RIA Novosti. Russia
March 5 2005
FILIPP BOBKOV: OUR VICTORY SAVED EUROPEANS FROM DEATH
The winter and spring of 1945 went down in the history of the Great
Patriotic War as a triumphant period for the Soviet Army as it
liberated the people of Europe from the Nazis. In January-February,
the 2nd Belarussian Front conducted the Vistula-Oder offensive
liberating Warsaw and the whole of Poland. On February 13, the 3rd
Ukrainian Front completed the Budapest strategic operation and
liberated the Hungarian capital from the Nazis. By then, the Soviet
Army had already liberated Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and was
approaching Vienna.
Viktor Litovkin, RIA Novosti’s military commentator, interviews Gen.
Filipp Bobkov, who fought in the Great Patriotic War, about the role
the Soviet Army played in liberating the people of Europe from the
Nazis.
– General, I’d like to start our conversation with something that
impressed me immensely. As it happens, some leaders of government
delegations and Western journalists covering the 60th anniversary of
the liberation of Auschwitz were surprised to learn that it happened
thanks to the Soviet soldiers. Why was it so surprising? Does it mean
that even well-educated people do not know who liberated eastern
Europe?
A: There is nothing surprising in this. The role the Soviet Army
played in liberating Europe from the Nazis was deliberately played
down in the postwar years as well as during WWII. This could be seen
in the delayed opening of the second front, in inconsistent and often
superficial coverage of the events on the Eastern, or Soviet front.
Our allies, particularly, Great Britain and Churchill personally,
sought to show that the main role in the victory belonged to them
alone, and Britain in particular.
Back in April 1942, for one, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill: your and
my people are demanding the opening of the second front to ease the
burden for the Russians, but our people have no idea that the
Russians are killing more Germans and eliminating more weapons of the
enemy than the US and GreatBritain put together.
Roosevelt was ready to open the second front, but Churchill had a
different opinion. He opened the so-called “second front” either in
Greece or in Italy or elsewhere, thereby avoiding direct attacks on
the core Nazi divisions and waiting for the Soviet Union and the
Soviet Army to be worn out completely. The real second front was not
opened until after the Tehran Conference. Then the Anglo-American
troops landed in Normandy in 1944. It was at the time when the Allies
realized that we could liberate Europe without them.
– Do you mean that our liberation of Europe was unwelcome?
– Yes. We showed the world that we could liberate half of Europe
without any assistance from the Allies. And this is when they
suddenly realized that unless they joined us in Europe, they would
find themselves owing their liberation to us. In other words, they
had to hurry to be able to call themselves liberators of Europe. By
the way, the same approach was manifest when Nazi Germany signed the
unconditional surrender. The Allies, for some reason, decided to
accept the surrender themselves. We were invited, but at a lower
level. Later, Stalin demanded their arrival in Berlin, but they sent
merely comparatively junior people rather than their supreme
commanders.
This was another way of playing down the contribution of the Soviet
Army in defeating the Nazis. Today, people tend to forget, for
example, that Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz. There is another
detail worth mentioning in relation to this terrible death camp. Do
you remember how the Allies bombed the Third Reich territories? They
virtually razed Dresden to the ground. Why didn’t they drop bombs on
the railway leading to Auschwitz, knowing that people were being sent
to Auschwitz along that particular railway to be killed? The Allies
did nothing to stop it, though they knew only too well what was
happening there, and not only there.
Incidentally, talking about Auschwitz, it is the onlyplace that
retains all the memories of the Nazi atrocities. There you can see
crutches, children’s clothes, boots, various objects that were taken
away from prisoners – all of these are there to remind people what
really happened. However, in Buchenwald, as far as I remember, the
entire evidence of the Nazis’ crimes is confined to a lamp with a
lampshade made of human skin. The rest of the exhibits are pictures,
photos and so on.
The Poles have preserved Auschwitz to remind themselves of the
destiny they thankfully escaped.
– Poland was the second country in Europe after the Soviet Union that
sustained huge losses under the Nazi occupation. Nearly six million
Poles died, and about six million Jews were murdered.
