926 and 1930 is clear proof of this. What
could Miliukov and Kerenski possibly have in common with the
generals of the White Russian movement, or the exiled Mensheviks
Iulii Martov and Fedor Dan with the Petersburg Black Hundreds,
other than opposition to the new regime in Moscow? The spectrum
of political parties in exile appears to be a copy or continuation
of that of pre-revolutionary times, but it was really nothing but a
shadow of its former self, being more of an intellectual or cultural
phenomenon than one with real political clout. Its function and
its importance in emigration lay, or so it would seem, not in their
nature as political parties, but rather in the specic force of the
views and images of the Russian Revolution and of Soviet Russia put
over by the political groups in their individual countries of exile.
The real contribution that could be expected of the politicians of
emigration was not so much as to what extent they succeeded in
building up a party, but consisted in the analysis and self-analysis
they could offer, something which is possible for those excluded
Berlin: Stepmother Among Russian Cities 57
true of the Eurasians, whose main bases were in Prague and Soa,
but who also provoked interest and irritation in Berlin with the
publications and lectures of Petr Savitskii and Lev Karsavin. They
too read the Russian Revolution as a creative occurrence that had
pushed the unique quality of Russia, its being beyond Occident
and Orient, to a new synthesis.35 This tendency to view Bolshevism
as a genuinely national Russian phenomen was put forward as part
of the platform of the Young Russians, a movement founded in
1923 in Munich by Aleksandr Kazem-Bek, which, with the Italian
Fascists and the German National Socialists very much in mind, put
forward the notion of a modernized i.e. Soviet monarchy to be
radically different from the dreams of the representatives of the
ancien rgime. The Gestapo appositely summed up this movement
in the following way: Unlike all other anti-Bolshevist emigrant
organizations, the Young Russian movement does not view the
Soviet Union as the work of the proponents of the Bolshevik World
Revolution, but rather as nothing more than the continuation of
the Russian Empire under the leadership of a government that does
not meet with their approval.36 Many of the elements developed
by the Young Russians corporativeness, the third way between
liberalism and Bolshevism, and nationalism were reected by
political parties in the 1930s.37
It should also be mentioned, in order to complete the picture,
that there were short-lived contacts between Russian and German
anarchists in Berlin.38
The chapter on Russian emigration in Germany with the most
signicant consequences was, however, not written by the revol-
utionary Social Democrats or Russian liberals, but by the Right,
from the conservative to the extreme right wing. Even before
Berlin had become one of the major civies of emigration which
happened after Vrangels defeat in November 1920 it had become
an outpost of the Russian civil war, just like other European capital
cities. Attempts were made from Germany to rescue the imperilled
Russian royal family by playing on the family connections of the
Hohenzollerns. Protected by Oberost, counter-revolutionary forces
had joined together in an attempt to reactivate the alliance of the
German and Russian Empires that existed before the War against
the liberal West. After the ceasere and the collapse of the Eastern
Front in November 1918 they moved west under the protection of
German troops. In the eastern Baltic German Freikorps and Russian
civil war troops joined forces. Berlin brought them together, and it
60 Karl Schlgel
was there that their cameraderie was effectively forged during the
Kapp Putsch of 20 March 1920. After the insurrection was quelled,
the centre of anti-Bolshevist and anti-republican activities moved
to Munich, where fringe groups of Russian monarchists became
involved in the initial phases of the National Socialist movement.
As with the political parties in emigration, this part of German-
Russian history also essentially consists of the activities of individual
groupings and the collaboration of central gures of the Russian
counter-revolution, such as General Vasilii Biskupskii, Pavel Avalov-
Bermondt, Fedor von Vinberg, Petr Shabelskii-Bork, Sergei
Taboritskii, Nikolai Markov II and Grigorii Shvarts-Bostunich on
the Russian side, and Alfred Rosenberg, Max Scheubner-Richter
and Arno Schickedanz on the German, or, to be more accurate,
on the German Baltic side. Quite apart from its political defeat
in the civil war, the monarchist movement was devastated by the
execution of the Tsar and his family. Any possible resolution of
the question of succession was legally shaky and was, in any case,
attacked by rival groupings. All efforts to unify the monarchist
movement, or to present it as the legitimate voice of emigration,
failed. The monarchist congress that took place from May to June
1921 in Bad Reichenhall (Bavaria) under the title Congress for
the Economic Reconstruction of Russia, in which more than
a hundred representatives of many countries took part but
without the House of the Romanovs being represented was as
unsuccessful in bringing unity about as a later congress that took
place in Paris in 1926. There was not a single convincing and new
answer to any of the questions that had played a part in the downfall
of the Russian monarchy. And the major obstacle throughout was
that the monarchist camp itself, which had kept on hoping that
the news from Ekaterinburg would turn out to be wrong and that
the Tsar would turn out to have been saved by a miracle, was itself
divided. One pretender to the throne, Kirill Vladimirovich, a
cousin of Nicholas II, had, after emigrating via Finland, France and
Switzerland, taken up residence in Coburg, the seat of his wifes
family. In 1922 he declared himself to be Regent until such time
as the death of the Tsar and the Tsarevich could be conrmed,
and in 1924 he styled himself Emperor of all Russia. From the
very beginning this legitimist self-proclamation was attacked by
the supporters of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich who, as former
Commander-in-Chief of the Russian troops, enjoyed a certain
popularity, among migr military circles in particular. But even
Berlin: Stepmother Among Russian Cities 61
people being employed by the embassy and the trade mission alone,
and there was about the same number of White Guards, as they
dubbed the refugees. In Berlin there was, though, a considerable
amount of overlap of the various social circles formed from within
the Soviet Embassy on Unter den Linden and Charlottengrad, as
the area of the west occupied by the Russian emigrants was termed.
Around both of these poles groups of politically highly active
people were formed, which did come into contact at a distance
with each other, but which generally distrusted and opposed
each other. The recognition of Soviet Russia by Germany turned
Berlin into the gate to the West for those travellers with the red
passport, and in the 1920s a never-ending stream of Soviet citizens
poured into the capital, sometimes enjoying the option of being
able to stay indenitely, or for ever. Berlin became the great centre
of communications between Russians at home and abroad. In their
newspapers and clubs the two camps crossed on the cultural
level over the demarcation lines that separated them politically.
Scarcely one of the great names of Soviet and Russian literature was
missing from the writers for Russian newspapers and periodicals
in Berlin: Mark Aldanov, Arkadii Averchenko, Andrei Belyi, Sasha
Chernyi, Vladislav Khodasevich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Don Aminado,
Ilia Erenburg, Sergei Esenin, Maksim Gorkii, Georgii Ivanov,
Aleksandr Kusikov, Lev Lunts, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Vladimir
Nabokov, Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Nikolai Otsup, Mikhail
Osorgin, Boris Pasternak, Boris Pilniak, Larisa Reisner, Aleksei
Remizov, Igor Severianin, Ivan Shmelev, Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov,
Aleksei Tolstoi, Boris Zaitsev, and many others. Russian Berlin
offered the two entrenched camps a social space in which the pure
and the impure, White and Red, could meet again. The series
of productions in the House of the Arts and the list of authors
writing for New Russian Books bring out the uniqueness of this social
world.45 Berlin was a transit station in which old acquaintances
could see each other again, even see each other for the very last
time, as was the case with Lev Shestov and Mikhail Gershenzon, and
with Boris Pasternak and his parents. Berlin became the cramped
site for the struggle to have the Russian culture of emigration and
the culture of Soviet Russia internationally recognized. Both Soviet
and emigration artists took part in the 1st Russian Art Exhibition in
the Van Diemen Gallery, and for many of them Berlin marked the
starting point of their international careers; these included Natan
Altman, Aleksandr Arkhipenko, Aleksandr Arnshtam, Ksenia
Berlin: Stepmother Among Russian Cities 65
multi-facetted Berlin of the 1920s and 1930s nds its most subtle
literary treatment in the novels and short stories of Vladimir
Nabokov.49
And how did the Germans react to the Russians? With anecdotes
about Charlottengrad, as Charlottenburg was called, and about the
Nepsky Prospect, which was the ironic name (by analogy with the
Nevskii Prospect in St Petersburg) given to the Kurfrstendamm,
which seemed to be overrun with Russians. Soviet Russia was rst
and foremost a topic of debate for the extreme Left, which saw
the emigrants merely as a bunch of failures and reactionaries, and
treated them accordingly by keeping them under observation
and by the use of bands of thugs. One group of those of a Russo-
phile disposition, mainly conservatives, came to view emigrants as
sources of information on, and representatives of, the good old
Russia, while another conservative Russophile group engaged in
top-secret military cooperation with the Soviet government. Thus
in Berlin in the 1920s we meet in this conned space not only
Georgii Chicherin, the Peoples Commissar for Foreign Affairs (and
former student of the Friedrich Wilhelm University, now Humboldt
University), but also Karl Radek being greatly in demand in his
Moabit cell, as well as the White generals. But we also meet incognito
generals of the Red Army such as Mikhail Tukhachevskii, who
are visiting the Republic to engage in secret negotiations with the
Wehrmacht, or to take part in training exercises.50 Berlin becomes
a place of astonishing alliances and meetings. At the receptions
of Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Krestinskii we nd not only Ernst
Jnger and Carl Schmitt, but also the representatives of Weimars
Cultural Bolshevism. In the Caf Leon on the Nollendorfplatz
Maiakovskii and Esenin, poets of the new Russia, encounter the
poets of the lost silver age. More or less simultaneously Oswald
Spenglers Decline of the West, Gustav Landauers Twilight in Europe
and Nikolai Berdiaevs The New Middle-Ages are published here.51
Friends of the New Russia gain new members from the middle
classes, such as Albert Einstein, Paul Lbe, Bernhard Kellermann,
Leopold Jessner and the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, while Moeller
van den Bruck sees in Dostoevskii and Merezhkovskii the key to the
riddles of modernity. The simultaneity of the historical experiences
of collapse and revolution that people had made in their individual
rooms, as it were, causes those who get to know each other in Berlin
to see each other as contemporaries, as fellow tenants of a home in
time (Ilia Erenburg).
