Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Twentieth Century
Russian-German Special
Relations in the Twentieth
Century
A Closed Chapter?
Edited by
KARL SCHLGEL
www.bergpublishers.com
Contents
Editorial Preface
Timothy Garton Ash and Gerhard A. Ritter
vii
Contributors
ix
11
31
43
77
99
119
133
vi
Contents
165
191
203
Index
217
Editorial Preface
Gerhard A. Ritter
vii
Contributors
Contributors
Contributors
xi
KARL SCHLGEL
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 relations 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 without thought for the censors involvement. The ideological battles
are over, and the past is allowed to be as complex and complicated 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 impact 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 industrial 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?
Karl Schlgel
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 GermanRussian 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?
Bolshevism, Russia as Lebensraum and as Germanys India. Feelings of superiority over Russia and the Russians had a high likelihood of acceptance by the majority in Nazi Germany. There is
no other way, says Jahn, of explaining the systematic killing of
commissars, the starvation of millions of Soviet prisoners of war
and the treatment of workers from the East. Jahn also asks why it
took so long in post-war Germany basically until the Crimes of
the German Wehrmacht exhibition rst opened (1995) and until
the forced labour compensations had been settled to start to fully
address the crimes committed in the East. Certain clichs and
attitudes could, according to Jahn, live on after 1945, when they
were reactivated within the transformed cold war frame, and West
Germanys inclusion in the struggle against communism and remilitarization. A result of this, Jahn notes, is that there continue to
be gaps in current research pertaining to the war in the East.10
Viktor Krieger discusses a topic which could truly only be addressed with the aid of historical materials after the end of the Soviet
Union. The Russlanddeutsche (Germans from Russia), especially
along the Volga, were categorically, in one fell swoop, accused
of collaboration and disenfranchised. This had wide-reaching
consequences well into the post-war period. Krieger can demonstrate that the Soviet leadership quickly gave up their initial differentiation between Germans and Nazis and began the wholesale,
collective deportation of the roughly 800,000 collaborators: the
Russlanddeutschen. This was accompanied by the disintegration of
the rich cultural infrastructure, the destruction of the economic
base, and the total disenfranchisement and life-threatening discrimination.11
Elke Scherstjanoi studies what the soldiers of the Red Army,
mainly young men, saw, felt and interpreted for themselves
and their relatives on their advance into Germany. Against the
background of available research on the perception of German
soldiers in Russia, she inquires into the perceptions of the Red
Army soldiers which are specic to the war. Her analysis is based
on anecdotes, memoirs, letters, diaries such things also exist
in Russia. The chapter in this volume offers an interpretation of
around 300 letters. The soldiers were particularly impressed by
the prosperity in Germany, the good roads, the sewerage systems,
the tiled roofs of the farmhouses, the furnishings; and also by
the reports from those freed from Majdanek and other camps.
But there are accounts too of soldiers satised by the victory, the
Karl Schlgel
A Closed Chapter?
Karl Schlgel
Notes
1. References in Karin Bock (ed.), Sowjetische Forschungen (1917 bis 1991)
zur Geschichte der deutsch-russischen Beziehungen von den Anfngen bis
1949 (Berlin: Akademie, 1993). The most detailed reference list is
found in Gerd Koenens West-stliche Spiegelungen. Gerd Koenen and
Lew Kopelew (eds), Deutschland und die Russische Revolution 19171924
(Munich, 1998), pp. 827934.
2. Gerald Freund, Unholy Alliance. Russian-German Relations from the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk to the Treaty of Berlin (London, 1957); Sebastian Haffner,
A Closed Chapter?
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
10
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Karl Schlgel
(in Russian: Moscow, 2005); Karl Schlgel (ed.), Russische Emigration
in Deutschland 19181941. Leben im europischen Brgerkrieg (Berlin:
Akademie, 1995); Karl Schlgel, Katharina Kucher, Bernhard Suchy
and Gregor Thum, Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland 19181941
(Berlin: Akademie, 1999).
Carola Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung. Deutsche Emigranten im
sowjetischen Exil 1933 bis 1945 (Mnster: Lit, 1996).
Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee. 19201933. Wege und
Stationen einer ungewhnlichen Zusammenarbeit (Munich: Oldenburg,
1993). Idem, Das Bild der Wehrmacht von Ruland und der Roten
Armee zwischen 1933 und 1939, in Hans-Erich Volkmann, Das
Russlandbild im Dritten Reich (Cologne, Weimar, Wien: Bhlau, 1994),
pp. 10524; Olaf Groehler, Selbstmrderische Allianz. Deutsch-russische
Militrbeziehungen 19201941 (Berlin, 1992).
Peter Jahn and Reinhard Rrup (eds), Erobern und Vernichten. Der
Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 19411945 (Berlin, 1991). For more on the
image of Russia in the Third Reich, cf. Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.),
Das Rulandbild im Dritten Reich. Gerd R. Ueberschr and Wolfram
Wette (eds), Der deutsche berfall auf die Sowjetunion. Unternehmen
Barbarossa 1941, (Frankfurt/Main, 1991); Omer Bartov, The Eastern
Front, 19411945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (New
York: St. Martins Press, 1986).
Alfred Eisfeld and Victor Herdt (eds), Deportation, Sondersiedlung,
Arbeitsarmee: Deutsche in der Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1956 (Cologne,
1996).
Elke Scherstjanoi (ed.), Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland. Briefe
von der Front (1945) und historische Analysen (Munich, 2004).
See the autobiographical sketch by Jens Reich, Wenn der Staat
bestimmt, in Kursbuch 148 (June 2002).
For more on post-Soviet contexts, cf. Klaus Segbers and Stephan de
Spiegeleire (eds), Post-Soviet Puzzles. Mapping the Political Economy of
the Former Soviet Union, vols 1-4 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1995).
DITTMAR DAHLMANN
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
13
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
15
16
Dittmar Dahlmann
The two worlds Russian and German industrialists met outside the business world, mostly in the clubs. The two most famous
and most prestigious in Moscow were the English club (angliiskii
klub) and the merchants club (kupecheskii klub). The English club
was the most distinguished, noble and elegant one on Moscows
main street, the Tverskaia; the merchants club was close to the
club of the nobility in Bolshaia Dmitrovka. Club life was the realm
of men: dining, playing cards, reading and of course discussing
business were the main activities in the clubs. Women were only
admitted for social events: balls and social gatherings.24
Shortly before the turn of the twentieth-century sports clubs
became fashionable among Russian and German entrepreneurs:
rst horse-riding and lawn tennis, and later car racing. Hunting
was another activity that both worlds shared, fox-hunting in
particular.25
The growing integration of the second and third generation
of Germans in Russia was manifested in the interest they had for
Russian theatre, music and literature. The younger generations
were more familiar with Russian authors Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and
Gorkii than with German ones. They admired the productions of
Konstantin Stanislavskii at the Moscow Artist theatre, together with
Russian ballet, music and painting.26
This world of culture is closely related to another eld that
German and Russian entrepreneurs shared the patronage of art
in general. Though more common among the Russian industrial
elite, their German counterparts also nanced literature, theatre,
music and painting.27
In the next part of this chapter I will describe the career of a
German entrepreneur in Moscow, namely Ludwig Baron Knoop,
one of the most successful German industrialists in Russia in the
second half of the nineteenth century, mentioned already at the
beginning of the chapter. His personal success story may seem
extraordinary, but there are at least another fty German entrepreneurs who were similarly crowned with success.
Ludwig Knoop began his career in Manchester in the 1830s in
the de Jersey Company, which was partly owned by two of his uncles,
before going to Moscow in 1840 as a representative of the rm.
In 1843 he married the daughter of a Baltic-German merchant in
Moscow and four years later Ludwig managed to complete his rst
big deal when in 1847 he sold a fully equipped textile factory to Savva
Morozov, one of the richest and most inuential entrepreneurs in
17
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 Russians 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 partnership 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
19
20
Dittmar Dahlmann
21
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 gatherings 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 SocialistRevolutionaries 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
23
24
Dittmar Dahlmann
25
Notes
1. I will not deal with the long discussion about the concept of culture
and cultural history (Kulturgeschichte). It is different in the Germanand 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
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
27
28
Dittmar Dahlmann
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
29
30
Dittmar Dahlmann
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
GERD KOENEN
On the evening of 21 June 1941 John Colville, private secretary to Winston Churchill, noted that Churchill again and again
repeated what a pleasure it was to see Germany and Russia nally
ghting one another; and that this was perhaps the happiest evening
of his life. That pleasure was of course perfectly understandable
because at that time Britain stood with her back against the wall.
But it is interesting that Churchill did not speak about Hitler and
Stalin, or Nazism and Bolshevism, but about Germany and Russia.
So it was not just an acute danger but a longstanding nightmare
from which he was released.
What were the main motives which resulted in Barbarossa? In
German history after the Second World War, it has become quite
commonplace to regard Hitlers Ostraumpolitik and its racist practices of enslavement and extermination of the so-called Slavic
subhumans (Untermenschen) as a culminating point in a longestablished tradition of Russophobia and Slavophobia, which after
the 1917/18 revolution appeared to merge with the new tendencies
of anti-Bolshevism, sharpened by a virulent anti-Semitism directed
mainly against Jewish Bolshevism. Thus Russophobia, antiBolshevism and anti-Semitism are widely regarded as a natural or
logical triad.
In this respect liberal- or left-minded German historians generally share the same perspective, as for example Ernst Nolte,
who constructed his notorious causal nexus between the rise of
Nazism to power in Germany 1933 and the acute moods of antiBolshevism, Russophobia and anti-Semitism after 1917.
31
32
Gerd Koenen
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 professor for Russian history at Berlin University, Theodor Schieman
believed that these tendencies of Russophobia had been systematically 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
35
36
Gerd Koenen
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 wartime, 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
37
38
Gerd Koenen
39
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 conservativism, 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
41
42
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
44
Karl Schlgel
45
46
Karl Schlgel
47
48
Karl Schlgel
49
50
Karl Schlgel
51
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 donations, 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
53
54
Karl Schlgel
55
Long after Russian Berlin had passed its zenith, churches reminded 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 organizations 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
57
58
Karl Schlgel
59
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 revolutionary 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 GermanRussian 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 AvalovBermondt, 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
61
62
Karl Schlgel
63
64
Karl Schlgel
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
65
66
Karl Schlgel
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 Russophile 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).