– True, Hitler put it straight: after we kill the Jews, we will get
down to the Ukrainians, Lemki, Goraks and the Poles. The Poles were
to be exterminated, and the Nazis were clear about this. This is laid
down in Mein Kampf and was stated in the prewar speeches of Third
Reich leaders. However, this detail, too, is hushed up nowadays for
no clear reason.
Do you remember how the 60th anniversary of the Allies’ landing in
Normandy was celebrated? Had it not been for our president, nobody
would have possibly remembered about Russia’s contribution to WWII.
This is exactly what happened on the 50th anniversary of this
operation. Nobody invited us then. However, when the Allies were
fighting the Nazis in Ardennes, the Western Front, their army
narrowly escaped defeat. The situation was so critical that Churchill
asked Stalin to help them in the east by distracting part of the Nazi
troops and stopping Nazi reinforcements.
Stalin and the General HQ decided to launch the offensive on the
Eastern Front, on the Vistula, two weeks ahead of schedule. At the
time, an Allied military delegation headed by Air Chief Marshall
Tedder was on a visit to Moscow. Stalin put it straight to Mr.
Tedder: even if we realize that our offensive is not proceedingas
actively as we would like it to be, we will not stop. All for the
sake of preventing the Nazis from lifting their troops from the
Eastern to the Western Front and mounting their pressure in Ardennes.
Indeed, no Nazis troops were moved from the Eastern to the Western
Front. Conversely, the Nazi lifted the 6th SS Tank Division followed
by 16 infantry divisions to the East. Once again, we had to face
those who had been moved from the Western Front, while the Allies
were planning their further actions. The British were impatiently
waiting to launch an offensive in the north but Eisenhower was more
inclined to advance in southern Europe and was negotiating the Nazis’
surrender wherever possible. The Nazis had already begun surrendering
to the Allies.
These were all elements of combat strategy, which did not cancel the
ideological principle of playing down the fundamental role of the
Soviet Army in defeating the Nazis. Do you remember a film that Roman
Karmen shot in Russia for the 50th anniversary of the victory in
WWII? This film, Unknown War, was made for Westerners. Thanks to this
film, the majority of Americans discovered that a war had taken place
in eastern Europe and that the Soviet Union had played a crucial role
in it.
The same can be said about Auschwitz. I might be confusing some
details, because a lot of time has passed since then, but when I
first visited Auschwitz, the guide spoke at length about what had
been happening there. He told us that 1.2 million people had died in
the death camp. I remembered this figure because I visited Albania
before then and learnt that the population of Albania was 1 million
people in all. I was then struck dumb by the fact that the Nazis had
killed more people in Auschwitz than there were in the whole of
Albania. According to the guide, half of the vicims were Jews, and
the others belonged to 27 ethnicities.
I am not saying this to play down the pain of Holocaust. No, it
should stay in our memories forever. It is true that the Nazis killed
six million Jews. It is a huge amount. Yet, apart from the Jews,
other people like the Slavs, gypsies, the French, Serbs and Croatians
were murdered. I have consulted some archives and found out that four
million rather than 1.2 million people died in Auschwitz. On January
27, 1945 when our troops entered the death camp, only 2,819 people,
including 96 Soviets, were alive.
In 1999, I read an article by Dr. Wolfram Verte from Germany in
magazine called Modern and Recent History. He wrote that the Third
Reich’s war against the Soviet Union was originally aimed at seizing
the territory up to the Urals, exploiting Soviet natural resources
and submitting Russia to Germany’s domination. Jews were not alone in
facing the threat of well-planned physical extermination, but also
the Slavs living in Soviet territories the Nazis occupied in
1941-1944. Only recently, German historians began to study “another
Holocaust” targeted at the Slav residents of the USSR, who, like the
Jews, were proclaimed “an inferior race” and were also doomed to
extermination.