Berlin: Stepmother Among Russian Cities 67
Notes
8. Cf. Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim, pp. 31022; Williams,
Culture in Exile, pp. 3869. For newspapers damaged in the war, cf.
Walter Andreesen, Berlin und die russische Literatur der 20er Jahre,
in Staatsbibliothek Preuischer Kulturbesitz, Mitteilungen 15 (1983), pp.
1314. For exile newspapers etc., cf. Russian National Library and
INION in Moscow.
9. The collection in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF,
ex-CGAOR) is particularly good. Cf. in especially ff. 6007, 5815, 5859,
5774, 5908, 6006 and 5853.
10. For information on the trophy archive, cf. George Clark Browder,
Captured German and Other Nations. Documents in the Osoby
(Special) Archive in Moscow, in Central European History 24 (1991),
4, pp. 42443; Jan Foitzig, Zur Situation in Moskauer Archiven,
in Jahrbuch fr Historische Kommunismusforschung 1993, pp. 299308;
Wolfgang Form and Pavel Poljan, Das Zentrum fr die Aufbewah-
rung historisch-dokumentarischer Sammlungen in Moskau ein
Erfahrungsbericht, in Bundesinstitut fr ostwissenschaftliche und inter-
nationale Studien, Information aus der Forschung 7, 1992.
11. Cf. Wilhelm Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Vlker. Bearb. in Verbindung
mit Theodor Kappstein und hrsg. im amtlichen Auftrage des Reichs-
wehrministeriums von Wilhelm Doegen, 6th edn, vol. 1: Der Kriegs-
gefangenen Haltung und Schicksal in Deutschland (Berlin: Politik und
Wirtschaft, 1921); Moritz Schlesinger, Erinnerungen eines Auenseiters
im diplomatischen Dienst, ed. and intr. by Hubert Schneider (Cologne:
Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1977).
12. Volkmanns calculations have not yet been superseded. He based
his gures on statistics from the German Interior Ministry, and on
information from von Rimscha, the German consul in Copenhagen,
and the Papal Welfare Organization for Russians in Germany
(Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, pp. 57). Cf. also Dodenhoeft,
Lat mich nach Ruland heim, pp. 810. Williams estimates there
to have been 60,000 Jews in the Jewish Diaspora (Culture in Exile, p.
113).
13. The statistics for the 1930s come from the Bureau for Refugee Affairs
in the Reich, Osoby Archive, f. 7, op. 1, d. 386, 1.43. Dodenhoeft
gures (1932: 60,000; 1933: 50,000) are based on reports for the
FO, Nansens ofce and the League of Nations, and are way below
these. Nash Vek of 19 March 1933 claimed there were 8,320 Russian
emigrants and 3,000 members of the Soviet Russian colony.
14. On the Vlasov Movement, cf. Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian
Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Emigr Theories (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987); Joachim Hoffmann, Die Geschichte
der Wlassow-Armee (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1984). On the
Soviet workers and POWs in Germany: Reinhard Rrup (ed.), Der
70 Karl Schlgel
39. For differences in the monarchist camp, cf. ibid., pp. 16080, 20221;
Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim, pp. 16870; Volkmann,
Die russische Emigration, pp. 613.
40. On the Russo-German connection in Munich in particular, cf.
Laqueur, Deutschland und Russland, pp. 99 ff.; Williams, Culture
in Exile, pp. 85 ff.; Henri Rollin, Lapocalypse de notre temps (Paris:
Gallimard, 1939); Rafail Sh. Ganelin (ed.), Natsionalnaia pravaia
prezhde i teper: istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki, chast I (St Petersburg:
Institut sotsiologii Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, Sankt-Peterburgskii
lial, 1992), pp. 1249, 13050.
41. Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim, p. 261, quoting Novoe
Slovo of 27 August 1939. The lack of awareness of the emigrants
emerges very clearly in the comments on the events of 1933 in Nash
Vek.
42. Cf. Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim, pp. 270, 282 on
declarations of loyalty and collaboration.
43. On contacts between the rst-generation emigrants and the Vlasov
movement: Sergej Frhlich, General Wlassow: Russen und Deutsche
zwischen Hitler und Stalin, ed. by von Edel von Freier (Cologne: Markus,
1987), p. 240; Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, Gegen Stalin und Hitler. General
Wlassow und die russische Freiheitsbewegung (Mainz: von Hase & Koehler,
1970), pp. 165 ff.; Hoffmann: Die Geschichte der Wlassow-Armee, pp. 39
ff.; Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim, pp. 27695.
44. On the trials of collaborating emigrants, cf. Vladimir Komin, Belaia
emigratsiia i vtoraia mirovaia voina. Uchebnoe posobie (Kalinin: KGU,
1979).
45. On the House of the Arts, cf. Thomas R. Beyer jr., The House of Arts
and the Writers Club, Berlin 19211923, in Beyer et al., Russische
Autoren und Verlage, pp. 938, as well as the memoirs of Ehrenburg
and Gul and the collection by Mierau.
46. On this rst exhibition, cf. the catalogue of Stationen der Moderne. Die
bedeutendsten Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, ed.
by Michael Boll (Berlin: Nicolai, 1988), pp. 184215; Jrn Merkert
(ed.), Naum Gabo: Ein russischer Konstruktivist in Berlin 19221932.
Skulpturen, Zeichnungen und Architektenentwrfe, Dokumente und Archive
aus der Sammlung der Berlinischen Galerie (Berlin: Nishen, 1989);
Eberhard Steneberg, Russische Kunst in Berlin 19191932 (Berlin:
Mann, 1969).
47. Cf.. Bhmig, Das russische Theater.
48. Nicholas Nabokov, quoted in ibid., p. 261.
49. Cf. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, vol. 1: The Russian Years (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990) and Andrew Field, Vladimir Nabokov:
The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Crown, 1986).
50. On Chicherin and Litvinov as students in Berlin, cf. Brachmann,
Russische Sozialdemokraten. On the collaboration between the German
Berlin: Stepmother Among Russian Cities 73
Army and the Red Army, cf. Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee
19201933. Wege und Stationen einer ungewhnlichen Zusammenarbeit
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993).
51. On Schmitt and Jnger as guests at Krestinskiis receptions even
after 30 January 1933, cf. Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution
in Deutschland 19181932. Ein Handbuch, 3rd edn (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), p. 50.
52. Serious research into this grey area stands in inverse ratio to the
enormous popular interest of the day, which was met by an outpouring
of trashy and detective stories, such as Essad Bey, Das weie Ruland.
Menschen ohne Heimat (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1932); Wladimir Orloff,
Mrder, Flscher, Provokateure. Lebenskmpfe im unterirdischen Russland
(Berlin: Brckenverlag, 1929); Grigorij Bessedowskii, Den Klauen
der Tscheka entronnen (Leipzig, Zrich: Grethlein, 1930); Tamara
Solonewitsch, Drei Jahre bei der Berliner Sowjethandelsvertretung (Essen:
Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1939). And there were, of course, the host of
lives of the Tsars daughter Anastasia, that went on into the post-
Second World War period.
Bibliographical note
77
78 Carola Tischler
I wrote these lines back then simply in the intensity of the moment.
Today I ask myself if anyone believes, can believe, the accuracy of these
observations. Those windows covered in red paper, with the production
targets of the plan, photos of the best workers, adorned with portraits of
Lenin, Stalin, Marx and Engels, were ugly, hiding the scarcity. But I didnt
think of them this way. It would be wrong to accuse me of immediately
justifying to myself the deplorable state of affairs I encountered. If one
presumes such an attitude, it would be responsible for everything. But
such simplications are not correct. I came from capitalist countries
and had often enough stood in front of beautiful, extravagant displays,
intended to lure in shoppers. But I often couldnt buy anything in these
countries, although I was hungry. In the Soviet Union there wasnt
much, but what there was, you could buy in plenty. Thats why the shop
windows, which had nothing to do with shop windows in the usual sense,
seemed pleasant to me.9
There was hardly anyone who wanted to leave the country at that
time. The persecution in Germany made a return home impossible
and the restricted employment options in most other migr
countries made them untenable alternatives. Moreover, in spite of
all the difculties mentioned, the Soviet Unions trump card was,
on the one hand, the manifold employment possibilities which
were offered to Germans and, on the other hand, the tremendous
enthusiasm in the 1930s for building socialism that had infected
most of them. All the problems that had to be overcome could, in
many cases, be rightly blamed on the backwardness of the tsarist
times.
The housing question was resolved for the different emigrants
in various ways. The Comintern owned an out-of-service hotel in
82 Carola Tischler
the centre of Moscow, the legendary Hotel Lux, which was used as
housing quarters for its leading functionaries.10 Other colleagues
could live in another hotel on Gorkii Street which was also owned
by the Comintern. In addition the MOPR, which maintained its
own emigrants house for approximately 200 people, also rented
rooms in many Moscow hotels in which emigrants lived on a short-
or even long-term basis. In general, various places of work also
owned the houses adjacent to their business. It was very difcult
to nd accommodation on the normal housing market due to the
overcrowding of the city. Finding a permanent room in a communal
apartment even a very small one was a great stroke of luck. In
the worst cases, people could live in rooms which became available
for short periods, and hence had to adjust to a year-long nomadic
existence. To relieve the situation dachas (summer houses) in the
area surrounding Moscow were used, which were unoccupied in the
summer months, but which, to some extent, became permanent
living quarters. The majority of Soviet citizens fared no better,
which eased the emigrants acceptance of the situation.
The international focus of the communist movement did indeed
open up opportunities for the emigrants, which would not have been
available in other countries of emigration. Alone the Communist
International, including its afliated sub-organizations, offered a
diverse eld of activities, not only for its leading functionaries. The
enormous amount of paper that the Comintern produced required
the maintenance of an extensive editorial, writing and translation
apparatus. The same structures existed in the Communist Youth
International, the International Revolutionary Theatre Alliance,
the International Red Cross, the International Workers Assistance
Organization, the International Agricultural Institute and the Red
Union International, all of which had their headquarters in Moscow.