67
Notes
1. First published in German in Karl Schlgel (ed.), Der groe Exodus:
Die russische Emigration und ihre Zentren 1917 bis 1941 (Munich: Beck,
1994), pp. 23459, 40711 (notes). English version see Yearbook of
European Studies, 13 (1999), pp. 23565; translated by Keith Bullivant
and Geoffrey Giles.
2. The St Petersburg female writers Vera Lure and Tatiana Gzovskaia
come to mind, as does the late Nina Berberova.
3. Written entirely from eyewitness accounts: Hans von Rimscha, Der
russische Brgerkrieg und die russische Emigration 19171921 (Jena:
Frommann, 1924) and von Rimscha, Ruland jenseits der Grenzen. 1921
1926. Ein Beitrag zur russischen Nachkriegsgeschichte (Jena: Frommann,
1927). From a historical point of view: Hans-Erich Volkmann, Die
russische Emigration in Deutschland. 19191929 (Wrzburg: Holzner,
1966). Still unmatched in breadth and wealth of material: Robert C.
Williams, Culture in Exile. Russian Emigrs in Germany, 18811941 (Ithaca,
68
4.
5.
6.
7.
Karl Schlgel
New York, London: Cornell University Press, 1972). Fundamental for
certain aspects: Walter Laqueur, Deutschland und Ruland (Berlin:
Propylen, 1965). Recent, with important source material: Bettina
Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim: Russische Emigranten in
Deutschland von 1918 bis 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern: Lang,
1993).
Lazar Fleishman (ed.), Russkii Berlin 19211923. Po materialam archiva
B. I. Nikoaevskogo v Guverovskom institute (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983);
Fritz Mierau (ed.), Russen in Berlin 19181933. Eine kulturelle Begegnung
(Weinheim, Berlin: Quadriga, 1988).
Franz Basler, Die deutsch-russische Schule in Berlin. 19311945. Geschichte
und Auftrag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983); Klaus Wiese, Von der
Emigrantenschule zur nationalsozialistischen deutschen Ostschule (Berlin,
1986); Michaela Bhmig, Das russische Theater in Berlin 19191931
(Munich: Sagner, 1990); Thomas R. Beyer jr., Gottfried Kratz and
Xenia Werner, Russische Autoren und Verlage in Berlin nach dem ersten
Weltkrieg (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag Spitz, 1987); Claudia Scandura, Das
Russische Berlin 19211924: Die Verlage, in Zeitschrift fr Slawistik
32 (1987), 5, pp. 75462, and eadem, Das russische Berlin 1921
1923: Die Zeitschriften, in Zeitschrift fr Slawistik 33 (1988), 4, pp.
51522; Alexander Schwarz, Russische Emigranten im deutschen
Film: Fallstudien zu Josif Ermolev und Ivan Mozuchin, in Wiener
Slawistischer Almanach 30 (1992), pp. 15395; on the Russian Scientic
Institute cf. Gabriele Camphausen, Die wissenschaftliche historische
Rulandforschung in Deutschland 18931933 (Frankfurt am Main, New
York: Lang, 1990); Gerd Voigt, Otto Hoetzsch 18761946. Wissenschaft
und Politik im Leben eines deutschen Historikers (Berlin: Akademie, 1978);
on the church Kte Gaede, Russische Orthodoxe Kirche in Deutschland in
der ersten Hlfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Stenone, 1985); Gernot
Seide, Die Geschichte der Russischen Orthodoxen Kirche im Ausland von der
Grndung bis in die Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983).
Particularly informative are: Roman Gul, Ia unes Rossiiu, vol. 1: Rossiia v
Germanii (New York: Most, 1981); Vladimir Nabokov, Sprich Erinnerung,
sprich. Wiedersehen mit einer Autobiographie (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984);
Iosif V. Gessen, Gody izgnaniia: Zhiznennyi otchet (Paris: YMCA Press,
1979); Ilja Ehrenburg, Menschen, Jahre, Leben, Autobiographie, vols 1-2
(Munich: Kindler, 19625); Simon M. Dubnov, Kniga zhizni (New York,
1957).
A summary is provided by Deutschland-Sowjetunion Aus fnf Jahrzehnten
kultureller Zusammenarbeit. Zum 50. Jahrestag der groen sozialistischen
Oktoberrevolution (Berlin: Humboldt Universitt, 1966). Exceptions
to the rule are Botho Brachmann: Russische Sozialdemokraten in Berlin
(Berlin: Akademie, 1962) and Gnter Gorski, Die antisowjetische
Emigration (Ph.D. dissertation, Halle, 1987).
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
69
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.
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.
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 Aufbewahrung historisch-dokumentarischer Sammlungen in Moskau ein
Erfahrungsbericht, in Bundesinstitut fr ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien, Information aus der Forschung 7, 1992.
Cf. Wilhelm Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Vlker. Bearb. in Verbindung
mit Theodor Kappstein und hrsg. im amtlichen Auftrage des Reichswehrministeriums von Wilhelm Doegen, 6th edn, vol. 1: Der Kriegsgefangenen 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).
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).
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.
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
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
Karl Schlgel
Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 19411945. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin:
Argon, 1991), pp. 140, 108 ff.
The gure of 50,000 Ukrainians in Berlin alone is probably too
high, cf. Frank Golczewski (ed.), Geschichte der Ukraine (Gttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), pp. 237 and 329. Schmidt
estimates there to have been 120,000 Russian and Baltic Germans,
of which half remained permanently in Germany. See M. Schmidt,
Wolgadeutsche Emigranten im Deutschen Reich zwischen 1917 und 1933
(MA thesis, Freiburg University), p. 42.
On the legal question: J.M. Rabinowitsch, Die Rechtslage der
staatenlosen russischen Emigranten in Deutschland, in Osteuropa 3
(1927/28), pp. 61725; Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, pp. 2945;
Alexis Doldenweiser, ber die Rechtslage russischer Flchtlinge in
Deutschland, in Columbia Collection, box 12, folder 2.
Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, p. 8. On Germany as a transit stop
for Jewish emigrants, cf. Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918
1933 (Hamburg: Christians, 1986).
Wipert v. Blcher, Deutschlands Weg nach Rapallo. Erinnerungen eines
Mannes aus dem zweiten Gliede (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1951).
Nabokov, Sprich Erinnerung, p. 281.
Internationale Rundschau der Arbeit, 1928, quoted in Volkmann, Die
russische Emigration, pp. 1213.
Spravochnik-Almanakh pod. red. G.V. Franka (Berlin: Argonavty,
1922).
Cf. Volkmann, Die russische Emigration, p. 15 and Dodenhoeft, Lat
mich nach Ruland heim, pp. 36 ff. The internal papers of many of
these associations were deposited in the Prague Historical Foreign
Archive.
The archives of the Red Cross were lost in the Second World War.
On the activities of the YMCA, cf. Kenneth Scott Latourette, World
Service: A History of the Foreign Work and World Service of the Young
Mens Christian Associations of the United States and Canada (New York:
Association Press, 1957).
Quoted in Wiese, Von der Emigrantenschule, p. 44.
Ibid., pp. 73, 96.
On the Russian Scientic Institute, cf. Camphausen, Die wissenschaftliche historische Russlandforschung, pp. 5660; Voigt, Otto Hoetzsch, pp.
178 ff.; Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim, pp. 89114.
Cf. Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim, p. 110.
Cf. here Williams, Culture in Exile, p. 137 and Gottfried Kratz,
Russische Verlage in Berlin nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, in Beyer et
al., Russische Autoren und Verlage, pp. 39150.
A less than complete overview of newspapers and magazines that
appeared in Germany is contained in Postnikovs bibliography and
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
71
72
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.
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.
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.
Cf. Dodenhoeft, Lat mich nach Ruland heim, pp. 270, 282 on
declarations of loyalty and collaboration.
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.
On the trials of collaborating emigrants, cf. Vladimir Komin, Belaia
emigratsiia i vtoraia mirovaia voina. Uchebnoe posobie (Kalinin: KGU,
1979).
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.
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).
Cf.. Bhmig, Das russische Theater.
Nicholas Nabokov, quoted in ibid., p. 261.
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).
On Chicherin and Litvinov as students in Berlin, cf. Brachmann,
Russische Sozialdemokraten. On the collaboration between the German
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
73
Army and the Red Army, cf. Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee
19201933. Wege und Stationen einer ungewhnlichen Zusammenarbeit
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993).
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.
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 postSecond World War period.
Bibliographical note
Since this research on Russian Berlin has been done,
a lot of new works research guides, bibliographies, anthologies,
monographs, memoirs have been published. The results of my own
research project of the 1990s are materialized in a series of books:
Karl Schlgel (ed.), Russische Emigration in Deutschland 19181941
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995); Karl Schlgel, Katharina Kucher,
Bernhard Suchy and Gregor Thum (eds), Chronik russischen Lebens
in Deutschland 19181941 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999). There
are two studies dedicated to prominent sites and personalities of
the Russian migr community in Germany: Johannes Baur, Die
russische Kolonie in Mnchen 19001945. Deutsch-russische Beziehungen
im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1998), and Christian
Hufen, Fedor Stepun. Ein politicher Intellektueller aus Ruland in
Europa. Die Jahre 18841945 (Berlin: Lukas, 2001). I tried to bring
together white and red Russian Berlin in the monograph Karl
Schlgel, Berlin Ostbahnhof. Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert
(Berlin: Siedler, 1998), in Russian: Berlin. Vostochnyi vokzal. Russkaia
emigratsiia v Germanii mezhdu dvumia voinami, 19181945 (Moscow:
Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2005).
74
Karl Schlgel
75
76
Karl Schlgel
CAROLA TISCHLER
78
Carola Tischler
79
80
Carola Tischler
81
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
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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 shortor 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 producing, 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
83
84
Carola Tischler
85
86
Carola Tischler
87
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
89
90
Carola Tischler
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?
91
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 warrelated 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.