This is what a German researcher writes. Therefore, when speaking
about Auschwitz, it is important to remember that it was one of the
many death camps where people of many ethnicities were murdered. Our
Victory did not only bring liberation to Europe but also saved its
people from death. Some people say today that we if had surrendered
to the Nazis straight away instead of fighting, and then we would be
living the same wealthy life as Germans today. These people forget
that they would not have been born if the Nazis had won the war.
Entire generations would have been killed.
Such an approach brings to mind the words of Smerdyakov from The
Brothers Karamazov: if Napoleon had conquered us, the clever nation
would have conquered the stupid one and annexed it. Life would have
been completely different, he said. The same Smerdyakov logic stands
behind the ideas expressed by some young but not very intelligent and
educated people.
– Are there any precise statistics about how many people we liberated
from death camps?
– Yes, of course. These figures can be found in some reference
materials on WWII. Yet, even without the statistics, we all know that
we liberated Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria,
Yugoslavia (most of it), some territory in Greece, Poland, Germany, a
piece of Denmark, the Bornholm island, and northern Norway. Moreover,
we saved Finland in a way. It withdrew from the war under our
pressure, which is why its cities and towns remained untouched by
Nazi bombs and artillery.
It is important to remember that when fulfilling its sacred
liberating mission, the Soviet Army lost about 69,000 people in
Romania, 600,000 in Poland, 8,000 in Yugoslavia, over 140,000 in
Hungary, about 26,000 in Austria, 102,000 in Germany. Requiem
Aeternum, and Glory To Our Heroes.
Besides, I’d like to remind you which death camps we liberated and
how many people fell victim to Nazi barbarians there. It should never
be forgotten. The Nazis had 20 major camps with about a thousand
branches. They operated like a death conveyor belt. There were 180
camps in Ukraine alone, and 260 in Belarus. That is where 11 million
Soviet people were tortured, including four million servicemen.
The major death camps included: the Trostyanets camp outside Minsk
(200,000 died), the Janovsk camp on the outskirts of Lvov (200,000
died), the Salaspils camp outside Riga – the one that the Latvian
president called “a labor correction camp” where 100,000 people died
after “failing to be corrected.” In Daugavpils 160,000 people were
killed; 100,000 in the Panerai camp outside Vilnius, 80,000 in the
Ninth Fort in Kaunas, and 30,000 in the camp outside Narva (Estonia).
On top of that, the Nazis set up death camps in Austria and Germany:
Dachau, Saxenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, Treblinka
and Majdanek. A total of 18 million people went through them, and 11
million of them died, in addition to those who were killed in the
Soviet Union.
The extermination of “inferior races” underlay the Nazi plans. As you
know, they moved towards their targets with German punctuality. Back
in 1924, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: we see the solution to our
problems in conquering new lands that could be inhabited by the
Germans. In Europe, the lands at stake are Russia and the countries
it has annexed.
However, this idea did not belong to Hitler perse. It was laid down
in a 1914 memorandum of the Kaiser’s Germany. The document laid out
plans to conclude a separate peace treaty with Belgium and France,
thereby securing a safe area behind the front lines, and to send
German troops to Russia. This was the main point of the document.
Further on, it says: This war may cost us a million people. But what
is this figure in comparison with the eviction of 20 million people,
including such scoundrels as Jews, Poles, Mazurs, Lithuanians,
Estonians, and others. We have the potential to do that. Russia will
have to put up with the loss of its lands during our further
expansion. Thus, if all the excessive energy of three generations of
Germans is put into colonizing the East, peace with England will be
possible on a status-quo basis. But if England chooses to wage war to
the end and if we need any colonies, we will conquer them, but in
2000 the dispute will hardly concern Germany and England [they wrote
this in 1914 – F. B.] but rather Europe, Asia and America.
Certainly, Europe for the Kaiser meant Germany without England which
was to become a nonentity by then under their plan. At present, as
you know, Old Europe is not very much favored by the Americans, and
the European-American confrontation continues to exist.