Whereas at the Lenin School, cadres were educated for illegal
activities, the Communist University of the National Minorities of
the West prepared the communist emigrants for activities in the
lower and middle party echelons.11
The emigrants could also utilize their education and experience
at the State Radio Committee, which since 1929 had been produc-
ing, among other programs, a German-language program, or at
the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, which dealt with the international
research and publication of works of the classical Marxist writers.
The German section of the Publishing Association of Foreign
Workers (VEGAAR) offered the group of German-speaking
German Emigrants in Soviet Exile 83
The mood of a part of the comrades has been unusually aroused. They
have been shocked and depressed by the many arrests. If one meets
another, he says, Youre still alive? If the comrades in our ofce come
and count their contributions, they say: Ah, your membership list is
shrinking too! How many left? Still a dozen? and Now youre open
just two days a week? Were amazed that you havent already closed
entirely!20
to carry out, over the course of half a year, operative and preventative
measures, in order to remove from the USSR all German and other
88 Carola Tischler
After the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact there were still almost
500 German citizens on the list of prisoners which the German
representation in Moscow had compiled. Schulenburg hoped the
new circumstances would bring about an accelerated release of
these people. An increasing number of Germans were deported in
the rst months of the pact period, who were now since Poland
no longer existed delivered directly to the German authorities;
among them were, as in previous years, anti-fascist emigrants, who
were immediately taken into protective custody in Germany. The
German diplomatic service, although it had received instructions
not to issue such people entry visas into Germany, did not want to
hamper the overall process. Also, for some people, the embassy had
no precise data and could not therefore produce an assessment
in line with the Gestapos directives. From 1939 to 1941, besides
approximately a thousand free returnees, about 350 people were
deported from Soviet prisons to Germany.
In foreign affairs both countries also adapted themselves to
the new circumstances, which for the USSR meant an end to its
anti-fascist propaganda. The KPD leadership was involved in the
decision-making processes as little as the Comintern they were
merely to execute what the Soviet party leadership demanded. It is
clear that the new line, which led many doubtful leftists in Western
Europe to break with the Soviet Union for good, threw the KPD into
confusion over it legitimacy. It worked hard at its communiqus, in
order to save at least part of its anti-fascism, but it had to give in to
the pressure passed on through the Comintern leadership. After
month-long discussions the KPD managed to force itself to nd a
political platform which was to guide further political orientation.24
The objective of this document was to exploit the ofcial friendship
between both countries, in order to anchor the KPD in Germany.
It shows the completely incorrect assessment of the situation in
Germany by the exiled leadership of the KPD, which since the
arrest of leading KPD functionaries in France in September 1939,
and the start of the Second World War, had been controlled from
Moscow. The KPD also hoped to re-strengthen its position within
German Emigrants in Soviet Exile 89
Second World War, but the refusal of Finland to comply with Soviet
demands after signing an assistance and trade agreement with the
USSR, provoked the Red Army assault on Finland in November
1939, and as a result the war. In this context all those who did not
possess Soviet citizenship were evacuated from Moscow (and other
large cities). The Soviet authorities even presented some German
emigrants with the decision either to participate in the evacuations
or to return to Germany. Since the people had lived in the Soviet
Union long enough to recognize that life in the province would be
much more difcult for them than in Moscow, several opted for
the second alternative.
The changes resulting from the new foreign policy situation
certainly had signicant effects on the life of the German emigrants,
but even more so did the internal political situation, marked by an
abatement of the Terror. Some historians speak of this time as the
rst thaw. In December 1938 Ezhov was relieved of his function
as Commissar for Internal Affairs by Beriia. Shortly afterward it was
conceded that mistakes had been discovered in the arrests. Among
the thousands set free at this time were many Germans. The NKVD
released imprisoned German emigrants mostly in the months
from December 1938 to April 1939 and November 1939 to March
1940.25 Although individual people were still arrested during this
time, the release of prisoners contributed to the feeling that the
Terror was over, in spite of the fact that these people were required
to remain silent regarding their imprisonment. Nevertheless, a
whole set of details about the prison conditions and the unjustied
recriminations began to emerge. Most of them applied directly to
the KPD for renewed Party membership. After initial delays and
insecurities, the KPD leadership re-established Party membership
in most cases. Those who still had imprisoned relatives could
continue to believe in an apparent mistake that would soon be
cleared up. How could they return to Germany in this situation?
that once again was being bitterly fought by the Soviet Union. The
emigrants were confronted with this dichotomy again in the Wars
aftermath.
Along with the external threat, the internal Terror escalated
again, although this time it was more focused than in the 1930s
and was above all concentrated against potential opponents of the
system. Across the board Soviet citizens of German nationality were
suspected of collaboration with the Germans, which led nally to the
break-up of the German Volga Republic and to the deportation of
the German minority to Siberia and Central Asia.26 Those German
emigrants who were still in Moscow and were not suitable for war-
related work were also caught up in the wave of deportations.
Many emigrants above all children, women and the elderly had,
however, already left Moscow for the east in the huge evacuation
that was initiated soon after the War began. Approximately 14 to 19
million Soviet citizens were on the move in the initial months, up
to 10 million were ofcially evacuated and up to 9 million left their
homes on their own initiative.27
Also affected by arrests, especially in the early months of the
War, were persons of German nationality. While the emigrants
distinguished themselves from the Soviet Germans, the Soviet
authorities saw no reason for a difference in treatment, and a number
of emigrants were arrested, primarily in the days immediately after
the beginning of the War and in the middle of September. The KPD
had been informed about forty-two cases by the end of December
1941, of which a large number were women.28 Information on this
subject that has come to light indicates that it was mainly relatives
of prisoners or those who had once been imprisoned themselves
who were affected by the new repression. They were classied as
socially-dangerous elements.
The treatment of these prisoners in the prison camps in which
many of the German emigrants were held also deteriorated.
Germans were no longer allowed to perform special work, which
could have made their difcult lives easier; and they were not set free
throughout the duration of the War even if their prison sentence
was over. Sometimes they were separated within the prison camps.
There was also a danger that for triing reasons they would be sent
to the detention room or, in extreme cases, even be subjected to
a new trial. All of these measures persisted while the course of the
War was uncertain. After the situation on the war front had become
less tense, the special treatment of the imprisoned Germans was
relaxed once again.
92 Carola Tischler
they were also integrated into the propaganda system. Above all,
the German emigrants radio stations made a signicant impact.
Foreign service was expanded signicantly and the Comintern
established its own broadcast stations.30 Emigrants wrote articles
for pamphlets, worked as translators for prisoner-of-war problems
or as anti-fascist teachers in camps for prisoners of war. They were
even trained as parachutists in order to work underground in
Germany. They wrote and spoke to German soldiers and to the
German public over the radio, over loudspeakers in the trenches
and through books or prisoner-of-war newspapers with the aim
of ending the War. They were decisively involved in the activity of
the National Committee of a Free Germany, which was founded in
mid-1943 at the instigation of the Soviet Union.31 And they turned
their face to Germany,32 by training their own comrades who had
survived and been dispersed by the Terror, as well as new cadres
from the masses of German prisoners of war, for tasks in Germany.
Epilogue
Notes
29. Cf. Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung, pp. 1867. For the extensive
literature on the labour army, see the chapter by Viktor Krieger.
30. Cf. Carola Tischler, Von Geister- und anderen Stimmen. Der Rund-
funk als Waffe im Kampf gegen die Deutschen im Groen Vater-
lndischen Krieg, in Karl Eimermacher (ed.), West-stliche Spiegel-
ungen. Neue Folge. Deutsche und Russen im 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn:
Fink, 2004).
31. Cf. Jrg Morr, Hinter den Kulissen des Nationalkomitees. Das Institut 99
in Moskau und die Deutschlandpolitik der UdSSR 19431946 (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2001).
32. A decree from the Secretariat of the EKKI of 15 December 1942
obligated the leading party functionaries to fully turn their face to
Germany in their work; to primarily concentrate their energy on
multi-faceted practical help for the reconstruction and strengthening
of the party at home, the party organization and the party leadership.
SAPMO BArch, NL 4036/542, p. 70.
This page intentionally left blank
MANFRED ZEIDLER
Introduction
99
100 Manfred Zeidler
During the decade before the First World War Russias military
structure showed some conspicuous similarities to the German
system, especially in respect of the central military apparatus. After
losing the war against Japan in 1905 the general staff was released
from its subordination to the Ministry of War and, following the
Prussian-German example, became an independent institution
immediately placed under the Emperor.3 The right of direct report
was introduced for a considerable number of inspectors for each
branch of the services, and for the heads of military districts, who
were similar to the German Generalkommandos and were simult-
aneously governor-generals over their respective regions. To sum
up it can be said that, as in Germany, the Russian system suffered
from a multiplicity of ofcers with access to the throne and a lack
of communication and coordination among them.4 Under the
Chief of Staff, General F. F. Palitsyn, a proteg of the Tsars uncle
Grand Duke Nicholas, from 1906 on German military thinking,
especially in the operational eld, exerted considerable inuence
on the younger Russian staff ofcers who were graduating from the
imperial general staff academy at this time.5
The years 1914 to 1917 represented a phase of military conict
in the overall context of the First World War, whilst maintaining a
sufciently active diplomacy to achieve an armistice in December
1917 and a peace agreement in March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk, with Russias new Bolshevist regime.
Moving on to the Third Reich after 1933. Nazi Germany saw three
very different phases: the years 1933 to 1938 were a time of very
fast-moving political alienation which, with the beginning of the
Spanish Civil War in 1936, turned into a kind of cold war, i.e. a state
of political tension and a growing propaganda war on both sides.