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Carola Tischler
93
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
The Stalinist Terror would be replaced for the German
emigrants by the Nazi Terror which was committed during the
War on Soviet soil. The neglect of the Terror years, however, is
among the congenital defects of the GDR. The members of the
three initiative groups which arrived in the Soviet Occupation
Zone (SOZ) at the end of April 1945 from Moscow, were not the
only ones who determined the politics of the early SOZ/GDR.
But they found themselves in a disproportionately strong starting
position and attained decisive positions little by little during the
tumultuous times when power in the Party was decided. They knew
the Soviet mentality and ruling techniques and had better contacts.
They required those returnees who came to the GDR from camps
and exile, especially after Stalins death, to keep their experiences
secret. And they themselves were unable to learn from the mistakes
of Stalinism. This suppression did not fracture the GDR. But the
failure to reappraise the damage whether the reappraisal was
marked by coming to terms with the Terror or by the survivors
silence and sense of guilt at a time when the immediate threat was
over, was a symbol for the systems lack of credibility.
Translated by Megan Harris and Felicitas Macgilchrist
94
Carola Tischler
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
95
96
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
Carola Tischler
Pieck, Wilhelm Florin, Walter Ulbricht, Franz Dahlem, Paul Merker
as well as the candidates Herbert Wehner and Anton Ackermann.
An example of German exile is the protocol of a party meeting of
German-language writers. See Reinhard Mller (ed.), Die Suberung.
Moskau 1936: Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung
(Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991).
Report by Paul Jkel Material zur Information, 29 April 1938, in
Luitwin Bies, Deutsche Emigranten in der UdSSR. Two Documents,
in Marxistische Bltter 5, 1992, p. 53.
On the terrorist, saboteur and espionage activities of the German
Trotskyites, being carried out on the orders of the Gestapo on the
territory of the Union of SSR. The wording is printed in: Reinhard
Mller, Herbert Wehner Moskau 1937 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition,
2004); cf. also idem, Menschenfalle Moskau. Exil und stalinistische
Verfolgung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001).
On the increasing activity of German spy organizations and special
arrangements of the fascist party (the foreign and foreign policy
section of the Anti-Comintern, on the intelligence service of the
Schutzstaffeln, etc.) on the territory of the USSR; cf. Nikita Okhotin
and Arseni Roginski, on the history of the German operation of the
NKVD 19371938, in Jahrbuch fr Historische Kommunismusforschung
2000/2001, pp. 89125, here p. 95; in Russian: Nakazannyi narod.
Repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev, ed. by Memorial and Goethe Institute
Moscow, Moscow 1999, pp. 3575.
The command appears in Reinhard Mller (with assistance from
Nataliia Mussienko), Wir kommen alle dran. Suberungen unter
den deutschen Politemigranten in der Sowjetunion (19341938),
in Hermann Weber and Ulrich Mhlert (eds), Terror. Stalinistische
Parteisuberungen 19361953 (Paderborn: Schningh, 1998), pp.
1656.
Bies, Deutsche Emigranten, p. 53.
See also Reinhard Mller, Menschenopfer unerhrt Eingaben
und Briefe deutscher Emigrantinnen an Stalin, Molotow und
andere, in Barck et al. (eds), Jahrhundertschicksale, pp. 2653.
Cf. Hans Schafranek, Zwischen NKWD und Gestapo: Die Auslieferung
deutscher und sterreichischer Antifaschisten aus der Sowjetunion an
Nazideutschland, 19371941 (Frankfurt am Main: ISP, 1990).
Okhotin and Roginski, To History, p. 100.
See Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung, pp. 1457.
Ibid., p. 157.
Cf. the chaper by Viktor Krieger.
Cf. Manfred Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion 19171991
(Munich: Beck, 1998), p. 634.
Namensliste ber den Verbleib deutscher Parteimitglieder, 30 December
1941; SAMPO-BArch: NL 4036/517, p. 8.
31.
32.
97
Cf. Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung, pp. 1867. For the extensive
literature on the labour army, see the chapter by Viktor Krieger.
Cf. Carola Tischler, Von Geister- und anderen Stimmen. Der Rundfunk als Waffe im Kampf gegen die Deutschen im Groen Vaterlndischen Krieg, in Karl Eimermacher (ed.), West-stliche Spiegelungen. Neue Folge. Deutsche und Russen im 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn:
Fink, 2004).
Cf. Jrg Morr, Hinter den Kulissen des Nationalkomitees. Das Institut 99
in Moskau und die Deutschlandpolitik der UdSSR 19431946 (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2001).
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.
MANFRED ZEIDLER
Introduction
As the subject of this chapter is very diverse, only the
most important aspects could be singled out, giving preference to
an accentuating and more thesis-like presentation of the theme as
opposed to a very differentiating one. Despite the wish to do justice
to the German and the Russian side, the German perspective will
after all prevail. Not least this has to do with the way one looks at
the subject and sees the historic importance of the issue largely in
its function as part of the secret German rearmament before 1933.
Admittedly, this may run the risk of reducing the subject too much
to a piece of German history and particularly of German military
history within this epoch.
First a few general remarks about the historical context of the
subject. Looking at the rather eventful German-Russian relations,
the period in question here, i.e. the time between the wars, belongs
to the cooperative side of those relations. The other side, the
confrontational one and uppermost in our general conscience, will
be dealt with in other chapters.
If we look at German-Russian relations between the creation of
the German nation state in 1871 and its re-establishment in 1990,
we see a constant sequence of confrontational and cooperative
phases, of cold or hot war, even war of extermination, and strong,
even intensive economic-technical cooperation, down to militarystrategic collaboration. We have therefore rarely known anything like non-dramatic inter-state normality, perhaps with the
99
100
Manfred Zeidler
101
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 simultaneously 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 BrestLitovsk, 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 securityrelevant 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 relations 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 (Grenzund 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
103
104
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
Military Relations 19201933. Underlying Foreign and
Military Policies.
As it is a well-known subject, only a brief summary of the
foreign policy basis for military relations of the time is necessary.
Both powers came off badly from the 1919 Versailles peace treaty.
Their joint anti-Versailles revisionism brought them together
and gave rise to the slightly romantic idea of a German-Russian
companionship of misfortune (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), a term
coined by Karl Radek, the Germany expert of the Comintern and
one of Moscows secret emissaries during his early contacts with
Berlin.
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 published 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
105
make military concessions to Germany. However, the Spa conference in the summer of 1920 conrmed the prohibitory provisions
of Versailles, thereby crushing these hopes and leading to a
complete U-turn in favour of cooperation with Soviet Russia. Two
statements of General von Seeckt from the rst half of 1920 clearly
illustrate this. The rst dates from January 1920 and declares: We
are prepared to be the bulwark against Bolshevism, in our own
interest which is also that of the Entente. For this it should allow us
the necessary arms.18
The second, only shortly after, reads: Only a rm union with
Great Russia will allow Germany to regain its world hegemony.
Even if the powers of the Entente ght this with all available means,
our mutual interests will eventually bring about German-Russian
unication by natural force.19
Further development took the path of, in Radeks terminology,
the counterrevolutionary variant of the German-Russian alliance,
i.e. it was based on opposite political doctrines. For Moscow this
meant stressing very highly vis--vis its imperialist competitors from
the Entente the political differences of Germany as a bourgeoiscapitalist and therefore potentially imperialist state in order to
avoid an anti-Soviet alliance of the European powers. The military
vacuum Germany represented in the centre of Europe due to
its disarmament in accordance with Versailles was seen as highly
dangerous by Moscow and it did not hesitate to demand openly
and plainly from Germany a resolute rearmament programme in
contravention of the terms of the peace treaty.
Neither serving the allies to win points, nor hope for help from
the League of Nations, this tool for the systematic humiliation of
Germany would regain the countrys national greatness although
only factors of power: dollars, dreadnoughts and aeroplanes could
achieve this. This was written in Pravda in the autumn of 1926,20
in the style of the German-national opposition, was addressed to
Berlin and therefore opposed Stresemanns dtente policy vis--vis
the Entente powers. In other words: Germany must rearm so that
Moscow could reap a twofold advantage:
1.
2.
106
Manfred Zeidler
107
108
Manfred Zeidler
The Locarno Policy and Military Relations
4.
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
109
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.
In the authors opinion, the long-term benets for the Russians
were more modest. Unlike the Germans, the Russians pursued
quantitative armament objectives and tried, among other things,
111
112
Manfred Zeidler
113
114
Manfred Zeidler
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, halfsecret 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 feeling 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.
115
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
116
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Manfred Zeidler
also David Irving, Die Tragdie der Deutschen Luftwaffe. Aus den Akten
und Erinnerungen von Feldmarschall Erhard Milch (Frankfurt am Main:
Ullstein, 1975), p. 62.
See Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 19201933. Wege und
Stationen einer ungewhnlichen Zusammenarbeit (Munich: Oldenbourg,
1993), p. 22.
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).
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.
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.
The following are a collection of Russian works, articles and documents 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. Voennopoliticheskie 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
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
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.
Karl Radek, Die Auswrtige Politik Sowjet-Rulands (Hamburg: Carl
Hoym Nachf., 1921), p. 73.
Quoted in Friedrich v. Rabenau, Seeckt. Aus seinem Leben 19181936
(Leipzig: v. Hase & Koehler, 1941), p. 252.
Hans Meier-Welcker, Seeckt (Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe,
1967), pp. 2945.
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.
Zeidler, Reichswehr, p. 46.
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.
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.
Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 171207.
Geyer, Aufrstung, pp. 1935; see also idem, Deutsche Rstungspolitik
18601980 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 1317.
Manfred Lachmann, Zu Problemen der Bewaffnung des imperialistischen
deutschen Heeres (19191939) (Leipzig: Ph.D. dissertation, 1965), pp.
801.
See Geyer, Aufrstung, pp. 199200; H. Sperling, Rolle und Funktion 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.
Werner Beitel and Jrgen Ntzold, Deutsch-sowjetische Wirtschaftsbeziehungen in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Baden-Baden: Nomos,
1979), pp. 6573.
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
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
Manfred Zeidler
Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 3023.
Ibid., pp. 20817.
Ibid., p. 303.
Gerhard Hubrich, Zwischen den Meilensteinen der Luftfahrt (Steinebach:
Zuerl, 1969), p. 78.