Incidentally, here are the straightforward instructions that Himmler
gave at a meeting with senior SS officers: the military campaign in
the east is designed to exterminate 30 million Slavs.The May 2, 1941
decree of Hepner, the commander of the 4th Tank Army, openly stated
that the upcoming war would be the follow-up of the Germans’ war
against the Slavs. So the task of exterminating other races was
clearly defined and formulated.
I believe that this is something we should remind people about during
the 60th anniversary of the Victory. Not only is it important for the
Russians but also for the Poles and other Europeans. We should
remember that the Nazis posed a serious threat to humanity. And this
is something our children should remember.
– Do you know that today, unfortunately, the memory of the Nazis’
terrible crimes, their misanthropist ideology and practice are fading
away for some reason. It sometimes gets to the point when people
begin to play the Nazis. For example, Britain’s Prince Harry recently
attended a party wearing a tropical Nazi uniform, with a swastika on
his arm. Fascist youngsters take to the streets in Germany, Poland
and even here, in Russia, which lost 27 million people in the war
against the Nazis. What needs to be done to eradicate this evil? What
is the problem here?
– You should first of all make some distinctions. I believe the
fascism we can see now reviving should be divided into several
categories, I believe. Fascism in Germany is nothing but an attempt
to take revenge. I have the impression, though I would like to be
mistaken, that some people who have been actively moving to Germany
of late, will not feel very comfortable there soon. As for Western
nations, Britain and the US, we are witnessing the remains of the
sentiments that existed there during the war as well. These are the
attempts to sublimate the elements that were not uprooted in the
postwar years.
In Russia, however, some people opt for anti-Semitism and
anti-Caucasus sentiments, and this is where fascist trends are the
most conspicuous. It is a matter of upbringing on the one hand. On
the other, people do not always understand that they are simply being
provoked to prevent stability and calm in the country.
Our main problem is that we cannot draw a line between the fight
against Chechen terrorists and the relationship with ordinary Chechen
people. Some of our politicians and some printed media permanently
speak about “these Chechens”. Nobody, except the leadership of the
country, has put it articulately that we are not fighting Chechens in
general but Chechen mercenaries.
In reality, far from all Chechen militants, so often mentioned today,
are ethnic Chechens – only 30% of them. The others are Arabs, Turks,
and even Slavs. They are all mercenaries. The terrorism they commit
is the terrorism of international bandits. They conduct military
operations in the territory of their enemy, which Russia is for
mercenary armies.
Why am I talking about this? Because we cannot avoid discussing
ethnic splits when discussing this topic. Let’s take Beslan, for
example. It was a horrifying tragedy. But how was it covered in the
press? The first series of publications were crying out that the
Ossetians would start their vendetta on the fortieth day mourning had
finished. But who would be the target of their vengeance? The
Ingushs, because the terrorists had come from Ingush territory. Let
us ask ourselves: Why would the Ossetians be set against the Ingushs?
Who stands to win from it? Who is interested in exacerbating the
still unstable situation in the North Caucasus? I think it is the
people who fund the mercenary army, who equipped and sent the
terrorists to Beslan.
We can see such sentiments spreading further. A horrible, immoral and
absurd letter sent by State Duma deputies to the Prosecutor General’s
Office demanding a ban on all Jewish religious organizations is a
graphic example. I think people have yielded to obvious provocations
seeking to demonstrate that fascist sentiments are developing in
Russia, like in other countries.
Let’s remember the days when we were marking the 60th anniversary of
the liberation of Auschwitz. Our president was there and talked about
his pain for the events there and in our country. If anything similar
to this letter happens in Germany or any other country, they will be
able to say that they are following the example of Russia’s fascists.
Perhaps, this was the original aim.
I recently gave an interview to journalists. They asked me how I felt
about such letters. I answered: you are writing about the first blast
in the underground organized by Armenian nationalists thirty years
ago. It has been forgotten but you are reminding us about it. You do
not realize it that this can become a prompt for some fanatics who
can repeat it. This is why it is important for the coverage of an
event to be cautious and reasonable to avoid breeding new crimes.