There was no longer sufcient trust to sustain national security-
relevant military cooperation, and military relations reverted to
routine or restricted attach liaison meetings.6
The years 1939 to 1941 were a period of intense economic rela-
tions of strategic signicance and a considerable transfer of military
technology from Germany to Russia.7 These were not so much
due to the neutrality and non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939,
but began with the Frontier and Friendship Agreement (Grenz-
und Freundschaftsvertrag), dated 28 September of the same year,
following the joint occupation and separation of Poland. Never
before or after did Germany and Russia have such close economic
relations as during this short period between 1939 and 1941.8
102 Manfred Zeidler
policy of peace and dtente vis--vis the West, as the far more
important and desirable historical point of reference than Rapallo.
The GDR, however, celebrated Rapallo as the rst successful
example of the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence, but almost
completely tabooed its military aspect.13
The Anglo-American science of history was the rst after 1945
to have access to German documents and without doubt laid the
groundwork in this eld. At the same time, however, it mystied
German-Russian military contacts by, for example, painting a highly
exaggerated picture of secret German arms production in Russia.14
Not included in this are the excellent landmark studies of Hans W.
Gatzke, John Erickson and Francis L. Carsten.15
Not until the years of perestroika, with a new assessment of their
own national history, did Russian historians begin to touch on this
highly delicate and long tabooed topic.16
The world and with it the Entente will unquestioningly see the growing
of a German-Russian community of interests. Whatever the future has in
store, either along revolutionary or counterrevolutionary lines.
Karl Radek wrote this in the autumn of 1920 for a brochure pub-
lished in Germany.17 At that time Moscow was still hoping for a
revolutionary variant of the German-Russian unication in the
shape of a proletarian class alliance resulting in a Soviet-Germany.
At the same time, the German bourgeois-conservative elite was
still holding the reverse hope that, by conjuring up the general
threat to Europe through Russian Bolshevism, the Entente would
The Strange Allies 105
The Dawes Plan of 1924 led to a big inow of capital into the
country and therefore a brief but stormy period of prosperity in the
late 1920s. This also widened the nancial operating possibilities
of government institutions which showed not least in the increase
in public budgets. The arms budget alone, which nearly doubled
between 1924 and 1928, demonstrated the increased room for
manoeuvre for the armed services ministry in the eld of material
arms projects. Expenditure of the Army Ordnance Ofce for
military research and development orders grew even more than
the overall arms budget, with an increase of over 10 per cent of
the reported budget total up to 1932.26 This enabled the placing
of large development orders for new arms within the framework of
the so-called 1st armament programme, projected since 1927,27
and intensive technical and tactical trials at test centres in Russia
following.
A similar development can be seen in trade relations between the
two countries. Here it is the great legal and economic agreement
(Rechts- und Wirtschaftsabkommen) of October 1925 that opened
The Strange Allies 109
If one has to answer the question about results and benets for
both partners it can must be said that Germany clearly had the
bigger advantages. For years Germany was able to test prototypes
of combat aircraft and tanks, developed since 1926 on the basis of
secret contracts with industry, in concealed test areas in Russia and
to further develop them to mass-production standard. This alone is
an invaluable advantage, but the same applies to personnel in that
a small but solid and highly qualied core of experts was formed.
Of the nearly 200 ofcers who were trained to be pilots or aircraft
observers at the Lipetsk ight centre near Voronezh, more than
thirty became generals in the air force or other branches of the
armed forces during the Second World War. The much smaller
training and test centre for the tank force at Kazan also produced
at least fourteen future generals.30 Of those who undertook one
or more visits to the Red Army before 1933, almost all the leading
gures of Adolf Hitlers army can be found, including: Blomberg,
Brauchitsch, Fromm, Harpe, Keitel, Krebs, List, Manstein, Model,
Olbricht, Speidel, Sperrle and Student.31 Even the two German
post-war armies, the Bundeswehr and NVA, the East German Army,
had high-ranking ofcers with personal experience of cooperation
110 Manfred Zeidler
between the Reichswehr and the Red Army, such as the rst air force
inspector of the Bundeswehr, General Josef Kammhuber, and his
deputy, Major General Hermann Plocher, both of whom received
their ight training as young Reichswehr ofcers at Lipetsk.32
One point must be emphasized again: the arms objectives of the
Weimar Republic could not be of a quantitative nature. Production
of arms in appreciable numbers was impossible because before 1933
the Republic was lacking in the wherewithal political will, freedom
of action and nance. So the main aim was to do what was possible
at the time and create the capability for Germany to arm itself and
thereby give future governments with the right preconditions the
chance to set up modern armed forces in a short time; in other
words, to open up an option for the future. Not pilots but teaching
staff, not stockpiles of arms but prototypes was the order of the
day. To have over a hundred qualied ying instructors available
became of vital importance when setting up the air force after 1933;
more or less the same applied to the tank force. In addition, there
was the priceless tactical and organizational experience gained on
Russian ground. A German aviation expert said in a review after the
War: When Hitler came to power he just needed to press a button.
The designs, the tests and the models were ready. Hitler only had
to order the series.33 This may be slightly overstated but one thing
is correct: when the rst German ghter planes and tanks started
being mass-produced as early as 1934, and the rst air force wings
and tank divisions were equipped a year later, this was the result
of the arms development and military personnel planning which
began with the rst armament programme of 1927/28, and could
never have reached its goal so quickly without the Russian test and
training centres.
Far less successful was the cooperation between the navies of
both countries because the German naval command, the so-called
Marineleitung, which was independent of the army command, the
so-called Heeresleitung, had chosen different foreign partners to
achieve its own secret armament objectives.34 Another reason was
the political and psychological reservation of the Germans because
of the ongoing political trauma within the German Navy following
the Revolution in November 1918.
country had ofcially long taken the line of the Litvinov policy
of collective security of the anti-Fascist alliance with the Western
powers, to explore the ground at an informal meeting at the
Moscow residence of ambassador von der Schulenburg. If Germany
and the Soviet Union still had the same friendly relations as they
used to, we could now dictate peace to the world, Tukhachevskii
is said to have uttered, according to notes made by a German
diplomat, and then expressed his great hope that Germany and
the Soviet Union will nd each other again.45 This was the same
Tukhachevskii who, only six months before in a sensational Pravda
article, had painted German rearmament in the most alarming
colours and branded it as a danger to world peace.46
Moscows leadership now started a dual-track, half-open, half-
secret probing and lobbying policy between Germany and the
Western powers which ultimately culminated in the Hitler-Stalin pact
of August 1939, followed by the frontier and friendship agreement
of September that year, with its many subsequent contracts up to
1941. Unlike before 1933, however, there was no longer any feel-
ing of trust between the two partners. The only political basis was
Germanys position of power on the European continent after
military victories over Poland and France which made the German
Reich and the Soviet Union immediate territorial neighbours and
demanded contractual clarication of their relationship. What
happened now was what politicians and the military could only
dream of during the Weimar Republic era: the joint revision of the
last territorial Versailles relics by way of military force.
This phase, lasting a good twenty months, changed abruptly into
a German war of aggression and extermination on 22 June 1941
a war which is still unique in history. Adolf Hitler pointed his
military tool, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, against the one
power which, by its willingness to cooperate with the political and
military revisionism of the Weimar Republic, had helped create the
basis for this tool.
Not the rst time, but never before in such a dramatic and
spectacular way, did history demonstrate that mutual state relations
only based on revisionist aims of power politics sooner or later
become a menace to peace an experience that may be a warning
not only for Germany and Russia but for the whole community of
nations.
The Strange Allies 115
Notes
also David Irving, Die Tragdie der Deutschen Luftwaffe. Aus den Akten
und Erinnerungen von Feldmarschall Erhard Milch (Frankfurt am Main:
Ullstein, 1975), p. 62.
12. See Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 19201933. Wege und
Stationen einer ungewhnlichen Zusammenarbeit (Munich: Oldenbourg,
1993), p. 22.
13. Ibid., pp. 223. The rst scholar from the GDR who dealt with the
topic in more detail was Gnter Rosenfeld, Sowjetunion und Deutschland
19221933 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984), pp. 26778. One of the
leading East German specialists on military history focused on the
theme, but not until the end of the GDR in 1989, see Olaf Groehler,
Selbstmrderische Allianz. Deutsch-russische Militrbeziehungen 19201941
(Berlin: Vision-Verlag, 1992).
14. Gerald Freund, Unholy Alliance. Russian-German Relations from the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk to the Treaty of Berlin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957);
Arthur L. Smith, The German General Staff and Russia, 19191926,
in Soviet Studies 8 (1956/57), pp. 12533.
15. Hans W. Gatzke, Russo-German Military Collaboration During the
Weimar Republic, in American Historical Review 63 (1958), pp. 565
97; John Erickson, The Soviet High Command. A Military-Political History
19181941 (London: Macmillan & Co, 1962); Francis L. Carsten, The
Reichswehr and Politics 1918 to 1933 (London: Oxford UP, 1966). See
also G.H. Stein, Russo-German Military Collaboration: The Last
Phase, 1933, in Political Science Quarterly 72 (1962), pp. 5471.
16. The following are a collection of Russian works, articles and doc-
uments on the topic from the last decade: B.M. Orlov, V poiskakh
soiuznikov: Komandovanie Krasnoi Armii i problemy vneshnei
politiki SSSR v 30-ch godakh, in Voprosy istorii, 1990, 4, pp. 4053;
A.A. Akhtamzian, Voennoe sotrudnichestvo SSSR i Germanii
19201933 gg., in Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 1990, 5, pp. 324; S.A.
Gorlov, Sovetsko-germanskoe voennoe sotrudnichestvo v 19201933
godakh (vpervye publikuemye dokumenty), in Mezhdunarodnaia
zhizn, 1990, 6, pp. 10724; idem, Moskva-Berlin, 19201933 gg. Voenno-
politicheskie otnosheniia mezhdu SSSR i Germaniei i stanovlenie sovetskoi
voennoi derzhavy v period Rapallo. Dissertatsiia na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni
kandidata istoricheskikh nauk (Moscow: MGIMO MID RF, 1993); S.A.