Werner Rahn, Reichsmarine und Landesverteidigung 19191928.
Konzeption und Fhrung der Marine in der Weimarer Republik (Munich:
Bernard & Graefe, 1976), pp. 17185.
Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 1978.
Diakov and Busueva, Fashistkii mech, p. 103.
Gustav Stresemann. Vermchtnis. Der Nachla in drei Bnden, ed. by
H. Bernhard, vol. 3 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1933), pp. 151, 1667; also
Grieser, Die Sowjetpresse, p. 182.
Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 1523.
Quoted in Max Domarus, Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen 19321945.
Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. I, 1 (19321934)
(Munich: Sddeutscher Verlag, 1965), p. 236.
See Akten zur deutschen Auswrtigen Politik (ADAP), Series B, vol. XXI,
Doc. no. 229.
Zeidler, Reichswehr, pp. 28791.
ADAP, B, vol. II, 1, Doc. no. 176.
Hans-Jrgen Rautenberg, Deutsche Rstungspolitik vom Beginn der Genfer
Abrstungskonferenz bis zur Wiedereinfhrung der allgemeinen Wehrpicht
19321935, (Bonn: Ph.D. dissertation, 1973).
As an example see Karl Radeks Pravda article from 10 May 1933, in
Dietrich Mller, Karl Radek in Deutschland (Kln: Wissenschaft und
Politik, 1976), pp. 26972.
ADAP, C, vol. IV, 2, Doc. no. 383, annex.
See M. Buchsweiler and J.L. Wallach, Menetekel. Der sowjetrussische
Marschall M. Tuchatschewski warnt im Mrz 1935 vor deutschen
Agressionsplnen (ein miachtetes und vergessenes Dokument), in
Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fr deutsche Geschichte 13 (1984), pp. 35165.
PETER JAHN
120
Peter Jahn
Bolshevist rule and its ideology of global revolution by the proletariat had been added to traditional Russian expansionism in this
view.
Under Nazi rule these images were made more aggressive, were
combined with anti-Semitism to Jewish Bolshevism and with the
Lebensraum ideology, to justify an imperialism directed towards
Eastern Europe culminating in the idea of the Ukraine as a German
India.
In the biological, racist concept, inferior people, among them all
Slavic people and especially the Asiatic Russian Slavs in addition,
infected by Bolshevism were denied any right to exist. This concept developed by Hitler and Rosenberg was in its strict form only
held by a minority, but parts of it and the idea of a competition
of ethnically strong and weak nations was shared by the majority.
Even Christians, for whom a racist biological concept of society was
unacceptable, saw no right for an atheist state to exist.
When in 1940, after Poland and France had been defeated and
the war with Great Britain had ground to a stalemate, the political
and military leadership in Germany began to plan the war against
the Soviet Union, these ideas were transformed into military
orders, forming the basis of a warfare that ignored existing international law. Soviet political ofcers, Kommissars, were to be shot,
atrocities against the civilian population were to be punished only
exceptionally, the murder of political and economic representatives
of the Soviet Union and of the Jewish population by SS and police
forces in the occupied territories was planned on a large scale. With
121
122
Peter Jahn
123
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 military 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, especially 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
125
126
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-ofwar camps.
To what extent these images made public in texts and lms reected 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 annihilation 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.
127
This character of the war memory was conforming to the political needs of the early Federal Republic seeking acceptance, and
was therefore reinforced by its politicians. At this time, when there
was no afuence as yet and democratic participation was not really
attractive for most Germans, the image this society had of itself
was largely based on rejecting the communist threat from the
East. And this collective warding off of the red ood helped the
conservatives to stay in power, because the Social Democrats who
at that time had not yet abandoned all Marxist ideas could thus
be denounced as untrustworthy. This invocation of the red threat
offered another justication for the war in the past, which was now
seen as a legitimate defence of Western civilization.
The establishment of a new German Army, explained exclusively
by the possibility of Soviet attack, could also prot from this new
positive interpretation of the war in the East. This became obvious
and practical when former ofcers and veterans organizations
were lobbying, demanding the release of any ofcers sentenced
to imprisonment as war criminals by the Western Allies, and the
restoration of honour for the Wehrmacht and their actions in
the Second World War, as a prerequisite to their cooperation in
forming the Bundeswehr. They were granted both, the restoration
of honour being given by President Eisenhower himself, although
he knew better it was nothing but a political tactic.
It would be misleading though to explain the justication of the
war in the East as being mainly in the interests of the government
and conservative groups; it was instrumental for them and they
reinforced it, but at the same time it answered the emotional
needs of a majority of the population, as 10 million soldiers of the
Wehrmacht had experienced the war as a decisive part of their
lives and as a time of enormous suffering. Whereas the genocide
of the European Jews had been committed by a limited number
of people, the war of annihilation in the East was fought by the
mass-organization Wehrmacht. Not every single soldier, let alone a
majority, took an active part in atrocities, but the identication with
the Wehrmacht, normally accepted as part of peoples own lives,
forced them to whitewash the past. After the trauma of defeat, with
Germany being split into occupational zones, and the founding of a
new state, there was a strong demand for continuity, for something
one could identify with across the changing political scene. So in
this situation, justifying the war in the East that had taken up old
images of the Russian enemy served this purpose. When the war
128
Peter Jahn
129
130
Peter Jahn
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 liberation, 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 annihilation, 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
131
VIKTOR KRIEGER
134
Viktor Krieger
Patriots or Traitors?
135
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.
Changes in Soviet War Propaganda
On the eve of military conict with the Third Reich
romantic images of the future war as a struggle against the
property owners and capitalists, in which the Soviet troops were
received by the working masses with enthusiasm, and hordes of
proletarians in soldiers uniforms would rush to the side of the Red
Army, was not only in the minds of the normal soldiers but also in
the thoughts of the political leaders. Such dreams were fed by the
experience of similar encounters in the Soviet-Polish War and on the
annexation of the Baltic States and Bessarabia in 193940. Even the
campaign against Finland, with its many losses and the clear refusal
by Finnish civilians and those belonging to the military to support
the liberation from the yoke of imperialism, changed little in this
stance.5 The offensive Soviet military doctrine, according to which
the enemy should be defeated on his territory, with a destructive
blow and few own (Soviet) losses (maloi kroviu, moguchim udarom),
stood in vivid contradiction to the harsh reality: in the process of
the rst two months of the War the Wehrmacht had stormed up to
Kiev and Dnepr and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and ofcers
had fallen. By the end of August 1941 1.5 million Red Army soldiers
had been captured or had disserted to the Germans under the
inuence of Wehrmacht propaganda.6 Added to this, noticeable
signs of local collaboration with the enemy were coming to light in
the occupied areas.
The following events contributed signicantly to a radicalization
of war propaganda. During the retreat from the recently annexed
areas, employees of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs
(Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del NKVD) executed thousands
136
Viktor Krieger
Patriots or Traitors?
137
138
Viktor Krieger
secondary importance. This telegram carried Stalins note, Tovarishchu Beriia. Nado vyselit s treskom Comrade Beriia. Out with
them with a bang, and pointed to another entry: The Peoples
Commissar [i.e. Beriia] has been informed of this, 25/08/1941.
With that the fate of the Russian Germans was sealed and on the
very same day Beriia presented a draft for the decision to resettle
the Germans currently living in the Volga region.17 One result of
this draft was the decision by the Council for Evacuation and the
War Council of the Southern Front to deport 53,000 Crimean
Germans on 15 August. This was thinly veiled by ofcially calling it
an evacuation.18
The Deportation of the German Minority
Stalin, supported by his colleagues in the politburo, had
by 26 August 1941 ordered the resettlement of the Volga Germans.
This was camouaged as a decision by the central committee of
the Communist Party (Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia
(bolsheviki) VKP(b)) and the Council of Peoples Commissars
(CPC), i.e. the government. In this top-secret decision, to which
only a close circle of party and state leaders were privy, there was no
evidence of guilt on the part of the German minority. The directive,
comprising nineteen articles and written in an emphatically factual
fashion, gives the impression of an orderly planned resettlement.
The regions of Altai and Krasnoiarsk, the areas of Omsk and
Novosibirsk, as well as Kazakhstan, functioned as reception areas.
The complete plan was entrusted to the NKVD.19 The secretly
formulated party and government decision to liquidate a Soviet
republic which was rmly anchored in the constitution did, however,
require permission, if only for a purely formal legal blessing from
the state apparatus. Thus, the decree, Pertaining to the re-settlement
of the Germans in the Volga District, which was supposed to give
the whole operation legitimate grounds, was signed two days later
on 28 August, by the head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, in the name of
the President of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. This decree was
only published in the News of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and in the
local press.20 Through a further decree on 7 September 1941 the
annexation of the territory of the Volga German Republic into the
bordering regions of Saratov and Stalingrad followed.21 Contrary
to the internally recorded government and party decisions, hefty
Patriots or Traitors?
139
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
Cultural Destruction and Economic Plundering
Patriots or Traitors?
141
The central library of the ASSR of the Volga Germans was dissolved 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
Patriots or Traitors?
143
144
Viktor Krieger
Patriots or Traitors?
145
146
Viktor Krieger
Germanophobic Propaganda and Hostility among the
Population.
Patriots or Traitors?
147
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 destruction 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 ftyve 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 outraging 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, increased 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
Patriots or Traitors?
149
150
Viktor Krieger
Patriots or Traitors?
151
mobilized can be characterized as a mixture of that of camp inmate, construction worker and military personnel, although the
camp-inmate characteristic was the most dominant. That can
be seen primarily by the fact that the distribution of food and
clothes was carried out according to normal GULag regulations.
A further similarity with the GULags is revealed in the role of the
NKVD to keep the mobilized German troops and labour columns
under surveillance, and to enforce strict order and discipline.