As for the Nazi plans to fully exterminate the peoples of Europe and
the USSR, we should remember that Russia is a multi-ethnic country,
and this is where her strength lies. If we are to survive, we need to
form a powerful multi-ethnic union, develop sincere friendship and
trust between our peoples. We owe our victory in the war to this
brotherly friendship above all. Ethnic conflicts were never mentioned
in those years.
– How about the deportation of Tatars from the Crimea, Chechens,
Ingushs and Karachais from the North Caucasus, Turk-Meskhetians from
Georgia and Germans from the Volga area?
– It was a different matter. War is war. Nobody recalls now that the
Americans interned the Japanese. During WWI, the tsar deported the
Germans too. It was a precaution for a country at war. As for the
Crimean Tatars, the North Caucasus ethnic groups and the Meskhetians,
I believe it was not a good idea. But it was brought about by the
Supreme Commander’s emotions and the policy of some of these ethnic
groups during the occupation period. But an entire nation cannot be
held responsible for their morally handicapped representatives. The
latter can be found in any nation orethnic group.
– True, there were Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians who sided
with the Nazis. And remember the Vlasov army? Nobody blamed the
entire people for these scoundrels…
– Absolutely. It goes without saying. I do not only rule out some
inadequate emotional decisions or the possibility that some national
leaders of the time were solving some other secret problems under the
disguise of the fight against conspirators. Why were the
Turk-Meskhetians deported? Their territory was not occupied by the
Nazis. Nor did they collaborate with them. Moreover, all male
Meskhetians were fighting on the front. Can you imagine how they must
have felt after conquering Berlin, when they could not return home
but discovered they had been deported with their wives, children, and
parents abandoned to an inhospitable land?!
Now about the Vlasov army. We have a fairly distorted picture of Gen.
Vlasov’s army. There was a time when we associated too many people
with the Vlasov army. I once talked to an officer who was the
commander of a unit during the war. He told me how he had fought the
Vlasov army. I was surprised: wait, I said, you returned from the
front in 1942 after losing your leg there. There was no Vlasov army
at the time.
Strictly speaking, the Vlasov army consisted of two divisions. They
did not fight in battles on the Soviet front. The only time when they
did was to fight Belarussian partisans following Hitler’s
instructions. Even then, the bulk of the regiment joined the
guerrillas. After that, they were never allowed to fight on the
front. The first battles they took part in were in Prague. Vlasov was
instructed to delay our units until the Americans arrived and, as the
Nazis planned, seize Prague.
But, as you know, it never happened. We liberated Prague and arrested
Vlasov, and that was the end. The Nazi army did not include the
Vlasov army alone. There were subdivisions of pure traitors, and I
had to fight in such battles when both Germans and Russians wearing
Soviet army uniforms were sent behind our lines to destroy us there.
This took place outside Spas-Demensk in the Kaluga region.
Other citizens of our country served for the Nazis too, but they
mostly occupied civil positions and had no access to ammunition.
Afterwards, they were all branded as members of the Vlasov army. I
remember a conversation I had with writer Anatoly Kalinin. We were
discussing his novel The Echo of War where he calls all traitors
members of the Vlasov army. I asked him: why do you write like that?
You make it sound as if the Vlasov army was far more numerous than in
reality. This is how these legends and myths are spread.
Incidentally, the Bendery, when accused of collaborating with the
Nazis, answer: hold on, you had the entire Vlasov army. But how many
Soviet people joined the Nazis? In essence, the Soviet people who
fought for the Nazis, including in “national” subdivisions – the
Turkestan, Kalmyk corps, the large SS unit of Ukrainian nationalists,
the Estonian and Latvian SS divisions – all numbered 200,000 people
maximum. The Nazis also formed a small Georgian battalion of POWs who
fought on the Western Front. That’s it. As compared to the 11-million
Soviet army, this is an insignificant group of traitors. Besides,
these people were for the most part victims of the horrifying
circumstances of the war rather than ideological enemies of the
Soviet regime.
I urge everyone to say nothing but truth about the war, no matter how
unflattering or painful it might be. Without this truth, despite the
tragic pages of history, we would not have won our glorious Victory.