Gorlov and S.V. Ermachenkov, Voenno-uchebnye tsentry Reikhsvera
v Sovetskom Soiuze, in Voenno-istorichskii zhurnal, 1993, 6, pp.
3944, 7, pp. 414, 8, pp. 3642; S.A. Misanov and V.V. Zacharov,
Voennoe sotrudnichestvo SSSR i Germanii v 19211933 gg. (Moscow:
Voenno-politicheskaia Akademiia, 1991); V.V. Zacharov, Voennye
aspekty vzaimootnoshenii SSSR i Germanii 1921iiun 1941 gg. (Moscow:
Gumanitarnaia Akademiia Vooruzhennykh Sil, 1992); Iu.L. Diakov
and T.S. Busueva, Fashitskii mech kovalsia v SSSR: Krasnaia Armiia
i Reikhsver. Tainoe sotrudnichestvo 19221933. Neizvestnye dokumenty
The Strange Allies 117
(Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1972), British edition: The Red Army and
the Wehrmacht. How the Soviets Militarized Germany, 192233, and Paved
the Way for Fascism (Loughton: Prometheus Books, 1995); Reichswehr
und Rote Armee. Dokumente aus den Militrarchiven Deutschlands und
Rulands 19251931, ed. by F.P. Kahlenberg, R.G. Pikhoia and L.V.
Dvoinykh (Koblenz: Bundesarchiv, 1995); N.E. Eliseeva, Nemtsy
veli i budut vesti dvoinuiu politiku. Reikhsver glazami komandirov
Krasnoi Armii, in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1997, 2, pp. 308.
17. Karl Radek, Die Auswrtige Politik Sowjet-Rulands (Hamburg: Carl
Hoym Nachf., 1921), p. 73.
18. Quoted in Friedrich v. Rabenau, Seeckt. Aus seinem Leben 19181936
(Leipzig: v. Hase & Koehler, 1941), p. 252.
19. Hans Meier-Welcker, Seeckt (Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe,
1967), pp. 2945.
20. Quoted in Helmut Grieser, Die Sowjetpresse ber Deutschland in Europa
19221932. Revision von Versailles und Rapallo-Politik in sowjetischer Sicht
(Stuttgart: Klett, 1970), p. 167.
21. Zeidler, Reichswehr, p. 46.
22. Ibid., pp. 708. See also Rolf-Dieter Mller, Das Tor zur Weltmacht. Die
Bedeutung der Sowjetunion fr die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Rstungspolitik
zwischen den Weltkriegen (Boppard: Boldt, 1984), pp. 11036.
23. Ibid., pp. 8997; Olaf Groehler and Helmut Erfurth, Hugo Junkers.
Ein politisches Essay (Berlin: Militrverlag der DDR, 1989), pp. 28
42. Almost the same happened with the other prominent partner
of the German military, the specialist for chemical warfare and
disciple of Fritz Haber, Hugo Stoltzenberg; see Rolf-Dieter Mller,
Die deutschen Gaskriegsvorbereitungen 19191945. Mit Giftgas zur
Weltmacht?, in Militrgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 27 (1980), pp. 269.
24. Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 171207.
25. Geyer, Aufrstung, pp. 1935; see also idem, Deutsche Rstungspolitik
18601980 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 1317.
26. Manfred Lachmann, Zu Problemen der Bewaffnung des imperialistischen
deutschen Heeres (19191939) (Leipzig: Ph.D. dissertation, 1965), pp.
801.
27. See Geyer, Aufrstung, pp. 199200; H. Sperling, Rolle und Funk-
tion des Heereswaffenamts beim ersten Rstungsprogramm der
Reichswehr, in Militrgeschichte 23 (1984), pp. 30512; Michael Geyer,
Das Zweite Rstungsprogramm (19301934), in Militrgeschichtliche
Mitteilungen 17 (1975), pp. 12572.
28. Werner Beitel and Jrgen Ntzold, Deutsch-sowjetische Wirtschafts-
beziehungen in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Baden-Baden: Nomos,
1979), pp. 6573.
29. W. Link, Amerika, die Weimarer Republik und Sowjetruland, in
Der Westen und die Sowjetunion, Gottfried Niedhart (ed.) (Paderborn:
Schoeningh, 1983), pp. 79104 (quotation, p. 94).
118 Manfred Zeidler
119
120 Peter Jahn
Wehrmacht was the assertion that they had known little or nothing
of the criminal plans and actions, let alone taken part in them.
A deep gap between the Nazi leadership and the Wehrmacht was
built up, an idea which was seemingly proved by the bitter struggle
between Hitler and the generals about operational and later even
tactical questions. This view was supported by an impressive number
of purely military accounts of the war in the East written by former
generals under the direction of Franz Halder and commissioned
by the Historical Division of the US Forces. At that stage, cold war
military expertise was more important than military ethos.
But even among the weak West German left there were strong
tendencies to deny the part ordinary people had played in the Nazi
regime. In an intellectual magazine called Der Ruf Alfred Andersch
was outspoken about the generals role as war criminals, but cleared
the soldiers of all charges, as they had to obey.
So we nd memoirs written by former generals, and purely mil-
itary accounts, as the rst uncensored publications on the War in
early 1950s Germany. Ten years later popular historiography of
the war in the East reached a peak with Paul Schmidts (a former
press ofcer in Ribbentrops Ministry of Foreign Affairs) book
Unternehmen Babarossa published under the pen name Carell. This
book, of which several hundred thousand copies had been sold by
the 1990s, has strongly inuended the popular image of the war in
the East.
In the course of the 1950s more and more autobiographical
accounts of that war, and of the time as prisoners of war, appeared.
It is remarkable how many doctors and clergymen were among the
authors. This does not tell us anything about the quality of these
books, but it does tell us something about the emotional needs of
the reading public. In retrospect, people preferred to be reminded
of the sensitive doctor or clergyman, able to help body and soul,
rather than of the armed soldier entering a foreign country as an
enemy. Taking into account that around 10 million German and
Austrian soldiers fought in the East, of whom at the most 3 million
were taken prisoner, the fact that 50 per cent of all publications
deal with captivity is in need of an explanation.
The Second World War played an important role in ction, espe-
cially in the popular mass literature of the 1950s, and it is the war in
the East that is the central subject. Individual authors Bauer, Kirst
and Konsalik, for example achieved print runs of up to a million.
Interestingly enough the genres of autobiographical and ctional
124 Peter Jahn
always been a Jew. Now the term Asiatic served a similar purpose,
thereby of course again taking up Nazi stereotypes. For a majority
of Germans the negative stereotype of Bolshevist-Asiatic hordes
threatening Europe was seemingly conrmed by the painful
experience of excesses of violence committed by uncontrolled
Red Army soldiers in the last months of the War, by contact with
Stalinist repression and by hunger suffered in Soviet prisoner-of-
war camps.
To what extent these images made public in texts and lms re-
ected the images people had in their minds cannot of course
be assessed exactly, as we have to acknowledge huge differences
in the indiviual attitudes. The few public opinion polls though
that of Sodhi and Bergius of 1953 and those of Wolf in 1959 and
1964 show basically the same results. Sodhi and Bergius list as
the seven Russian qualities named most often: brutal when drunk,
unpredictable, primitive, loving their home country, modest, cruel
and kind to children. The list continues again named by more
than 50 per cent with stubborn, lacking individuality, instinctive,
dirty. At least later polls show that the very emotional, very hostile
classications gure less prominently.
The view of the war in the East as outlined here, a view formed in
the 1950s that saw the war as a defence of the German population,
that saw atrocities almost exclusively on the Soviet side, that saw
German soldiers as well as civilians only as victims, a view that, with
only minor modications, kept using the old, deadly image of the
enemy, of the primitive, barbaric Russians this view could lead to
the assumption that Germans at the time generally still adhered to
Nazi ideology, since the conquest of Lebensraum and the annihila-
tion of Jewish Bolshevism were central elements of this ideology.
Although a lot of what had happened between 1933 and 1945
was played down and whitewashed, the criminal character of the
Nazi dictatorship and the fact that it had ruined the German state
were widely accepted, above all in the political sphere, but by and
large with most of the people, too. But of the regime that had to be
criticized, the war in the East was cut off and so the things people
had done in this war could be regarded as justied.
The majority realized that the Nazi leaders had been criminals,
but in the East Germany had been defended, so the war should
have been won. A substantial majority of Germans therefore saw
themselves as victims of both the Nazis and the Soviets, the latter
being worse.
Facing the Ostfront 127
and the unions. The change in the attitude to the War became
very obvious with President von Weizsckers speech on the 40th
anniversary of the German capitulation. Conservative Weizscker
carefully considered Germanys military and political defeat and
then characterized it in spite of all the losses and pain as lib-
eration, as the only chance for a new beginning that could not have
been achieved alone. The vigorous protest of conservative circles
also showed that his position was not a common one.
In 1991 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the German
assault on the Soviet Union, a documentary exhibition was shown in
Berlin that for the rst time presented the ndings of professional
historiography on the War and on the various complexes of crimes
in the East to a wider public. The positive reactions even in the
conservative press could be taken as an indication that the war in
the East was now seen as an essential part of Nazi crimes. Further
development seemed to conrm this assumption. The exhibition
turned out to be a forerunner of a museum in Berlin-Karlshorst that
became the rst permanent institution to remember this war and
its crimes. In the euphoric early 1990s the museum was founded in
1995 as a joint venture between the Federal Republic of Germany
and the Russian Federation, so far a unique project.