Furthermore, these Germans were isolated from the normal workforce, were accommodated in barracks and were deprived of
their freedom of movement. As with GULag prisoners, they were
assigned the most strenuous physical jobs and unskilled work,
such as railway and industrial construction, coal and oil extraction or wood cutting. Their forced conscription by the local war
commissariat and their subordination to military courts gave this
group the appearance of military recruits. The existence of party
and Komsomol organizations at the sites albeit with severely restricted authority and the envisaged wages in accordance with the
salary scale of their civilian careers ultimately suggested the survival
of some elements of civil rights. The same fate awaited healthy men
of other minorities who were capable of work, whose motherland
was at war with the USSR. The GKO resolution of 14 October 1942
(No. 2409) proclaimed these regulations for Soviet citizens of
Finnish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Italian or Rumanian descent. All
in all during the War, no fewer than 350,000 of the approximately
1.12 million Russian Germans who came under Soviet jurisdiction
were sent to forced labour camps.65
A speciality of this conscription was its absolute inclusiveness:
alongside the simple workers and farmers, the entire intellectual
and functionary classes of the Russian Germans found themselves
in the camps. This included deputies from the Supreme Soviet
of the USSR and from the Union Republics and Autonomous
Republics; ministers and government ofcials; party, economic
and Soviet specialists; professors and lecturers; writers and doctors;
teachers and engineers; ofcers and judges from the Volga German
Republic. Numerous German and Austrian emigrants from the
Sudetenland were also threatened with this forced recruitment
and some of them endured years in labour camps.66
The highest concentrations of German workers were those
on construction sites for industrial buildings and penal camps
that specialized in tree felling. Thus on 1 January 1943, on the
152
Viktor Krieger
Patriots or Traitors?
153
ranks of the NKVD. Supervision of the German labour force essentially remained the responsibility of the NKVD. Only in the case of
suspected espionage and serious legal or economic wrongdoing did
the NKGB assume the investigation. A massive wave of repression
seized the Russian Germans: by July 1944, 8,543 forced labourers
were arrested on the grounds of attempted escape, alleged acts of
sabotage and counter-revolution, and also because of self-mutilation
and intentional weight loss. Of these, 6,392 were sentenced to
many years imprisonment and 526 to death.69 In the majority of
cases the punishment was handed down by a special council of the
Peoples Commissar of Internal Affairs thus circumventing proper
criminal jurisdiction.
The terrorization of forced labourers served many purposes;
on the one hand it was an important method of intimidating
them and making them compliant in particular the intellectuals,
professionals, the former civil servants and leaders of business.
The ruination of the national elite reduced the Germans to a
weak-willed, disposable mass. On the other hand the number of
convicted or exposed counter-revolutionary organizations among
the Germans had to be large enough to provide a raison dtre for
every single Chekist to secure their job and spare them from being
sent to the front. And last but not least, credible evidence of the
Germans treacherous and criminal activities had to be discovered
in order to support the deprivation of their rights retrospectively.
An analysis of the early commemorative books of the victims of
political repression in the territory of Sverdlovsk indicates that
during the years 1941-45, the German minority received a fth of
all convictions, although their employment rate during this time
hovered between a mere 3 and 4 per cent.70
The search for the suspected connection between the German
minority and political, intelligence and military posts in the
Third Reich was the focus of attention right from the beginning:
dozens of secret processes with hundreds of accused were aimed
at confirming the existence of Hitlers 5th Column in the
USSR.71 In June and August 1942, on the construction site of the
Cheliabinsk iron and steel combine, the OChO arranged two trials
of the recently arrived trudarmiia workers counterrevolutionary
and mutinous organizations. The leaders of one of the groups of
conspirators was Jakob Mller, the rst party secretary of the canton
of Krasnoia, in the Volga German Republic from 1938 to 1941, and
Wladimir Hartmann, the chairman of the executive committee of
154
Viktor Krieger
Patriots or Traitors?
155
command centre of the mutinous counter-revolutionary organization. By means of torture, these prominent Germans were forced
to admit their formation of an anti-Soviet organization in the
former ASSRVG and of planning to carry out extensive sabotage.
On top of that, they were accused of preparing this expanded
underground organization for an armed uprising against the Soviet
powers following an attack from Nazi Germany.74
The investigation, which lasted more than a year, the prisoners
contradictory statements and the particular importance of this
case led the Deputy Peoples Commissar for State Security, Colonel
General Kobulov, to order the Moscow NKGB headquarters to
take on further investigations from 4 November 1945.75 The case
became the responsibility of the department assigned with particularly important investigations on behalf of the NKGB of the USSR.
Heckmann, Korbmacher, Fritzler and Maier were transferred to
Moscow. Everything pointed to a large-scale show trail, with public
condemnation of the treason committed against the socialist
homeland by the Volga Germans and, by association, by all the
Russian Germans. However, for such a plan to work, credible confessions and trustworthy evidence was needed. With mere personal
confessions the risk of public condemnation was far too great if the
evidence was to be based on mere personal confessions, particularly
as during their stay in Moscow prisons the accused had distanced
themselves from their previous confessions made under duress.
The careful investigation took over six months and included ofcial
visits to Sverdlovsk and Krasnoiarsk, where dozens of previous and
new witnesses were questioned. Everything which could be related
in any way to this process the rich state security archive, current
and closed investigations, extensive personal indexes etc. was
subject to meticulous examination.
These far-reaching inquiries revealed nothing new and no
trace of any rebellious group or fascist dissidents could be found.
The nal indictment therefore declared that the membership
of Korbmacher, Heckmann, Fritzler and Maier to an anti-Soviet
rebellious group could not be proven.76 They were then simply
charged with anti-Soviet propaganda with nationalist tendencies
and on 9 August the special council sentenced each to four years
imprisonment. As later investigations from the Khrushchev period
proved, this and other group punishments could only be carried
out by drastically violating the legitimate laws of the time. Most of
the people involved were later pardoned after they had died.
156
Viktor Krieger
From 1945 and 1946, the labour columns were steadily disbanded and members of the German special contingent were transferred 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
Under the pretext of collaboration, the Stalinist leadership declared the Russian Germans state enemies and banished
them to the eastern territories of the country. Without exception
they were deprived of their rights, primarily to enable the patriotic
mobilization of the Soviet society for the Great Patriotic War.
Sent east and subject to the special regimes of the NKVD, they
had to work principally on construction sites, in pits or doing hard
physical labour on the land, and were barred from all intellectual
work or positions of responsibility. In contrast to other nationalities
the state leadership ordered the forced admission of every German
man, woman and youth into labour camps. Soldiers and ofcers
of German descent were sifted out of the military and also sent
to labour camps. Ofcial Germanophobic propaganda stirred the
ames of national hatred; personal insults and abuse relating to
nationality remained unpunished.
Attentive observers quickly recognized the fatal connection
between the unbridled hatred of the Germans and the evergrowing xenophobia. The well-known literary scholar Sergei Bondi
had already said in July 1943: I really regret the anti-democratic
tendencies that one sees every day. Look at national chauvinism.
From what is it evoked? Most of all through the mood of the
army, which is anti-Semitic, anti-German and against all national
minorities.77
The fateful ideological developments of the post-war period, with
its greater Russian chauvinism and its anti-Western slogans, the ght
against the so-called rootless cosmopolitans and grovellers to the
West, is hardly imaginable without the groundwork and clichs
Patriots or Traitors?
157
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.
Translated by Catherine Venner
Notes
1. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki. 19401941, vol. 23, book 2 (2). 2 marta
1940 22 iiunia 1941 (Moscow, 1998), pp. 7645. German version in
Gerd R. Ueberschlger and Wolfram Wette (eds), Der deutsche berfall
auf die Sowjetunion.Unternehmen Barbarossa 1941 (Frankfurt am Main,
1991), p. 271.
2. Quoted from I. Stalin, O velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow, 2002),
p. 15. In German, Josef Stalin, ber den groen Vaterlndischen Krieg
der Sowjetunion, 3rd edn (Moscow, 1946), p. 13. Here the different
meanings of the two Russian words nemetskii and germanskii should be
explained. Nemetskii means belonging to the German Volk in the ethnic
sense. Germanskii, apart from describing the old Germanic tribes,
serves in relationship to the state as a national feature and as such has
a political nature.
3. Povernite Vashe oruzhie . . . (Ispolzovanie povolzhkikh nemtsev v
kontrpropagande na naselenie i vooruzhennye sily Germanii letom
1941 g.), in Voenno-istoricheskie issledovaniia v Povolzhe, 2 (Saratov,
1997), pp. 27494, here pp. 27983.
4. Povernite oruzhie protiv bandy gitlerovskikh ubiits! Golos krestian
Respubliki nemtsev Povolzhia, in Pravda 194, 15 July 1941; the same
in Krasnaia zvezda 164, from 15 July 1941; Silnei beite prokliatykh
izvergov: pismo Konrada Geringera iz kantona Kukkus, Respublika
nemtsev Povolzhia, in Krasnaia zvezda 202, 28 August 1941.
5. See also V. Nevezhin, Sindrom nastupatelnoi voiny. Sovetskaia propaganda
v predverii sviashchennykh boev, 19391941 gg. (Moscow, 1997), p. 67;
V. Tokarev, Sovetskoe obshchestvo i polskaia kampaniia 1939 g.:
romanticheskoe oshchushchenie voiny, in Chelovek i voina.Voina kak
iavlenie kultury (Moscow, 2001), pp. 399 ff.
6. Ortwin Buchbender, Das tnende Erz. Deutsche Kriegspropaganda gegen
die Rote Armee im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 60 ff.; Hartmut
Schustereit, Vabanque (Herford and Bonn, 1988), p. 73.
158
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Viktor Krieger
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.
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 Voennoistoricheskii arkhiv 2, 1997, pp. 23253, here p. 252.
Pravda, 14 July 1941.
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.
Wir nehmen an ihnen Rache fr dich, Genosse!, in Nachrichten
(Engels) No. 203, 29 August 1941; David Wagner, Das Komsomolmitgliedsbuch Nr. 12535944, in Bis zum letzten Atemzug, vol. 2
(Alma-Ata, 1972), pp. 17181.
Quoted from B. Nikolaevskii, Tainye stranitsy istorii (Moscow, 1995),
p. 204.
E. Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke. Istoricheskii opyt Rossii
(Moscow, 1999), pp. 26379.
A typical example is the wordplay of the title in the main article
Besposhchadno istrebliat fashistskoe zvere, in Pravda, 3 January
1942.
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
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.
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?
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
159
160
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
Viktor Krieger
V. Kherdt (Victor Herdt), Etno-demograficheskie protsessy v
Saratovskoi oblasti v 1940-e gody, in Rossiiskie nemtsy na Donu, pp.
21122, here p. 215.
The text of this instruction is printed in Deportatsiia narodov SSSR, pp.
94105.
Viktor Bruhl, Die Deutschen in Sibirien, vol. 2 (Nrnberg, 2003), p. 28
44.
Kherdt, Etno-demogracheskie protsessy, pp. 21519; O. Skuchaeva,
Novye raiony Saratovskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi
voiny: migratsionnyi aspekt, in Nemtsy SSSR, pp. 11524; A. German,
Nemetskaia avtonomiia na Volge. 1918-1941, Part 2: Avtonomnaia Respublika 19241941 (Saratov, 1994), pp. 3208 (Pokinutaia zemlia).
Beniamin Pinkus and Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen in der
Sowjetunion. Geschichte einer nationalen Minderheit im 20. Jahrhundert
(Baden-Baden, 1987), pp. 32138.
An extensive analysis of the national socialist term vlkische Ungleichheit (racial inequality) and the principle of privileges which stems
from it, as well as the theoretical grounding and practical use that can
be found in Diemut Majer, Fremdvlkische im Dritten Reich. Ein Beitrag
zur nationalsozialistischen Rechtssetzung und Rechtspraxis in Verwaltung
und Justiz unter besonderer Bercksichtigung der eingegliederten Ostgebiete
und des Generalgouvernements (Boppard am Rhein, 1981) (Schriften
des Bundesarchivs, vol. 28).
The statute of this department is printed in Lubianka. VChK-OGPUNKVD-MGB-MVD-KGB. 19171960. Spravochnik (Moscow, 1997), pp.
2701.
More in Viktor Krieger, Personen minderen Rechts: Rulanddeutsche in den Jahren 194146, in Heimatbuch der Deutschen aus
Ruland 2004 (Stuttgart, 2004), pp. 93107; L. Oberderfer, Deportirovannye nemtsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri (19411944 gg.): Deistvitelnost
i pravovoi status, in Sibir v XVIIXX vekakh. Problemy politicheskoi i
sotsialnoi istorii (Novosibirsk, 2002), pp. 187200.
Krieger, Personen minderen Rechts, pp. 99100.
Head of the local department of NKVD in Kansk (Krasnojarsk
region), Zabludovskii, to head of OSP, Ivanov, 17 December 1941, on
the accommodation of 1,500 Germans from the town of Engels, in
Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 9479, op. 1,
d. 85, l. 230.
Bruhl, Die Deutschen in Sibirien, p. 46.
L. Belkovets, Spetsposelenie nemtsev v Zapadnoi Sibiri (19411955
gg.), in Repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev. Nakazannyi narod (Moscow,
1999), pp. 15880; L. Burgart, Nemetskoe naselenie v Vostochnom
Kazakhstane v 19411956 gg. (Ust-Kamenogorsk, 2001); V. Zemskov,
Spetsposelentsy v SSSR. 19301960 (Moscow, 2003). Among the affected
Patriots or Traitors?
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
161
162
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
Viktor Krieger
ber wirtschaftliche Unterbringung und Arbeitseingliederung
der Sonderumsiedler, die in der Region Krasnojarsk angesiedelt
sind, 25 May 1943, in GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 133, l. 3302, 337.
German, Nemetskaia avtonomiia, pp. 314-19.
Nemtsy SSSR, p. 48.
Mobilizovat nemtsev v rabochie kolonny . . . I. Stalin, Sbornik
dokumentov (1940-e gg.) (Moscow, 1998), p. 52.
I. Shulga, Iziatie iz riadov Krasnoi Armii voennosluzhashchikhnemtsev v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (19411945 gg.),
in Nemtsy Rossii v kontekste otechestvennoi istorii: obshchie problemy i
regionalnye osobennosti (Moscow, 1999), pp. 34758.
A typical example is the fate of an experienced military pilot, First
Lieutenant Viktor Fuchs. In September 1941 he was recalled from
active service for no reason and sent together with a further twenty
ofcers of German descent to the town of Magnitogorsk, where they
were set to work with spades and shovels on the construction of a
railway. Their protests had the support of the military prosecutor of
the district, which brought about a postponement. Fuchs worked for
some months as leader of the construction department of the local
school for civil aeronautics, until he was removed from his position
and forcibly conscripted to a labour camp at the beginning of 1942,
V. Fuchs, Pogrom. Dokumentalnaia povest o prestupleniiakh sovetskogo
rezhima zicheskom unichtozhenii nemetskoi natsii v SSSR s 1930-kh godov
i do kontsa stoletiia (Krasnoiarsk, 2001), pp. 15771.
Lektsiia nachalnika GULaga V.G. Nasedkina, prednaznachennaia
dlia slushatelei Vysshei shkoly NKVD SSSR, 5 oktiabria 1945 g., in
GULag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei). 19181960 (Moscow, 2000), pp.
296315, here p. 310.
Viktor Krieger, Verweigerungs- und Protestformen der Rulanddeutschen im Arbeitslager (19411946), in Ralph Tuchtenhagen
and Christoph Gassenschmidt (eds), Ethnische und soziale Konikte
im neuzeitlichen Osteuropa. Festschrift fr Heinz-Dietrich Lwe zum 60.
Geburtstag (Hamburg, 2004), pp. 14579; idem, Nekotorye aspekty
demogracheskogo razvitiia nemetskogo naseleniia 1930-kh 1950kh godov, in Nemtsy Rossii: sotsialno-ekonomicheskoe i dukhovnoe razvitie
18711941 gg. (Moscow, 2002), pp. 47092.
Carola Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung. Deutsche Emigranten im
Sowjetischen Exil 1933 bis 1945 (Mnster, 1996), pp. 18693; Barry
McLoughlin, Hans Schafranek and Walter Szevera, Aufbruch
Hoffnung Endstation: sterreicherinnen und sterreicher in der Sowjetunion, 19251945 (Vienna, 1997), pp. 57885; lists of members of
the Communist parties of Germany (131 members), Austria (74),
Finland (7), Hungary (76), Rumania (57), Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland Germans, 44 members) were handed over from the control
commission of the Komintern to the NKVD with the request that
Patriots or Traitors?
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
163
ELKE SCHERSTJANOI
165
166
Elke Scherstjanoi
167
168
Elke Scherstjanoi
169
170
Elke Scherstjanoi
171
172
Elke Scherstjanoi
173
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 ragcollecting 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 unimpeded 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
175
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.
So wrote one soldier who had gone to the front as an eighteen-yearold volunteer, to his sister. In the main, however, they were short,
sometimes stereotypical formulations, which could nevertheless
signalize civic behaviour.
At the start of the battles the soldiers, bitter and triumphant,
realized that German towns and villages were burning. Automatically, youre pleased to see Germany in such a state, wrote
one artillery captain to his mother, one month before the major
offensive. Finally, it is experiencing for itself the old Russian
proverb: He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. Now
its paying for everything it did to us.
For many Red Army soldiers the advance was their rst taste of
foreign lands. Im seeing German towns and villages. Id never have
thought I would see all this, one twenty-year-old Muscovite wrote
home at the end of January. Some letters reveal how exciting this
aspect of the conquest was for the soldiers. Occasionally, thoughtful moments would occur, tied to short escapes from military life
for instance, a short trip into safe territory. We drove out towards
a small hamlet [. . .], which was one kilometre from the sea. It was a
disappointment you couldnt see the sea at all, and the countryside
was nothing like countryside near a sea just some elds, a dam . . .
was one majors description of his rst contact with the Baltic Sea in
January 1945. But the hard ghting and rapid marches prevented
the vast majority of soldiers from seeing such sights. Also, the letters
do not allow a nal judgement on how preoccupied the soldiers
were with the tourist aspects of the victory march. Scenery was a
topic that was low on the list of priorities to write about. According
to a soldiers logic: as a survivor, one can describe it all much more
accurately, whereas a dead mans perceptions are of no interest to
anyone anymore. Often they would hint at their surroundings and
promise more descriptions later.
It is probable that the War did not only take most soldiers abroad
for the rst time; for many of them, especially the younger soldiers,
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Elke Scherstjanoi
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 retribution. An observer who enjoys the view of ruined enemy settlements
will not develop much curiosity for its attractive features. Everything 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.
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 foreign 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.
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Elke Scherstjanoi
179
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 welloff 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 phenomenon 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:
Were walking through dozens of towns, hundreds of villages, and everywhere its the same scene: the roads are lled with Germans; German
women, children, men dragging themselves along, pushing little carts
with stuff they could grab at the last minute. In most cases, they threw
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Elke Scherstjanoi
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.
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
181
182
Elke Scherstjanoi
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.
184
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185
186
Elke Scherstjanoi
Notes
1. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, Befehl des Obersten Befehlshabers Nr.
70, 1 May 1944, in J. W. Stalin, ber den Groen Vaterlndischen Krieg
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
187
188
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Elke Scherstjanoi
approx. 500 roubles (excluding supplements). The average wage
of a worker in the centrally managed Soviet industries was approx.
570 roubles. The average price of 1kg of wheat-our in the Soviet
Union in 1944 was 162 roubles, 1kg of beef 244 roubles. (M.P. Zinich,
Ispytanie i velichie naroda, in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina 19411945, kniga 3: Osvobozhdenie (Moskva, 1999) p. 348-62.
See Peter Knoch, Kriegsalltag, in Peter Knoch (ed.), Kriegsalltag.
Die Rekonstruktion des Kriegsalltags als Aufgabe der historischen Forschung
und der Friedenserziehung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989), pp. 22251, here
p. 230.
No letter mentions that photos or other evidence of brutality against
the inhabitants of occupied territories were found in German homes.
The Red Army soldier Fedor Zverev claims to have seen such evidence
in over 100 German houses. Text of the interview in Helke Sander
and Barbara Johr (eds), BeFreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigungen,
Kinder (Munich: Kunstmann 1992; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
1995), p. 123.
Okorokovs lecture, 6 February 1945.