Also in 1995, a privately initiated exhibition, A war of annihila-
tion, crimes of the Wehrmacht, opened and was positively received
in Hamburg and Berlin. It was not considered sensational though,
as it presented in its centre the participation of the military in
a quite simplied way a statement that was taken as a starting
point rather than as a result in the academic discussion as well as
in the aforementioned exhibitions. But the provocation suceeded
in other places where the exhibition was shown and polarized the
public, so that the Wehrmachts part in Nazi crimes became an
issue for a broader discussion. On the one hand this (and later the
subsequent totally revised version) confronted a large number of
people with hard facts. For the majority the idea of the Wehrmacht
staying clean was no longer acceptable. But on the other hand
the exhibition, with its intention to polarize, has made a number of
conservatives, who had started to see things more critically, go back
to their old positions claiming that the Wehrmacht had fought an
honourable war, defending Germany against communism. The
controversy stabilized this position for a minority.
The survival of this kind of memory is a receding problem. It is
more difcult now to make people realise the dimension of the
Facing the Ostfront 131
133
134 Viktor Krieger
time and the message was also treated as signicant by the media.
However, a rational public debate was missing, which often lead to
such name-calling as rst bandit Hitler, fascist band of murderers,
Hitler, the black blooded dragon, fascist cannibals, the Hitler
group, gone mad from blood and Mein Kampf, the Bible of the
cannibals. This kind of vocabulary had already become established
in the mainstream of Soviet society during the 1930s through the
process of exposure and of banishing the Trotskyites along with
other supposed peoples enemies, and thus it was brought back in
the rst days of the War for contemporary propaganda purposes.
1. The acts of war on the Dnestr have proven that the German pop-
ulation 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
Because the registration of the Germans in the town of Tula did not
occur with the involvement of the military authority, an undercover
operation to track down all the Germans currently resident in the
town and territory is being carried out with the help of the housing
department. On top of that the same work is also being done by
special departments in industry and in the authorities [. . .] and by the
undercover informants of the operative department of the NKVD. This
work should be nished by 27 September this year [1941].23
Over the next few months the exile of other groups of the German
population, who did not enjoy the status of autonomy for
example, from the Ukraine, the Trans and North Caucasus, from
the towns of Moscow or Gorkii followed as a result of the secret
decision taken by the state committee for defence (Gosudarstvennyi
Komitet Oborony GKO), on the orders of the Council of Peoples
Commissars, under the command of the NKVD and the various
war councils of the individual army fronts. The complete German
operation was carried out under a press and publicity blackout.
According to ofcial gures, by the end of 1941, 799,459 people had
been resettled from the European territories of the Soviet Union
to Kazakhstan and Siberia, including 444,115 Volga Germans.24
140 Viktor Krieger
The central library of the ASSR of the Volga Germans was dis-
solved in a similar fashion. The library, founded in 1918, also
housed alongside the scientic, educational and aesthetic literature
in German, Russian, French and other European languages,
testimonials of the history and culture of the Volga Germans and
other geographical groups of Germans in Russia and the USSR. A
considerable number of these books, which were collected over
many years, were destroyed due to inappropriate storage; selected
works were conscated. About 3,500 valuable publications, mainly in
Western European languages from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries were selected in 1943 by a delegation from the University
of Saratov to be taken to their academic library. A further part of
the collection, which had no direction connection to the German
Russians, was strewn across the country in different libraries in an
attempt to top up their foreign language sections. Books with the
stamp of the central republic library of the ASSRVG in Engels, can
be found in the state libraries of Moscow and St Petersburg, in
lending libraries in Volograd, Karaganda, Novosibirsk, Almaty and
dozens of other towns.31
142 Viktor Krieger
head ofce for political propaganda for the Red Army, L. Mekhlis,
which on 10 December 1941 ordered the replacement of the
slogan Workers of all Countries, Unite with Death to the German
Occupiers in all military newspapers. He justied this change by
claiming that the international proletarian slogan had disorientated
many in the armed forces in the face of the assignment to destroy
all German occupiers.50
The immense suffering of the civilians and the complete destruc-
tion of areas around Moscow, which became apparent upon their
rst recapture during the ght for Moscow, immeasurably increased
Germanophobic hysteria in the mass media. On the whole, however,
the destruction was the result of merciless Soviet war policy. On
17 November 1941 Stalin ordered, in command No. 0428 from
the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander, the destruction
of all human settlements and housing within a 40-60 km radius
of the German front. The arsonist commandos, who were formed
especially for this purpose, began with a systematic destruction of
the basics for survival, so that the German conquerors should freeze
under the open skies. On 25 November the operatives of the Fifth
Soviet Army alone reported the destruction and burning of fty-
ve settlements.51 The concerns of the Soviet population who fell
under the German occupation were not taken into consideration:
The Soviet arithmetic is simple to send one German and with
him a hundred Russians to ruin is a heroic action. But if one spares
the life of one German along with a hundred Russians that is bad;
that amounts to treason.52
Molotovs diplomatic notes of 25 November 1941, On the out-
raging bestialities practised on Soviet prisoners of war by German
authorities, and of 6 January 1942, On the general plundering,
the thefts from the population and the dreadful bestialities of the
German authorities in the territories under their occupation, in-
creased the countrys desire for pogroms. The main aim of the
Soviet mass media was the propagation of hate against the enemy
within as programmatically announced by the famous author
Aleksei Tolstoi in a Pravda appeal on 28 July 1941. Supporting him
in this regard were a whole host of famous authors, such as Leonid
Leonov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Ilia Erenburg, Konstantin Simonov et
al. Poems such as Simonovs Kill him or Surkovs I hate obviously
served to raise ghting lust in the troops. Ilia Erenburgs pamphlets
and articles even described the Englishman Alexander Werth,
not particularly known for his sympathy towards the Germans, as
nothing short of propaganda for a race war.53
148 Viktor Krieger
From 1945 and 1946, the labour columns were steadily disband-
ed and members of the German special contingent were transfer-
red to the permanent staff of rms or construction companies
where they had been employed during the War. They still did not,
however, enjoy the same rights as normal Soviet citizens and were
instead given the status of special settler as were almost all of
the remaining Germans in Siberia or Kazakhstan. If their nances
permitted, their families were allowed to join them. Or, if their
managers and the special commander agreed, they could return to
the place from whence they had come.
Conclusion
laid and tested during the War. The fate of the Russian Germans
clearly shows that the Soviet totalitarian regime was fully able to
embrace racist measures of suppression, despite internationalist lip
service and the rhetoric of class struggle.
Notes
7. Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 4: Der Angriff auf
die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 7812; Bogdan Musial,
Konterrevolutionre Elemente sind zu erschieen. Die Brutalisierung des
deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941 (Berlin and Munich, 2000),
pp. 2009; Alfred M. de Zayas, Die Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle.
Dokumentation alliierter Kriegsverbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 7th
expanded edn (Munich, 2001), pp. 32735.
8. A. Kokurin, N. Petrov, GULag: struktura i kadry. Statia deviataia,
in Svobodnaia mysl 5, 2000, pp. 10924, here p. 110; Evakuatsiia
zakliuchennykh iz tiurem NKVD SSSR v 1941-42 godakh, in Voenno-
istoricheskii arkhiv 2, 1997, pp. 23253, here p. 252.
9. Pravda, 14 July 1941.
10. A selection of documents from the investigation is to be found in
Vernite mne svobodu. Deiateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii
zhertvy stalinskogo terrora. Memorialnyi sbornik dokumentov iz arkhivov
byvshego KGB (Moscow, 1997), pp. 30420.
11. Wir nehmen an ihnen Rache fr dich, Genosse!, in Nachrichten
(Engels) No. 203, 29 August 1941; David Wagner, Das Komso-
molmitgliedsbuch Nr. 12535944, in Bis zum letzten Atemzug, vol. 2
(Alma-Ata, 1972), pp. 17181.
12. Quoted from B. Nikolaevskii, Tainye stranitsy istorii (Moscow, 1995),
p. 204.
13. E. Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke. Istoricheskii opyt Rossii
(Moscow, 1999), pp. 26379.
14. A typical example is the wordplay of the title in the main article
Besposhchadno istrebliat fashistskoe zvere, in Pravda, 3 January
1942.
15. After heavy defeat during the First World War, in mid June 1915,
10,000 Russian citizens of German and Jewish descent from the
Baltic States, Poland, Volynia and the Ukraine were accused of
collaboration with the advancing German and Austro-Hungarian
troops and forcibly resettled by their governments at the suggestion
of the military authority. Cf. Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im
Zarenreich (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 5079; S. Nelipovich, Nemetskuiu
pakost uvolit i bez nezhnostei . . . Deportatsii v Rossii 19141918
gg., in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1997, 1, pp. 4253; Frank Schuster,
Der Krieg an der inneren Front. Deutsche und Juden im westrussischen
Kriegsgebiet whrend des Ersten Weltkriegs 19141916, MA thesis
(University of Gieen, s.a.), available online: http://www.uni-giessen.
de/~g814/Schuster.html
16. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1990, 9, p. 195; in German in Alfred Eisfeld and
Victor Herdt (eds), Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee: Deutsche
in der Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1956 (Cologne, 1996), pp. 545.
17. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine,
Vol. 2, book 1: 22 iiunia 31 avgusta 1941. Sbornik dokumentov
(Moscow, 2000), p. 521.
Patriots or Traitors? 159
165
166 Elke Scherstjanoi
German Prosperity
On the one hand, the letters indicate that there were soldiers who
had scruples; others found enemy belongings simply repulsive. But
in many cases, it was real necessity which drove the soldiers to rag-
collecting and looting. The Soviet Union was in desperate need
of supplies, and many soldiers immediately thought of sending
packages home. By 1945 these, in addition to the soldiers meagre
incomes, would become one of the most important sources of new
products for families.9 Most desirable were durable, pretty textiles
and luxury foodstuffs which had become rare. The kolkhozes had
barely even seen black tea during the war; coffee and chocolate
were unattainable.
The Red Army soldiers voracity for representative booty, and
also for rare products and simple items for daily use is therefore
explicable. More difcult to explain is the almost reckless way
they helped themselves. As they continued their advance through
Germany, the soldiers made an increasing number of comparisons.