Manfred Zeidler cites German sources for the Red Army leaderships
measures, from January 1945, for strengthening discipline, controlling
excessive alcohol consumption and stopping wanton destruction,
plundering and assaults on the elderly or women. Kriegsende im Osten.
Die Rote Armee und die Besetzung Deutschlands stlich von Oder und Neisse,
1944/45 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), pp. 15560.
Highlighted by an item in the Krasnaia Zvezda, 9 January 1945.
Zeidler, Kriegsende, p. 153.
A.P. Jakushevskii, Protivnik, in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina 1941
1945, kniga 4: Narod i voina, pp. 24180, here p. 271.
Lev Kopelev, Khranit vechno (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975); interview with
Kopelev in Sander and Johr, BeFreier, pp. 1356.
Swetlana A. Alexijewitsch, Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht (Berlin:
Henschel, 1987; Hamburg: Galgenberg, 1989).
That the child-loving Russian was neither clich nor a myth of postwar East German ideology is shown by Wolfgang Engler by means
of school essays from early 1946. Wolfgang Engler, Die Russen
kommen: Wie die Ostdeutschen Krieg und Nachkrieg erlebten und
welche Folgen das hatte, in idem, Die Ostdeutschen. Kunde von einem
verlorenen Land (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999) pp. 313.
Instead of a lengthy, nuanced discussion here, see Erich Kuby, Die
Russen in Berlin 1945 (Munich: Scherz, 1965).
The extraordinary amount of interest can be partially explained by
the enduring socio-cultural reserve concerning the topic sexuality
and violence. What could be more fascinating than the process
not yet completed of freeing society from this taboo? Norman M.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
189
Naimark, in his book, also makes rape the central dominant problem
for The Russians in Germany.
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.
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.
Such is Beevors argument, Berlin, p. 32.
Naimark, The Russians in Germany, p. 114.
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).
Lev Kopelev, Chemu istoriia nauchila menia, in idem, O pravde i
terpimosti (New York: Khronika Press, 1982), pp. 516, here p. 6.
JENS REICH
192
Jens Reich
193
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 shtoli? (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
195
196
Jens Reich
197
198
Jens Reich
199
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
201
KLAUS SEGBERS
German-Russian Relations in
the Early Twenty-rst Century.
Some Reections on Normalcy
204
Klaus Segbers
German-Russian Relations
1.
2.
3.
4.
205
206
5.
6.
Klaus Segbers
international spheres, but rather the vanishing of the markers
between those realms.
The nature of interactions is increasingly difcult to monitor,
to control and to govern. Diplomats may talk about many
things, but their impact on capital markets is limited to say
the least. The impact of satellites transmitting content into different cultural settings can rarely be predicted and is difcult
to regulate. Many capital and content ows are difcult to
organize and cannot be regulated effectively at least not by
the traditional instruments and strategies inherited from the
Westphalian and cold war settings.
The very concept of regulating and controlling processes
and developments is in crisis. Regulation requires a clear conception of the relevant players interests and resources, viable
mechanisms for monitoring, sufcient funding, tools for
impacting on the players involved, and incentives for relevant
players to accept governance mechanisms. First and foremost,
however, it requires a clear stipulation of what should be regulated and how it should be regulated. There is much talk
about global governance but very limited clarity about how this
should be done.
In reality, we have a patchwork of parallel, co-existing and competing norms, tools and systems of governance. The very term
governance is in crisis. What is needed is fresh thinking about
new concepts which are more appropriate for the early twenty-rst
century concepts of moderating and of navigating. To moderate
processes does not mean to change their direction, but to inuence
the intensity and the pace of their development. To navigate trends
and currents is even less of an engineering concept: here one just
tries to move in or among the currents of processes, the sources
and driving forces of which are beyond anyones control.
One could add that the very style of doing politics is itself changing. The increasing mediatization of political agendas, in the form
of info- and poli-tainment, and permanent election campaigns
under intense media scrutiny, is producing a growing legitimacy gap
between citizens/voters expectations and the ability of politicians
to produce acceptable outcomes. Additionally, ad-hocism is
becoming the dominant mode of politics, i.e. the consistency of
politics is decreasing.
German-Russian Relations
207
208
Klaus Segbers
98%
82%
55%
Mineral Oil
Natural Gas
Coal
German-Russian Relations
209
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 reunication, 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 migration, 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.
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Klaus Segbers
Russias Foreign Policy: Shaping Factors
The Russian Federations (RF) external politics in general and external behaviour in particular, are dependent on two
groups of factors: transformation, i.e. the accelerated systemic
changes that started in the mid-1980s; and globalization with all
its implications. While there are many issues that can be and are
disputed in detail, there can hardly be serious doubt that these
variables precluded a consistent Russian foreign policy (the same
goes for domestic politics, of course). In the natural absence of
coherent national interests though not of groups and people
claiming to represent them we have to talk about the external
behaviour of many regional, economic and bureaucratic groups
rather than of a foreign policy of the state.
The single most important link to the outside world has long
been energy. While oil and gas are indispensable for domestic
economic development and social stability, they also provide an
overwhelming part of the hard currency income for the exporting
companies as well as for the state budget. Only with these revenues
was it possible in the period after the nancial crash in 1998 to
largely overcome the notorious virtual economy. Also, the growing
middle class proted from the energy-dependent economy, in
addition to income from Western aid programs and NGO support.
At the same time, the high degree of dependency on energy exports
made the country vulnerable for the volatile developments of the
world energy markets.
In any case, the linkages between the RF and the global economy
became even stronger. This remains one of the most important
reasons for the fact that an isolated development of Russia is no
longer possible.
Furthermore, Russias external behaviour is embedded in a domestic context. It cannot be understood or explained without that.
Here, several developments are relevant. First of all, compared to
the early and mid-1990s, most of the relevant players now dene
their preferences differently. Instead of looking only for shortterm advantages, they see their prosperity depending much more
on medium- and long-term calculations and developments. Time
horizons have become much longer, a process also encountered
in other regions and historic precedents undergoing rapid and
sometimes violent transformation. Those shifting interests are what
the late economist Mancur Olson has described and predicted
as the conversion of roving into stationary bandits.
German-Russian Relations
211
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 interested 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 phenomenon 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 stabilization by no means indicate a political, economic and social development 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
German-Russian Relations
213
214
Klaus Segbers
German-Russian Relations
215
Index
Abramov, 63
Abramovich, Rafail, 57
Adorno, Theodor, 200
Aichevald, Iulii, 53, 55
Albrecht, Georg, 18
Aldanov, Mark, 64
Alexander I, 100
Alexander II, 32
Altman, Natan, 64
Amburger, 12
Julius, 19
Aminado, Don, 64
Andersch, Alfred, 123
Arkhangelskii, Alexei P., 63
Arkhipenko, Aleksandr, 64
Arkwright, Sir Richard, 20
Arnshtam, Aleksandr, 64
Atta, Mohammed, 205
Avalov-Bermondt, Pavel, 45, 60
Averchenko, Arkadii, 64
Babel, Isaak, 53
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 200
Baedecker, 13