They came to urban, and therefore wealthier, regions which
had, admittedly, suffered much greater damage but at the same
time, they met large numbers of German refugees. Here they also
discovered poverty, for example by looking at the others footwear.
One captain and party organizer wrote to his wife at the end of
March 1945: The whole of Germany is walking on wooden soles.
This footwear with wooden soles is not even only for indoors, they
are also shoes for going out. And if it isnt wooden soles, then some
sort of substitute. You meet this substitute at every turn. And he
notices that: The majority of Germans are starving, in the true
sense of the word. They are living from paltry rations and have
absolutely no way of getting anything else. But this sort of message
was an exception in the letters. And such observations apparently
rarely led to feelings of sympathy among the soldiers in early
1945.
Some questions about the perceptions of German wealth remain
unanswered. The analysis of individual views does, however, move
the focus towards contexts which have thus far been neglected. It
suggests that certain attitudes were set in place by the almost un-
impeded access to strangers personal effects in the rst days of the
conquest of German territory, which had dramatic effects on the
numerous subsequent encounters with the German population.
At this later stage, not only unclaimed possessions were taken, but
goods were forcibly stolen and people were coerced into handing
them over. The characters with this predisposition irrespective of
174 Elke Scherstjanoi
German Scenery
I know that its hot where you are, spring is on its way, sowing time is not
far off. Here, spring is well under way. The trees are sprouting, the grass
is getting green on the pastures and roads, the winter grain on the elds
is like velvet. You can hear the birds cooing in the grove all day long.
The evenings are wonderful, warm and quiet. Soon the lilac will bloom.
Thats what its like here in May. But, you know, Zhenia, spring doesnt
have the same effect on people here as it does at home. Everything is
different.
it was also the rst time they had ever left their home regions.
Someone who had been at the front a long time had seen a lot
of Otherness. Unfortunately, the letters discovered here offer no
way of differentiating between the perceptions of a soldier with
more experiences of the Other, and a young recruit who went
directly to enemy territory from his home. The accounts in the
letters are generally too meagre to be able to formulate from them
culturally specic questions regarding the perception of Germany
as an-Other world (from an apolitical perspective). By and large,
descriptions of German scenery, towns and details of settlements
found their way into the correspondence of the particularly keen
and experienced writers.
Nevertheless, unprejudiced observations of even apolitical issues
were difcult. The enemy villages were, at rst, not only different
but distasteful. It was the same time as the loud calls for retribu-
tion. An observer who enjoys the view of ruined enemy settlements
will not develop much curiosity for its attractive features. Every-
thing here, beginning with the earth itself and nishing with the
planted forests, the houses, everything here is dismal, and calls
for retribution in the name of our home, according to one letter
of a volunteer, born 1913, who had gone from the Caucasus via
the Crimea and Ukraine to Eastern Prussia. And in another: How
foreign it all is here, the earth and the wood and even the sky. And
even the air seems different. It all smells like Prussia.
Only very slowly and with the increasing number of relatively
peaceful occasions for observation, did Red Army soldiers develop
the ability to discover unknown habitats and landscapes. Houses
made of stone, beautiful villas, tiled roofs, castles and palaces, the
Baltic Sea, beautiful mountain scenes. Every now and then they
discovered peculiarities of ordinary buildings: the construction
and function of cellars, the location of elds around the houses.
As soon as they were billeted, they could take a closer look. We
arent ghting now, wrote one twenty year old just before the end
of the War. Were near an old port, living in nice ats and in a very
civilized way, like in a health spa. The village, a town really, where
the owners of the urban factories and plants lived before us, is very
pretty. Instead of fences they have planted bushes, and theyre
interwoven so nice and tight that theyre much more secure than
a fence. In another letter, the same author writes: The houses
are made of stone and all are sinking in greenery. Climbing plants
are growing up the walls, and their pretty blossoms are blooming.
Vot ona prokliataia Germaniia! 177
There are also big trees growing along the streets. So, when you
walk along a road, its like walking through a tunnel.
The conquerors displayed fairly typical ways of perceiving for-
eign worlds, similar to those shown both for peacetime and also
for other more open peoples, more accustomed to travel: what
fascinates one person, repulses another. And so one soldier at the
end of March thought that
for the Russian eye this kind of life is boring, it just about suits the
Germans; its not for us. The roofs are dull, high and pointed. Or take
the animals: there are only colourful cows. The houses are all alike [. . .].
What else: the roads are good, the countryside is nice. But there is no
place for my soul here. It leaves me cold, and I say, let it be pretty all
around, the further I travel, the more I look with my heart back to you
and to Russia.
goods was soon joined by the theme of kitsch. Both themes led
to contempt and unrestrained destructiveness. Firstly, there was
the question often articulated in the letters of why these well-
off Germans had wanted to take the very last possessions from the
poorer Russians. From this perspective the destruction of German
living space could be seen as justied revenge.
The second aspect was a more general non-military phen-
omenon of encountering the Other: the foreign culture is
ridiculed. But also in this case the intruders aloof and arrogant
attitude had been drastically exacerbated by the War. Outbursts of
hatred were especially noticeable when the idiosyncratic, foreign
world suddenly exposed its militant side, for instance when angel
gurines and frills were discovered in German bedrooms next to
a portrait of the man of the house wearing his uniform.11 Hitherto
unknown items from the Western world, such as pornographic
pictures, often had a repellent effect. They aroused the curiosity of
many soldiers, but violated their sense of morality. The newspapers
and especially the magazines are full of pictures of naked men and
women in all sorts of poses and positions. Thats the most popular
literature, wrote one young captain and war correspondent to his
girlfriend in February. The extent of this rejection is not clear. But
there is no reason to attribute it to un-modern prudishness.
Overall, that the rst encounters with Germans was via their
abandoned homes seems only to have intensied the victors hatred.
This not only prolonged recognition of the enemys humanity, it
stimulated the kind of thoughts which made an understanding
more difcult. Even later, after the soldiers had made direct
contact with the inhabitants, they not only destroyed the foreign
furnishings, but also made a point of dirtying them with rubbish.
When the Red Army met German civilians, the latter found
themselves in a terrifying, hopeless situation, making them seem
even more abhorrent and repulsive. They seemed to be frightened,
hysterical, stupid, tired and often dirty gures. That the most
helpless among them as a rule were also the poorest was not
immediately clear, or relevant.
One letter from early February 1945 reads:
away all their possessions, leaving them behind in the houses they had
lived in peacefully just a few hours ago, not imagining that the wave
of war could reach them; believing war was a trip to foreign countries,
devastating for other peoples, bringing suffering for women and
children of any nationality, just not the German.
Their homes are burning, their possessions are in ruins, their cattle is
running around unsupervised, and they themselves are homeless. And
you want to say to every one of them: There, thats what you get for
making us suffer; thats what you get for the suffering of my family, and
hundreds of thousands of other families. And thats for the deaths of
many hundreds of thousands of Soviet people, for the deaths of our
wives and children, who you didnt regard as human, treated worse
than animals, and ruthlessly annihilated. You look at these monstrous
products of humanity with disgust, whether they are men, women
or children. The men were the direct executors of these crimes; the
women helped them, if not physically then morally, and the children
were preparing themselves to commit just these same crimes as their
fathers; considering themselves from birth onwards as something
superior. Theyre dragging themselves westward, not knowing whats
awaiting them, or where they will end up. They look pitiful, but there is
no sympathy for them.
At home many were waiting for exactly that news. You can feel the
satisfaction the Germans have now (at least here) understood
what war means, said another soldiers letter.
Here a central problem concerning the attitude towards the
enemy civilians is emerging: how much should one take revenge,
what do they deserve? The military leadership of the Red Army
spread the message that beating an old woman to death in the
back of beyond will not speed up Germanys downfall.12 Political
Vot ona prokliataia Germaniia! 181
Oh, how repulsive they all are. You cant imagine. Especially here in
Prussia. To understand it properly and feel it, you have to have seen
this land and these people. Dull and disgusting. On the outside human,
but really animals ready for real baseness. It could make you sick how
agreeable and servile, but its clear it is all an act, and the main thing is,
it is their cowardice that makes them like this.
The Germans are acting all humble towards us. This example shows
how far the German nature has fallen: [. . .] When a German woman
Vot ona prokliataia Germaniia! 183
was asked where any remaining German soldiers could be found, she
showed them where the Germans soldiers actually were. In general there
are, as well as the German spies, many who betray their own people. Of
course, there are also those who walk by and look away or down. You can
feel the helpless rage.
The old, the women and the children look at us in fear and with pleading
eyes. They feel their guilt towards us and beg for their lives. No, we dont
touch them, we dont ght them. We are just satised that they now
nd themselves in the same position that our people were in from 1941-
1942, and that they are frightened of us. Russian soldier is good they
say, as if from one script. Of course, if we dont kill them, which they
have earned after all, then were good.
But is it possible that the blind brutality of the avenger and the crimes
of the scoundrel can absolve, or even just slightly rehabilitate, those very
criminals whose terrible deeds led to the calls for revenge in the rst
place, and who supplied the very arguments used by the most merciless
preachers? Back then, in the winter of 1945, many in the army were just
as surprised and distressed as I was, and condemned the vengefulness
and other base instincts emerging from four years of war in a few soldiers
during our advance from the Volga to the Oder. As we also condemned
the cruel passions which pour out in the delirium of a victorious assault.
Many others countered the rape and plunder much more effectively
than did I.27
Notes
Naimark, in his book, also makes rape the central dominant problem
for The Russians in Germany.
22. The Russian ambassador in London reacted strongly to Antony
Beevors book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (London: Viking, 2002).
He was particularly opposed to the claim that Red Army personnel
had sexually assaulted the Russian women they had just freed from
concentration camps. Em Barban, Eshche odno padenie Berlina,
in Moskovskie Novosti, 1 July 2002, p. 14.
23. Although no serious institution in Germany questions the extent of
sexual crimes against German women at the end of the War, there
is no halt to efforts to document the number of women who were
raped. The exact number is apparently extremely important in
order to even begin to understand the dimensions of the social and
political ramications. (Sander and Johr, BeFreier, pp. 4673). None
of the calculations is methodically persuasive. The numbers game
contributes no new knowledge.
24. Such is Beevors argument, Berlin, p. 32.
25. Naimark, The Russians in Germany, p. 114.
26. This apparently appeared in a Soviet yer ascribed to Ilja Ehrenburg.
Lev Kopelev, contemporary and philologist wrote: I saw and read this
so-called Ehrenburg-Flyer for the rst time here in West Germany
after 1980 [. . .] It is a fairly primitive collation of various quotes from
Ehrenburgs wartime essays, plus several sentences (calls for murder,
for rape destroy the racial arrogance) which Ehrenburg could
not have written, neither morally nor linguistically; they are written
in such an atrocious Russian, and seem to have been translated from
another language. None of my acquaintances and comrades can
remember a yer of this sort. It seems that only the German troops
knew of its existence and it was probably an attempt by Goebbels
cadres to strengthen the Wehrmachts resistance. (Cited in Bernhard
Fisch, Ubej! Tte! Zur Rolle von Ilja Ehrenburgs Flugblttern 1944
45, in Geschichte-Erziehung-Politik, 1997, 1, p. 22).
27. Lev Kopelev, Chemu istoriia nauchila menia, in idem, O pravde i
terpimosti (New York: Khronika Press, 1982), pp. 516, here p. 6.
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JENS REICH
191
192 Jens Reich
Nearly every night we had people as guests for the night, who then
headed westwards. Once there was a boy, somewhat older than me
and therefore condescending, who told me pompously that they
were eeing from the Bolshevists, who would rape all the women.
It was the rst time I had heard the word Bolshevists and did not
know what raping was, but his description lled me with a deep
horror. Months later the impression I got was exactly the opposite.
It was after my father had been released from the army medical
corps, returned home and opened his practice. His consulting
room was inside our apartment. Patients used to wait in the hall.
I once saw a Russian ofcer there together with a gure under
a blanket. The ofcer was the interpreter, and when my mother
who helped as receptionist asked him why his comrade was hiding
under the blanket, the ofcer said, Hes got venereal disease hes
so ashamed. A rapists being ashamed a paradox!
Another incident, Mother stood and I stood in a long queue
outside the bakery awaiting the bread delivery when a Russian
Army patrol came past and approached a child sitting sideways in
a pram. The queue froze with fear. One of the soldiers, however,
tenderly stroked the childs hair and asked him with amiable
naivety (I can still hear it): Nu kak tebia zvat, milyi moi, Vitiok shto-
li? (He perhaps had a son by the name of Vitalii at home). The
queue relaxed and smiled not all Russians were as bad as their
reputation. However, some time later, a squad came into our home
and arrested my grandfather (who was seventy-ve) and took him
to a camp in Siberia. The reason for this is to this day unknown. He
died in the camp some time later of typhoid. An aunt of mine living
a few streets away was brutally raped and some months later gave
premature birth to a girl, who was severely handicapped and died as
a child. By contrast, months later again, when as a schoolboy I was a
passionate chess player, the teacher took our chess group to a match
with a soldiers team at the Soviet garrisons headquarters near the
town; we played in a tournament and were spoilt with candies.
Another more lasting inuence than these early recollections were
the regular visits to our at of a pensioner, a very old man, who had
lived a long time in Russia even before the revolution of 1917, and
kept an unbelievable number of boxes with index cards of Russian
words and Russian grammar. He liked to invite children and play
fascinating quiz shows, with Russian riddles, songs and sketches,
which I can still recall today. For me this made an early and deep
imprint of the Russian language and literature, and it shielded me
194 Jens Reich
Stalin annexed Eastern Poland in 1939. And yet our friend Michal
repeatedly asked me to speak English if we were together on public
transport. He felt uneasy speaking Russian, as the anti-Russian
sentiment was (and is) so widespread in his country and in Eastern
Europe in general. It sometimes borders on the ridiculous. I
remember a visit in Lithuania in the 1990s when I was invited to
a very joyous festivity of Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian)
universities, with wonderful costumes, brilliant vocal music and
the merry dances of the students. Those nations speak completely
different languages and young students as well as the dignitaries
addressed each other through the microphones in clumsy English,
although I am convinced that nearly all of them would have
understood Russian and could speak it uently, if not idiomatically
correct. Still more astonishing is the adamant refusal to speak
Russian in certain regions of mid-Asia or Trans-Caucasus. Stalin
forced the Cyrillic script on them (after Lenin, who introduced
the Latin alphabet) so that only specialists can now read the old
books and documents written in Persian or Arabic letters. Now the
new generation eagerly discards the Cyrillic script as well, and this
has the consequence that they have to start again. Many years ago
I visited the university library of Ulan-Bator in Outer Mongolia. It
consisted of thousands of volumes of Russian scientic literature
and of countless textbooks and review journals translated from the
English into Russian (the famous referativnye zhurnaly). Within a few
years nobody will be able to read modern technology in Cyrillic.
And for a long time they will not have the vital information in
their own new language, and hardly have enough money to buy
literature in English. Hopefully the Internet will be able help them,
but the renunciation of Russian seems to be irreversible.
It is sometimes asserted that the GDR period brought a renewed
close relationship between the Russian and German cultures. I
think this is a myth. There are certain intellectual circles that had
intimate connections, for instance several prominent writers. But
this was against backdrop of mutual non-awareness. The best Soviet
lms were shown and acknowledged over the years, but without
making a really lasting impression on what was produced at the
same time in Poland, Hungary or GDR (except perhaps in certain
intellectual circles I mean the lms by Tarkovskii, Riazanov,
Mikhalkov and others). The Russian avant-garde from pre-Stalinist
times was a historical phenomenon, and was not presented in the
ofcial representation of culture. Still more insignicant was the
200 Jens Reich
German-Russian Relations in
the Early Twenty-rst Century.
Some Reections on Normalcy
203
204 Klaus Segbers
98%
82%
55%
The fth and nal factor is the role of history. For decades,
historical legacies connected to the inter-war years and the Second
World War constituted signicant constraints formal and informal
on Germanys sovereignty and on actual foreign protocol. This
limitation was lifted only by the 4 plus 2 treaty in 1990.
But in the period before, and especially after, reunication, these
limits have been gradually disappearing. Germany is politically
sovereign though of course economically shaped by globalization
as are all other global actors. The consequences of German reun-
ication, feared by many, could almost be disregarded. No new
assertiveness has developed. While the country is still deeply
embroiled in domestic problems, partly related to reunication,
but also to demographic developments and to embedded social
brakes hampering adjustment to changing conditions, the actual
foreign policy turned out to be surprisingly pragmatic. This is a
case where the notorious word normalization really makes sense.
These ve factors and conditions produce a foreign policy
which is bound to be integrationist and institutionalist. Zivilmacht
corporatism the logic of being a trading state, the relevance of
non-state players and the consequences of reunication all point
in the same direction: it is real, and legitimate, to have particular
German interests. But they will be pursued primarily by working
in and through European and other institutions. In this regard,
it is not easy to identify Germanys specic concerns. Germanys
foreign policies are pretty much European.
Nevertheless, it is possible to attempt to list the relevant German
interests. First, and by far the most important, are European issues:
institutional reforms, enlargement embedded in a new institutional
setting, the stability pact although, even now, Germany is violating
it for the third year in a row. And managing and regulating migra-
tion, as an important all-European issue.
Second, and due to more or less common demographic trends
and to globalization, social systems health, pensions, and taxes
have to be reformed and adapted efciently, preferably in a
European context, to avoid intra-European competition (the race
to the bottom).
Third, the undeniable global role of the US has to be set into a
web of global institutions. This is not directed against US interests
per se. It is the result of Germanys positive experiences with rules
and institutions. And it is also a strategy of safeguarding against the
unilateral execution of dubious policies resting on unfounded and
unconrmed assumptions.
210 Klaus Segbers
Only when, and if, this conversion takes place possibly the most
important variable of transformations can one expect that reliable
forms of cooperation will appear, and that conditions will be ripe
for a relative increase in stability. No formal institutionalization for
a state based on the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) is conceivable with
short time horizons.
The result is, among other outcomes, an increasing degree of
saturation in most of the important groups of the business and
political elites. These groups are, in turn, becoming rather inter-
ested in securing in legal terms what they had previously
grabbed.
The visible tendencies toward longer time horizons and toward
stabilization found their expression in something which may be
called a new equilibrium, symbolized by Putin. Here, we dene
Putin rstly as a phenomenon signalling exactly this tendency,
then as a person. This new equilibrium signied by the Putin phen-
omenon produces a visible acceleration of institutional changes.
There was progress in central-federal relations, in the hardening
of budget constraints, in new tax and customs regulations, in the
new land code, and in the introduction of reforms in the banking
sector and the kommunalnoe khoziaistvo. By and large, we may expect
the continuation of institutional changes because they are in the
interests of the relevant political and economic players, and also of
the increasing middle class.
At the same time, these dominant tendencies toward stabiliza-
tion by no means indicate a political, economic and social develop-
ment free of conicts. There are always players who perceive
themselves as being treated unfairly. Unsatised groups are not
silent bystanders. This is especially dangerous when there are
signicant gaps between the political clout and the material base of
players, as is the case with many of the so-called siloviki. The Yukos
affair is a colourful demonstration of this.
So while the general tendency is still directed toward global
integration and internal stabilization, there is no guarantee that
the fragile boat will not be rocked by someone, and that the rocking
could not last for some time.
What does this mean for Russias external behaviour? First of
all, domestic concerns matter most. Foreign issues follow later,
rmly xed on back benches. By far the majority of the rhetoric
regarding the CIS, the integration of former Soviet states, unions
with Belarus and similar dark corners of the failed empire are for
domestic consumption. So they are certainly meaningful, serving
212 Klaus Segbers
Bilateral Relations
Conclusion
217
218 Index