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3
Balabin, 63
Bansa, 12, 14
Bauer, Josef Martin, 123, 124
Bazhov, Pavel, 148
Beek, Gottfried zur, 61
Belyi, Andrei, 53, 64, 65
Berdiaev, Nikolai, 53, 66
Bergius, Rudolf, 126
Beriia, Lavrentii, 90, 138, 139
Bib, Istvan, 42
Biskupskii, Vasilii, 60, 62
Bismarck, Otto von, 32
Bloch, Raisa, 62
Blomberg, Werner von, 109, 113
Boguslavskaia, Ksenia, 65
Bll, Heinrich, 200
Bondi, Sergei, 156
Botkin, Sergei von, 47, 50
Brauchtisch, Walter von, 109
Brecht, Bertolt, 200
Brezhnev, Leonid I., 194
Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich Graf,
102
Broido, Eva, 57
Brutskus, Boris, 53
Bubnov, Nikolai, 23
Bukharin, Nikolai, 112
Bunin, Ivan, 53
Bush, George W., 205
Carell, Paul, 123
Carsten, Francis L., 104
Chagall, Marc, 65
Charchoune, Serge, 65
Chekhov, Anton P., 200
Chelishchev, Pavel, 65
Chernov, Viktor, 58
Chernyi, Sasha, 64
Chernyshev, Vasilii V., 150
Chicherin, Georgii, 66
Churchill, Sir Winston, 31, 32
Colville, John, 31
Cuno, Wilhelm, 107
Dahlmann, Dittmar, 2, 3
Dallin, David, 57
Dan, Fedor, 56, 57
Deist, Wilhelm, 129
Dementev, Aleksandr, 148
217
218
Diagilev, Sergei, 65
Diakova, Olga, 54
Diederichs, Eugen, 40
Dittbender, Walter, 84, 86
Dblin, Alfred, 35
Dostoevskii, 3, 16, 3541 passim, 66
Dragomirov, Vladimir, 63
Dubnov, Simon, 61, 62
Dzhalil, Musa, 13
Ehrenburg, Ilja, 3, 64, 66, 147
Einem, von, 12
Einstein
Albert, 66
Carl, 65
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 127
Engels, Frederick, 32, 81
Erickson, John, 104
Erpenbeck, Fritz, 81
Esenin, Sergei, 64, 66
Evlogii, Bishop, 55
Ezhov, Nikolai, 90
Frank, Semen, 61
Friedrich, Hedwig, 23
Fritzler, Friedrich, 154, 155
Fromm, Friedrich, 109
Gabo, Naum, 65
Gates, Bill, 205
Gershenzon, Mikhail, 64
Gessen, Iosif V., 50, 53, 54, 58
Gessen (Hessen), Sergei, 23
Glatzke, Hans W., 104
Glinka, Mikhail, 55
Goebbels, Joseph, 41
Gogel, Sergei, 53
Gollwitzer, Helmut, 124
Golovin, 62, 63
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 128, 194
Gring, Hermann, 103
Gorkii, Maksim, 16, 35, 53, 64, 200
Gorlin, Mikhail, 62
Grass, Gnter, 200
Index
Grigorev, Boris, 65
Gromme, E. W., 18
Gul, Roman, 61
Haider, Jrg, 205
Halder, Franz, 123
Hammerschmidt, 12
Handel, Georg Friedrich, 200
Hanemann, 19
Harnack, Arved, 40
Harpe, Josef, 109
Harriman, William Averell, 137
Hartmann, Wladimir, 153
Hasse, Otto, 106
Heckmann, Alexander, 134, 154,
155
Hermann, 14
Hillgruber, Andreas, 129
Hindenburg, Paul von, 113
Hitler, Adolf, 3, 31, 40, 41, 61, 62,
10914 passim, 120, 123, 129,
1346, 146, 153, 165, 166, 191
Hoetzsch, Otto, 33, 40, 52
Hoffmann, Heinrich, 136
Hohenzollern, 8
see also Wilhelm II
Horowitz, Vladimir, 65
Hussein, Saddam, 204
Iashchenko, Aleksandr, 53
Iasinskii, Vsevold, 53
Ilin, Ivan, 53, 61
Iudenich, Nikolai N., 45
Iuzhnii, Iakov, 65
Ivanov, Georgii, 64
Ivanov, Ivan, 144
Jahn, Peter, 4, 5
Jkel, Paul, 86
Jellinek, Georg, 22
Jessner, Leopold, 66
Jnger, Ernst, 40, 66
Kalantarov, Mikhail, 22
Kalinin, Mikhail, 138
Index
Kaminka, Avgust, 53, 58
Kaminskii, Grigori, 79
Kammhuber, Josef, 110
Kandinskii, Vasilii, 65
Karsavin, Lev, 59
Kautsky, Karl, 35
Kazem-Bek, Aleksandr, 59
Keitel, Wilhelm, 109
Kellermann, Bernhard, 66
Kerenski, Aleksander, 56, 58
Khludov
Aleksei, 17
Gerasim, 17
Khodasevich, Vladislav, 53, 64
Khrushchev, Nikita, 155
Kirdetsov, Grigory, 58
Kirill Vladimirovich, Grand Prince,
49, 60
Kirov, 83
Kirst, Hans Hellmut, 123
Kistiakovskii, Bogdan, 22, 23
Kizevetter, Aleksandr, 53
Kliuchnikov, Iurii, 58
Knoch, Peter, 174
Knoop, 2, 13
Andreas, 18, 19
Daniel, 17
Gottfried, 19
Johann, 18
Johann Ludwig, 19
Julius, 11, 1719
Baron Ludwig, 1120 passim
Theodor, 18
Kobulov, Bogdan Zakharovich, 155
Koenen, Gerd, 3
Kogan, A.E., 50, 53
Kokoshkin, Fedor, 22
Knig, 12
Konsalik, Heinz, 1235
Kopelev, Lev, 186
Kopp, Viktor, 45
Korbmacher, Heinrich, 154, 155
Kosmodemianskaia, Zoia, 136
Krebs, Hans, 109
219
Kreiter, 63
Krestinskii, Nikolai, 66
Krieger, Victor, 5
Kroner, Richard, 23
Krdener-Struve, Baron A., 50
Kulenkampff, 18
Kusikov, Aleksandr, 64
Kuskova, Elena, 58
Kusonskii, Pavel I., 62
Lampe, Aleksei von, 62, 63
Landau, Grigorii, 61
Landauer, Gustav, 66
Laqueur, Walther, 1
Lebedev, Pavel, 107
Lenin, Vladimir, 21, 38, 81, 199
Leonov, Leonid, 147
Liebknecht, Karl, 61
Link, Werner, 109
List, Wilhelm, 109
Litvinov, Maksim, 113, 114
Lbe, Paul, 66
Lomonosov, Mikhail, 21
Ludendorff, Erich, 38, 100
Lukianov, Sergei, 58
Lunts, Lev, 64
Luther, Arthur, 55
Luxemburg, Rosa, 61
Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 64, 66
Maier, Johannes, 154, 155
Mamontov, 20
Mandelshtam, Osip, 2, 24
Mann
Heinrich, 38
Thomas, 3, 31, 34, 379, 65, 200
Manstein, Erich von, 109
Marc, Moritz, 1214
Martov, Iulii, 56, 57
Marx, Karl, 32, 78, 81
Masing, Johannes, 51
Matrosov, Alexandr, 136
Medvedev, 20
Mehlis, Georg, 23
220
Meierkhold, Vsevolod, 200
Mekhlis, L., 147
Melgunov, Sergei, 54
Meretskov, Kirill, 111
Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 39, 66
Messerschmidt, Manfred, 129
Mikhalkov, Nikita, 199
Milch, Erhard, 103
Miliukov, Pavel, 56, 58
Milosevic, Slobodan, 204
Model, Walter, 109
Moeller von der Bruck, Arthur,
39, 66
Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,
133, 147
Morozov
Savva, 16, 17
T., 12
Mller, Jakob, 153
Mller von Hausen, Ludwig, 40, 61
Mussolini, Benito, 39
Nabokov, Vladimir, 4966 passim
Nansen, Fridtjof, 48
Nasedkin, Victor, 150
Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vasilii, 64
Nicholas II, 60
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 41
Nikolaevskii, Boris, 57
Nikolai Markov II, 60
Nikolai Nikolaevich, 60, 61, 101
Nolte, Ernst, 31
Okorokov, A. D., 169
Olbricht, Friedrich, 109
Olson, Mancur, 210
Osorgin, Mikhail, 64
Otsup, Nikolai, 64
Palytsin, F.F., 101
Pasternak
Boris, 2, 24, 64
Leonid, 61
Peter I, 11
Pevsner, Anton, 65
Index
Pilniak, Boris, 64
Pinkus, Benjamin, 143
Pirogov, Nikolai, 21
Plocher, Hermann, 110
Prokopovich, Sergei, 58
Polgar, Alfred, 65
Potekhin, Iury, 58
Puni, Ivan, 65
Putin, Vladimir, 197, 211
Radbruch, Gustav, 23
Radek, Karl, 66, 104, 105
Rathenau, Walther, 34, 35, 40, 61
Reich
Bernhard, 136
Jens, 6
Reisner, Larisa, 64
Remarque, Erich Maria, 200
Remizov, Aleksei, 64
Riazanov, Eldar, 199
Rickert, Heinrich, 23
Rockefeller, John D., 20
Romanov, 8, 60
see also Alexander I, Alexander
II, Kirill Vladimirovich, Grand
Duke, Nicholas II, Nikolai
Nikolaevich, Grand Duke,
Peter I
Root, Alexander, 154
Rosenberg, Alfred, 40, 60, 113,
120
Rowohlt, Ernst, 66
Rozengolts, Arkadii, 107
Ruge, Arnold, 23
Ruperti, Alfred, 15
Savitskii, Petr, 59
Sazonov, Sergei, 54
Scherstjanoj, Elke, 5, 6
Scheubner-Richter, Max von, 60
Schickedanz, Arno, 60
Schiemann, Theodor, 33
Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 53
Schleicher, Kurt von, 113
Schlesinger, Moritz, 45, 52
Index
Schliemann, Heinrich, 12
Schlippe, Theodore von, 50
Schlgel, Karl, 3, 42
Schmidt, Paul, 123
Schmitt, Carl, 40, 66
Schulenburg, Friedrich Werner
Count von der, 87, 88, 114
Schulze-Grvenitz, Gerhart von, 20
Schumacher, 14
Seeckt, Hans von, 102, 105, 113
Segbers, Klaus, 6, 7
Serov, Ivan A., 139
Severianin, Igor, 64
Shabelskii-Bork, Petr, 60
Shaposhnikov, Boris, 107, 111
Shchukin, 17
Shestov, Lev, 54
Shkuro, Andrei, 63
Shmelev, Ivan, 64
Sholokhov, Mikhail, 147
Shterenberg, David, 65
Shvarts-bostunich, Grigorii, 60
Simmel, Georg, 23
Simonov, Konstantin, 147
Smirnov, S., 50
Sodhi, Kripal Singh, 126
Sokolov-Mikitov, Ivan, 64
Soldatenkov, Kozma, 17
Speidel, Hans, 109
Spengler, Oswald, 3, 40, 66
Sperrle, Hugo, 109
Spies, 12, 13
Stadtler, Eduard, 3, 39, 40
Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich, 4, 31,
41, 81, 93, 133, 1368, 147, 150,
154, 156, 165, 194, 197, 199, 204
Stanislavskii, Konstantin, 16, 200
Stepun, Fedor, 23, 63
Stieglitz, 12
Stolypin, Pjotr A., 33
Strasser, Gregor und Otto, 41
Stravinskii, Igor, 65
Stresemann, Gustav, 102,103, 105,
112
221
Struin, I., 141
Struve, Petr, 53
Student, Kurt, 109
Sukhanov, Nikolai, 54
Sukhomlinov, Vladimir, 54
Surkov, Aleksej A., 147
Svatikov, Sergei, 22
Taboritskii, Sergei, 60
Tarkovskii, Andrei, 199
Theresa, Mother, 205
Thorwald, Jrgen, 125
Tikhon, Bishop, 55
Timoshenko, Semyon, 111
Tischler, Carola, 4
Tito, Josip, 196
Tolstoi
Aleksei, 58, 64, 147
Lev, 16, 24, 35
Trautwein, Theodor, 154
Trotzkii, Lev, 41, 61
Tsvetavea, Marina, 64
Tukhachevskii, Mikhail, 66, 113,
114
Vinberg, Fedor von, 60, 61
Vlasov, Andrei, 47, 63
Vrangel, Pjotr N., 45, 46, 50, 59
Vysheslavtsev, Boris, 61
Weber
Alfred, 23
Max, 22, 23
Weizscker, Richard von, 130
Werner, 145
Werth, Alexander, 147
Wilhelm, 145
Wilhelm II, 32
Williams, R.C., 54
Windelband, Wilhelm, 23
Wogau, von, 2, 1215
Karl von, 14
Wolde, 18
Wolf, 126
222
Zaitsev, Boris, 53, 64
Zeidler, Manfred, 4, 181
Zenker, 12, 18
Zernack, Klaus, 2
Index
Zhivago, Sergei, 23
Zinner, Hedda, 81
Zinovev, Grigorij, 61
Zola, Emile, 38